T.S. Eliot
Back to the bad news
[Last week I tried to lighten the general mood and my own by writing about some good news. News about people who see a person in peril and are not afraid to get involved to save a life. About a desperately poor girl from one of Trump’s “shithole countries” who rose to become a world-class distance runner through talent, an iron will, and by continuing to run even when she couldn’t afford shoes.
Most people can still see what the right thing to do is, unlike the political leaders in this country and many other nations. Yet we are back to the bad news this week, from the tragic accident that took Kobe Bryant’s life to the perverse policies perpetrated by Republicans at all levels.]
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“April is the cruelest month,” the poet T.S. Eliot wrote. For the Trump administration and for Republicans of the current era in general, at the federal and state levels, any month is good for cruelty.
January will do as well as April. This month in Florida, for example, politicians faced with the choice of helping diabetics who have to inject insulin to preserve life and limb or enabling just three drug companies that have a stranglehold on the market for the medication to attain maximum profits by charging astronomical prices, the GOP-controlled legislature chose corporate profits over people’s lives. Naturally.
It was a cold and deliberate choice. Republican leaders in the legislature have no illusions about Pharma. At the beginning of the legislative session, Florida Speaker of the House Jose Oliva accused the drug companies of perpetrating “financial assault” on patients. But after a bill was introduced in the House capping patient copayments at $100 a month, Oliva changed his tune. He reverted to stock Republican ideology, saying that whenever you control prices, “someone has to pay for it.” Yes, someone must pay. Either the drug companies by being denied a minuscule proportion of their fabulous profits. Or living, breathing human beings, who pay with their lives, their eyesight, their kidneys, their hearts, and every other organ in their bodies.
None of this is theoretical. Already, two people under 25, who failed altogether to inject the prescribed insulin or tried to ration it, have died in Virginia and Minnesota. Two states, Colorado and Illinois, have done what Florida failed to do: pass legislation capping monthly insulin copays at $100 a month. That’s $1,200 a year, still a steep price for many people but a lot better than the over $5,000 drug companies are charging today, almost double the roughly $2,800 they were charging in 2012.
What will they be charging in the future? Whatever they want, sayeth the GOP Florida legislature.
At the federal level, the case for April as the cruelest month is strong. April is when the Trump administration will throw 700,000 adults without children off the food stamp rolls. That’s more people than live in cities like Miami (471,000), Cincinnati (301,000), or Cleveland (385,000). For many of those, who depend on food stamps to make ends meet—barely—the cuts will be a personal disaster.
It’s a travesty that a country with the biggest economy in the world cannot find the money in its colossal government budget, which includes magnificent benefits for the rich, and corporations, to ensure that no one goes hungry. Yet, in this country, millions of people do go hungry or must settle for an unhealthy diet to afford eating. In a country, which the president constantly proclaims to be the greatest in the world, with the best economy, that’s an outrage. To make the problem worse by cutting food stamps is unconscionable.
The Republican rationale is that unemployment is so low no one should need food stamps. That ignores a few well-known facts. A significant number of workers of very profitable companies like Walmart and Amazon are forced to use food stamps to make ends meet. Low pay, not unemployment, is why so many people need food stamps. The average housekeeper in the United States makes $25,000 a year. Can you live on that in Miami?
The real reasons for throwing food stamp recipients under the bus is the Republican addiction to punishing the poor and the GOP dogma of “individual responsibility,” which translates to the notion that if people are poor it’s their own damned fault. That’s easy to say for the millionaires and billionaires in Trump’s Cabinet, especially the ones, like Trump himself, who inherited substantial fortunes.
Sewage rounds out this month’s bad news. No, not the stuff coming out of Trump’s lawyers in the impeachment trial. I am referring to a story that appeared in The New York Times on January 24, which stated:
The Environmental Protection Agency has made it easier for cities to keep dumping raw sewage into rivers by letting them delay or otherwise change federally imposed fixes to their sewer systems, according to interviews with local officials, water utilities and their lobbyists….
The actions are the latest example of the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back nearly 95 environmental rules that it has said are too costly for industry or taxpayers. That list grew on Thursday, when the administration stripped clean-water protections from wetlands, streams and other waterways.
Republican priorities are clear and brutal. Cold and cruel, from the decision to favor Pharma profits over people’s lives and health in Florida to easing the way for cities to continue to pour their shit into rivers hurting the health of millions of people, the livelihoods of those who make their living from fishing, the health of those who consume their catch, and the ecosystem up and down the food chain.
Profits trump people.
