May 15, 2018
In a chilling article yesterday in Vox, Matthew Yglesias cogently made the case that the raison d’etre of the Trump administration is cruelty. The evidence is there in the hundreds of policy decisions, large and small, that seem to have no other purpose than to inflict the maximum amount of misery on the targeted groups, whether they are immigrants seeking asylum or transgender troops seeking to serve their country. Yglesias warns the complacent majority that a government fine tuned to deliver pain doesn’t turn on a dime and become benevolent when it runs out of targets. It simply pivots to other ones — be they journalists, or Democrats or Californians.
Trump has made no secret of his admiration for murderous autocrats and it is his most profound desire to achieve the same absolute power and obeisance borne of fear that they enjoy. As a result, he has deputized everyone in his administration, and instructed his Republican accomplices, to work feverishly to hasten our descent into penury and ignorance.
Yesterday, The New York Times reported that Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, had dismantled the task force investigating for-profit colleges for fraudulent practices, whittling the team down from a dozen under the Obama administration to three. DeVos hired the former dean of for-profit behemoth, DeVry Education Group, to supervise the investigative unit and has stacked the department with other former employees of the for-profit college industry, including the Department’s General Counsel, Carlos Muniz, (Source: “Education Department Unwinds Unit Investigating Fraud at For-Profits,” by Danielle Ivory, Erica L. Green and Steve Eder, The New York Times, 5/13/18).
This decision targets the most marginalized Americans who make up a disproportionate percentage of the students of for-profit colleges. Black students are between 22% and 27% of the students of for-profit colleges, despite making up between 13 -16% of the student bodies of public and private not for profit colleges. Military veterans make up 12% of the student population of for-profit colleges, despite being only between 2 and 7% of the student population at public and private not for profit colleges (Source: “Statistics in Brief. A Profile of the Enrollment Patterns and Demographic Characteristics of Undergraduates at For-Profit Institutions,” by Caren A. Arbeit, Laura Horn, RTI International, Sean A. Simon, National Center for Education Statistics, nces.ed.gov, 2/28/17). Clearly, DeVos is using the instrumentality of the federal government to make it easier for for-profit colleges to prey upon the most vulnerable in our society, pulling up the rungs of a critical ladder of opportunity.
Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are eagerly looking for a way to starve more Americans. The current iteration of the Farm Bill imposes a work requirement for those seeking to receive SNAP benefits. Never ones to be dissuaded by the facts, Congress ignored the reality that ¾ of the adults currently receiving SNAP benefits are working (Source: “Most Working Age SNAP Participants Work, But Often in Unstable Jobs,” by Brynne Keith Jennings and Raheem Chaudhry, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, www.cbpp.org, 3/15/18). The bill contains draconian penalties for violating the work requirement – one year for the first violation and up to three years for subsequent violations, potentially drastically increasing hunger and food insecurity for hundreds of thousands of Americans (Source: “Republican Farm Bill Calls on Many SNAP Recipients to Work or Go To School,” by Brakkton Booker and Dan Charles, The Salt, NPR.org, 4/12/18).
This is the Trump/Republican vision for America– uneducated, starving and broke, the pursuit of happiness be damned. Remember, cruelty is the point.
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