Photos: Jim Hightower\YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
At last, Washington is going to eliminate government waste!
Trump & Company’s budget-whacking crew even brandished a big ol’ chainsaw to show us hoi polloi that they’re serious. So goodbye to those ridiculous, multibillion-dollar giveaways to politically connected corporate elites, right?
Uh… don’t get silly. The chainsawers-in-chief are Elon Musk, Trump and a mess of ultra-rich GOP cabinet appointees, and their fortunes are built on fat checks from the government, so they will NOT be targeting any of their boondoggles. Instead, they’re aiming at programs offering modest help to middle-class and poor families.
For example, the Agriculture Department regularly mails out billions of dollars in “farm subsidies,” but most real farmers don’t get a penny, while about 80 percent of the taxpayers’ money goes to the richest 10 percent of agribusiness owners, including city-dwelling billionaires and corporate giants.
But rather than touching their giveaways, the Ag Department has just made a political show of zeroing-out a very successful farm-to-market program that enables small producers to sell their fresh goods to local school districts and food banks. This is government at its best—serving as a catalyst to “free up the enterprise” of small businesses by allowing them to bypass monopolistic middlemen and provide top-quality fresh foods to their communities.
Big Food, however, hates competition. Thus, Brooke Rollins (a corporate-hugging, far-right-wing lawyer who is Trump’s new Ag Secretary) summarily cancelled this enterprising local food initiative, announcing on Fox News that it was “nonessential” waste.
This is Jim Hightower saying… So there you have their guiding ethic of these “waste warriors.” Programs helping regular Americans are just waste to be eliminated—but giveaways to the rich are “essential” waste to be protected.
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