Americans are
truly impacted by the political environment in which they live. If we have a government that is felt to care
about meeting the needs of people… our children, our seniors, those who are ill, our veterans,
those who live in poverty, those in the work force, we live in an atmosphere of
trust, hope and security.
If, on the other
hand we live in a political environment that does not seem to care about meeting
the needs of people, we become uncomfortable, we feel stress, on alert and
wondering what is coming down the road next that we will have to deal with?
For the past year,
we have had a man in the White House who has systematically destroyed
everything he has touched with a pen. His obsession with reversing every Obama
proposal is exactly that, an obsession.
Whether it is due to policy considerations or to get back at Obama for the
way that Obama roasted Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondences’ Dinner,
the result of Trumps slashing pen has been to destroy, not create attempts to meet
the needs of citizens.
His administration,
in general, seems to be predicated on destroying everything that has been
created over the past 80 years to protect and defend American Citizens. He is functioning as Steve Bannon’s proxy to
destroy our democratic structures with no constructive alternative in mind. What do we gain by removing over time pay
requirements for those who are working over time, who still have a hard time
making ends meet? What do we gain by removing Social Security, Medicare and
other safety net provisions that were created to protect citizens from another
1929 Stock Market Crash?
What do we gain by
having people in Cabinet positions who oppose the work that their very agencies
perform on behalf of our citizens? The
Secretary of Education who is against public education. We have a Secretary of Labor who is against
unions and minimum wages and overtime pay. We have a Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Interior and an EPA Administrator who refute the impact of human induced climate
change on our planet.
The Center for
Disease Control and Prevention has been ordered to not use seven words—diversity,
fetus, transgender, vulnerable, entitlement, evidence-based and
scientific-based, in documents used to create next years budget. The elimination
of these words negatively impact those who are transgender, abortion funding, and
using science and evidence as a basis for funding. This new directive from
Trump brings back the Orwellian 1984 assertion “it’s a beautiful thing, the
destruction of words.” Without words,
things, issues and people just go away. Is this more delusional thinking on the
part of Trump?
We have lies
becoming the new normal for a President. His position is that if the news media
disagrees with him, or criticizes him, it is “fake news.” He admonishes us to listen
to him, because he will give us the real news. He has also said that he “knows more than the generals and that he
is the only one who can fix our economy.” It has been documented that fifty
percent of what he says is not true.
We have collusion
charges levelled against Trump and ongoing investigations that are looking in on
what has actually transpired in relation to Russian interference in our 2016
Presidential election process. We have Trump
reportedly readying to “fire” the very person who is charged with a Special
Investigation that is looking into those charges. And, there is mounting
evidence that suggests that the Trump campaign was, in fact, being aided by the
Russians in his attempt to defeat Hillary Clinton. How is it possible for the
very person who has allegedly done something wrong to fire the person who is
investigating the various allegations of his involvement in doing something
wrong? This is the kind of crazy behavior
that, left unchecked, makes citizens uncomfortable and discouraged about their political leaders.
We have had
efforts made, by this President and the GOP, to destroy health care legislation
that the Obama Administration had passed into law. The Trump supported legislative
process itself was an example of hastily slapping together proposals that were
decided upon behind closed doors. Their's was a rush job to get something
passed, regardless who was hurt in the process. Thankfully, it did not pass.
One of the goals
of the Obama effort was to ensure that millions of people would be able to gain
affordable health care. This was felt to
be important because the biggest cause for bankruptcy in the United States was
the inability for citizens to pay for catastrophic health care costs.
With the Trump/GOP
plan, millions of citizens would have been taken off of the rolls for medical
care. One of the convoluted reasons the GOP wanted to replace the Obama Affordable
Care Act was because the GOP felt that people needed the right to choose
not to be insured, or for people to be able to choose substandard health care options.
Obama’s ACA
required a minimum level of coverage that would protect everyone one from going
without health care and would ensure that the public would not have to pay for
emergency room visits that others needed and could not afford.
This was viewed by
Trump and his supporters as being too ‘socialistic’ and not democratic enough.
With that in mind, how ‘democratic’ is it for Trump to outlaw the use of specific words that relate to certain groups of people and situations in the creation of the the Federal budget? Or, what about denying First Amendment rights to people for using certain words
in the creation of a Federal Budget?
Now the same
process has been repeated with the Trump/G.O.P Tax Bill. It has been hastily slapped together
proposals that were decided behind closed doors. The plan to vote on it was set
before anyone has had the opportunity to read what was being voted on. Not only is the Congress in the dark about
what was being proposed, so is the public.
The Congressional Budget Office has not even had the time to review the
bills implications and costs.
The review of what is presently known about the bill
suggests that it is filled with untruths about what good it is suppose to be
doing for the average citizen, who it is really going to help and what are its real
goals.
So far what has
been discussed has only had to do with domestic issues that reflect Trump’s
destructive tendencies and practices.
Internationally, his first week in office, he caused conflict between
himself and the President of Mexico and with the Prime Minister of Australia.
He is verbally setting the stage for another Korean War, by provocatively taking on ‘little rocket man’. And he has
caused upheaval in the Near East as a result of his Jerusalem- Israeli-Capital
speech. In effect, he has taken the United States our of having a role in
participating in a peace settlement in the area.
As was said at the
outset, we are impacted by the political environment that is created by
our elected officials. In the past year
much of that atmosphere has been fed by actions on the part of Trump and the G.O.P
that have been created by a feeling that the needs of
citizens and their welfare are not his administration’s focus. As a result, we are living in stressful times
of uncertainty and threat. This is not the America that our fore fathers have
fought for and given their lives to defend.
It is the world that has been created by delusional and deceptive
thinking by the likes of Bannon, Trump and those who enable such people in
their abuse of position and power.