The Trump Administration has fulfilled the dire prediction I made in last month’s Sun column: “We must not wait until the inevitable financial tsunami… the precarious working class will be homeless and unable to afford food within a few months unless there is an immediate serious policy intervention like Bernie Sanders’ National Relief Act…The Overlords of Capital want to crank the money machine back on in a month. They are fully prepared to accept the deaths of 2.4 percent of the peasants…”
I can collect an I told you so, no-cash-value gift card for being right about my deep premonition. I would have been glad if I had been proven wrong.
Instead, we have cast the die for a national healthcare policy surrender that will be the death of a caste. The poorly planned Red State “re-opening” schemes place the burden of the pandemic on the backs of the most powerless gig and marginal wage workers, the precariat.
Rather than actually governing, Trump and his cronies exploited the crisis to dispense corporate favors. Instead of spending the last two months while we did quarantine to urgently set up mass-scale national testing and tracing capacities, the Republican administration’s response was instead to muzzle the CDC, focus on diminishing reported stats, dispense crackpot medical misinformation, and embolden right-wing militias to storm into state house buildings with AR-15s demanding an end to the quarantine.
The Republican neo-fascist death drive is doubling down deeper into moral deviance and political malpractice. We must vote them out, if that option is still available.
This is cruel and cynical Republican Party policy, top to bottom. It looks like Stephen Miller’s team crunched the numbers and saw that the demographic most impacted are poor people and people of color. ‘Well, that’s great news. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead!’
Until 2016 I had never thought that an election might be a potential species extinction event. We may have passed our last exit when we failed to nominate Bernie Sanders to manage this national crisis.
It’s still not too late to contact your Congress members and Senators to register your support for the Sanders/Jayapal National Relief Act. The bill would address the acute employment crisis and provide immediate financial relief, guarantee paid health care for all for the duration of the crisis, make sure no one goes hungry, suspend monthly payments for four months, including rent, mortgages, medical, and consumer debt collection. This is the critical financial bridge for the service economy workforce, to save them from the needless fate of tumbling, traumatized, into penury.
Very little money is currently flowing to the 40,000,000 laid-off workers and the tens of thousands of local small businesses. They are dying on the vine. Now is a time to speak up and make it clear where the citizens of Sonoma Valley stand. We can’t let the quarantine stop politics. In fact, you may have more time than ever right now. Use it, don’t lose it.
Mitch McConnell, the grave-digger of democracy, now states that he feels “no pressure” to backstop working-class wages. Even Fed chair Jerome Powell publicly warned against letting millions of citizens and small businesses go bankrupt in the midst of a pandemic. This is unsustainable. Speak up before the die is cast.
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