📌 What You Will Learn In This Video:
The centerpiece of the bill remains its extension of the 2017 tax cuts for wealthy Americans and corporations, making those tax cuts permanent. The tax structure in the measure funnels wealth from the poorest Americans to the top 1%.
According to immigration scholar Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the measure also provides an additional $45 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants, on top of the current annual budget of $3.4 billion.
It adds $14.4 billion for transportation and removal on top of the current annual budget of $750 million. It also adds $8 billion for new ICE hires and retention. Reichlin-Melnick notes that this budget will give ICE more money for detention than it gives the entire U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
the Senate bill cuts $930 billion out of Medicaid—more than the House bill cut—and, according to Ron Wyden (D-OR), makes additional cuts to Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the measure will cause 11.8 million Americans to become uninsured, almost a million more than would have lost health insurance under the House version.
The immediate future does look bleak.
But please do not become cynical.
Don’t lose hope. Don’t give up the fight.
Trump and his lackeys want us to be cynical because then we’ll stop fighting. If we stop fighting, they win everything — not just the entire government but our entire society.
It looks dark today, but it will not remain dark. The Caligula on the Potomac is getting nowhere on tariffs. Inflation threatens. The vast majority of Americans oppose his plan to cut Medicaid and give the rich a huge tax cut. His popularity continues to plummet. He is facing mounting opposition from the rest of the world.
Do not succumb to cynicism. We must keep fighting. Too much is at stake. We will prevail.
Every action matters now. Every effort small or large counts.
And moving, movement is the essential key to dispelling despair.
I think of Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”, “The world is essentially over. I will fight for another day”, “I have lost my faith in humans. I commit to love them more.”
To live as Jung said – with two existing opposite thoughts at the same time. Survival right now depends on our ability to swim in this duality.
To not linger in the pain, but to allow ourselves to be moved by it.
To not whitewash reality, but also not to take up lodging in the house of despair.
This is the dance of our times.
We must become agile and flexible. To feel responsible but not so guilty we are immobilized. To feel rage but to learn how to direct it into action and passion and purpose. To lift ourselves to a more existential absurdist place where the fascists cannot touch us. Not disassociation or numbness, but finding the grace, energy and humor that come when we commit ourselves more deeply to one another.
So how do we resist and rise?
We have to believe the impossible is possible.
The illusion and seduction of the American dream is over.
Neoliberalism is dead. There are huge cracks, openings in the old structures and narratives. These are opportunities to plant the seeds for the new world as we protect those suffering now.
What the fascists want more than anything is our fear, exhaustion and despair. Or they want us angry, reactive, cruel and violent like them.
“Your humanity is also your resistance. Don’t underestimate its power. It’s the only thing they can’t take away from you.”
Every action matters now.
Every effort small or large counts.
And moving – movement is the essential key to dispelling despair.
How we care now, how we love, how we come together, how we build and protect each other is in itself the building of the new world.
Elizabeth McDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, is tasked with ensuring that the reconciliation bill complies with the “Byrd Rule,” which, among other things, excludes measures in which funding is “incidental” to a policy change.
The scope of the items she has rejected and the harm they could have caused if they stayed in the bill boggles the mind. The partial list of rejected items demonstrates how radical and destructive the MAGA Republicans’ agenda actually is.
“Gone are GOP-led efforts to
“MacDonough determined that each item was in violation of a critical Senate rule that prohibits extraneous measures in bills like the one Trump wants on his desk for signature by July 4.”
And that is merely a partial list.
In an atmosphere of lawlessness and capitulation, when it is so easy to say “yes” to Trump’s whims, here is someone to stand up and say: “Rules aren’t optional. They matter. They ensure we are a government of laws, not of petulant autocrats.”
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As the predicted authoritarian dictatorship has arrived, author Jared Yates Sexton, explains how Americans can rise to the moment to take back their democracy in the face of an increasingly fascist playbook.
