Stephan: I find it both macabre and fascinating that any working-class and middle-class people still vote Republican. And yet according to FiveThirtyEight on 29th April at 0213 PDT 42.6% of us still still approve of Trump, and what he is doing.
Today we witnessed Trump telling the workers at meatpacking plants they have to go back to work, while his CDC issues directives that give the corporate owners legal cover and to not require those corporate owners to do anything. Just what they thought was reasonable.
I imagine Trump's thinking was something like this: "People need meat. I need meat. Those workers are mostly Blacks and Brown, so who amongst my supporters is going to care if they get sick and die. " It is like something out of Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle. Day after day, amongst the endless lies, Trump makes his contempt for the non-rich so very very clear. And yet as in a cult his followers don't seem to care.
But it isn't just Trump it is the Republican Party, as this article lays out very well.
A worker in front of a boarded up Keen Garage outdoor shoe store in Portland, Oregon Credit: Alex Milan Tracy/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Twenty-six million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits as of April 23, as a result of the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. And many of them are discovering what plenty of people already knew: our system is dysfunctional.
Although unemployment programs are run by the states, which means the quality varies from place to place, across the country, the broader social welfare system in the United States is generally hard to access: riddled with red tape, and plagued by pointless burdens.
In Florida, for example, the previous Republican governor, Rick Scott, created a congested unemployment system that was nearly impossible to use so that the unemployment numbers would remain artificially low. Other states try to run an efficient system but simply lack the capacity to do so.
Pamela Herd is a public policy professor at Georgetown University and the co-author of Administrative Burdens: Policymaking by Other Means. That book, like much of her research, examines how policy interacts with and reinforces inequality. In a […]
The “Progressive Populist” has some very good articles in the current issue about the USA being totally unprepared for any epidemic or pandemic. It mainly is because of the fact that there is no profit in preparing for them. Professor Richard D. Wolff says it is capitalism itself to blame. He is right!
The “Progressive Populist” has some very good articles in the current issue about the USA being totally unprepared for any epidemic or pandemic. It mainly is because of the fact that there is no profit in preparing for them. Professor Richard D. Wolff says it is capitalism itself to blame. He is right!