Ron Johnson brings partisan perversion to the public square
Like the warden calculating precisely how many calories a prisoner doing hard time needs to work, walk and sleep -
- Ron Johnson has been tapping away on his pocket calculator to find the lowest dollar amount - perhaps it's $200, but it sure ain't $600 - that will motivate lazy Americans to find jobs that don't exist:
Said Johnson:
Yet who collects about $15,000 a month in public salary with no pay cut to equalize the suffering. And who routinely gets gobs of subsidized perks like free air fare home, the Senate dining room and gym, and a King's ransom of a pension plan.
Who is now nickel-and-diming millions of citizens who are out of work, out of income, out of health insurance and pretty much out of the middle and working classes for the foreseeable future in the worst economic collapse since The Great Depression.
In the middle of an insidious pandemic worsened by the 'President' whom Johnson has robotically protected for nearly four years that has already killed 150,000 Americans with no end in sight.
Johnson's indifference is the very definition of perverse.
And what's really perverse is Johnson's coming up with yet another version of the boiler-plate GOP myth of the conniving, lazy, undeserving American and throwing it at citizens en masse out there without any data to back it up - during a debilitating, killer pandemic.
Worse, this sleazy stereotyping is routine partisan and political perversity by the Republican Party.
* Ronald Reagan had his welfare queens.
* Scott Walker fabricated in exchange for votes a dog-whistled caricature of people he said would rather sit on the sofa playing video games than work as hard as he and fellow good small town lad Paul Ryan had done when they flipped burgers at separate Wisconsin McDonald's.
And, yes, Ryan had his own, 'lazy inner-city men' version of Walker's coach potatoes and Johnson's shiftless - and unnamed, of course - gig-workers whom he believes prefer government checks to money they'd been earning in jobs with personal and societal value.
The underpinning of these disrespectful and unproven Republican tall tales is that only these GOP elites know work and its meaning.
Which is why they believe they are entitled to call the shots while steering the public sector which they and one-time rightwing guru Grover Norquist agreed should be starved, throttled and drowned in a bathtub.
Which for public officials managing the public sector with its public health and safety obligations for The People is about as perverse in a democracy as it can get.
- Ron Johnson has been tapping away on his pocket calculator to find the lowest dollar amount - perhaps it's $200, but it sure ain't $600 - that will motivate lazy Americans to find jobs that don't exist:
Ron Johnson spearheads GOP proposal to extend pandemic unemployment while reducing its amountNote the complete absence of humanity in Johnson's cold-accountants'/wonky-government-speak-calculus:
"The states have the option — if they can't handle the two-thirds plus-up, they can accept the $200 flat plus-up," [Johnson said....]And then he got in one last dig at millions of out-of-work Americans who hadn't yet found that new opportunity since Ivanka Trump sent them on her heartfelt Easter egg hunt.
Said Johnson:
On the Senate floor Thursday, he argued that the HEROES act was too expensive and that by continuing the $600 payment, "we are creating a very perverse incentive for people to remain unemployed when our economy is calling for more workers."I'll tell you what's perverse: a millionaire US Senator who married into money and just got a massive windfall.
Yet who collects about $15,000 a month in public salary with no pay cut to equalize the suffering. And who routinely gets gobs of subsidized perks like free air fare home, the Senate dining room and gym, and a King's ransom of a pension plan.
Who is now nickel-and-diming millions of citizens who are out of work, out of income, out of health insurance and pretty much out of the middle and working classes for the foreseeable future in the worst economic collapse since The Great Depression.
In the middle of an insidious pandemic worsened by the 'President' whom Johnson has robotically protected for nearly four years that has already killed 150,000 Americans with no end in sight.
Johnson's indifference is the very definition of perverse.
And what's really perverse is Johnson's coming up with yet another version of the boiler-plate GOP myth of the conniving, lazy, undeserving American and throwing it at citizens en masse out there without any data to back it up - during a debilitating, killer pandemic.
Worse, this sleazy stereotyping is routine partisan and political perversity by the Republican Party.
* Ronald Reagan had his welfare queens.
* Scott Walker fabricated in exchange for votes a dog-whistled caricature of people he said would rather sit on the sofa playing video games than work as hard as he and fellow good small town lad Paul Ryan had done when they flipped burgers at separate Wisconsin McDonald's.
And, yes, Ryan had his own, 'lazy inner-city men' version of Walker's coach potatoes and Johnson's shiftless - and unnamed, of course - gig-workers whom he believes prefer government checks to money they'd been earning in jobs with personal and societal value.
The underpinning of these disrespectful and unproven Republican tall tales is that only these GOP elites know work and its meaning.
Which is why they believe they are entitled to call the shots while steering the public sector which they and one-time rightwing guru Grover Norquist agreed should be starved, throttled and drowned in a bathtub.
Which for public officials managing the public sector with its public health and safety obligations for The People is about as perverse in a democracy as it can get.
2 comments:
If any good comes out of this it will be that average wage republican voters find out that when they need help, when they have lost their jobs and are out of options, they will be viewed as lazy welfare queens by the party they voted for.
When an extra $600 lifts a person's income above what they would make by working, it tells me they aren't being paid enough to begin with. Let that sink in you money sucking critics!
Post a Comment