Capitalism Has Reduced Thanksgiving* to a Day of Self-Deceit

With a Sneeringly Genocidal Federal Budget Threatening All of Us, 
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.

Thus the budget proposal's weaponized finances remain...

(To read the rest, go here.)