Underpinnings of the New "Golden Age"

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Trump's big bullshit bill that became law last week is supposedly going to usher in a new "golden age" in America.   The stated intent is that it will pump more money into some peoples' pockets, particularly those who are very rich, which their largesse will then allow it to  "trickle down" to the unwashed masses, a phony assumption that has been proven wrong over and over again for the last half-century.  The bill will also transfer large amounts of our national treasury, which has been operating in the red for decades, to Immigration and Custom's Enforcement (ICE), and will give that agency almost unlimited means to detain and deport people, even American citizens who were born in this country.

The bill will balloon our already staggering national debt, but does nothing to positively address the also-staggering, social inequalities in America - and the needs of the working poor - things like basic nutrition, healthcare, public education, housing, the environment, and poverty in general.    Those cans have been kicked on down the road and somebody else can deal with them later on.

Issues of inequality can always wait.  The first order of business is to take care of those who are already doing well.

I heard a story on the news yesterday about a housing ordinance that was passed last month by the city of West Fargo, North Dakota.  It seems people were having the audacity to rent storage units and then move into them - the only type of housing they could afford.  Once the city officials learned of the situation - they rushed to pass ordinances which would make it easier for developers to come in and build low-income affordable housing.

That, of course, is not true.

When the very respectable leaders of West Fargo found out about the problem, they did what the city leaders of many other American communities are so quick to do - they passed an ordinance which banned sleeping in buildings, vehicles, or temporary structures not designed for residential occupancy - including storage units and tents.  The newspaper account that I read this morning did not mention sleeping outdoors, but many American communities also do not allow their homeless to sleep in parks, on beaches, or on the streets.

City governments often see homelessness as something which must be moved on down the road.  The situation is generally ignored by state government and the Feds.  Where the homeless go is unimportant, just so long as it's somewhere else.

There are solutions to homelessness of course, but they involve spending money to construct houses, providing job training, creating jobs with living wages, and all manner of things that would interfere with tax breaks for people who don't need the money.

Sometimes the chronically homeless require hospitalization (if they don't just crawl off and die), or they are incarcerated for brief periods of time as punishment for daring to sleep outside - and their children are bundled off into state foster care systems, and none of those options are free - or cheap.  They can be so time time-and-money-consuming that more public housing begins to make sense.  But Americans tend to have an almost rabid reaction to the notion of somebody getting "something for nothing."  Jesus certainly would not approve of handouts to "those" people.

The answer is likely to wind up being to house them in the many huge detention facilities (aka "concentration camps") currently being planned by ICE, with our government then trying to balance its books on the backs of the poor by selling their labor to corporations.  We had a similar system in place during the early years of America.  It was called slavery.

Or, the neo-Nazis currently burrowing their way into the federal government may have something else in mind.

Golden age, my ass.