"In the Spirit of Marie Antoinette's 'Let Them Eat Cake'" McConnell’s COVID Relief Concerns Are Only About the Rich, Let Them Eat a Three-Martini Lunch: Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash
December 2, 2020
With Marie Antoinette’s dismissive decree of “Let them eat cake” as a precedent, Mitch McConnell’s perspective is to ignore the dire needs of tens of millions of Americans. Instead, he is focusing on millionaires and billionaires, who are already reaping a windfall during the pandemic, to offer legislation that would “Let them eat a three-martini lunch.”
By Thom Hartmann
Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are proposing to let employers injure or even kill their workers and bring back the three-martini lunch...in exchange for one measly month of extended unemployment benefits.
Senate Republicans are trying to sabotage both the incoming Biden administration and screw working people by refusing to extend expanded unemployment benefits in Mitch McConnell‘s new “stimulus“; it does, however, make it illegal for workers to sue their employers.
It’s been six months since the House of Representatives passed the $3 trillion Heroes act that gave jobless people $600 a week, and more than two months since they passed a slimmed-down $2.2 trillion version that gave only $300 a week. But the GOP said no to both.
Mitch McConnell today proposed a new “stimulus“ bill that gives workers an extra $0 a week (not a typo), would end working people’s right to sue their employers for Covid-related injury or death, and brings back massive tax breaks for big business under the guise of helping restaurants.
Meanwhile, the day after Christmas 12 million Americans will lose their basic unemployment coverage. McConnell and Senate Republicans say they’ll solve this problem by extending those benefits for one whole month.
Republicans have opposed unemployment benefits ever since such payments were first put into law in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt. So this isn’t surprising; it’s what Republicans do. But during a pandemic and the Trump Depression, it’s particularly heartless and evil.
More than 20 million Americans’ protection against evection runs out at the end of this month; McConnell and Senate Republicans refuse to extend that. They also refuse any money at all for police, fire, hospitals and other state and local government functions.
They refuse to extend SNAP benefits for hungry families and children, but give businesspeople a 100% deduction for the “three martini lunch,” something that was tossed out back in 1987 because it was such an absurd subsidy for American fat cats.
Republicans would toss a small bone of support to education and vaccine distribution, but embed a time bomb that will blow up in the face of Joe Biden: they make it illegal for the Treasury Department to help the Fed sustain the economy the way they have since March.
Using their regular bullshit talking point about “stopping fraud by working people” (fraud by fat cats and corporations is ignored) GOP senators want to make it harder to file for unemployment benefits in every state, further crippling Biden‘s ability to stimulate the economy.
Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate and House exist only to serve billionaires and the corporations that made them. And billionaires and corporations return the favor: the GOP is almost entirely funded by them.
So it should be no surprise that Republicans repeatedly rejected legislation passed by the House of Representatives that would help average working people, and instead today proposed legislation that primarily helps big corporations and their billionaire owners.
Republican multimillionaires like Mitch McConnell, Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue laugh at the working class”suckers” who vote for them, while they fly around in private jets and live safely cocooned in their palatial mansions.
Call your members of Congress at 202-224-3121 or reach out by email and social media. Tell them to put the tens of millions of unemployed and hungry people ahead of three-martini lunches and liability limits for meat-packing plants and giant corporations.
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