The Big Fascist Budget Bill

& Two Remarkable Things I Saw in DC Yesterday

A study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale estimates that the big fascist budget bill (BFBB) Donald Trump signed yesterday will kill 50,000 Americans per year on average over the next decade. That’s thanks to its massive cuts to Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other programs, all slashed to pay for giant tax breaks for the wealthy, for increased “defense” (military empire), and for an escalation of Trump’s war of terror on brown-skinned immigrants.

Bernie Sanders is elementarily right to call the Trump budget bill a “death sentence for low-income and working-class people” and “gift to the billionaire class” on the part of a political system wildly tilted to serve the rich over and against the common good.

But the BFBB is worse than just an act of economic oppression and investor class oligarchy. It establishes “an anti-immigrant police state, replete with a standing army of ICE agents and a gulag of detention facilities with will transform ICE into the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the government” (Robert Reich). The bill channels tens of billions of dollars towards “immigration enforcement” and building the big nativist wall on the US-Mexican border.

That is racist and nativist, key components of the fascism that lay at the heart of the MAGA movement and presidency.

“Immigration enforcement” is antiseptic language for the Gestapo-like terror that the Trump fascist regime has unleashed on immigrant families and communities, living in fear of Trump’s masked 21st Century fugitive slave catchers.

There is a color, so to speak, to the bill’s attack on lower-and working-class health care and food assistance. The budget cuts will disproportionately harm and indeed kill Black and other people of color, consistent with the virulent racist Social Darwinism that characterizes fascism past and present. The measure will particularly harm Black Americans, who rely on the programs being slashed to a significantly greater degree than whites.

The giant military complex that is getting a big boost from the BFBB is being enlisted in domestic immigration enforcement and political oppression within the United States. US Marines are now deployed in Florida as well as California, with the Western United States plus Alaska and Hawaii subject to de facto martial law under a recent Ninth District US Court of Appeals panel’s ruling on Trump’s presidential memo sending National Guard troops and Marines into the streets of Los Angeles. Trump’s sado-fascist Homeland Security Secretary “Gestapo Barbie” Kristi Noem has said the troops are there (over and against the protests of the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of California) to bring about regime change -- to “liberate” the city and state from “socialist” rule.

Since most Americans are not sadistic Social Darwinists and fascists, the bill is immensely unpopular with the US public. It is viewed unfavorably by just slightly less than two-thirds (64%) of US adults.

But so what? After signing the bill, Mein Trump proclaimed that the American people love the bill. In the deranged and malignant minds of Trump and his MAGA cult followers, truth is what Trump says it is.

If Trump says that two plus two equals five, that there’s no windmills in China, that capitalist-imperialist Democrats are communists, that anti-terrorist protests in four square miles of a five hundred square mile city constitute a “rebellion against the US government,” that black is white…well then, so be it. Trump says. Trump is truth. Trump is law.

I personally beheld two remarkable events in Washington DC yesterday, where I joined Refuse Fascism comrades calling for Trump’s removal from power before it’s too late to stop the consolidation of fascist rule in the United States:

(1) RF activist and podcast host Sam Goldman announcing Mein Trumpf’s signing of the BFBB and leading 1000 marchers in a die-in to acknowledge the mass murderous and fascist nature of the terrible legislation:

refusefascism

A post shared by @refusefascism

(2) Herr Trump shortly thereafter celebrating the moment when he put his trademark satanic signature on the BFBB with —- I shit you not, my friends — three B-2 Stealth Bomber flyovers overhead:

The New York Times today: “Accompanied by a flyover of B2 bombers, the same aircraft used in the recent bombing of Iran, Mr. Trump touted the massive tax cuts included in the bill and downplayed the unpopularity of the legislation in polls and the potential impact of spending cuts.”

How F’ng fascist was that?!