Slavery never went away (Part 2)

This administration has now labelled undocumented immigrants as commodities to be profited from. Same as it ever was in the land of the free, where nothing is ever free.

I had initially intended this to be a two-part series, but to provide the level of detail it warrants, it requires an additional piece. I hope you will stay with me for the whole journey because it’s important that you see the big picture.

It takes an extraordinary level of arrogance for Trump and his acolytes to conclude that doubling the healthcare premiums of 24 million Americans, two-thirds of whom are their own voters, is a vote-winner. There’s no question that the US healthcare system is not fit for purpose. It only works if you have enough money not to be troubled by being extorted by insurance companies. For the many, it’s a system never designed to be anything other than a ball and chain used as a weapon by employers. I’ve long said you can dress it up however you like, but once living or dying depends on the size of your bank balance, you have a problem.

Aside from its lack of humanity, free-market healthcare has become a cancer on American society, providing the wealthy with a license to print money. It is complete nonsense to suggest that healthcare for all is too expensive and the domain of socialism. It’s no more accurate a statement than to say America is a shining beacon of democracy, or that Trump never lies. I live in a country which operates a taxpayer-funded health system, and for all its faults and failings, I’m never going to die because I don’t have enough money to save my life. The UK's per-person healthcare cost is around HALF that of the US, at 9.7% of GDP compared to 17.2%. Americans pay around $13,000 a year compared to around $6,500 in the UK.

Image - Forbes

When Republicans speak of taxpayer benefits like Social Security, Medicaid or SNAP, they mysteriously transform the word benefit into that dirty word ‘entitlement’. It’s a deliberate rebranding that is designed to stigmatise those who need to rely on the already threadbare safety net the government provides. What they fail to mention is that these are EARNED ‘entitlements’, paid for by recipients through payroll tax contributions. Yet people are made to feel like scroungers for cashing in on their hard-earned contributions.

No such stigma is attached to cashing in profits from asset sales or stocks, or to creating a corporate welfare culture that replaces the need for corporations to hold reserves to mitigate unexpected economic stress. If we imposed upon Republican donors the requirement of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, hundreds of corporate entities would have gone to the wall during COVID. The truth is that profits are theirs when times are good, while losses become taxpayer bailouts in bad times. It’s as predictable as night following day.

The whole corporate model is designed to mop up taxpayer money like gravy on a Christmas dinner plate. Assuming you can afford gravy, of course. It’s a system hard-wired for the shareholder class to gorge themselves while demonising the recipients from whom they profit. Let’s take SNAP as a primary example. 10% of all US workers receive SNAP payments, that’s 16.3 million people. The constant Republican drumbeat is that there is rampant fraud and abuse in the system, despite there being little evidence to support the claim.

The SNAP budget is around $100 billion each year. The Republican narrative portrays this $100 billion as money wasted on lazy Americans who should be working, even though over half of them are already working. It really is time for the American people to wake up to the truth. The SNAP budget is nothing more than a state-sponsored corporate welfare slush fund. Walmart reported net income of $15.511 billion for fiscal year 2024, up 32.8% from the previous year. About 24% to 26% of recipients' SNAP dollars end up in Walmart cash registers. Now, unless I’m counting wrong, without the $25 billion in SNAP payments, that net income figure would look very different. Might I be so bold as to suggest we should not be looking towards struggling American families as the source of fraud and abuse? When it comes to that, remember we need look no further than Republican world corruption champion Senator Rick Scott, whose company settled the largest medical fraud case in US history for $1.7 BILLION—enough to refit the Qarari 747 bribe given to Trump twice over.

Alleged waste fraud and abuse has become the foundational basis on which malign political actors have built an economic fantasy that government workers, poor people and immigrants are the cause of a financial collapse in America, not GREED. This has led a large segment of the public to cheer on the job losses of family members and neighbours in response to a carefully crafted propaganda campaign. A campaign worthy of the East German Stasi of the Cold War era, where now, people inform on work colleagues unsympathetic to the Trump regime.

As reported by Andrea Hsu, from NPR on December 18th 2025, ‘317,000 are out of government’. The piece notes:

Month after month of firings, buyout offers and heightened uncertainty for the federal workforce has led to a mass exodus.

By the end of 2025, some 317,000 federal employees will be out of the government, according to the Office of Personnel Management. Tens of thousands were fired. Far more retired or resigned, many out of fear they would lose their jobs if they stuck around.

I have linked this piece because every one of those 317,000 workers was a real man or woman with a family and a life that was often left in pieces out of spite by a government with the wealthiest cabinet in American history. Russell Vought (Director of the Office of Management and Budget clearly stated he wanted “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected” and federal workers to be viewed as “the villains. The plan worked, as you will see from Andrea Hsu’s article, which recounts the experiences of just three of the victims of this ideology-driven retributive cull.

If the objective were to address waste, fraud, and abuse, it would surely be more productive to pursue the estimated $1 trillion in evaded taxes each year, which is primarily the domain of the wealthy. I have discussed this in detail in previous posts, but if you want to read more, this article, which first appeared in the New York Times in 2021 and was updated in April 2025, is a good point of reference. It’s also worth noting that with this lost revenue, you could eradicate food insecurity, end homelessness and replace the $880 billion stolen by the Republicans from Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the ‘have yachts’. Instead, Trump has gutted the IRS and is dangling the carrot of abolishing the income tax.

Image - Getty - Moor Studio

Politicians spend their entire existence hoping and praying that people won’t join up the dots to reveal their collusion with corporate America, to hoover up your hard-earned tax dollars in government subsidies and corporate welfare. It’s your gift to them to live in a state of outrage that keeps you busy looking everywhere but where you should be looking. The only horse I have in this race is fairness and social equality, so you won’t find me defending indefensible behaviour from either side of the aisle. Are Trump and his enablers disgusting, soulless monsters? I believe they are, but please don’t tell me Democrats have not contributed to where we find ourselves.

Moving forward, there’s every chance that come election time, corporate America will simply throw on a blue suit and condemn Trump, saying they knew all along he was a bad apple. Then, it will be business as usual as the keys to the gravy train are transferred to corporate-supported Democrats delivering more of the same old same old. We can argue all day about my cynical nature, but I’ve been around politicians all my life, not to mention having circled the block a few times. I know how it works: the current Democratic leadership and their many corporate-funded colleagues are incapable of delivering the transformative political change the American people are screaming out for, without a revolution within the party.

Image - Getty - Moor Studio

The American people are being forced to live through a tyranny imposed upon them by the stupidity of 70 million of their peers. This was a result of a man-made, carefully crafted campaign of political division. The bitter pill can’t be sweetened because a hard core of the new Republican base has stated that they would prefer Putin rather than a Democratic President, and they mean it. The level of political vitriol is palpable. There is a reason we call the MAGA movement a cult, because that’s precisely what it is. And this brings us nicely back to mass deportation.

In the first part of this now three-part series, I dismantled the fiscal conservative argument that mass deportation brings with it any fiscal upside. There are absolutely NONE. Immigrants are the boogeyman that has won elections for Republicans for decades. The obvious question is, who will they blame once the ‘illegal immigrants’ have gone, taking with them their $96.7 billion in taxes that have long propped up Medicaid and Social Security?

I’m sure the Tech Bros are telling Trump that AI will replace the almost 10 million jobs held by those being deported. It’s just another in a long list of lies. The one thing AI is unlikely to replace is crop pickers, meat factory workers, and many of the other jobs held by undocumented workers. Their labour has, over the years, been hardwired into the economy; you can’t wave goodbye to $96.7 billion in tax revenue and the money they spend in the economy without it having a significant impact. However, that doesn’t stop the likes of Herr Miller from placing Aryan ideology above the welfare of the American people and the US economy.

Mass deportation is not about protecting society; it’s about reshaping it on the flawed premise that native born Americans are a superior race. Not only is the premise a flawed comedic punchline, but it’s also divisive by nature and economically self-harmful. Successful societies aren’t imposed on people; they grow from the talent and diversity that come from social cohesion. The engine that is the US economy was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of a significant immigrant population. There is no strength in a society that is fearful of ‘the other’. This constant drumbeat of ‘we can’t afford X because of the poor, the disabled and the brown and black people’ is designed to ensure everyone lives in a perpetual state of anxiety.

The American tech industry would not exist without imported talent, many of whom did not receive their education in the US; if they had, 21% of them would be illiterate. This distorted sense of exceptionalism is frankly absurd. It’s a society built on the exploitation of slaves, and the working class who, after returning from World War II, were no longer prepared to settle for slave wages, having just fought a rich man’s war for him. Whether it’s unions or civil rights, the top 1% have, since the day they were forced to concede ground, been rolling back hard-fought-for rights to arrive at this moment when the American wealth gap is the largest in history.

In PART THREE, we’ll do a deep dive into the commoditization of immigrants through the mass deportation program. Regardless of arguments to the contrary, this program has its roots in Hitler’s rounding up of the Jews from October 1941; the resemblance of the program is absolutely chilling, and the final piece of this series will chill you to the bone. Now tell me independent commentary is not worth supporting.

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