Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Tuesday
As I write this, Senate Republicans are trying to pass Trump’s unironically named “Big Beautiful Bill,” which over the next ten years will take one trillion dollars out of the national economy and put it in private hands. In the process, Medicaid and various entitlements will be gutted. Millions will lose their healthcare.
Political scientist John Stoehr of the Editorial Board points out there will be other ramifications as well:
Higher prices, fewer jobs, less growth – or as one Federal Reserve official told Bloomberg TV recently, the question isn’t whether we’re going to see stagflation in the near future, but the magnitude of it.
Bertolt Brecht has poems for such occasions. For instance, there’s this one about him watching the wheeling and dealing on the Chicago Wheat Exchange—this during the Great Depression—which for a socialist primarily concerned with people getting enough bread to feed their families is a confounding experience.
Let’s just say that the dealers in wheat are not concerned with the issue of hunger:
Years ago when I was studying the ways of the Chicago Wheat Exchange
I suddenly grasped how they managed the whole world’s wheat there
And yet I did not grasp it either and lowered the book
I knew at once: you’ve run
Into bad trouble.There was no feeling of enmity in me and it was not the injustice
Frightened me, only the thought that
Their way of going above it won’t do
Filled me completely
These people, I saw, lived by the harm
Which they did, not by the good.
This was a situation, I saw, that could only be maintained
By crime because too bad for most people.
In this way every
Achievement of reason, invention or discovery
Must lead only to still greater wretchedness.
Such and suchlike I thought at that moment
Far from anger or lamenting, as I lowered the book
With its description of the Chicago wheat market and exchange.
Much trouble and tribulation
Awaited me
I’m a little confused by his remark that “every achievement of reason, invention of discovery must lead only to still great wretchedness” although it makes me think of the giant tech companies, many headed by Trump-supporting billionaires, who stand to rake in billions from the bill. Perhaps Brecht means that the more society becomes rationalized and systematized, the greater potential there is for exploitation.
Yes, these people live by the harm they do, not by the good. Much trouble and tribulation will indeed visit us if the big beautiful billionaires’ bill passes.
As for the white working class Trump voters who made this moment possible and who will suffer grievously, I turn to another Brecht poem:
When it comes to marching many do not know
That their enemy is marching at their head.
The voice which gives them their orders
Is their enemy’s voice and
The man who speaks of the enemy
Is the enemy himself
The question is whether they will ever acknowledge this.
