are we seriously this unevolved?
re: the big beautiful bullshit bill. written in 60 minutes or less. h*ppy july 4th.
Let’s start here: there’s a reason that Trump and his dead-eyed dipshit brigade branded the bill as big and beautiful, sans any sort of verbiage pertaining to the bill’s contents: it’s a brazen, monumental transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest, a bill that can only pay for the cash it funnels into the military, border security and Big Oil by slashing funds for supplemental food assistance and Medicaid. It’s all monumentally villainous, but that latter cut is particularly grotesque, what with the way House Cuck Mike Johnson and other GOP ghouls touted the inane media line that any cuts to Medicaid would be targeting “waste and fraud,” targeting “29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games” and other nonexistent exploiters. I hate knowing who Mike Johnson is. I hate how much brainspace these anti-human, boring, basic-ass monsters occupy in much kinder heads than their own. Would much rather he be rotting on the couch, playing video games, instead of uselessly selling out millions of much-better people than himself, creating waves of destruction that’ll reverberate far after Johnson’s left D.C. and fixed his pathetic gaze on some other external challenge that makes him feel less like a dipshit.
I can’t find the quote, but Johnson or some other loser went on to describe, on one program, that 29-year-old male as sitting on his couch, cashing Medicaid checks for health care he isn’t receiving. Only Medicaid doesn’t send its recipients checks or cash; depending on their coverage, after a Medicaid recipient goes to the doctor, Medicaid either corresponds with the health care provider or a private insurance company to cover the care. It’s a completely fabricated scenario that Johnson and others know isn’t possibly taking place in the U.S., under Medicaid, as written into law, and it’s worth noting that Medicaid also pales in comparison to most other developed nations’ federal health care programs, with universal or near-universal enrollment in all countries as large and wealthy as the U.S., per KFF.
It’s like every other wealthy nation out there has figured out a way to give every taxpaying citizen three well-rounded meals per day, whereas America’s only developed a small-scale subsidized french fry program that it keeps waffling between expanding to also cover certain sodas, and cutting back to only cover french fries for people who work 20 hours per week.
And I want to consider another line of thinking. If there’s a 29-year-old, sitting on the sofa, without a job, who’s benefitting from Medicaid coverage, aren’t the chances pretty high that he’s unable to work in the traditional sense? Like, doesn’t that make more sense than the alternative? I mean, seriously. In a world where your material is perhaps more tied to money than anything else, why wouldn't somebody who’s able to work even a few hours a week … do that? That conservative bullshit line about people who receive welfare just doesn’t make sense, if you’ve met one (1) human being. People aren’t wired to “work” a fraction of what capitalism requires of us … but we are wired to do whatever it takes to secure food and shelter, aren’t we? Which, in this world, translates to some form of “work,” right? Outside of that, it’s not like people are typically wired toward isolation, or having the same sensory experience day in and day out, binging game shows and wasting away on the proverbial sofa. The vast majority of people have interests. Wants. Desires. Preferences for how their life looks, and what pleasures they can afford to enjoy.
It’s just the most inane idea, that welfare recipients enjoy the paddleboat the government gives them, on account of how comparatively broke they are. A 29-year-old guy on the couch, unable to work, and benefitting from Medicaid is more likely one of the 22.2 million Americans with a disability (nearly 80% of whom are unemployed). Maybe he’s a nonverbal autistic. Maybe he has cerebral palsy, or cystic fibrosis, or is, I dunno, recovering from a brain injury. My point being, thinking about these things for, like, 15 seconds, seems to undo any inane conservative non-logic around Medicaid, regardless of whatever lie these losers are schilling.
“We’re not cutting Medicaid,” Johnson said on Meet the Press last month. “What we’re doing is strengthening the program. We’re reducing fraud, waste and abuse that is rampant in Medicaid to ensure that that program is essential for so many people, ensure that it’s available for the most vulnerable.”
But they are cutting the program, by requiring that Medicaid recipients under 65 work at least 80 hours a month to qualify for their benefits. And to complete that work requirement, recipients will have to complete an erroneous and burdensome amount of paperwork, apparently so complicated and difficult to keep up with that, when enforced at the state level, similar work requirements have translated to a purging of qualified recipients from the Medicaid rolls, simply because they’re unable to keep up with the bureaucratic requirements. It’s a sneaky way to avoid any outright cut, while enacting a policy that you know will lead to far fewer Medicare billings and payouts. Deceptive, insulting, enraging.
There’s a lot else to say about the bill, but whatever, I’m barely citing my sources up there and leaving out a ton of other stuff I, like, 80% remember but don’t recall well enough to include. It’s just always striking to these, in these moments of cruelty that feels inevitable, that the supposedly most evolved species on the planet find itself living in a merciless, violent mercantile system, where most members of the species are probably less able to obtain food and shelter than wolves and dolphins and rabbits and literally any other animals aside from human beings.
Really though. Like, can you imagine wolves hoarding dead elk in huge piles, only dispensing the elk to pack members who have completed their compulsory toiling for a quarter of the day’s hours, and for more than half their daily waking hours? Capitalism, and this way of life … It's absurd. It’s so unevolved. It’s embarrassing, pathetic, just really poetic, as if we’re existing as some sort of dark fable about the inevitable triumph of greed and selfishness.
Only, I don’t think that’s true. I think the soulless ghouls really are in the minority. I love humanity. It’s even difficult (though far less increasingly so) to blame some individual Trump voters for what’s being wrought — or, at least, it’s difficult for me to do that, when I think about the individual Trump voter being up against a slick, wildly successful, $25 billion conservative propaganda megamachine exploiting those dark, dirty base instincts that can certainly feel good to embrace, especially when the alternative is more personally uncomfortable. And that means that, if a minority of our most soulless and bad-for-the-species folks are wielding untold amounts of power and influences over our lives, and our current system seems to reward ruthlessness and a willingness to conspire against the common good, for personal or a smaller collective gain, … might we consider reimagining things? Our human-built systems, simply because they already exist, seem somehow barred from being rebuilt or reimagined. But that isn’t true!
I’m all over the place. But I’m more hopeful about humanity than our loudest and dumbest GOP motherfucking newsmakers make me see red. Zohran’s win in the New York mayoral primary has me feeling particularly hopeful about the power of strong communicators who can explain common sense, progressive policies in plainspoken terms. I think that’s a huge part of why he won — because of his ability to work past the traditional fearmongering around, well, so many things about his platform and identity, and clearly articulate a social safety system, meaningfully changing people’s quality of life, funded by a stark, stark minority of wealthy residents whose material comforts will not change an iota.
It still seems crude. Why do those people get to keep all the rest of their money? “Give us some of that!” I want to say. But for now, it’s something close to evolved. (But still really embarrassing, no?)