Answering Kennedy’s Call
“Just more than one week after President Donald Trump unveiled plans to deploy troops from the D.C. National Guard and to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department to tackle crime in Washington, six states have pledged to send in their own National Guard troops to pitch in with the effort.” Fox News
The civil war isn’t over? The Republican Party, envious of the blue states and a federal government that protect the rights of all Americans, has been attempting to take away as many of those protections as possible since Donald Trump returned to power.
Republicans have attacked such basic freedoms as women’s rights (abortion), immigrants’ rights (birth right citizenship), minorities and the poorest (loss of Medicare, Obamacare benefits) and seniors with cutbacks in social security services.
Trump added fuel to the fire when he said the Charlottesville torch carrying parade in 2017 that chanted racist, Nazi and antisemitic slogans had “very fine people on both sides.”
And since the big ugly tax cut bill was passed, Trump has sent National Guard Troops to Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, cities with black mayors (Chicago and Philadelphia may be next). It’s now obvious the Trump’s Republican Party has become the party of White Nationalist Christians, as if Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a mere blip on the screen of history that Republicans since the Jim Crow era have attempted to erase.
Six red (formerly confederate) states; Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee; have also sent a contingent of their National Guard to “police” DC with the mission to aid in fighting crime.
Yet three of those red states—South Carolina, Louisiana, and Tennessee, rank in the top ten states with the highest rates of violent crime. Why aren’t they policing their own cities, such as Memphis, Tennessee that has the highest violent crime rate in the country?
Red States don’t have those services for a reason. Generations of control by Republicans haven’t raised minimum wages, have weakened unions’ right to collective bargaining with right to work laws, and provided fewer health care services or environmental protection.
That’s why the minimum wage in Blue states can be more than twice that of Red states (Washington State is $17/hr versus Texas’ $7.25/hr, the national minimum age). When most families are barely earning enough to get by, employers have their pick of distraught, panicked workers willing to work for subsistence wages.
It’s become increasingly clear that Trump’s Republican Party doesn’t want to believe that it lost the civil war.
They have instead chosen to make it a cultural war between the Haves (blue states) and Have-nots (red states) by attacking the human rights and climate protections in blue states that far outclass those in red states and has resulted in the huge economic and cultural divide between them.
Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Red states produce just 29 percent of our income and wealth, according to the Hartman Report, a progressive podcast. The median family income in Blue states is $74,243 vs. $63,553 in the red states. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.
Donald Trump and his Republican-led red states should be wanting to emulate the best parts of blue states, instead of invading them: such as with better environmental protections, higher incomes, lower poverty rates, crime rates, and better health care above all.
But it might result in citizens of the red states wanting those protections as well, and Republicans losing their hold on power over them.
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
No comments:
Post a Comment