Tag Archives: antiTrump

The next crisis

First the US gets three years of Trump ruining everything he touches. Then COVID-19 races through the US while Trump calls it a hoax. States step in to slow the virus; people begin to stay home or wear a mask; Trump pressures Americans to go back to “normal.” People return to work and leave their masks at home or around their necks. The virus spikes again.

An estimated one-quarter to one-half of the American workforce is still unemployed. Millions have lost so much income that even if they’re back at work, they can’t pay the rent. Eviction moratoriums are expiring, which means people are going to get kicked out of their housing. States have little money to help. The Republican Senate is stopping all federal assistance pushed by the Democratic House. Enhanced unemployment checks, which have helped so many survive until now, stop at the end of July.

The USA is about to experience levels of hunger and homelessness not seen in nearly a century. Our president only cares about the kind of people who own several houses and have never missed a meal. Trump might help ordinary people if he thinks he has to do it to win re-election. But who knows what goes on in that big empty head? Whatever nonsense Fox talk-show hosts spouted this morning, that’s what he thinks.

Homelessness became an epidemic in the US when Reagan slashed federal housing programs in 1981. For the first time, we had veterans, newly jobless workers, and families with children living in the streets. Nothing significant has been done since then by either party to help Americans afford housing. Now things will be much worse.

We must elect Democrats this fall. But that’s just a start. So much harm has been done to ordinary American families over the last 40 years that we need to make big changes, not take baby steps. Health care is a human right. Shelter is a human right. All children deserve adult attention and education. If we believe these things, we have a lot of work to do. Once we get a new administration, we must push them hard to the left. The federal government has to stop spending half our money on the military, yank the other half back out of the hands of the billionaires, and instead fund housing, health, and education.

Americans have finally hit the streets in protest. I’m afraid we’ll have to stay there for a while longer.

The stock market isn’t the economy

The stock market dropped in late March when it hit Americans all at once (except Trump, who knew months before) that COVID-19 was a deadly plague which demanded a quick response. The real economy, where people go to work and get paid, and then go out and spend their money, largely shut down. Suddenly 1 out of 4 Americans was out of a job.

The stock market has recovered. The real economy has not. Why does Dow Jones seem not to care that the Jones family can’t pay the rent? Because the Jones family is not rich and does not own stock. They are the poor relations that the Dow does its best to ignore.

But another stock market crash is almost inevitable. The Jones family’s unemployment checks will run out. They will not be able to find new jobs. No matter how much Trump denies it (and because of his denial), COVID-19 is raging through the US and people are rightly afraid to start their businesses back up. The Jones family’s landlord will stop forgiving the rent, because he can’t afford to pay his mortgage without getting it. They are all in danger of losing their homes.

The only reason the stock market cares about the 40 million Americans who have lost their jobs is that pretty soon, those people will stop spending money, because they won’t have any.

The capitalist economy depends on the American consumer. Nonstop advertising has trained us to want new things constantly. We buy every plastic gimcrack and follow every new fashion. Without our shopping, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

That house of cards hasn’t been sheltering most people very well anyhow. Capitalism only works if you have capital. Put another way, it takes money to make money. People who have never had a chance to accumulate wealth, like most Americans of color and those born into the lower classes, get stuck in jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. When the real economy shuts down, they have no savings and no collateral.

The US is about to face hunger and homelessness on a scale we have not experienced since the Depression of the 1930s. The federal government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to the Depression with laws, jobs programs, and public works projects known as the New Deal. Slowly, the New Deal programs put Americans back on their feet.

We know the only Jones that Trump cares about is the Dow. He is perfectly willing for the rest of the Joneses to die of coronavirus, or lose their homes, or starve, as long as his rich buddies continue to make more money. With a normal president, Americans could expect the federal government to help us get through these bundled crises. Now we know we can’t expect any help until we elect a new president. If we lose everything meanwhile? Trump will just call us losers.