ReedLovesTrumptxt (PDF)

Thomas W. Reed II, an attorney and the representative of the
23rd Congressional District of New York, is a high-profile
Trump supporter. Tom Reed portrays himself as a moderate
Republican, as a balancing force to Trump’s overt racism,
brash lunacy and open corruption. This is however a fabrication, constructed to legitimize a regime of destructive and radical policies.
Tom Reed supports the efforts to gut Medicaid, a desperately
important lifeline for poor working people. In addition, he supports Trump’s dangerous and misguided plan to repeal the
Affordable Care Act without first creating a replacement
which guarantees access to health insurance for low-income
people. Tom Reed sides with corporatism and big government,
betraying working people and selling out younger generations.
Tom Reed wants to cut women’s healthcare by de-funding
Planned Parenthood. Public money is used to fund vital
mammograms and birth control, but not abortions. Tom Reed
nevertheless stated at a town hall meeting that public money
goes to abortions. That is an outright lie being used to leverage
an attack on essential health services for women and refuse reproductive health to those who can’t pay.
Reed doesn’t just favor extremist measures in healthcare; he
also endorses a reckless and destructive energy policy. Reed
supports opening up public lands to oil and gas drilling, including national parks. The National Park system, while created
in the context of settler-colonialism, is land set aside in the purported interest of natural preservation. However, Reed supports expanding oil and gas extraction even there, because he
serves capitalist accumulation and corporate profits above all.

On top of this, he favors deregulating oil and gas drilling.
This means the technical operations of energy production will
be done in only the most profitable ways with no regard for the
land, the safety of workers and people living near oil rigs, and
the inevitable crises that attend the frantic process of resource
extraction, oppressive to the earth and all. Who will protect
our environment in our crucial need for worldwide unity and
healing as the destructive interests of lawmakers like Tom Reed
dismantle and deregulate our already lacking environmental
protection laws?
Yet one must go further in questioning the very character and
shadowy mentality of an agent of power serving as a member
of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team. Tom Reed
supported Donald Trump throughout his campaign as Trump
insulted women and disabled people, called for a massive
xenophobic ban on refugees and an expanded border wall,
labeled undocumented and poor people as a threat to the privileged class that could not exist without their labor, invited a
rise in white-nationalist activity, declared that “torture is
good”, committed blatant scams, conspired with Russia to undermine the ‘freedom’ of democracy in the U.S… and so on.
Tom Reed’s support of Trump is a statement of his support for
all of these things.
More and more people will become disillusioned with Trump,
if nothing else, for his inability to govern the country back into
a selectively prosperous era of American manufacturing jobs–
impossible in an age of global capitalism. Reed, like Trump,
has true loyalty only to big government and the corporate elite,
not to working people of the middle and lower classes. Reed
is up for re-election in 2018. We must take a stand against Tom
Reed and against all the corrupt government officials who sell
out the people. Vote out Tom Reed in 2018!