Arizona and twenty-four other states have sued the current administration for refusing to use existing monies to issue SNAP benefits in November. The only reason to refuse benefits is to hurt the public so they will tell the Democrats to give up on saving health care to save food care. 42 million Americans and 920,000 Arizonans will go hungry.
A meme on Facebook said: “Do you really want your tax dollars going to feed someone else’s kids? Yes! 1000% Yes. I want my taxes to help feed hungry kids. WTF is wrong with people?” Someone paid for my parents’ food surplus when I was a child; someone paid for my food stamps when I was a young adult; someone paid for both my sisters food stamps when they were young single mothers. Yes, I’m happy to pay for someone else’s child who is hungry.
If you make $60,000 a year, you pay $36.00 per year for food stamps. But every dollar spent in SNAP creates $1.80 in local financial activity. You also pay $37 a year for TANF (welfare). But you pay $700 a year for corporate subsidies.
And the corporations you are supporting? Musk with his Tesla and Starlink and Space X etc. had $2 billion in 2012 and $486 billion now; Meta and Zuckerberg had $1.5 billion in 2008 and has $245 billion now; Bezos with Amazon and Washington Post had $1.6 billion in 1998 and $233 billion now; Larry Ellison of Oracle fame had $23 billion in 2009 and $370 billion now. Does anyone really need a billion dollars let alone nearly half a trillion?
Yet federal minimum wage remains at $7.25/hour and has not gone up since 2009. Average income in the U.S. in 1998 was $39,000. Average income today is $62,000 – nowhere near the increases seen above to the uberwealthy. And yet the Big Billionaires Bill literally took money out of the mouths of children to give tax breaks to these businesses and these men. It can be nothing but corruption, graft, and cruelty.
On October 29, ICE agents beat and choked a Houston teen and his father during a traffic ambush and shot a Honduran man in Phoenix. Judge Ellis in Chicago has ordered the top U.S. Border Patrol official to come to court every day at 6 pm with his body-worn camera to report because he and his thugs were violating a court order limiting their use of tear gas against protesters. She also ordered them to wear visible identification and turn on their body cameras. She said she had better not see them tear gassing children who are trick or treating. Did you ever think you would hear a federal judge in the U.S. order cops not to tear gas children that are trick or treating? In my small town, I started the trick or treating for UNICEF many decades ago. I certainly never thought about cops gassing me.
The latest act of cruelty is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was formed after the financial interests crashed the economy in 2008 to protect consumers has drafted a rule to the Fair Credit Reporting Act to say that medical debt must be reported to the credit agencies. Several states have state laws that mandate medical debt is not to be reported because it is involuntary among other reasons. The CFPB, now completely perverted from its original purpose, seeks to overturn those laws.
Who does that benefit? No one. Reporting it does not mean any of it will be paid. The bills are inflated because the health care industry is gouging us while paying their CEOs millions. A Johnson and Johnson bandage is $3 and a Bayer aspirin $5. And for heavens sakes never take the Kleenex!
Who does this rule harm? Consumers, the people – especially those who were or are “involuntarily” sick. With a bad credit report, they can’t buy a house or rent an apartment or buy a car or get a school loan. It helps no one; it hurts many. Why do it? Because you are cruel. It’s really a shame that the people who voted for this administration don’t realize how much they despise them and harm them.
I just finished re-reading “The Theory and Practice of Hell” by Eugen Kogon which is stated to be one of the best books about the concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the society behind them. The author is an Austrian who spent considerable time in different camps. When you read of the atrocities and cruelty and depravity it’s hard to believe it. That’s the problem. Normal people cannot believe it is happening because we cannot even think up these things let alone consider how a person could do such things. So we wait too long to act because of this disbelief. But there are such people. In talking about one guard the author said he couldn’t even say what he did because it was too depraved. Given what else he had already talked about, it’s impossible for me to imagine how more depraved it could be!
Near the end of the book when he was describing the kind of people who do this, it was really a gut punch because it is so similar to today. He talked about people who had come down in the world because of their own ineptitude leaving them feeling inferior. Such people really hate others who have education, ability, respect, prestige, courage, and conviction – all what they lack.
He then gave several examples of those people, and it read like Trump’s biography. Born in privilege but not really up to snuff; pushed forward without merit by money and power; learned to make it by cheating, stealing, and violence. If you saw “The Apprentice” you saw that Roy Cohen, the notorious and vicious lawyer for Senator McCarthy among others, taught Trump who eventually turned the tables on Cohen. You got to be bad to turn the tables on Roy Cohen.
One of the names that comes up frequently in the book is Koch. The Koch brothers’ ancestors did come from Germany as did Trump’s. So did mine for that matter.
The author says that other markers of the SS were failure to read and low intellectual development. For example to be promoted to a sergeant you had to answer questions like what is the difference between a child and a dwarf and between a ladder and a stairway?
To mask this inferiority SS members were harsh, ruthless, arrogant, relentless, and spread fear. Sound familiar? Critical thinking was not used; doubt was not allowed; loyalty and obedience was required. The pursuit of power was all. Kogon concluded that inferiority was the basic reason for it all.
While we see ICE and Border Patrol acting just like this today, it’s not the first time. Tim Weiner has written “The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century” and for all that we knew it was a disaster much of the time; it’s worse. I read with near disbelief how ignorant the principals and line officers were when planning and carrying out attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. How do such stupid people get to such positions of power? See above.
In excruciating detail Weiner showed their gross incompetence and the lack of foresight, analysis, and knowledge of history. This is truly a secret government gone wrong. The whole lot should be in the dock for torture over the “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the renditions to Black Sites – same as they are doing today. We use the same failed strategies over and over.
The level of brutal, illegal violence and sadism rose dramatically with Black Sites, today called rendition sites e.g. Guantanamo which is being used again to send immigrants and Abu Ghraib (don’t worry, we’ll see this shortly). Remember two of the principal were from Arizona. Then like now they were firing the competent and courageous ones to put the incompetent and violent ones in charge. Inevitably, because they are all suffering from an inferiority complex, their ego’s flare up against each other.
The underlings knew the president was a Russian asset; they knew he was the national security threat. Yet they said and did nothing making them traitors too. They still know and watch in silence as our country descends into the abyss. The president is “mad” as one reporter said after his deranged speech to the UN.
By its own actions, the CIA destroyed its spying ability. People turned in their own countries to come here and be free but they were betrayed just as those who helped us in Afghanistan were left to be murdered. No one will trust us again. They purged the agency of people of color and sent Caucasian spies to Africa and Asia because…..?
The author concludes, “The President of the United States had gone over to the other side.” We joined the authoritarian axis and voted with Russia, North Korea, and Iran against Russia withdrawing from Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2025. The president is now in bed with the very ideologies we fought for 80 years. He is the national security threat.
The level of the incompetence and stupidity then and now is staggering. They embarked on the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan with no idea at all what they were doing. They refused to listen to anyone who had any idea or knowledge and continued blundering their way to death and disgrace. How we have survived this long with this level of idiocy among the decision makers is a mystery to me. It’s only up to us.
We all need to get over our inferiority complex. Men are not better than women; whites are not better than people of color; rich are not better than poor; city are not better than country, etc. But we all are better than what this country has become so please stand up and let your better selves take over.