They were careless people, Tom and Daisy they smashed up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
That's nothing, said an employee at my favorite neighborhood grocery store.
I had come in and noticed the grocery cart area near the entrance almost empty, and I looked around and saw why. Standing near the employee, I commented on the store, crowded with young mothers and their children.
There was a woman who came up to the counter with four grocery carts, the employee said. She had young children.
Hungry children, no doubt.
In a predominately white neighborhood, I've always felt comfortable here. Apparently, white, black, latino/a, Muslim, Asian, Indian. It's the country. It's the world. All of us feel welcome. But the president of this country wants more hungry children in order to achieve-- the impossible!
Democrat Governor Tony Evers, Wisconsin, released the funds to send out to SNAP recipients. Just as Social Security is an entitlement, so is SNAP. In the last couple of weeks, families with children and seniors have had to rely on food panties and the neighborliness of neighbors to keep the shelves filed.
Immediately after Evers released the funds and recipients headed for local grocery store, the Dear Leader began demanding that Evers return the funds! This after two judges ordered the Leader to issue SNAP funds children are going without food! --he refused. The US Supreme Court followed the judges and stayed the order. Still, the Dear Leader demanded that Evers put the money, from an entitlement program, mind you, be put back!
For whom?
Children in the US are without food!
Pursuant to and consistent with an active court order, Wisconsin legally loaded benefits to cards, ensuring nearly 700,000 Wisconsinites, including nearly 270,000 kids, had access to basic food and groceries. Evers told the press when asked if he heard the Dear Leader's demand to return the SNAP benefits.
He had and his answer was no, said Evers.
Not everyone is so cruel and callous as the Dear Leader who can host a second Gatsby party, lavishing guests such as the Trump-like Javier Milei, president of Argentina, and Viktor Orb n, president of Hungary. The display of wasteful excess that one of my favorite writers described in The Great Gatsby was intended to be a critique of the cruel and callous wealthy class. F. Scott Fitzgerald was denouncing such a display as criminal.
But for the criminal Dear Leader, its quite possible that he met to send a mess about just how cruel and callous he and his regime could be. Maybe this is the message: There is more to come!
Just as the capitalism demands that little if anything is ever given away to the little people, the Dear Leader and his ilk have been claiming that elections and everything else, like SNAP and Medicaid, have taken money that belongs to the wealthy class. In the meantime, the Dear Leader of this free world of wealth, will host more Gatsby parties. He will build a 300-million-dollar ballroom as he has hand installed gold marble bathrooms in the White House for the benefit and behinds of wealthy. The people who matter!
The little people, in turn, are thieves!
It never should've come to this, Evers said.
Last month more at least 7 million Americans protested across the US, saying no, NO KING in America!
Its should have come to this!
**
Recognize that within the Constitution is the potential for tyranny, writes professor of history, Andrew Hartman. The US, founded on a compromise with slaveholders, incorporated into this and the Declaration of Independence ideas about freedom and democracy when, in fact, enslaved blacks and indigenous had no such things as freedom, which meant that the US was a democracy for the wealthy. The document writers barely noted the economically poor or working class whites unless needed to patrol or hunt down runaways or Indigenous people.
As Fitzgerald noted in the 1920s the wasteful and callousness of the wealthy class in New York in his day, the Roaring Twenties, another writer, journalist at the time, also noted the atmosphere for the economically poor and working class in the US. Not only were the masses slaves of the bourgeois class, of the bourgeois State, Marx insisted, They are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer.
I can imagine how Marx would have looked at that era of American growth and considered the contradiction in what the Constitution claimed and in the actual presence of enslaved blacks and then in the dreadful state of the free blacks.
Who better than the former enslaved black to see through the working state in the US and equate it, too, to days of existing on plantations? Who better than the black America to see how freedom had not come to them. That they were, in fact, less of value than the cotton and tobacco they were asked to return and pick for barely a living wage.
Hartman recognizes in the modern era enslaved Americans and of all races. If you can't leave a demeaning and an exhausting job or one with long hours because you'd like to keep a roof over your head and some food in the refrigerate and cabinets, or you need to pay insurance premiums, you must have thought about those at the top of the company, living and eating well, and receiving ever bigger bonuses, year after year.
We are enslaved! Slavery has another name! And we are enslaved to what?
Marx called for the abolition of slavery and a focus on class struggle. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. If you take your eyes off the history of white supremacy in the US, youll encounter what the black soldier Isaac Woodard did in 1946. Or what Ruby Bridges experienced in 1960.
Ask any black mother trying to feed children on SNAP benefits, if its just a matter of class without race.
White supremacy is ingrained in the American foundation, in its psyche! It came over in ships sailed by immigrants from England who, not long after, went on a rampage, slashing and burning homes of the native population, and killing the people as if these people hadn't a long-standing civilization. It was there in 1619 when the first hunters captured Africans to enslave in the New World.
It's still with us when the Dear Leader opens to door to South Afrikaners rather than desperate Haitians or Mexicans, trying to escape the legacy of an ideology that proclaims value for resources and materials and not the black and latino/a populations. Its there, dripping in hatred and fear, when Michael Brown's 18-year-old body is allowed to remain on the ground for four hours after he was shot by police officer Darren Wilson.
Its there when the Dear Leader repeatedly, and I believe, deliberately, informs his supporters that its black and brown immigrants who receive SNAP benefits, In fact, its whites who are the largest racial group receiving these benefits. According to The Root, 35% of SNAP recipients are white. But that doesn't stop the Leader from continuing the lies to justify the cruelty on display as resources shift from the economically poor and working class to the wealthy class.
White supremacy was maintained at certain employment sites! Laws and signs might not be in place today, but the Dear Leader is determined to fire as many blacks from high-profile positions, whether or not he has the authority to do so. He is all about his class, but he hates black people!
It's a matter of the owners versus the owned, writes Hartman. I get that. But as a black woman, I see black America still fighting for equal rights and the backlash heralded the Dear Leader to the highest office in the country.
Democracy is in need of our attention. We can't continue repeating that we have a democracy when, in fact, what has happened with the SNAP benefits alone indicates a problem.
Why is there a SNAP program now? Why isn't democracy assuring that all eat as well as the Dear Leader and friends? Or at least, eat healthy? Why is it necessary for Americans to worry about Medicaid and Obamacare or their individual insurance companies raising their premiums? Why don't we have Single Payer? The Dear Leader is destroying the peoples house while the people are struggling to pay rent.
Oh, yes, black people will steal black and latino/a immigrants will jump over fences and barriers We have to protect Americans! Who are those Americans? The Dear Leader and the white Christian nationalists say its white Americans only!
As Hartman notes, there is in the US an insatiable demand for unpaid labor that persist and should tell Americans that something needs to be changed. And soon.
This maybe the point of departure, writes Hartman, for the working class now from those who see only profits, value things, cant abide by the lived experiences of the economically poor and working class Americans. Its not enough to just repeat this phrase. The economically poor and working class must unite in the awareness of the history of the enslaved and working and economically poor classes in the US. And only then can this collective begin to shake off the chokehold of capitalism.
We know better. SNAP shouldn't be. No SNAP, no hungry children!
But we the people can never be free until we are free from capitalism.
