Investigative Historian Eric Zuesse On... How Bad Republicans Are

-by Eric Zuesse

I have written many articles documenting how atrocious America’s leading Democrats are-- such as “America Is Guilty if We Don’t Prosecute Obama”-- but the situation is even more extreme with regard to Trump, because his evilness is far more blatant, not nearly so well hidden as was the case with that silk-tongued Nobel Peace Prize winner. However, no matter how bad Trump is, he still retains the respect of approximately 40% of Americans, and of 86%-89% of Republicans. Here is just some of the most recent evidence of why that 86%-89% range from Republicans is scandalous:

On January 6th, Reuters bannered “Special Report: U.S. regulators ignored workers' COVID-19 safety complaints amid deadly outbreaks”, and reported that:

Miguel Cabezola, a driver for United Parcel Service Inc in Tucson, Arizona, complained on March 27 to U.S. workplace safety regulators, alleging the company was taking a lax approach to social distancing, sanitizing equipment and quarantining workers with COVID-19 symptoms. He hoped for an inspection of the facility that would force changes to protect worker safety.

Instead, the state arm of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) summarized Cabezola’s concerns in an email to company management, reviewed the UPS response and closed the file.

Over the next two months, a COVID-19 outbreak infected more than 40 Tucson UPS workers - including a manager who eventually died - and caused delivery delays throughout southern Arizona, according to interviews with six Tucson UPS workers and local union officials of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. …

UPS said the firm did not report the manager’s death from COVID-19. …

Arizona OSHA said the agency has no plans to investigate the matter further after UPS told regulators that the death was not work-related. ...

The UPS outbreak is among dozens of cases identified by Reuters where OSHA largely disregarded workers who reported lax pandemic safety practices, according to agency records. ,,,

Reuters identified 106 U.S. workplaces where employees complained of slipshod pandemic safety practices around the time of outbreaks - and regulators either never inspected the facilities or, in some cases, waited months to do so. … Regulators never inspected nearly two-thirds of the 106 workplaces where Reuters identified outbreaks. …

In Las Vegas - which has hosted millions of tourists during the pandemic - workers at 25 different resorts across the city sent more than 60 complaints to Nevada OSHA about lax virus safety protocols between June and September.

To date, Nevada OSHA has conducted one COVID-19-related inspection of a Vegas casino - the Aria Resort. The case, prompted by a complaint about inadequate enforcement of mask-wearing and social distancing, is still open. …

Workers at the Cosmopolitan casino filed complaints to Nevada OSHA seven times from June through August, alleging that the hotel wasn’t following state mandates on requiring guests to wear masks and keeping the casino at half capacity. … “Employees have been informed that if they refuse to take a shift, they will then be terminated,” read one complaint from late August. ...

At the D Las Vegas casino, a worker complained in July that “fifty percent of the employees at the D have tested positive,” yet “the employer is not notifying potentially exposed employees.” …

Tesla workers complained nine times to OSHA about pandemic-related issues, and Panasonic workers filed 10 complaints.

Tesla workers said in complaints that groups of four to five workers were required to remain in close proximity to maintain production, and that mask wearing wasn’t being enforced. … Tesla managers were aware of the illnesses and required employers to work anyway, the complaint alleged.

Nevada OSHA has not conducted an inspection of the facility. …

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. …

At Tyson Foods Inc, testing in late April revealed nearly 900 employees in Logansport, Indiana, had contracted COVID-19. …

Indiana OSHA never inspected the site for COVID-19 problems. …

Tyson did not answer questions from Reuters about its workers’ OSHA complaints. …

[However, OSHA has issued citations in some cases.] Some of the federal OSHA citations came with no fines at all. …

Some former OSHA officials say the agency’s hands-off response to the pandemic reflects a notable divergence from the past, even compared to prior Republican administrations that also favored a light touch on industry regulation. ...

Former OSHA officials, along with public health experts, labor groups and lawmakers, argued beginning in the spring that OSHA should issue an emergency temporary standard requiring employers to follow specific infection-control practices such as mandating social distancing, requiring masks, and removing infected workers while providing them pay. OSHA issued no such standards. ...

Arizona OSHA officials have still not inspected or visited the UPS facility, and the agency told Reuters it has no plans to do so.

Also on January 6th, The Hill headlined “Congress must pass The Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act”, and two physicians urged Congress to pass into law a bill that had been introduced in the U.S. Senate on July 29th and which the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has blocked even from being considered, “S.4349 - Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act”:

Named for the New York physician who took her own life after working for months treating COVID patients and seeing far too many die, the bill provides funding for mental and behavioral health awareness, education, and treatment for our health care providers in order to reduce and prevent their alarmingly high rates of suicide, burnout, substance use disorders, and other psychologically-related conditions.

As many predicted since the onset of the pandemic, mental health issues are surging among health care professionals. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that among some 1,250 medical professionals working with COVID-19 patients in China, more than 50 percent reported symptoms of depression, nearly 45 percent noted symptoms of anxiety, and over seven in 10 reported distress. Buttressing these findings, researchers in Canada discovered that the prevalence of PTSD among nurses was as high as 40 percent. And in the first national study of its size, researchers at the University of California-San Diego confirmed that nurses are at a significantly higher risk of suicide than the average person, while other research has shown that physicians die by suicide at a higher rate – about 1.5 times – than the general population (Suicide among physicians and health-care workers: A systematic review and meta-analysis (plos.org). ‘’’ …

Having worked with populations prone to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, such as veterans, mass shooting survivors, and 9/11 first responders, we, and others in the health care community, know that if not identified early and treated comprehensively, the mental health challenges our medical professionals are facing will become chronic, life altering, and deadly.

That bill had been introduced by a Democrat, Senator Tim Kaine, but was blocked from being considered, because Republicans controlled the Senate. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a Democratic-controlled Senate would have passed it into law, but only that Republicans are more blatant about their benefiting only rich donors. Democrats work hard to hide that they are basically the same.

Both in the White House and in the Congress, America’s Republican Party has been leading at increasing America’s international failure at controlling the global Covid-19 pandemic, and ultimately the failure of the U.S. economy. The more out-of-control the epidemic is, the more damage it will do to the economy; and the Republican Party has been even worse than the Democratic Party regarding regulation-- basically handing the nation off to the billionaires who finance their political campaigns (and who control the massive corporations that are basically being left to ‘regulate’ themselves-- to the benefit of their owners).

Also, Good Jobs First issued a study on January 6th, headlining “50-state breakdown reveals what private and charter schools got in federal pandemic funds”, and reporting that because of many provisions that the lobbyists who now write America’s laws had slipped into the initial Covid-19 relief law that was passed in the Spring, private and church-operated schools had received from the federal Government “$855,000 per facility on average compared to $134,500 for public schools.” For decades, billionaires’ ‘charities’ have propagandized for federal subsidization of private-school education and denigrated the public schools. Everything was being done to serve the wealthiest at the expense of the public. Consequently, low-income families are now heavily subsidizing middle-and-upper-income families, the ones who can afford private schools. The original basis for creating the public schools — to equalize children’s opportunities — is now gone, and instead there is socialism that’s specifically for the non-poor, to exacerbate economic inequality. This has been done by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress, but especially by Republicans — and it has especially been promoted by the Trump Administration.

The latest Morning Consult poll on Trump’s job performance, taken on January 6th and 7th (during the DC riots), shows an all-time record low job-approval for him of 76% among Republicans. Apparently, the recent events have reduced by around 10% his support by Republicans, but it still remains very high; and, so, it is clear that Trump, even now, is very respected among Republicans, even after his colossally failed Presidency, and after his having failed to fulfill any of the promises that he had made as a candidate, except to move the courts even farther to the right, and to waste federal money building only a bit of the southern border wall that he had promised to build complete. He obviously reflects the values of the vast majority of Republicans. And American politics will need to deal with the reality that the Republican Party is an extremist right-wing party, nothing that can reasonably be considered moderate. The Democratic Party is (and ever since Bill Clinton’s Presidency has been) a moderately conservative party, comparable to what the Republican Party had been until Ronald Reagan became elected in 1980. Ever since 1980, the U.S. has been moving farther and farther to the ideological right, just as the nation’s inequality of wealth has been growing to reach perhaps the highest level in all of U.S. history.

America’s Republican Party is rule by billionaires, even more blatantly than the Democratic Party is. At least the Democrats pretend to be concerned about the welfare of the public.

However, the real evil is in the source, the paymasters for it, who are the billionaires of both Parties, who can never be satisfied. Their desires are insatiable, and now control not only the mega-corporations, and the mega-media, but even the federal Government itself.

On the surface, America’s political conflict is between Democrats versus Republicans (such as between Biden versus Trump); but, deeper down, it is only between the billionaires versus the public. The difference between being ruled by Democratic billionaires, versus being ruled by Republican billionaires, is tiny by comparison with the difference between being ruled by the billionaires (an aristocracy) as compared to being ruled by the public (a democracy). America is not ruled by representatives of the public; it is ruled by representatives of the billionaires.