Trump administration Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has proposed tapping into the "34 million able bodied Americans" on Medicaid to fill out the labor pool of agricultural workers drained by the mass deportation program masterminded by White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. This is forced labor. While it's a nice reality check on anyone in the working poor who likes to bitch about immigrants receiving public benefits, it also exploits a cycle of poverty in underpaid labor, largely for the benefit of corporate agriculture.
Tying health care financing to employment is already discriminatory. Tying it to specific employment further divides the workforce into haves and have-nots, as some get better "benefits" than others. Don't like your insurance plan? "Get a better job," say the cheerleaders for the free market, as if you could just skip merrily over to that more generous employer who surely exists somewhere.
Medicaid is not a cushy free ride. Neither is Medicare. Big gaps are left solely for the benefit of private insurance companies and skinflint tax-haters who think that depriving fellow citizens of essential services and gouging them for the supplemental coverage expresses some virtue in social Darwinism and the glorious profit motive. In their idealized vision, the magnificent labor herd runs, harried by wolves and cheetahs and lions that pick off the weak while strengthening the survivors. Some of us are obviously nearer the top of the food chain than others.
Moves by the MAGA government to consolidate power should not surprise anyone, but they should never elicit a yawn, either. The freedom and future of anyone alive today faces serious threats from the unholy alliance of the immensely wealthy, authoritarian religion, and tireless disinformation aimed at voters too busy pulling together a living to do a lot of comparative research about the news selected for their direction.
As for the conscripted workforce of low-income Americans, we're still talking about public money spent only to address part of a problem that could be solved by a more organized program of national service.
When we got rid of the military draft -- which was a very good decision -- we took away a shared rite of passage endured by young men for decades. The volunteer military functions much better than one filled with unenthusiastic conscripts. But it removes that direct connection to the nuts and bolts of citizen government and the responsibilities of maintaining the Land of the Free. I have thought for years that a broader based national service requirement, providing subsidized labor to a wide array of necessary functions like agriculture would create a sense of greater ownership of the general welfare of the nation. Programs like Americorps and the Peace Corps (and others) have functioned relatively invisibly to most of us. If they had the same level of public image that the military enjoys, and were coordinated into an admired and valued complete package of public services, we would create another whole category of veterans, hopefully less exposed to traumatic violence. As a species, we should be working toward phasing out the traumatic violence.
Such dreams will have to wait until we are no longer held under the rule of a regime that values traumatic violence and the threat of incarceration as tools to enforce order. Welcome to the Land of the Free and Obedient.
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