By: Ian Elder, National Director
Last Friday, President Trump signed into law the grotesque, 1,000-page legislation known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB).
We believe the government should serve the people. It should create public goods for the benefit of all, to create a fairer and better society. But instead of celebrating democracy and equality on Independence Day, the MAGA regime chose to ram through policies that attack the working class, hurt millions of people, and consolidate even more power into the hands of the executive.
The new law sets in stone massive tax breaks for a small group of the ultra rich and dramatically increases funding for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), while gutting healthcare, cutting badly needed food assistance for millions of children, and taking on massive new debt.
The law triples the budget for ICE to an average of $37.5 billion a year, making them, all by themselves, larger than the entire militaries of Italy, Israel, or Brazil. ICE is functioning as a secret police force, sending in masked, unidentified units to attack immigrant communities, arrest U.S. citizens and public officials, abduct students to punish them for their free speech, and disappear people to a notorious gulag in El Salvador.
The MAGA regime will rip healthcare away from tens of millions of people by cutting Medicaid and Medicare in the biggest rollback of federal healthcare support ever. Many people won’t be able to get the care they need and will suffer and die early, and many with private health insurance will face large rate hikes. JMA works with rural communities, and with a trillion dollars of healthcare cuts, many may lose their local hospitals.
Finally, the law betrays our children by turning its back on federal investments into building clean energy and strengthening U.S. advanced manufacturing. This puts the future of good manufacturing jobs at risk, will increase energy bills everywhere, and worsens our climate future, increasing the likelihood of extreme climate events like the current deadly floods.
In circumstances like this, it’s hard to maintain hope. We believe that the government can and should be a force for good; yet now we’re seeing the entire federal apparatus harnessed, more than ever, to benefit the wealthy and punish workers and the poor.
But we’ve also seen that organized people have real power.
At JMA, we are partnering with communities and workers to create community benefits agreements with employers — agreements that benefit everyone by creating fair career pathways, trained workforces, and manufacturing facilities that are good neighbors. We stand with our allies across the labor movement, the environmental movement, and civil society in organizing to hold our government accountable, too.
Together, we are fighting for a society where we all can thrive.