That Republicans want your granparents to “take one for the team,” to die save the economy, should be no newsflash.
Give Me Your Poor, Your Tired, and We’ll Kill Them
Republicans are the party that:
- Turned down Medicaid money in seventeen states for Obamacare that would make it viable, and insure every American in that state, leaving millions uninsured, nationally;
- Voted more than a seventy times to repeal the ACA, stripping away the healthcare of the aged, the poor, and the low-wage worker without a viable replacement plan;
- Continue to try to defeat Obamacare at the Supreme Court;
- Have been quietly pushing, through “holidays” to the payroll tax, to bust Medicare, and Social Security.
Take One For the Team, Grandma and Grandpa...
Texas’ Lt. Governor Dan Patrick kicked off the current outrage, with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s propaganda hour on Fox News, by suggesting that grandparents would sacrifice themselves to aid the economy for their kids, and grandkids:
Doubling down on this insanity, Fox’s Brit Hume, following up the day after, agreed with Patrick:
Even huckster has-beens like Glenn Beck are climbing on the ‘sacrifice yourself’ bandwagon.
“I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working even if we all get sick. I’d rather die than kill the country. ’Cause it’s not the economy that’s dying, it’s the country.“ — Glenn Beck
‘Thinning the Herd’ is the GOP Mantra
About three years ago, in my Huffpost piece, “Trump and Republicans Expect You to Die, Joe Public,” I introduced you to the concept of “democide,” the mass murder of people by their socioeconomic class. The 1% of the 1% who are the leading funders of Right-wing extremism are, by family lineage, largely Social Darwinists.
A misuse of Darwin’s teachings that is more of a modern excuse for divine-right oligarchy, the theory is that people who get filthy rich do so because they are genetically superior to their fellow men.
Globally, many of the one-percenters see the growing world population, which moved from 6.9B in 2010 to 7.8B in 2020, as a burden which they know that they, ultimately, will be forced to bear.
So, when, early in the Trump Administration, Republicans were clear about taking away Obamacare, and replacing it with smoke-and-mirrors mock insurance, that was a baldfaced attempt to redistribute even more money from poor to rich, it narrowly went down to defeat.
The one thing that has been clear, even going back long ago, to the days of Richard Mellon-Scaife’s quiet investments into social re-engineering of America in the 1970’s and 1980’s Republicans have been heavily invested in firming up 1% privilege and white power, at the expense of the rest of America.
The pattern has been around for decades: Bogeyman immigrants, and Americans of color to fearful whites, in the shrinking majority. With the Neocons, over Bush I & II, they off-shored jobs to take advantage of cheap labor.
When the cheap labor markets in Asia struck back, by the Great Recession, it was computers, robotics, and AI, slowly replacing the workforce, and reducing the need for the humans that did things that the machines now do, from clerical to manufacturing, without need for vacations, maternity leave, breaks, family emergencies, or retirement.
That trend is expected to continue, with once top-dollar white collar jobs in law, medicine, engineering, and sciences, disappearing due to deep-learning AI, and robotics, to the point that the majority of humans will be unemployed in thirty years, experts predict.
The Republican Retirement Plan: Six Feet Under
So, my friends, what, exactly, do the masters of people like Donald Trump, and Mitch McConnell, need you for, exactly?
You consume resources, but money can be made on fewer people, paying a lot more, to do the same thing.
At the beginning of the Trump Administration, we know that they were trying to screw over the poor and sick through Trumpcare, where the elderly would have seen a 30 percent hike in their insurance rates, and Trump would have knocked four to six million Medicaid recipients off of state rolls by 2024.
What we didn’t know, at the time, was that, by 2018, Trump, along with gutting the social safety net, was beginning to strip the gears of government that protect us from pandemics, like novel coronavirus (COVID-19). The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) budget was stripped for pandemic response by 80%. John Bolton took over the portfolio of pandemic response duties, something for which he, and his team had no qualifications.
This pandemic should have surprised no one in power. Whether it was this, or ebola, or another form of SARS other than COVID-19, like Bird Flu, the stage was being set to stress the emergency response system to the breaking point.
That’s consistent with Republican policy, and the agenda of the 1% funders who pull their strings.
While they’ve been very open, all of a sudden about doing in grandma and grandpa, seemingly killing off their own fear-soaked voting base, the senior members of your family are not the only ones that Republicans would be happy to see six feet under, if your brokerage account is below a certain size.
