By Kim Rosenberg
We’re living in a time when the wealth of the world is held in the hands of a few people. It isn’t that there’s not enough money for what we need—affordable health care, food, housing, childcare, schools. It’s that control of the vast riches of our world have been hijacked and hoarded by a few morally bankrupt and undeniably corrupt men and women. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and the entire Trump administration and family have no idea how much things cost nor do they care.
This morning I read that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, thinks butter costs about $1 a pound. The US Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins thinks Americans can eat affordably at $3 a meal consisting of a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a tortilla, and one other thing. Try to get your kids excite about that. The president says there is no affordability problem. The rest of us regular folks who work regular jobs and have regular incomes find ourselves with less and less while a few people at the tippy top get more and more without paying much in the way of taxes. It shouldn’t be that way.
The people currently in office who voted to cut food assistance, housing assistance and health care programs obviously don’t grocery shop or cook, don’t rent their homes or carry a mortgage, don’t worry about how they’ll cover health care costs or an unexpected car repair. They don’t think about money when they fill up their cars or turn up the heat in their homes or take their kids to buy shoes—although honestly, they probably have the nanny do that. They don’t think about any of those things because they don’t have to. They tell us there is no affordability crisis and we should all settle down. The wealth gap that we see and experience on the daily doesn’t exist for them because for them, we don’t matter.
The members of Congress and Senate, in fact all government workers, have a US government funded health insurance plan that the rest of us pay for and yet our government can’t find a way to fund health care for the rest of us or ensure that the Social Security program we’ve paid into all our working lives will be solvent in another ten years. Under Elon Musk’s DOGE and the current president’s direction they have dismantled and are continuing to dismantle the agencies, programs and departments of government that we rely on for the public good but the good of the public doesn’t matter to them. We are expendable to the Stephen Miller’s and Jared Kushner’s of our country.
They tell us that prices will come down when the war in Iran that wasn’t supposed to happen is over. And remember during the last campaign how the Russian/Ukraine war was going to end on the president’s first day back in office. That’s what we were told but so much of what we’ve been told is not true.
Trump said he would release the Epstein files, he said only undocumented criminals would be deported, he said he’d bring down the cost of groceries and gas and stop endless wars but none of this is true.
Tariffs and the cost of diesel have increased prices on everything and forced people out of business while not adding jobs in our country or serving our own economic interests. How is what’s happening great for any of us Americans?
The Republican majority Senate (whose average net worth is 5.7 million dollars) and House (average net worth 1.5 million) who were happy to end or restrict access to food assistance, health care, education and housing programs have failed to hold this administration accountable for its widespread corruption. They give in to the president’s demands and give up on the rule of law, the Constitution and all of us people in the cheap seats. They gaslight us and demonize the ‘others’ among us—the brown, the poor, the unhoused, the trans, the gay—whatever group of people they can use as scapegoats. They spread lies based not on reality but on our fears and prejudices.
They distract us in order to divide us from each other because they know that together we are stronger. Together we have power. And we are wising up to the ongoing lies and broken promises.
In the words of Bob Marley, “You can fool some people sometimes but you can’t fool all the people all the time. So now we see the light—what you going to do? We’re going to stand up for our rights.”
In France in the 1700’s the gap between the very rich and everyone else was caused in part by a system that didn’t tax the rich but heavily taxed the regular working people. The French government was in financial ruin because of a national debt from years of costly wars. Crop failures and drought caused severe food shortages, starvation, and widespread riots. Any of this sound familiar?
At the same time that regular people were starving, the rich lived lives of luxury. It’s not different now. While the rest of us try to figure out how we’re going to pay for food and rent, childcare, gas and health care, the billionaires really don’t care. But do you?
It’s time to clean the House. Let’s take out the trash and take back our country for all of us regular people. We can start with our vote.
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