IF YOU ARE POOR OR AN IMMIGRANT, THE TRUMP GOVERNMENT WILL INCREASE YOUR MISERY

…A TIME Magazine cover that Trump won’t be framing for Mar-A-Lago


Republicans claim that government doesn’t work, but when in control, they proceed to prove it!

As Henry Giroux writes, "In Trump's Orwellian world, the truth is dangerous, thinking is a liability, and the sanctity of free speech is treated with disdain." This is real and this is why we're shouting the truth about Trump and his cronies from the rooftops.

And just who is Henry Giroux?

Henry Giroux is an American / Canadian scholar and cultural critic. He is also one of the founding theorists of “critical pedagogy” in the United States. 

“Pedagogy” is the “method and practice of teaching”, it explains how we all learn by using the absorption of science, psychology, curriculum and sociology, especially for academic subjects or theoretical concepts.

So, what does all that mean?

Well, there is an old saying where the Republicans continue to claim government doesn’t work, but when they take control, and they show that they haven’t used the real “methods of learning” and they then proceed to work on proving that government doesn’t work.

However, what’s going on today is not just a GOP learning issue.  Something else is happening right now, especially in the Trump administration but it is extending to Republicans at all levels.

We are now seeing the emergence of a two-pronged GOP approach.

First, the current government is in the business of protecting some US consumers, workers or anyone who doesn’t have the money and the power, and they are called “Trump’s base”.  At the same time, they’re weaponizing the bureaucracy itself in order to use it against everyone they don’t like, whether it’s immigrants or poor people or even Democrats.

This is their learning concept .  They have learned that they can say whatever they want, just as Orwell told us in his 1984 book, regardless of whether it is true or not.  “But if you say it often enough, both the listener and the speaker will start to believe it.”

There was the proof of this seen on mainstream TV when a reliable reporter asked an Iowa farmer, a “Born again Christian”, about the Trump program where the immigrant children were taken away from their parents.  But the farmer said “the children are all being taken care of by the government and what they are showing on TV at the children centers is all a big lie.”

But today we are starting to see the real focus of the Trump administration.
You may recall that the Labor Department was originally created to give American union workers their own focus beyond that of the corporations.  In other words, an organization for the men and women that take a shower after getting home from work, not before going to work.

Well, the same Trump official that his eviscerated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Mick Mulvaney, who is also the head of the Office of Management and Budget, he has issued a request to federal leaders to find ways to merge overlapping, duplicative offices and programs and eliminate those the administration views as unnecessary.

So guess what is now being suggested?

The White House on Mulvaney’s direction, is proposing the merging the Education and the Labor department into one federal agency.  This would be the centerpiece of a plan to remake a bureaucracy that President Trump and his supporters consider too big and bloated, according to an administration official familiar with the plan. 

But what in the world do the labor department and the education department have to do with each other except maybe in the areas of trade school education ?  But more importantly, based on Trump’s continuous lack of having any planning, who would think that this massive merge would be handled properly?

The plan also is expected to include major changes to the way the government provides benefits for low-income Americans, an area that conservatives have long targeted as excessive.  This would be done by consolidating safety-net programs that are administered through multiple agencies.

Yes, it’s possible for some good things to come out of this kind of reorganization. Just like any large organization, the government has plenty of inefficiency and duplication that could be improved upon.  But the fact that it’s being led by Mulvaney, tells you that making things run more smoothly is not his primary goal.

Let’s put this in the terms of the Republican party.

As all Republicans well know, since the 1960s the word “welfare” has been associated in the mind of white Americans with shiftless black people getting unearned benefits.  But actual welfare, the cash assistance program now referred to as “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families” amounts to just $16.6 billion per year, or about four-tenths of 1% of the total federal budget.  And that’s an amount that has been frozen since 1996.

Yet with the comments made by the GOP, many Americans continue to believe that we’re spending lavishly on welfare.  In one 2014 poll, 58% of Americans said we spend too much on “welfare,” but when asked about “assistance to the poor,” only 16% said we were spending too much.

So when a Republican administration sets out to brand nearly all safety net programs as “welfare,” we know exactly what they’re doing. It’s trying to mobilize racial resentment to delegitimize those programs as a way of setting the stage for future cuts.

Of course, if you asked the Trump administration, they would say it only wants to reduce the size and scope of government, because every step forward government takes is a step backward for freedom. Yeah right.  All this does is weaponize a bureaucracy.

The current border crisis is a perfect  example of how, when they want to, Republicans will put in place a bureaucratic mess that certain people will find impossible to navigate. 

If you’re seeking asylum in the United States, you’ll be dealing with a system that can take months or even years to resolve your case.  But the Trump administration has made it even crueler, to the point of taking children from their parents in order to punish and deter those fleeing their home countries.

If you work for an agency like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), you’ve been liberated to use government authority in arbitrary ways to impose your will on people who are powerless against you.

Or consider then there’s the order Trump signed in April that tells federal agencies to impose work requirements on all forms of public assistance wherever and whenever they can.

Experts will tell you that the idea that significant numbers of people are milking the system is total B.S.  Most people who get things such as Medicaid or food stamps are either working low-wage jobs, looking for work or can’t work because they’re disabled or they are caring for loved ones. What work requirements do instead, is force recipients to struggle through a bureaucratic nightmare of documenting their hours, getting their boss to sign their time sheets, then delivering them on time to the government office.  And any slip-up means they could lose your benefits.

Republicans pretend to care about the nation’s deficit, only until they get the opportunity to cut taxes and raise military spending.  Their concern about overbearing government bureaucracy turns out to be a totally selective choice.

If you’re the right kind of person, such as a large corporation that would like to pollute more or mistreat its workers, or a payday lender charging ridiculous interest rates, or a for-profit college scamming its students, the Republicans say they are committed to liberating you from the government’s oppressive hand.

But if you’re the wrong kind of person, an immigrant or a poor person, they’ll use government bureaucracy to increase your misery in any way they can.

This is just the GOP at work.

Copyright G.Ater  2018