The only parts of the U.S. Government that have been shut down are those that are actually trying to help people. Three-quarters of a million workers have been locked out of their jobs by Trump.
Other federal employees have been forced to work without getting paid, including air traffic controllers. That’s the sort of stress that they — as well as passengers and crew members — don’t need.
Inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have been told to stay home. Meanwhile, 16 workers were killed in an explosion at the Accurate Energetic Systems munitions plant in Tennessee.
However, the ICE Gestapo agents terrorizing Chicago and the rest of the United States are still getting paid. The U.S. Navy is executing people in the Caribbean while plans for invading the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela are going ahead.
The shutdown didn’t prevent live artillery shells from being fired from the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton across Interstate Highway 5, stopping traffic between Los Angeles and San Diego. (Amtrak trains were also halted.) One shell exploded prematurely, showering shrapnel over two vehicles.
The Oct. 18 spectacle was presided over by Vice-Führer JD Vance and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. It was a not-too-subtle threat to the millions of people demonstrating the same day across the United States in the “No Kings” rallies against Trump.
That’s more proof that the real capitalist state is the “deep state” of violence, prisons, cutbacks and war.
We need to organize our own resistance
Almost all Democrats in Congress are refusing to vote for a “continuing resolution” that will fund Trump’s regime. It was another story back in March, when Charles Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate and nine other members of the Democratic caucus voted for a similar measure.
Trump praised Schumer for capitulating. A few days earlier, almost none of the over 200 Democrats attending Trump’s March 4 speech to a joint session of Congress did anything to protect Texas Rep. Al Green. The 77-year-old Black congressperson was dragged off the floor for shouting, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid.”
The reason for Schumer’s about-face is that millions of voters are demanding resistance to Trump’s march towards fascism. The Democratic Party establishment wants to keep this struggle within the bounds of capitalist elections.
They don’t want anti-war and pro-Palestinian slogans raised at the No Kings rallies. The wealthy and powerful are fearful of an even larger struggle than the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020.
The Democratic Party leadership’s opposition to the “continuing resolution” is centered against the so-called Big Beautiful Bill that will force millions of people off Medicaid. It will also remove the subsidies for getting health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, which will make monthly premiums skyrocket.
The response of Trump and his Fox News cheerleaders is to claim that Democrats want to provide free health care to undocumented immigrants, who these bigots call “illegal aliens.”
No child is illegitimate, and no human being is illegal. Without the absolutely essential labor of undocumented workers on the farms and in the food processing plants, we would starve.
Instead of denouncing this hate mongering, Democratic Party spokespeople are denying they want to give any aid to human beings without papers.
Are people born in other lands supposed to be denied medications and drop dead in front of hospitals? Are immigrant children needing treatment to be left to die?
Health care is a human right!
Refusing poor people health care is old news in the United States. Hundreds of Black men were deliberately denied treatment for syphilis in the notorious Tuskegee Study. These experiments lasted from 1932 to 1972.
T. Harry Moore and Harriette Moore were murdered in their Brevard County, Florida home on Christmas Day, 1951, by Ku Klux Klan members who planted a bomb. The Black couple helped tens of thousands of Black people to register to vote.
Both were driven 30 miles away to a Black hospital because the nearby white hospital would have denied them admission. Hundreds of medical facilities refused treatment to Black, Indigenous or Latine people until well into the 1960s.
It’s political cowardice for Democratic congressional leaders to say they’re against providing health care for the undocumented. It’s capitulating to racist Trump.
People’s movements, especially the labor movement, need to declare that health care is a human right. Our enemies are the billionaires, not our fellow poor and working people.
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