Stealing and Discarding Lives

IT HAPPENED in the wee hours, as usual, when nobody was watching. As if the public wouldn't find out later, by watching the morning news. The Vice President of Perfidy, J.D. Vance, cast the deciding vote in the Senate, a vote to reneg on commitments to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and food assistance to starving people in impoverished countries. (Previously, the fuhrer and his lackeys in Congress had cut S.N.A.P.benefits for hungry people in the U.S.) Almost amazingly, three Republicns joined all forty seven Senate Democrats in attempting to keep the promise. Unsurprisingly, the fifty miscreants who voted to withdraw the funding were, as ou might have guessed, Republicans. Never let it be said that a modern day Republican ever did anything for the purpose of helping people. By a vote of fifty one to fifty, the U.S. Senate voted to defund the parent company of National public Radio and the Public Broadcast system of approximately one billion dollars for the next decade. NPR is among the few worthwhile radio broadcasters; PBS is quite epossible the only truly valuable programming available among the thousands of television channels now available. (Upon further reflection, there are others, mostly having to do with nature and history.) Hundreds of thousands of pounds of food, something exceeding five hundred metric tons, has been wasted by a Trump administration and Republican perfidy, by preventing it from being delivered to its intended and desperatly needy locales, places like GAZA and Sudan. The food lay rotting and spoiling in storage. It cost the American taxpayers about eight hundred thousand dollars, and will soon be incinerated at a cost of approximately one hundred and thirty thousand dollars. More than a million dollars of wasted food and effort, all because the Trump administration prefers to avoid helping people. The food would have fed hundreds of thousands of people for at least one week. The radio and television broadcasting entities would have provided, (and still might provide, if alternative philanthropic funding can be found) people in rural areas one of their only sources of information. Noam Chomsky once said that he can think of no word sufficiently strong to describe the behavior of people and corporations which place the future of organized civiliztion in jeopardy, seeking to further line already overstuffed pockets, by sidesteping safe clean energy sources in favor of the continued exploitation of fossil fuels. The word "evil" is utterly, tragically inadequate. No decent, educated person could disagree. And, as a matter of fact, government subsidies for wind, solar, and geothermal energy have alredy been removed by the reprobates who currently govern America. Indeed, Mmorons Are Governing America. As an astute historian and student of current events remarked, it is almost as if a foreign country had attacked and invaded the United States, assumed control, and set out on a deliberate plan to destroy the United States by reducing it to a moral and cultural wasteland of greed, deprivation, impoverishment, and iniquity. Much the same can be said of current Americna policy towards the world. How many millions of people could have been kept alive long enough by merely sending help where help is desperately needed to give these countries a greater opportunity to develop their own efficient systems of production and distribution? Many. I have heard people express amazement at the abject cruelty of the current administration. And I have heard others express heartbreak and amazement at what the United Stats seems to have become. I could not agree more.