Worried About Your Finances and Your Future? He’s Just So Incoherent, So Racist, and So Weird

This question can give me nightmares: how can people follow him? Economic matters, high costs, have been of such concern for so many of us. But which Presidential candidate might best help reduce these burdens? And which candidate would protect our vote, our power and rights so we could influence government policies to serve our needs? Wouldn’t that take someone who cares about the quality of regular people’s lives?

 

DT said the following on 7/26/24: “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore…. [For in] four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore…” In other words, vote for me now, and you’ll never be able to vote again?

 

He said of V.P. Kamala Harris “She was Indian all the way, and then she became black.” And “She is a DEI hire.” As if a woman, or someone black just isn’t talented enough to earn on her own merit any important position, for example as a prosecutor, Senator, Vice President or President?

 

He even told his own nephew, whose son has a physical disability, “these people (with disabilities), all the expenses…they should just die.” And a few years later he literally told his nephew he should just let HIS OWN SON die because of his physical disabilities. Would this person care at all about the majority of us except to get our votes?

 

Commentator Brian Tyler Cohen added⎼ DT threw his own VP candidate under the bus by saying: You’re not voting for a VP candidate—you’re voting for me. This reminds me of how he treated his former VP, when he stood by watching the Jan. 6 insurrectionist mob chant “hang Mike Pence”? Only I am important. And maybe DT’s right to dismiss his new VP choice, who said in 2021, the nation is run by a bunch of “childless cat ladies,” who have no stake in America and are miserable at their own lives. America must go to war against the idea that women don’t have to have children. And: people without children are “psychotic,” “deranged.”

 

Over the last 5 years, many people have had to face awful choices due to high prices for purchasing a home, food, or other goods. But: Will a person who cares only for himself improve the economic situation for most of us if he ever became President again? Or: Would we be better off now if he had lost his influence once he had lost the 2020 election?

 

DT boasts about his great economy. From the distance of 4 years, the past might seem better than the present. We might forget the harmful chaos of the DT administration. And who really benefitted, especially in the long run, from his economic policies? Did his economy help cause the pain many of us now feel?

 

The only big economic legislation he helped pass was the 2017 tax act, which heavily favored the rich. “As a share of after-tax income, tax cuts at the top — for both households in the top 1 percent and the top 5 percent — are more than triple the total value of the tax cuts received for people with incomes in the bottom 60 percent.[2]” Most of us had a temporary tax cut; corporations (and thus rich executives) had a permanent one, from 35% to 21%. As a result, government income was greatly reduced, and a heavily increasing debt was created.

 

In testimony to The Senate Committee on Budget and Policy Priorities, Samantha Jacoby, a tax and legal analyst, said:

Cutting corporate taxes costs significant revenue, and evidence is sorely lacking that the benefits have trickled down. Executives, disproportionately wealthy corporate shareholders, and highly paid employees have reaped virtually all the economic gains from the corporate rate cuts, research suggests.

With less money going from the rich to the government, the rest of us pay more, for schooling, to maintain infrastructure, to finance health and science organizations, for the military, etc. By 2019, DT was leading the nation into a total downfall that had begun even before the pandemic….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The GOP Would Sacrifice Us on the Altar of their Power and Profit: What if, Instead, We Created a Better World?

What if we, or I, have been looking at this all wrong? I often feel like we’re on the verge of losing almost everything. But what if we’re on the verge of⎼ well, winning. Or maybe not winning but at least making things better? Maybe we must re-think our thinking about  what’s possible.

 

The GOP, and even some Democrats, or the financially well-off financiers of some Democrats, have become totally desperate. The immorality of many GOP, their willingness to sacrifice everything and everyone for their greed and power, has become totally upfront and obvious to anyone not blinded by lies and an unwillingness to question their beliefs or recognize the humanity of those holding views different from their own.

 

Desperation is a sign of weakness, not strength. Unwillingness to change one’s views or listen to others is a weakness, not a strength.

 

On May 30th Sonali Kolhatkar, host and founder of Rising With Sonali, a tv and radio show that airs on Free Speech Radio and Pacifica stations, wrote an article for the Independent Media Institute arguing very cogently that the very rich are making a very dangerous calculation⎼ that it is worth sacrificing millions or even billions of lives in order to preserve corporate and individual profits.

 

She cites a new poll by the National Surveys on Energy and the Environment which found that “there is no longer skepticism among the public that the effects of climate change are real, as 76 percent of respondents—the highest on record since the poll started—’believe there is solid evidence that temperatures on the planet have risen over the last four decades.’”

 

Yet, despite overwhelming support for doing all we can to halt climate change, “corporate profit-based considerations have constantly dictated our energy use and climate policies, [and] we have effectively decided that major sacrifices of lives—most likely poor people of color—will be worth the pain of relying on fossil fuels for energy.”

 

And the same holds true with the pandemic. “Today, even as COVID-19 infection rates are skyrocketing, with cases having risen by 58 percent in the last two weeks alone, mask mandates are being dropped all over the country and COVID-19-related restrictions are ending. This is not because the virus is under control—it is clearly not—but because it’s no longer financially viable for corporate America to sacrifice profits for lives. So, it will sacrifice lives for profit….”

 

Greg Sargent wrote in the Washington Post back in September about how the GOP would exploit the pandemic, sacrifice lives by lying about vaccines, for example, to resurrect their power. Millions of people were tricked, made sick, and many died due to the anti-vaccine propaganda of DJT and the right.

 

*This blog was syndicated by The Good Men Project.