Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: Essential Workers Are Being Sacrificed on the Altar of Corporate and Billionaire Owners as "Disposable People" Become Infected and Die

April 21st 2020

Christina Phinnessey, lodging custodial worker, makes a bed in a guest room at the Eagle’s Rest Inn March 30, 2020 (Mauricio Campino)

By Thom Hartmann

Right wing billionaires behind groups like ALEC and Freedomworks helped organize and fund tea party protests a decade ago, resulting in a healthcare program with no public option. Now they are funding hard-core right wing groups who are demanding governors stop protecting their citizens from the coronavirus. These billionaire funded groups are on the same page as billionaire owned Fox News.

But, why? If governors “rip off the bandage“ it will cause hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths, although those deaths will be most heavily concentrated among communities of color, poor whites and Hispanics, and elderly people.

These are the groups that rely heavily on government funded programs like Medicare, food stamps, and housing subsidies – all things that are paid for, in part, by taxes on billionaires. These billionaires also, in large part, got their riches through economic activity. So it appears this effort may produce a twofer for these right wing billionaires: the “expensive“ people die off so it’s easier to cut billionaire’s taxes, and even if massive numbers of workers get sick and die there will always be more poor people willing to come into the workforce to make more money for the billionaires.

Heads they win, tails you lose.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.