In less than five months, we’ll be at Election Day. Hopefully by then, most voters will have cast ballots by mail, though whether you do so depends on the whims of politicians, notably Republicans who feel threatened by such balloting and the increased participation it implies.
Regardless, this time voters should take their ballots very seriously, because this year, literally, your life may depend on your vote.
Bluntly, the country is in a deep economic depression, the worst since the 1930s, due to closures needed to fight off the coronavirus pandemic. National unemployment is already near 20% officially, and higher than that both unofficially and in several states.
More than 40 million people—disproportionately though not exclusively female, low-wage workers and/or people of color—have lost their jobs. Millions of those jobs, in hotels, travel, restaurants and similar firms, will never return. Those workers may be jobless for years.
Hunger now really stalks the land, more than before, and for the first time since the days of the Dust Bowl. Cities are deserted. Commerce is slowly coming back from its grinding halt.
All this, of course, is an effort to fight the coronavirus pandemic, which has, by now, sickened more than 1.6 million people in the United States and killed more than 100,000.
It did not have to be this way, and that’s why we say you should vote as though your life depends on it. Because politicians in Washington, and especially GOP President Trump, created these horrific circumstances by refusing to combat the pandemic until it was too late, and by reopening too soon. Some Republican politicians, slaves to the corporate class, never closed their states. The deaths, misery and suffering they caused were needless and should have been avoided.
Continue those politicians in office and you risk continuing your misery—and dying.
It’s not just Trump. There are politicians—and you know who they are—who turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the suffering of millions.
Higher jobless benefits? That’s only through July 31. After that, you’re on your own. If you starve to death or die from the virus, “So what?” these pols believe. You didn’t vote for us.
The same politicians laud first responders, especially nurses, while cutting their pay and not providing them with protective gear. And they shorted all of us on masks and testing, too.
Yet those same politicians talk of eliminating capital gains taxes, which benefits the rich corporate class while stiffing the rest of us, and raising taxes on residents of “blue” states.
Those same politicians aid and abet corporate criminals—and they are criminals—who drive “essential” workers back to their jobs despite health dangers from the pandemic’s spread. And corporate criminals pit worker against worker by declaring some essential and others not.
But for those politicians, their corporate controllers and other bosses, plutocrats and investors are “essential” enough to slop at the federal trough and pocket the proceeds in pay and perks. Not coincidentally, those are the pols’ campaign donors and “dark money” funders.
And just to make sure they win, the politicians and that 1% connive in every way possible to prevent you from voting in November’s election, or having your vote counted.
We’ll be blunt: Should one particular set of politicians stay in power, you stay jobless and you starve to death, if the coronavirus doesn’t kill you first. And democracy dies, too.
That’s what’s on your ballot this fall: Life or death. Attacking the pandemic and the depression in an organized manner that benefits you and me, or not attacking it at all, and letting the 1% grow richer while the rest of us starve and die.
Remember that as you vote.
(PAI)