We Should Be Rising Up in Fury, Not Bowing in Craven Submission
YES,
BUDGETS ARE BORING, unless they contain – as the proposed 2018 federal
budget surely does – death threats to entire groups of people. Even then
they are a huge pain in the ass to properly cover because proper
coverage requires hours (and often entire days) of wonkishly
scrutinizing line-item minutiae.
Nevertheless,
be not dismayed; I have chosen here the least-wonkish, most
informatively readable reports on the proposed 2018 federal budget I
could find. Why? Because for many of us, this budget will literally be a
matter of life and death – more likely the latter.
Though it is absurd to imagine we can stop the intended killing
by any means short of revolution, we may indeed reduce the death toll –
perhaps even substantially – by vehement protest, which I most
emphatically recommend. At the very least we will be forewarned of the
budget's disastrous impact in time to construct whatever collective and
individual preparations we might be able to organize to protect our
communities, our families and ourselves.
In
whatever form this budget is finally enacted, the Ayn Rand ethos of the
Trump-Pence Regime guarantees it will be the most deliberately vicious
budget of my lifetime – and possibly the most deliberately vicious
budget in the entire post-slavery history of the United States. That's
because the neoliberal malice of Congress long ago defined the federal
budget as a weapon for inflicting slow-motion mass-murder on those of us
condemned as “surplus population” – that is, those of us who are poor
and/or old and/or disabled and/or chronically unemployed and therefore
no longer exploitable for Capitalist profit.
(To read the rest, go here.)
