With the passage of the so-called “big beautiful bill,” the poorest of the poor are being told their shelters are no longer funded, their food pantries won’t take them anymore, and their chronic illnesses will lock them into six-digit debts. All the while, one of the same bill’s provisions allows businesses to deduct the full costs of private jets. This type of prioritization is social murder, and we need to think beyond the corporate media and NGOs to build structures that can fight for the future we can – and need – to win.

As union workers in SEIU protested on the Senate lawn to declare, “these cuts kill.” While NOAA’s proposed 2026 budget closes all federally funded weather and climate research labs, the government’s Earth-destroying military budget is set to exceed $1 trillion. Over 130 people in Texas are dead after experienced National Weather Service staffers were offered severance, and the local government rejected flood warning systems due to cost. Social murder is a term coined by Friedrich Engels to describe the deliberate societal forces that bring about a “murder against which none can defend themselves.” Did these Texans die, or were they socially murdered? When a politician signs a paper forbidding a woman from receiving life-saving medical treatment, is it a passive act of someone dying, or is it violent act of someone killing? This bill is not an outlier. It is a crescendo of the austerity politics that have been cutting off community life supports for decades. We cannot allow any spectrum of debate to include costing out that which kills by omission; we can not cost out the lives of our neighbors, coworkers, or families.

Just a handful of private, multi-billion-dollar conglomerates own 90% of all US federal, state, and local media networks. Due to this, all widely broadcast discussions are framed with an unquestioning loyalty to the root narratives behind these highly-profitable social murder policies. Lively debates are held on just what degree people should have to prove their societal worth to allow them access to a doctor. The imposed scarcity framing this conversation is never questioned. Neither Fox News nor CNN, however, speak of scarcity when this same bill pushes nearly eight times the “saved costs” from food access into militarization. Over a trillion of our dollars will be spent every year imposing mass starvation and death upon all the world’s people this US government declares our enemies. Yet, when this same bill makes our incarceration and deportation machine the third-best funded army on the planet, it is seen as “unprecedented.” In the name of “non-partisanship” and “neutrality,” the corporate media’s coverage builds the public consent for our congresspeople to socially murder tens of thousands of Americans. We cannot let the ruling class define the field in which we fight. We have to meet people where they’re at, but we must do so with organizational media that is unafraid to educate, raise expectations, and make demands.

How did you resist the bill likely to be Trump’s longest lasting impact? More of us than ever before called our senators and marched through our cities. However, with the primary cost imposition being withheld votes and bad press, we can’t leave our struggles behind on the streets. Union density and participation is low, and there are no large scale political parties accountable to the working class and marginalized peoples. The only big institutions our angry public has for our defense are NGOs and nonprofits. These institutions are kept separate along the lines of their single issues, and are not accountable to their members. They’re accountable to donors and philanthropists – themselves unaccountable to a strategy. A nonprofit only has the power to ask you or me to call up a politician and tell their office worker what we think. This is not empowering. Much like a demonstration in the public square, it functions as an appeal to power. The capitalist state, purposed on reproducing itself, defines a democracy such that corporations are people and money is speech. The upper echelons of the political class are loyal to the “speech” that makes each of them more wealthy than you or I will ever be. A withheld vote or day of bad press will never speak as loudly as withheld labor and economic leverage. Actions like a strike or a widespread, disciplined, and targeted boycott take vast, connected structures of accountability. For a long term, winning movement, these are the structures we need.

Communities are weaker than ever. We are torn apart every day by the social murder committed by neoliberal policies – incarcerations, evictions, and social service destruction. These crises are amplified exposures of the everyday, not ruptures from the norm. Without an organized and structured community, all we have is the hope that someone else will do something. It will not save us to have awareness, prayers, and praise for the “resilience” of those who endure once the hurt hits close to home. We need to unite and strengthen the few remaining representational organizations like labor unions. Where there are missing structures that could unite people across currently isolated struggles, we need to create them. Tenants unions, students unions, and debtors unions alike can be built and scaled up across decades. These are the institutions we must join into, struggle with, and lead to form a shared horizon for those whom there is not yet a place to be represented. You can’t create a government truly accountable to the people unless the people have unifying structures that exist to empower them. Only when line cooks, tenants, retirees, students, and all those in between are comfortable leveraging their power and solidarity can we create a new society truly beholden to the people.