December 10, 2016, John Hanno www.tarbabys.com
My Comment on Joy Ann Reid’s, “Hey White Working Class, Donald Trump is Already Screwing You Over”
Joy, no one could have said it better! But I would like to add…
“The Republi-cons May Soon be in Charge.”
Maybe it’s actually a good thing that these Republi-cons may soon take over the White House and both houses of Congress. They’ve demonized President Obama ever since the congressional leaders met on the eve of his inauguration, where they hatched the conspiracy to obstruct his administration at every turn, just so that he would be a one term president. They couldn’t care less if America’s middle class and working poor perished along the way. Even though the President and the Democrat controlled congress reeled our economy back from the abyss, after the previous Republican administration, as usual, plunged the economy into a deep recession, there was never a single word of praise. If President Obama would have cured cancer, these Republi-cons would have blamed him for reducing employment in the medical field and for grand standing.
But now, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves, if they finally succeed in their decades long campaign to dismantle programs created during FDR’s New Deal and the Johnson Administration’s Great Society. That includes turning the Social Security trust fund over to the banksters and Wall Street, privatizing Medicare, block granting Medicaid and ending any scrap of common sense governmental regulation.
They’ve been bashing Obamacare for 6 years, spending $10’s of millions attempting to repeal the ACA more than 60 times. They say they’ll repeal and replace it on day one, but still, after all this time, they have no credible alternative. Their idea of a health care plan, is as always, dictated by and aligned with the insurance industry and big pharma. If they succeed in repealing Obamacare, hospitals throughout the nation are already predicting total chaos and financial collapse.
What people who voted for Trump can’t understand is that the Republi-cons couldn’t care less about their rising insurance premiums. If they were, they would have jumped at the chance to expand federally paid Medicaid in the red states controlled by Republi-con governors and legislatures. And they wouldn’t have voted against the ACA public option. They could have partnered with the President and Democrats to find ways to improve the ACA instead of trying to cripple it, but obstructing any success for the Obama Administration was more important than fashioning a modern health care system or addressing the number one cause of America’s deficits. They know that if Obamacare hadn’t been implemented, premiums would be even higher than they are now. Under Obamacare, insurance companies can only take 15% of premiums for administration and profits, unlike the 30% average they enjoyed before the ACA was passed. Any excess premiums have to be returned. And Medicare has lower administrative costs than pre-ACA plans. So if Obamacare is repealed and the Trump supporters policies are canceled or premiums skyrocket for crappier plans, they can’t blame the Democrats.
But the real reason these Republi-cons and their corporate benefactors hate the ACA, is that folks who signed up, especially those with pre-existing conditions, now have the freedom to quit the crappy jobs they were hanging onto just for the insurance. Because of the much better quality Obamacare plans, with lower deductibles and the generous subsidies for lower income folks, 10’s of millions of older workers not yet eligible for Medicare, jumped at the windfall and have either left the workforce, found better, higher paying jobs or even started a business. That’s now why virtually 100% of small and medium size businesses are desperately looking for workers and why the employment participation rate is so low. These employers may soon have to start paying workers a living wage unless they can get the Republi-cons to repeal Obamacare. That’s also why they will try to privatize Medicare.
Anything Trump and the Republi-cons replace the ACA with, will be either much worse, or a clone of Obamacare with a different name attached. But anyone with half a brain knows that the only sensible alternative or improvement, is Obamacare with a public option or a true single payer health care system. These Republi-cons will do the bidding of employers that want total control of their employees; that want workers who have no choices, who are so desperate for health insurance that they will be forced to hold onto those crappy low paying jobs.
Maybe when these incompetents finally muck up our governing institutions, our health care system, our departments of housing, education, labor, agriculture, environment, Veterans Administration, and then drive the economy into a ditch again, we can only hope that bamboozled voters may actually start paying attention to the facts and ignore the fake news stories propagated by the diabolical far right and their Russian handlers. Unfortunately, folks who disseminate these conspiracy theories and fake news seem extremely proud and unapologetic. And if you point out that these are insane stories not supported by any facts, it just seems to have no effect on the gullible.
If you took a poll about the merits of the 2016 Democrats platform, I would guess that the lower 90% of American wage earners would overwhelmingly approve of each issue. And the top 10% of wage earners would overwhelmingly approve of most of the issues in the Republican platform.
Trump is heading into office with the lowest (41%) approval rating of any president in many decades. Vice President elect Pence has only a 39% approval rating. Less than 40% approve of Trumps cabinet choices. Only 45% believe he can handle an international crisis, only 44% think he will use the military wisely and only 44% think he will avoid a major scandal. George Bush entered office with a 70% approval rating on all these issues. Trump is personally viewed favorably by only 37% of Americans, only 41% view him as honest, only 37% see him as well qualified, only 31% see him as a moral person and only 26% view Trump as a role model. A majority of Americans believe Trump’s business interests will surly present conflicts and 65% of those polled believe his business ties will adversely conflict with America’s best interests.
Even though Hillary received more than 2.7 million more popular votes than Trump, and even if we’re to believe the questionable vote counts in the swing states, you still have to wonder how more than 60 million American’s could vote for Trump. I guess there’s an awful lot of suffering Americans desperate for change. But still, we’ve witnessed a con job extraordinaire.
It’s hard for me to believe a majority of white women and so many union workers and working poor voted for Trump. You’re much more apt to prosper and find a living wage job if you support the Democrats, who have always supported unions in particular and labor in general, than you would if you go out of your way to support a billionaire who is hiring other billionaires and multi millionaires who will cut taxes for the top 1% on day one. And who will systematically attack all the underpinnings of the quickly fading American middle class.
If you think a Trump Administration run by billionaires will propose an increase in the minimum wage, you’re dreaming. Trump nominated fast food Carls’ Jr. and Hardee’s Andy Puzder for Labor Secretary. Puzder believes the only thing better than an employee earning $7.25 and hour is a robot, which he praises by saying “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case,” Who does Puzder think will be able to afford his burgers; robot don’t eat. The Trump Administration is teeming with plutocrats who can’t wait to enter what’s left of America’s middle class in the global race to the bottom. I honestly believe these guys hate anyone who isn’t rich. I guess these folks never heard of Henry Ford, who believed that no matter how many or how well he made his automobiles, if his own employees couldn’t afford them, the company would fail.
And if Trump supporters think this cabinet of billionaires will reverse the exodus of living wage jobs to China, Mexico and other low wage countries, they’re fooling themselves. These corporate titans have discovered that when their companies decide to lay off American workers and ship the jobs off shore, their stock price always increases substantially. Executives make enormous profits. And they don’t even invest the purported savings in plants and equipment or R&D, they usually just implement stock buy back programs which then increases the value of their own generous stock holdings. There’s enormous incentive for CEO’s and boards of directors to continue exporting jobs.
Trump and his billionaire ideologues will try to drag America back to the gilded age, but the folks who were so desperate for change may turn on these evildoers like a rabid dog, although I probably won’t hold my breath. I think it was Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce who said Trump is hiring four kinds of people for his cabinet, ideologues, billionaires, people who have no governing experience and billionaire ideologues who have no governing experience. For extremely complicated jobs that demand expertise, nuance and being able to hit the ground running, Trump has employed ideological novices with training wheels. Can you imagine this group taking over in January 2009, when our economy was imploding and we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. That’s why Trump will eventually jump on the TPP bandwagon.
These phony conservatives have proposed no credible solutions for what ails America and only pledge to shrink government down to the size where they can drown it in a bathtub. But there’s a big problem with that philosophy; the special interests that they pander too, Wall Street, multinational corporations, the fossil fuel industry and crony capitalists around the world, depend on rational, functioning American governance and regulations more than anyone. They just don’t want to pay for it.
I guess one thing we can depend on is that these ult right governing pretenders can’t help but overreach. We may only have to endure a two year assault on our Democratic American Ethos. John Hanno