Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, three times, four, more… and shame on us. All of us. Over the past fifty years, the American people have been screwed over so thoroughly and completely that we can’t tell up from down anymore. We’ve been screwed from side to side, from top to bottom, and from bow to stern. This way, that way, and every which way but loose—and the sad thing is we’re being screwed by our own government—the very people we elected to represent us.
We the people have had to fight for everything we have—or had. The rise of unions in the early twentieth century gave us decent wages, the eight-hour day, the five-day work week, workman’s compensation, voting rights, equal opportunity, and more. We earned that.
Minorities and marginalized populations had to fight for everything from the right to vote to equal rights to an equitable public education. Everyone had to fight for a fair workplace. We earned that. We’ve fought in a multitude of wars to keep our republic safe. We the people have fought the enemy, the bosses, the owners, and we’ve won. We earned it. We had the upper hand for a while, but not now. They’re relentless. They never ever stopped trying to screw us.
I had the luck to grow up in what history will probably know as the golden age of America. When my father passed, leaving my mother with five young boys to raise, she was able to make do with Social Security and VA checks. We didn’t live high on the hog, but we always had clothes on our backs and food in our bellies. The government safety nets took care of us, and because of that, we were able to go to college and are now productive and upright citizens. Who could say that’s true today?
How did this happen? How did they screw us? Once upon a time, the United States had a strong and vital middle class. Higher education was affordable. When I left home for college, I only had to pay $400 a semester for tuition. Health care was affordable. Housing was affordable. Then it all began to change.
The year was 1980. Enter Ronald Reagan and the concept of trickle-down economics. His tax cuts of 1984 were designed to give tax breaks to the country’s wealthiest citizens with the argument that these actions would spur the economy. Reagan’s assertion was that as the rich invested this money, the wealth would “trickle down” to the great unwashed massed. Us. It never happened. Instead, these taxes siphoned off middle-class wealth, transferring it to the ultra-rich.
They did similar tax cuts three more times, and, according to the New York Times, “the arguments have remained fixed: Tax cuts will stimulate growth, pay for themselves and benefit all Americans. But a retrospective by a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization made up of former top congressional aides found that the previous tax cut measures — in 1981, 2001, 2003 and 2017 — did exactly none of those things, falling short of the claims made beforehand.” All this did was to begin the creation of an ultra-rich superclass—the one-percenters.
It worked for those in power and their wealthy friends—their donors. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me four times, there’s enough shame to go around.
It’s not just the money—and not just Republicans, though we’ll get back to that later. It’s the extremes these people will go to in order stay in power. Instead of a system designed to “establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”, (The Constitution of the United States), our legislative process has devolved into a quid pro quo system where corporate and monied interests can lobby for favorable laws and regulations in return for being campaign donors, and since the SCOTUS Citizens United ruling, there is very little regulation or oversight to the dark money flowing into Washington. For the most part, Congress has been bought and sold.
Over the past fifty years, our government—with a very few exceptions—has consolidated this quid pro quo relationship between themselves of big money, of shucking and jiving Americans, of shaking us down for as much money as they could. Selling us trickle-down economics was only the beginning.
In the 1990s, some states, including Wisconsin, began privatizing public schools. Private corporations were now taking our tax money and determining curricula for students. Some Christian schools taught that evolution was a fallacy, and that man lived alongside the dinosaur—a blatant and ridiculous scientific falsehood—that we paid them to teach our children. Corporations got to skim profits off the top of state funding for education, and, quid pro quo, guess who gets a new set of campaign donations?
Prisons have also been privatized, too. According to the ACLU, “private prison companies obtain more and more government dollars, and private prison executives at the leading companies rake in enormous compensation packages. Private prison companies essentially admit that their business model depends on locking up more and more people. The American economy should not include locking people in cages for profit.”
This practice has given birth to the school-to-prison pipeline, pushing students—usually children of color—from the educational system straight to the criminal justice system.
These sorts of privatizations and manipulations hasn’t happened by accident, and it’s only going to spread. The far-right manifesto and playbook called Project 2025 laid it all out. And now, today, since Donald Trump was reelected, we are seeing the endgame of the greed and avaricious powers that have taken the reins of our government. Trump illegally commissioned DOGE to ravage Social Security, the Veterans Administration, the IRA, USAid, and dozens of other government agencies. He took over the Department of Education and has commandeered the Department of Justice to persecute his political enemies. He is one happy camper.
It stands to reason that Trump and his minions would like to stay in power. It’s a pretty lucrative gig. He has already engineered dozens of sweetheart deals with himself and his family and rerouted billions of taxpayer dollars to his own coffers. He’s so desperate to stay in power that at one point he incited a riot at our nation’s Capital Building—and got away with it.
And they’re staying in power by fooling the American people, making them think that one candidate will give them security, jobs, affordable living, healthcare, and what was it again? Establish Justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare. That’s the social contract, but what has our government—and all of it, not one party or the other—become? Opportunists, leeches, thieves. They fool us with million-dollar election campaigns and then try—even now—to manipulate voting laws to exclude marginalized citizens. The Republican SAVE bill now in Congress is nothing more than a voter suppression tool. They’re trying to rig the game.
None of this is news. We know it’s been going on for years, but it has into crystal clear focus during this our current disgustingly corrupt administration. We’ve been heading this way for years.
This is the path we’re still on, but there is hope. We do have government representatives, voices for the people, who are working for the people. Bernie Sanders, Liz Chaney, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Zohran Mandami, and others on both sides of the aisle are working for universal health care, affordable housing and childcare, income equity—the general welfare. I believe there are those who do want to do the right thing, but who are too intimidated by Trump’s fanatical followers to act. But they must. And they must start today, before it’s too late. If not, shame on them.
Fool me once, twice, three times, four….
Hegel allegedly said, “the only thing to be learned from history is that nothing is ever learned from history”.
That seems unfortunately true.
It does, but I hope we remember enough of fascist history to stop this steaming clusterfuck.