April 29th 2020

By Thom Hartmann

The latest Republican scam to screw working class people and help out their billionaire buddies has to do with “open the state“ orders and Trump’s executive order about meatpacking plants. The simple fact is that when governors and employers both say that the workplace is or can be open, workers no longer qualify for unemployment or other benefits if they are afraid to go to work. Because Trump’s incompetence has left the nation without adequate testing, workers are forced to choose between possibly killing themselves or vulnerable members of their families on the one hand, or losing all their benefits, going hungry, and ending up homeless on the other hand.

The final middle finger that Republicans are giving workers and American consumers is a legislative attempt to outlaw the right of workers to sue employers or businesses for putting them in a situation where they might get sick and die.

Seriously. Republicans want workers to have all the responsibility and liability for deciding whether to go to work or to starve, without any good information from testing, at the same time the GOP wants to make sure that their fat-cat billionaire buddies and big corporations will never be held accountable and will be able to make even bigger profits by not having to pay unemployment benefits. It’s time for a political revolution.

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.