Unmask the GOP as a party of negligent homicide



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In Arizona, a family takes care of a child's heart problems lost their house and their car to medical bills that they could not pay. In Saint-Louis, a closed shelter and later a homeless man was found frozen to death in a bin. In California, a poor family was found dead in their van of carbon monoxide poisoning.

"Poverty is a death sentence," said Sen. Bernie Sanders at a rally in the 2016 campaign. The public nodded. They should have screamed. Look at the story. Look at the statistics. Conservative and neoliberal policies kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. When Republicans dismantle Obamacare, they kill people. When lawmakers on both sides tear down the safety net, they kill people.

The neoliberal democrats are also accomplices. The devastating anti-poor measures that came under the guise of "welfare reform" in 1996 defended by Bill Clinton and supported by many Democrats in Congress. It reduces cash payments to the poor and may have led to shorter life. This led to a Increase of 153% of deep poverty, with Americans living on $ 2 a day. This led people to sell their plasma or food stamps for money quickly.

Republicans, however, went even further, constantly shaping the GOP in the party of negligent homicide. They intentionally increase the structural violence of the state. Victims die but we do not "see" them because our media focus on the staff, not the system. We are trained to consider the authorities as legitimate, so it is almost impossible to recognize them as mass murderers. But the poor are dying in an ongoing crisis that needs a radical humanitarian policy.

The United States is a crime scene

What is a negligent homicide? This is when you expose someone to risks that a reasonable person would say are unjustifiable. Death was not the intention but the result. Like when an accidental self-help guru grilled visitors in his sweat lodge. Or the school driver with a bus full of kids accelerated on the tracks to overtake a train and was rammed.

Many cases involve a vehicle. The biggest case concerns the largest vehicle in history: the nation-state. In the often quoted metaphor of Plato The Republic, the state ship can be dangerous when it is headed by the greedy.

When conservatives run the state, "we people" are in danger. We lose our well-being, lose public land, lose health care, lose access to the vote and lose legal protections. The humanitarian side of the state that provides for the people is dismantled. The hierarchy is exploited for the rich while the police and the army are reinforced. Cross tax expert Grover Norquist said that the goal is to reduce the government so small, Republicans can "drown in the bathtub".

When they kill the state, they kill the many people who need it to live. At the present time, someone who has never had any health care is dying in an emergency room. Right now, a child is screaming hunger. Right now, a black woman who has been stressed by racism for years remove his chest during a heart attack.

In our country of 325 million inhabitants, the 40 million poor and 30 million people without health care need a safety net to save them or save their lives from being cut by stress or illness. Academic reports say it. Medical journals say it. The demonstrators say it. So when our lawmakers dismantle the state, they commit negligent homicide. Any reasonable person can see mathematics and know that the "free market" is an undue risk to the poor.

Fear of health

"We are making America even more beautiful," said President Trump as Republicans smiled, big smiles to the fullest. He signed the 2017 Law on Tax Reductions and Jobs, selling it as the liberalization of business red tape and federal taxes. In reality, the Republicans had signed the death warrant for thousands of people.

In one stroke of the pen, Trump put an end to Obamacare's individual mandate, which forced people to buy health insurance or pay a fine. Without this, 13 million people would leave Obamacare and some will die. Weeks earlier, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said on CNBC"When people lose health care, they are less likely to get preventive care, they are more likely to postpone the health care they need and are more likely to die." Ten thousand people. This is how he said that many would die. Ten thousand.

And many were already dying. In 2009, a report found that 45,000 lives were lost each year for lack of health care, or one every 12 minutes. In 2010, 49.9 million Americans were uninsured; after Obamacare, it had fallen to 28 million in 2016. And with this 44% decrease, the annual mortality rate, based on the ratio, would be about 26,000 people. How are they invisible? How are these preventable deaths not considered a crime?

In 2009, MoveOn.org made a video in which people held signs: A sign from a woman said that her mother was almost bankrupt medical; The sign of a nurse says that her aunt has cancer. Face after face followed. A woman using a wheelchair, a man with a heart surgery scar and another man breathing through tubes – all were holding placards saying "we can not wait" for health insurance.

Nine years later, I wonder if they received any help. Did they live? Are they at risk of losing the assurance that Republicans are attacking Obamacare? In a few years, if MoveOn.org relaunched this video with these people, how many of their faces would be replaced by gravestones?

The fields of the misery of poverty

"One thing we will be looking at very closely is the welfare reform," Trump said at a meeting at the White House in October 2017. "People are taking advantage of the system and are looking at it. other people are not getting what they need. "He shook his head in a dry tone, as if the cameras were broken.

April 10, 2018, he published an executive order for federal agencies to review work requirements and block subsidies to states. This is an easy target. Republicans are too scared to go after Social security and health insurance before the mid-term, they attack the poor, whom the American legislators have demonized for decades by calling them "social parasites".

Last year, Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur trip from Skid Row to the deep south to Puerto Rico Hurricane. He found a dying American. It documents how the 40 million poor people scrape food and compassion to survive day-to-day. Five million are in desperate conditions.

He saw bitten women because of the bugs in their tents. He saw a man whose teeth were rotten, yellow tips. He felt the sewage escape from a kitchen sink. He visited homes in Puerto Rico, broken by splinters and rubble by the storm.

Six years before Alston's travels, American scientists have calculated the number of Americans who die each year from poverty in a 2011 Report; that's 291,000. Divided by the number of days in a year, this amounts to 797 people a day. They are dying invisibly because we choose not to see them. They die away from the cameras. They die alone and frightened. Officially, the deadly condition is diabetes, heart attack or hypertension, but in reality, it is the alteration of the body through stress, sorrow and despair.

Republicans have told voters that while they are still in power after the mid-term, they plan to use the giant federal deficit caused by their tax bill to cut Medicare, Medicaid, social security and food coupons. If they do, the poor will die in separate postal codes that Alston has visited. They are dying here now.

The Humanitarian State

"It's great, guy," said Scott Miller, a volunteer dentist for Remote Area Medical, a non-profit group that is setting up mobile medical clinics to provide free dental and eye care in addition to disaster relief. He just worked on a man's teeth for four hours. Someone flashed a mirror in front of the patient, who smiled and said that he could not recognize himself.

"That's the only thing I can do," said Miller ABC News as his voice trembled. "I can change someone's life like that." His sincere joy in repairing lives is a glimpse of what American humanitarian policy might be.

Imagine a policy that recognizes the current crisis of the poor and provides for immediate action. Imagine an administration that has taken billions at the Pentagon and Homeland Security to increase non-profit organizations like Remote Area Medical so that it can rent stadiums in cities to get free dental care, mammograms, basic physical exams and glasses.

Imagine a White House that nationalizes vacant buildings and renovates them for those who do not have a home. And made sure everyone had a Medicare for All card in their wallet. Imagine if everyone had a college to go for free and a future that they could see.

Americans could touch their new teeth and new glasses, knowing for the first time in generations that negligent homicide is actually a crime. And many people were his victims, including conservative voters.

It sounds like a dream, but it happens everywhere all the time. In civil society, countless groups practice a humanitarian policy. Any "reasonable person" knows that when you heal poverty, a new world may not be the intention, but it is the result.

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