Your Government Chooses to Ignore Your Needs
Most Americans were struggling economically before COVID hit. It is fair to say that the pandemic added catastrophe to calamity for the people and small businesses. Predictably, the US government has done nothing of substance to help its people, in contrast to all other developed nations.
What enabled those less wealthy nations to support their people and their economies is their now traditional emphasis on social welfare, as opposed to the priority the US government gives to the well-being of corporations and the 1%. In the US, the New Deal reforms and their focus on the well-being of the people and the Main Street economy were an historical anomaly. Those reforms could not have happened were it not for. powerful left-led movements that brought together unionists, the unemployed, the hungry and homeless, WWI veterans — The Bonus Army — and allies, to make the government offers it could not refuse. Such a massive demonstration of popular sovereignty had not occurred in this country since the Revolutionary War.
But it did not take long for the forces of wealth to start clawing back those social gains and to restore the government’s hostility to the needs of the people. Thus, social welfare as government policy, as represented by the New Deal, was prevented from taking root. By then, the full employment created by WWII had kick-started a new, wider affluence and burgeoning middle class, which together weakened the left and its ability to defend the ND reforms.
Today, after 45 years of neoliberal rule over government resulted in the steady decline of the middle class, the wealth of ordinary Americans is in the tank, while the rich have become obscenely richer.
Our government has made a very blatant and dastardly choice in refusing to help the people, having adopted austerity as a social policy. Imagine just how bad off we were before the pandemic hit, in terms of poverty, hunger, homelessness and medical need, looking the way we did even AFTER about $450 billion in US philanthropic giving in 2019! How much worse would things have been without it? Here, one gets a real sense of the magnitude of the need and the accumulated amount of neglected federal aid.
It remains a startling fact, because it is hidden from general public awareness, that Congress does not refuse to help the millions of needy Americans due to an unavailability of funds, regardless of what they claim. Routinely, Congress has new dollars created to cover the day-to-day operations of government, or to cover whatever expenses they deem necessary, by passing authorizing legislation. NO federal taxes or borrowing are used to pay federal bills. NONE! Everything is funded via new, digitally minted and delivered dollars. Just like the $600 per person that will be direct-deposited in your account any day. That deposit could just as easily have been for $2000 or $5000, and monthly as well! NO ACTUAL FISCAL CONSTRAINTS EXIST TO PREVENT SUCH AN ACTION.
The clear upshot is that our government made a conscious decision to allow millions upon millions to continue to suffer, while simultaneously assisting the super rich to become ever more obscenely wealthy.
Were the American people more widely to be aware of how the federal government actually pays its bills, would they continue to accept those official lies and abuse?
