Congress must pass a stimulus bill!
2nd November 2020 · 0 Comments
We know what this is…. the same old, same old.
Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Capitol became major obstructionists back in 2008, when the nation’s first Black president, Barack H. Obama took office and Republican Senator Mitchell McConnell vowed to block any agenda item America’s first Black president proposed. It’s a strategy that the Republicans used to block President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merritt Garland, and it’s the main tactic they have continued to use to block Democrats’ legislative bills since 2010.
When Democrats controlled the 111th Congress (2009–2011) with majorities in both houses of Congress, under the leadership of the country’s first African-American president, Democrat Barack Hussein Obama, the Congress and the Obama Administration oversaw the passage of the Affordable Care Act, rescued the economy, passed Wall Street reform, secured a U.S. commitment to a global agreement on Climate Change, negotiated a deal to block a nuclear Iran, eliminated Osama bin Laden, ended U.S. combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, turned around the U.S. Auto Industry, repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’’, supported Federal Recognition of Same-Sex Marriages, reversed Bush’s torture policies, established rules to limit carbon emissions from power plants, normalized relations with Cuba, protected DREAMers from deportation, boosted fuel efficiency standards, established Net Neutrality, passed the Fair Sentencing Act, revived the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and put two U.S. Supreme Court justices on the bench, Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, in addition to many other accomplishments..
And what has Donald J. Trump accomplished in his first term?
He and his Republican cohorts in Congress passed tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, got one Black woman out of jail, bowed to Putin’s every whim, pardoned his criminal friends, stopped enforcing Consent Decrees, separated immigrant children from their parents on the border, stacked the federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court with far-right wing judges, passed a coronavirus stimulus packaged that disproportionately benefited major corporations, bailed out farmers (not Black farmers, though, refused to provide a federal plan for containing the coronavirus pandemic or help cities and states bear the cost of viral infections, and supported white supremacist terrorist groups, and told thousands of lies, among other acts that have caused division and racial animus.
Most egregious of all, Trump has sat idly by while, at last count, 227,000 Americans have died from coronavirus. Trump and his minions contracted the virus but that didn’t stop him from holding viral super spreader rallies, while telling his supporters that the country has rounded the corner on the pandemic, which is a flat out lie.
Trump’s inaction has proven that he is content to witness millions of American deaths under the theory of “herd immunity,” wherein millions of Americans would have to die to reach a point where the virus is no longer widespread. Health experts have said such a theory is unproven and it is not a valid remedy for the pandemic. According to one expert, herd immunity is “mass murder.”
In our humble opinion, what Trump has done in not creating a federal plan and funding to contain the virus, looks more like genocide.
Clearly, Trump’s reluctance to push Republicans to do a second stimulus deal, to help millions of Americans who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic, is proof that he is a death merchant and that he doesn’t give a damn about millions of American people who can’t feed their families, pay their bills, or return to work in the middle of this pandemic.
And while his administration’s talking heads have blamed the lack of a stimulus package on the Democrats, the truth is that McConnell doesn’t have the votes to pass a package in the U.S. Senate; not even for his proposed $500 billion “skinny bill,” which would give money to major corporations, no aid to state and cities, and kibbles and bits to the unemployed.
After ramming Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett down Americans’ throats, in the wake of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg — whose dying wish was not fill her seat until after the November 3, presidential election — and Barrett’s swearing in by Republican Justice Clarence Thomas, the only black on the U.S. Supreme Court and the most anti-black jurist on the court, McConnell, who calls himself the “Grim Reaper,” (because bills die on his desk) announced that the Senate would be on recess until November 9, which insures that no stimulus package would be voted on until after the election, if at all.
Desperate to get reelected, Trump claimed to want a bigger stimulus package than both parties proposed. In fact, the week before the election he dangled a carrot in front of voters: “After the election, we’ll get the best stimulus package you’ve ever seen.”
Given his track record for being a pathological liar (The Washington Post has documented at least 29,000 of Trump’s lies), there is no reason to believe anything Trump says.
The bottom line is that whoever ends up in the White House and the Senate, Congress must act to bail out the American people first…. and not with the crumbs from McConnell’s table.
As of October 7, 2020, 31 million people had filed for unemployment (the unemployment rate for African Americans is 17.4 person), people can’t put food on their tables, renters can’t pay their rents, and people are having a hard time paying mortgages and ordinary bills.
If this trend continues, the U.S. will experience the horrors of the Great Depression. At press time, the stock markets were in a freefall because the coronavirus is spreading like wildfire and Congress failed to pass a stimulus package.
For his part, Trump continued to promise that he will create the best economy ever (he didn’t create a good economy, Obama did), and that he would protect people with pre-existing conditions – while his administration is in court trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act aka Obama Care with a lawsuit set to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on November 10.
If by some miracle or cheating, Trump wins re-election and the Democrats don’t flip the U.S. Senate, “we the people” must rise up and blow up their telephones, their social media accounts, write letters, and launch economic boycotts of corporations that support Republicans.
Moreover, It’s solely up to the voters to hold whoever is elected to Congress, state houses, and local governments to use funds that “we the people” contribute to in taxes of all sorts, to benefit American families, not the wealthy or major corporations. It’s not rocket science to understand that the more governments invest in the people they serve, the greater the return on those investments.
Trumpism will continue, no matter who is in the White House, so people who want true equality and justice have to battle a racist ideology which says, ‘all for us; none for the others.’ We are in an uncivil war launched by McConnell and ratcheted up by Trump and his Republican sycophants.
Voting is just the first step toward a level playing field. After the election, we must use extreme political pressure and economic boycotts to achieve a living wage, criminal justice and judicial reform, and equality. These tactics worked in the past in the Deep South and they will work again if people unite for common causes.
We are not hopeless. We saw democracy in action as people, worldwide, demonstrated against racial injustice and the wanton murders of Black people. We witnessed the first multicultural uprising in the 21st century, as we came together to say, “Enough.”
But we can’t take our foot off of the gas now. We can’t vote and think this is all we have to do. We must hold all elected officials accountable, no matter their party affiliation. We must watch what they do and act accordingly.
We are the bosses of elected officials; we pay their salaries. We must bring an end to an abnormal system where we are paying to be brutalized and marginalized.
The will of the people will prevail, but it will take persistence, commitment, and a united front to force those who purport to be public servants to cease being self-servants.
This article originally published in the November 2, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
