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The day after Donald Trump received the 2024 election, the ten richest individuals on the planet — together with 9 Individuals — expanded their wealth by practically $64 billion, the best single-day enhance in recorded historical past. Since then, an unholy marriage of billionaire buyers, tech bros, Christian nationalists, and, after all, Donald Trump has staged an oligarchic assault on our democracy.
If the nation’s company elite as soon as leveraged their relationships inside authorities to counterpoint themselves, they’ve now minimize out the intermediary. We’re residing in a brand new Gilded Age, with a proto-fascistic and religiously regressive administration of, by and for the billionaires.
With the wind at their backs, main components within the Republican Social gathering have quickly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether, airing their anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-poor prejudices in unapologetically broad and brazen phrases. The impact of this, particularly for essentially the most susceptible amongst us, is seismic.
Through the first two months of the second Trump administration, we’ve witnessed nothing lower than an escalatory conflict on the poor. The assaults are many-pronged.
Rural improvement grants, meals banks, and environmental safety measures have all been slashed within the identify of “ending radical and wasteful authorities DEI applications.” Deliberate Parenthood and different life-saving well being care providers for poor and marginalized communities have been defunded. Homelessness has been ever extra intensely criminalized and Housing First insurance policies vilified.
The Division of Schooling, which has traditionally supplied crucial assets for low-income and disabled college students, has been gutted, whereas the barbaric circumstances in overcrowded immigrant detention facilities have solely worsened. Billions of {dollars} in funding for psychological well being and habit providers have been revoked.
Worse but, these and different mercenary actions might show to be simply the tip of the spear. Tariff wars and potential cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Safety, and SNAP may go away each the lives of the poor and the worldwide financial system in shambles.
This unstable second might signify an unprecedented, even existential, menace to the well being of our democracy, however it’s constructing on many years of neoliberal plunder and financial austerity, authored by each conservative and liberal politicians. Earlier than the 2024 elections, there have been greater than 140 million individuals residing in poverty or one disaster away — one job loss, eviction, medical concern, or debt assortment — from financial damage.
On this wealthy land, 45 million individuals usually expertise starvation and meals insecurity, whereas greater than 80 million individuals are uninsured or underinsured, 10 million individuals reside with out housing or expertise persistent housing insecurity, and the American training system has usually scored beneath common in comparison with these of different nations within the Group for Financial Cooperation and Improvement.
Amid large social and financial dislocation, conventional American establishments and political alignments have steadily misplaced their that means for tens of thousands and thousands of individuals. Nearly all of us know issues aren’t effectively on this nation. We will really feel it, thanks not simply to the violent and vitriolic political surroundings through which we reside, however to our financial institution statements and debt sheets, our rising lease and utility payments.
Because the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the query stays: How will we chart a extra simply and humane path ahead? There are not any straightforward solutions, however there are profound classes to be discovered from the previous, particularly from actions of poor and dispossessed those that have impressed lots of this nation’s most vital moments of democratic awakening.
This can be a portion of Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Again’s “The Energy of the Poor” in “Trump’s America,” initially revealed on LA Progressive. For the complete article or extra info, go to www.laprogressive.com.
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