https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/04/25/starving-the-poor-to-feed-the-rich/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/04/25/trump-world-is-a-white-world/
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Taxpayers will pay at least $475 billion so Elon Musk can have fun giving babies HIV
Enough to pay for single-payer healthcare for every American.
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Here’s some math that every American needs to know:
+ $160,000,000,000
That’s the amount Elon Musk claims his (largely illegal) cost-gutting efforts have benefited taxpayers. He has not substantiated it seriously and is a world-historical liar, but since it’s just over 8% of what he promised to cut, let’s go with it for now.
- $135,000,000,000
That’s the amount the Partnership for Public Service estimates Musk has cost taxpayers with his capricious and heartless firing and re-hiring of federal employees.
- $500,000,000,000
The IRS predicts tax revenues will be down by that much, thanks to the Musk-led “rapid demolition” of the agency responsible for collecting our taxes.
American taxpayers will pay about $475,000,000,000 for 100 work days from the wealthiest man alive. And that's not even counting Musk's tax cuts and new no-bid contracts.
And what have we gotten in exchange for our nearly half trillion dollars, which, according to a 2020 study, would be enough to fund America’s adoption of a “single-payer, universal healthcare system?”
Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at ProPublica report:
One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.
And that’s not all, explains the MIT Technology Review:
Around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day as a result of the new US administration’s cuts to funding to AIDS organizations, new modeling suggests.
Calculating the current and future damage DOGE’s efforts are doing to America’s medical research, universities, and health care system is almost impossible to put into numbers, let alone words.
But STAT News tried:
By STAT’s own analysis, billions of dollars that would normally be flowing out to universities, academic medical centers, and nonprofit research organizations have either been staunched or clawed back.
Harder to wrap one’s mind around is the human toll of all these cuts — the thousands of personal tragedies playing out across the country, far beyond the NIH’s Maryland campus — as labs go dark and careers evaporate and clinical trials for new medicines lag. That trauma looks like a young scientist suddenly worried about paying rent, a researcher halting her study of maternal mortality, a lung disease specialist forced out of his dream job by his own conscience, a cancer patient facing a treatment delay, a university administrator trying to hold it all together.
And what is Musk getting out of all this slashing, clearly backed by the president he installed and the GOP establishment that has lusted for the moment when they could lawlessly choke off much of the good our federal government does?
Zachary Bassu at Axios reports:
He's leaving with his reputation wounded, relationships severed, companies in crisis, fortune diminished — and little to show for DOGE but chaos and contested savings.
And as Donald Trump said, “He doesn't need to do this."
So why did Elon Musk do it? And why will he continue to do it? Because we know his promises to step back will likely just leave Trump in the Linda Yacacrino position as the face of the government, while Musk continues to pull many of the strings.
We have to assume he’s doing it for his pure love of the damage, death, and dismay.
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Starving the Poor to Feed the Rich
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
As a child, I felt so fancy when we used the purple food stamps — those were the pretty ones.
We were a hardworking, loving family. My parents ensured we weren’t around anyone who tried to make us feel “less than” for needing help to make ends meet.
That’s just reality in America. When the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 while prices for everything else increase month after month, year after year…yeah, we’re going to need some help feeding our families, affording health care, and keeping a roof over our heads. Where I live, the hourly cost of child care alone is more than twice the minimum wage.
So as an adult I again rely on food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to feed my family. SNAP helps over 40 million Americans put food on the table.
And I’m watching with fear as the Republican majority in Congress and the Trump administration propose slashing food assistance to 40 million people and denying free and reduced school meals to 12 million children. Even Meals on Wheels, already deeply underfunded, has taken a hit recently.
“So, go to a food pantry,” these people say. The reality is that for every one meal that food pantries struggle to supply, SNAP provides nine. And the Trump administration is also cutting funding for food banks.
“Get a job. Budget better,” they say. I have a job, and I know how to budget.
But you can’t “budget better” when there isn’t enough in your paycheck to cover even basic human needs. Most people who receive SNAP benefits who are able to work do work. Two-thirds are children, seniors, or people with disabilities. We’re all at risk of losing even this modest assistance to feed ourselves and our families.
‘We’re just cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in the SNAP program,” they say. But the fraud rate in SNAP is just 1 percent. So why is food for children, families, people with disabilities, workers, and seniors on the chopping block?
Let’s get beyond the false rhetoric to the truth: The new administration and its allies in Congress want to fund a massive tax giveaway to the richest Americans and the largest corporations. So they’re taking our taxpayer dollars away from programs that support us and giving them to those who need the least help.
They all took an oath to serve us, but instead they’re betraying us. The rich have so much already, but they always seem to want more.
Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, my father always worked in our community to help others. I do the same to help my neighbors find the resources they need and to hold our elected officials accountable. My heart is full of love. When I look at my community, I see the beauty and the greatness among the need.
We may be poor due to this country’s wage and income system, which rewards inherited wealth over hard work and disinvests in families and communities. But we know the values of family, community, work, and service. We demand that those elected to serve us do the same.
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Trump World is a White World
President Trump’s policy initiatives appear driven by various motives, including retribution, personal enrichment, narcissism, petulance, and perhaps more. Yet an underlying goal in the President’s agenda is white supremacy. At its core, MAGA means MAWA: Making America White Again. Fueled by racism, the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which motivates Trump and his followers, envisions a white population confronting and thwarting what they see as an “invasion” by nonwhite migrants, aa well as the higher birthrates of Black and Brown families.
The second Trump administration has sought to eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in hiring and admission policies of government agencies, universities, and corporations; and in educational and entertainment programs in public schools, libraries, and cultural institutions. Claiming that diversity goals and affirmative action place minority hiring and admissions ahead of competence, Trump and his followers assail DEI as racism against white Americans. They fail to see that DEI programs were adopted to allow people of color to compete for school admissions, jobs and public contracts on an equal basis. DEI was meant to correct centuries of intended exclusion.
Now we are viewing the eradication of DEI wherever it exists; in the media, universities, museums, and even in performances and books that recognize the accomplishments of minorities. Recent changes at Washington’s Kennedy Center and Smithsonian museums that now restrict Black performers and erase Black history are cases in point.
The quest for whiteness is evident in the Trump immigration policies, which combine rigid exclusion at the borders with mass deportations from inside the country. Only racism can explain the administration’s zeal to keep non-whites out of the country and to arrest and deport as many as possible of such persons residing in the U.S. Witness the recent kidnappings, jailing and deportations of students and faculty members (many of whom hold green cards) simply for speaking out against the Gaza genocide. The victims of such abuses are mostly Palestinians and other persons of color from the global south, rather than white-skinned Europeans or Scandinavians.
The ongoing efforts of the U.S. government to deport Columbia University Graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder from Palestine, is only one of hundreds of similar deportations now taking place around the country, Another even more egregious case is the continuing refusal of the Trump administration to retrieve from an El Salvador prison green card holder Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian immigrant who was abducted and deported by mistake and sent to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador. Garcia is a father, married to a U.S. citizen. He has no criminal record. These are only two of the many ongoing ICE kidnappings and deportations of apparently hundreds of young persons from all over the country. In all of them, the common denominator is dark skin color.
Following his inauguration on January 20, Trump declared his intention to suspend the entry of migrants from “countries of particular concern.” He is now reportedly considering an expansion of his 2017 Muslim travel ban, which would primarily target seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Leaked information from the White House suggests a long list of other countries that would face higher scrutiny. While the public rationale for such a ban is “national security,” residents in almost all of the affected populations have black or brown skins.
Like his predecessor, Trump sides with and supports Israel with lethal weapons for its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza. He goes even further by giving Netanyahu carte blanche for the removal of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank to make room for (mostly White) Israeli settlers. The color line is also evident in joint Israel-U.S. plans to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.
Last month, Trump announced his plan to offer some 67,000 white South Africans refugee status in the U.S. He claims that they were victims of racial discrimination by the Black-led government. This follows his executive order in February, cutting-off U.S. funding to South Africa for AIDS medicines, citing violence against white landowners by the government of South Africa.
Racism and the goal of white supremacy are evident in each of the above cited cases. While the Trump agenda has other objectives, such as tariffs (that hit hardest against black and brown countries), his administration’s larger program has a pronounced racist bent. Clearly, Trump and his associates are determined to Make America White Again.
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