When Will Congress Vote To Condemn The Horrors Of Capitalism?

The House, including many Democrats, recently voted to condemn the economic system that ISN’T screwing us right now.

It’s always pretty rich to hear conservatives posing as the defenders of the working class. This now-common claim seems vaguely possible because of the real desertion of the working class by the Democratic Party. Recently, Donald Trump visited East Palestine—the site of a Feb. 3 train derailment which has contaminated the area with toxic chemicals—and handed out MAGA hats and offered to buy food for police and firefighters. President Biden, for his part, has indicated that he has “no plans” to visit the area. But beyond these recent facts, even the lightest scrutiny leads Republicans’ claims that they give a shit about the working class to utterly collapse. Republicans have done all of the following: insisted on ending pandemic aid to working households, supported the Biden administration in blocking a strike by exhausted rail workers, blocked a minimum wage increase, and fought the expansion of Medicaid for poor families. As Warren Buffett once said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” And conservatives are the shining knights in this war, leading the heroic charge against those dark progressive enemies who would try to give single moms child care aid.

But these are dark hours to the twitchy, paranoid conservative eye, since the defeat of their blundering semi-fascist president by a conservative Democrat, whose administration has seen some actual halfway-decent policy, especially the funding for climate-related programs in the Inflation Reduction Act. With the new, incredibly narrow and incredibly ungovernable GOP House majority, the time came to take a brave stand against any future such outrages with H.R. 9, a Resolution Denouncing the Horrors of Socialism. Stepping boldly aside the mountain of corpses starved to death by capitalism every week around the world, our wise leaders decided that any past socialist regime needed to be brought in and condemned. Democrats were split by the measure rather than uniformly voting for it, as would have been the case in the past—arguably a sign of a small, wretched crawl toward progress. Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi’s successor as House Speaker and among the largest recipients of hedge fund dollars in the House, voted for it along with a great number of liberal, centrist, and conservative Democrats.