November 17, 2020

By Thom Hartmann

All across America today, millions of people are terrified. And it’s not just fear of getting a deadly COVID illness that often leads to strokes, dementia, long-term heart disease and kidney failure.

Over 30 million Americans are unemployed, and because of repeated Republican cuts, the unemployment benefits for many run out at the end of the year. Since early summer, we’ve been adding another 700,000 or so people to those rolls every month.

Millions of others have put their lives into their small businesses and are now overwhelmed with debt in the face of lost customers and shutdowns, facing the destruction of their middle-class dreams and the disintegration of their families’ lives.

 Boris Johnson, the conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, just ordered England back into lockdown, but also guaranteed that every worker in the country will get 80% of their normal pay and there will be generous supports for small businesses.

 But here in the United States, six months after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed legislation that would similarly help Americans, Republicans in the United States Senate refuse to even hold a hearing on the issue.

The Republican-controlled Senate was in session yesterday: Mitch McConnell pushed through six new unqualified right-wing judges at the request of his billionaire backers. But not a single piece of legislation to help average Americans was even considered.

Nearly a quarter-million Americans are dead, millions more are disabled by this virus, and Republicans in Congress and the White House refuse to do anything except push through unqualified judges and sell deadly weapons systems into the Middle East while their donors kick back the profits as campaign contributions.

This is the face of today’s Republican Party. They campaign on “right to life“ but fight every attempt to help Americans stay healthy and alive.

They say they’re for the “little guy“ but gave billionaires tax breaks worth over $2 trillion, and the same week refused to end a nationwide $1.5 trillion student debt crisis.

They claim “Christian values“ but fight giving food to the hungry, healthcare to the sick, housing to the homeless, and help to the poor.

They claim to be the “modern party of new ideas,“ but give over $600 billion a year in subsidies to an 18th-century fossil fuel industry and it’s billionaire CEOs Who are killing our planet, while blocking assistance for 21st-century clean energy solutions.

They claim to be in favor of a “bright future“ making America a “shining city on a hill,“ but are doing everything they can to destroy America’s public education system.

They claim to care about all Americans, but their judges and elected officials are almost uniformly wealthy and white, and very outspokenly oppose any assistance to communities of color in crisis.

They talk about “law and order“ but wink and nod as bankers, drug executives, and polluting industries rip off and even kill Americans on a daily basis with impunity.

They say they are for the working person, but have spent fourty years tearing down worker safety protections and fight every attempt to let workers organize.

 They say they will “bring our jobs home,“ but their USMCA trade deal increases the tax incentives for big corporations to move factories overseas, increasing the rate at which American manufacturing jobs are being lost.

They say they believe in elections, what fight as hard as they can to prevent about half of America from voting.

America is figuring out that Donald Trump has spent his entire life as a criminal and a grifter. Some even suggest but the modern Republican Party has been reshaped in his image.

But the simple truth is that, since the 1980s and the Reagan Revolution, the Republican Party has been one long racist grift that only serves the rich and the very rich.

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

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