Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: What Do You Do When The Government Won’t Help You?

May 11th 2020

Donald Trump addresses reporters outside the South Portico entrance of the White House (Joyce N. Boghosian)

By Thom Hartmann

Don’t expect this administration or the Republican party to do anything at all to help you, your family, or your friends during this pandemic and Trump Depression. Ever since 1980, the Republican Party has used each Republican presidency to shovel another few trillion dollars to their friends and owners, America’s billionaires. Most recently, between Trump’s 2017 millionaire tax cuts and the coronavirus stimulus programs, they’ve shoveled another 2 or 3 trillion to the billionaires, and the Fed has put a $6 trillion icing on that cake.

And now, Republicans are telling us, the money is all gone and there’s nothing left for average working Americans. To add insult to injury, they’re also proposing cuts to long-term Social Security in exchange for small cash payments out of the Social Security fund today. At the same time, because of five months of lies and bungling incompetence from Trump and Kushner, over 40 million Americans have lost or are on the brink of losing their health insurance. The Republican response to this is similar: “We’ve got ours and screw you.” Red state governors are even still refusing to expand Medicaid, while state unemployment systems, like the one that former Florida Governor Rick Scott intentionally rigged to make hard to use or get benefits from, continue to fight making payments to working people.

While Northern European countries that put working people ahead of billionaires have kept their unemployment rates below 6% and kept their middle-class prosperous even in the face of a pandemic, average Americans are getting wiped out at the same time that America’s billionaires dramatically increase their wealth. Only a political revolution in this country to bring us into line with the rest of the developed world and solve this crisis.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.