From the My God! How Much More Evidence Do You Need Before You Realize That Republicans Favor The Rich, Screw The Non-rich And Increase The Federal Defecit Files?: The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of what corrupted, radical, authoritarian House Republican plutocrats want to do to us:
1% = 3.32 million people
20% = 66.4 million
• The trio of tax bills that House Republicans will consider in committee on Tuesday, June 13, include tax cuts that would mostly benefit the richest one percent of Americans and foreign investors.
• Under the legislation, the richest fifth of Americans would receive $60.8 billion in tax cuts next year while the poorest fifth of Americans would receive $1.4 billion in tax cuts.
• Because foreign investors own much of the stock in U.S. corporations, they would ultimately receive $23.8 billion of the corporate tax cuts next year.
• The only group of Americans receiving more than foreign investors next year would be the richest 1 percent, who would receive $28.4 billion.
• The legislation includes an increase in the standard deduction that would help some middle-income taxpayers but would do little for those who most need help.
Just weeks after threatening to cause a catastrophic default on the federal debt to address an alleged budget crisis, House Republicans plan to consider legislation that would increase the deficit by expanding the Trump tax cuts for corporations and other businesses.
Officially the cost of the new tax cuts would be offset, mostly by provisions that would roll back certain parts of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act addressing climate change, but the true costs are hidden by budget gimmicks.
The most important budget gimmick is that the legislation enacts the biggest tax cuts for only two years even though its proponents plan to extend them in the future making them, in effect, permanent. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that if all provisions are permanent, the trio of bills would result in more than $1 trillion in revenue losses over the next ten years.
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What a second term would look like: Politicized, corrupt, police state law enforcement: The NYT writes:
When Donald J. Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to “go after” President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night after his arraignment earlier that day in Miami. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”But by suggesting the current prosecutors investigating the Bidens were not “real,” Mr. Trump appeared to be promising his supporters that he would appoint an ally who would bring charges against his political enemies regardless of the facts.
The naked politics infusing Mr. Trump’s headline-generating threat underscored something significant. In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.
Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.
What does this tell you about DJT, the GOP elites, their major donors and the American people who support them? Obviously, opinions will differ. But it tells me that most of them are anti-democracy, pro-tyranny (some combination of autocracy, theocracy and plutocracy). That is the undeniably case whether they know it or not. The line of plausible deniability has clearly been crossed.
The NYT says that DJT appeared to be promising his supporters that he would appoint an ally who would bring charges against his political enemies regardless of the facts. That is an inexcusable understatement. Enemies will be eliminated regardless of facts is exactly what he is saying.
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Capitalist for-profit health care and moral injury: I've argued here many times that for-profit capitalism is inherently inimical to the public interest in certain areas, e.g., health care, energy policy, environmental policy, infrastructure, utilities and insurance. There is plenty of evidence to back that up.
More evidence is discussed in a NYT article that focuses on the moral injury that many health care providers are experiencing as capitalist health care becomes ever more ruthless about squeezing out more profit at the expense of everyone and everything else. The NYT writes:
Psychiatrist Wendy Dean read an article about a physician who died by suicide. Such deaths were distressingly common, she discovered. The suicide rate among doctors appeared to be even higher than the rate among active military members, a notion that startled Dean, who was then working as an administrator at a U.S. Army medical research center in Maryland. Dean started asking the physicians she knew how they felt about their jobs, and many of them confided that they were struggling. Some complained that they didn’t have enough time to talk to their patients because they were too busy filling out electronic medical records. Others bemoaned having to fight with insurers about whether a person with a serious illness would be preapproved for medication. The doctors Dean surveyed were deeply committed to the medical profession. But many of them were frustrated and unhappy, she sensed, not because they were burned out from working too hard but because the health care system made it so difficult to care for their patients.In July 2018, Dean published an essay with Simon G. Talbot, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, that argued that many physicians were suffering from a condition known as moral injury. Military psychiatrists use the term to describe an emotional wound sustained when, in the course of fulfilling their duties, soldiers witnessed or committed acts — raiding a home, killing a noncombatant — that transgressed their core values. Doctors on the front lines of America’s profit-driven health care system were also susceptible to such wounds, Dean and Talbot submitted, as the demands of administrators, hospital executives and insurers forced them to stray from the ethical principles that were supposed to govern their profession. The pull of these forces left many doctors anguished and distraught, caught between the Hippocratic oath and “the realities of making a profit from people at their sickest and most vulnerable.”
One survey found that nearly one in five health care workers had quit their job since the start of the pandemic and that an additional 31 percent had considered leaving.
The article focuses on doctors. It points out that moral injury does not affect all doctors. Many specialists are doing fine and have no moral complaints or concerns.
In case one might think that moral injury is liberal vaporware, a search of the science literature for the exact phrase "moral injury" from 2015 to 2023 gives 14,200 hits. Moral injury is a real thing, not vaporware. A 2019 review of the moral injury literature (full pdf here) indicated that the phenomenon (disease?) has limited clinical data leaving treatment options unclear:
Although a dearth of empirical clinical literature exists, some authors debated how moral injury might and might not respond to evidence-based treatments for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) whereas others identified new treatment models to directly address moral repair. Limitations of the literature included variable definitions of potentially morally injurious events, the absence of a consensus definition and gold-standard measure of moral injury as an outcome, scant study of moral injury outside of military-related contexts, and clinical investigations limited by small sample sizes and unclear mechanisms of therapeutic effect.
The point here is obvious. The overwhelming moral value that brass knuckles capitalism operates under is profit. Everything else is secondary. Secondary concerns like crappy patient care and moral injury are almost always treated as problems for propaganda campaigns and "public relations" departments to deal with. All huge corporations tell us they care about us, but for some of them that is a pure lie. They care about profit and good public appearances but not much or anything else.
Qs: Can one reasonably assert at least some moral failing in the millions of people who work for ruthless capitalist health care and other companies that clearly put profit ahead of human, environmental and other important social concerns? Any difference between the owners and executives who impose ruthless policies in pursuit of more profit and the workers who implement them?
