by Dana Henricks, Florence
Dear Jane Lambert,
Yikes! Thanks for calling me out on that “profits” thing in my first letter to you! I should have made that a lot clearer. When I said that Democrats value people and the planet over profits, I did not mean the profits that we all have to earn to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads and to cover the rest of our needs, plus the extras that make life worth living. And I didn’t mean all business owners, big or small, who are making a nice profit for themselves, either.
What I should have said was this: “Democrats value people and the planet over profits that harm people and the planet.” The war in Iran is an example. Iran has oil. The wealthy oil corporations want to take their oil. They donate millions to Trump and other Republican politicians. To return the favor, Trump has attacked Iran to take their oil, just like he did in Venezuela. And who’s paying for the war? The oil corporations? Nope. We are, the American taxpayers.
Trump’s war is costing about $1 billion dollars every single day (not to mention the lives lost, both American service members and Iranian civilians). We could be spending that $1 billion dollars a day on improving our schools, on keeping rural hospitals open, on helping our veterans, on improving our roads and bridges and airline safety, on protecting social security and Medicare, and on expanding Medicare to every American paying into Medicare who wants to enroll, and so much more.
That $1 billion a day could also be spent on developing cars that do not use oil OR lithium batteries, which are bad for the environment. Just imagine a world where we don’t have to even think about what’s going on in the Middle East because we don’t need their oil anymore. And a future where we get almost all our power from renewable, nontoxic energy sources so that places like Sheep Creek at the headwaters of the Bitterroot will not have to be mined. I know it seems out of reach today, but as the saying goes, “If we can put a man on the Moon, then we can . . . !”
And I bet when I said “expanding Medicare to every American,” a couple paragraphs ago, your first thought was, “Socialism!” You say “tomato,” I say “to-mah-to.” You say “socialism,” I say “government that is paid for BY us providing services FOR us—instead of the government handing out millions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to the greedy billionaires and corporations who don’t need them.
Like Abraham Lincoln once said: “Government BY the people, FOR the people.”
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