What Would Nellis Say?
This Is The Moment!
This is the moment!
By Rick Stiller
After President Bone Spurs’ bombastic hour-and-forty-minute tirade filled with lies, threats, and glee at his buddy Elon’s unbridled rampage gutting all the executive agencies by firing thousands of civil servants without cause or notice, every American should be terrified by the damage and destruction that he and his legion of sycophants have done to this country and everything we stand for in their first six weeks in office.
After running through a list of purges and pogroms targeting programs that benefit the most vulnerable in our society, he offered a cruel smile and said, “And we’re just getting started.”
The proposed 2025 Republican budget would cut federal spending by at least $2 trillion, give the wealthiest 1% and their corporations $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, and increase the deficit by at least $2.8 trillion. This after hisprevious administration ran up the deficit by 25% in four years, the most by any president in history.
When President Biden took office, he inherited an economy in crisis due to Trump’s incompetence in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the country being locked down, markets in freefall, and inflation pushing double digits. After four years, Biden left a thriving economy with unemployment at historic lows, retail sales and stock markets at all-time highs, and economic growth at 3% per year and rising, while stubborn inflation had dropped under 4%.
The budget coming up for a vote next week depends on the Ways and Means Committee reducing expenditures for Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, welfare programs, and clean energy subsidies by $4.5 trillion ( which is the exact amount he wants to hand over to his billionaire buddies).
$880 billion or more will be withdrawn from Medicaid, which provides comprehensive health and long-term care for 1-in-5 people living in the United States. Thousands of rural hospitals will close, and millions of citizens will face catastrophic medical conditions without insurance. The costs for attending to those patients will result in drastic increases in premiums for your health insurance and reduced services from your providers.
After claiming that he would “never” touch Social Security, he expounded on “millions” of people over 100 receiving Social Security checks, when the reality is that very few centenarians actually receive any payments. He pointed to massive fraud, mismanagement, and waste, while the Social Security Administration Inspector General’s report released in July found that only 0.84% of benefit payments were improper. While SSA is perhaps the most efficient agency in government, Musk’s minions fired 4000 seasoned employees last week. Seniors should not be surprised when their checks are not paid and phones at the SSA helpline go unanswered.
To reinforce Trump’s belief that our service members are “losers and suckers”, thousands of veterans are being laid off throughout the government in the efficiency sweep by Elon Musk and his junior programmers. The Veterans Affairs Department announced that it plans to cut more than 80,000 jobs in a “reorganization.” The quality and availability of care for our veterans will certainly be compromised. Adding to the callousness of this draconian announcement, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins said in a video, “Now, we regret anyone who loses their job, and it’s extraordinarily difficult for me, especially as a VA leader and your secretary, to make these types of decisions. But the federal government does not exist to employ people. It exists to serve people.”
After ambushing Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last week before a worldwide audience, Trump froze all military aid, including turning back arms in transit to Ukraine, and ordered our spy agencies to stop sharing intelligence, surveillance, and communications intercepts of Russian forces with our democratic ally fighting an overwhelming invasion and suffering massive genocide by a ruthless dictator who intends to dominate the rest of Europe.
Trump has signaled his plan to abandon our security and trade commitments to NATO and our European partners and return to colonialism by the mighty at the expense of smaller nations by gobbling up Greenland, Canada, and Panama. Trump’s pat line about “America First” seems to mean that standing up for our own foundational ideals and historic friendships comes second to securing Putin’s approval.
American citizens are envied around the world for our freedoms, our creativity, and the democracy we enjoy, but Trump’s assault on the government we all depend on is following the script the Republicans published more than a year before the election in the nine-hundred-plus pages of Project 2025. Everything we are witnessing was prescribed in detail in that document, but Americans were too lazy to seek out the truth. Those who voted for the sloth because he granted them the right to hate will suffer the results of their folly along with the rest of our society.
Soon after Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Senate Minority Leader McConnell said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Speaker of the House, John Boehner, referring to Obama’s agenda, added, “We're going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
Vice-President Joe Biden was told by several Republican Senators that, “For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back.”
Democratic leadership has yet to show up for the fight. Our legislators should follow the Republican example and do everything they can to gum up the works and expose the demolition being executed right before our eyes! Let the government shut down when the Republican’s budget fails next week, and let them own the disaster they created.
Being courteous and submissive while a tyrant puts on a clown’s performance filled with bigotry, hate, and lies does not convince our constituents that you are willing to commit to the battle or take bold action to stop the demolition of our nation. Stand up and pound the podium! Offer real solutions for real problems! Scream! Get thrown out! Show some spunk!
Crowd Trump off the air by flooding the media all day, every day with a coordinated campaign to inform the American people about what’s going on and what Democrats intend to do to end the mayhem. Let your actions demonstrate your willingness to fight for the future of our nation and the welfare of everyone who lives here!
The economy is about to implode, millions of people are losing their jobs, and programs that allow our neediest citizens to maintain their health and dignity are being hollowed out so the oligarchs can privatize their services for a huge profit.
This government doesn’t care about the voters who elected them. If Trump and his lackeys are allowed to continue, there will never be another presidential election. If our opposition waits until the midterms to act, it will be too late.
This is the moment for real Americans to join together in massive protests to shut down the nation until the billionaire criminals and thieves can be run out of office and sanity restored before there’s nothing left to save.
Now is the time to stand up, speak out, and make a difference! Resist!
Thank you for your support and I look forward to your thoughts!
Visit: www.rickstiller.com for more essays and my novels.
www.rickstillerart.com for floral portraits from my garden.