Many Republican Senators Would Like To Distance Themselves From Trump-- But It's WAY Too Late For That

Several states run by governors refusing the work on flattening the curve are seeing an increase in confirmed coronavirus cases already-- and it's going to get a lot worse in these states. On Monday, Texas saw new 535 confirmed new cases. Yesterday there were 655 new cases. Florida has 610 new cases Monday and 708 yesterday. Iowa had 392 new cases Monday and 508 Tuesday. Oklahoma had 27 Monday, 130 yesterday. South Dakota had 33 Monday, 68 Tuesday.

Trump has been interfering to make it worse, primarily by encouraging his death cult base to "liberate" themselves from social distancing restrictions and by pressuring governors to discard them and open for business. Yesterday, though, he took a bigger step, announcing that he was ready to take aggressive action to force meat processing and packing plants to stay open, despite rampant contagion in the industry. He says he'll use the Defense Production Act to order the companies to stay open and also claims-- no one believes him-- that he'll provide additional protective gear for employees. He's aiming at processing plants supplying beef, chicken, eggs and pork.

Illnesses in the meat-processing industry and shifts in demand after restaurants closed have disrupted the supply chain. Dairy farmers are dumping milk that can’t be sold to processors, broiler operations have been breaking eggs to reduce supplies and some fruit and vegetables are rotting in fields amid labor and distribution disruptions.

Many low-income Americans, meanwhile, have been waiting in long lines at food banks, which have reported shortages.

Asked about the country’s food supply, Trump said: “There’s plenty of supply.”

The Defense Production Act allows the government broad power to direct industrial production in crises. Trump has previously invoked the law-- or threatened to invoke it-- in order to increase the supply of medical gear including ventilators, masks and swabs to test for coronavirus infection.

...Trump acted one day after Iowa’s two U.S. senators and its governor urged the administration to invoke the DPA to keep meatpackers open and reopen closed facilities “as soon as it is possible to do so safely.” Iowa produces one-third of the nation’s pork supply, according to the state officials.

Across the country, at least 6,500 meat processing employees have been impacted by the virus, meaning they either tested positive for the disease or had to go into self-quarantine, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the largest private-sector union. Twenty workers have died.

At least 22 meat plants have closed within the past two months, reducing pork processing capacity by 25% and beef processing capacity by 10%, according to UFCW. Farmers have animals with nowhere to go as a result, and the situation is so dire that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is setting up a center to help growers with “depopulation and disposal methods” for animals.

Mike Siegel is the progressive candidate running in a central Texas congressional district represented by Michael McCaul one of the GOP clowns who refused to wear a mask on the floor of the House last week. Last week Mike told us that "every day, across Texas and this country, our workers are making a terrible choice: earn a paycheck or protect your health. You can’t do both. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government’s role in protecting worker safety was limited. As one steelworker told me, even when a facility like a chemical plant had a major accident or release of toxic chemicals, OSHA wasn’t likely to show up. If a worker filed an anonymous complaint, OSHA would send a fax to the company and ask for a remediation plan. The company would fax back its remediation plan. Case closed."

Greg Abbott declaring that businesses are open and workers should be careful is far from "case closed." Mike also reminded us that "In response to COVID-19, OSHA has issued Guidelines on Preparing Workplaces, but takes pains to say how they are recommendations only. Here in Texas, the state has not developed its own occupational safety agency, so we are stuck with what the federal government offers. Cities and counties have code enforcement departments, and places like Austin have made efforts to respond to COVID-19 concerns at work places, but there is no agency that is equipped to make sure workers have the PPE they need, or the space necessary to avoid spreading the virus. For the last week, I’ve been working with unions to raise awareness of the lack of workplace safety, at the same time that Texas Governor Greg Abbott publicizes his plans to 're-open' the state. Building on the efforts of Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin and over 50 House Democrats, who filed a 'Reopen America Act of 2020' to ensure testing and PPE before the country attempts to return to normal, I joined with Texas unions, labor councils and regional federations to propose expanded OSHA compliance and investigative capacity to ensure safe workplaces in the COVID era."

Tony Corbo, an official of Food and Water Action told the media that" Trump’s plan to instruct slaughter plants to stay open despite causing major outbreaks of COVID-19 is even worse than his suggestion to use disinfectant to treat sick people. It’s deadly and foolish and will cause catastrophic harm. The consolidated and profit-driven agricultural industry has made our food system weak. It’s crucial the food industry protects workers by closing plants when necessary in order to keep the food system from collapsing entirely. Companies have proven they cannot be trusted to take the necessary measures to continue functioning safely amidst this pandemic. Even Tyson Foods admitted in their full-page ad in the New York Times that they are failing to meet safety standards in every single plant. In most plants, social distancing is impossible and fast line speeds make safety precautions impractical. Furthermore, most workers have not been supplied with proper personal protective equipment to work in these dangerous conditions. Thousands of food workers have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least 17 have died. One hundred of those workers are federal meat inspectors, two of whom have died. Even more workers have been exposed to the virus already, but a lack of testing is hiding the true scope of infection. The federal government should be stepping in to supplement food distribution networks to get our abundant frozen meat supplies to stores and food banks that need them. Instead, they’re currying favor with giant corporations that have continuously put their bottom line above worker workers’ health, food safety, and the vitality of our food supply chain. It’s simple: if unsafe food plants remain open, more food workers will die."

Personally, I'd suggest Americans will be a lot healthier and the environment would be way better, if Americans consumed much less meat and much more fruits, grains, beans and vergatables. Can you imagine someone like Trump (or Biden) ever saying anything like that?

That's half a trillion-- with no strings attached

Can the Trumpist regime force reluctant workers back into dangerous situations? They've told unions that any worker who doesn't get back to work in any industry the government opens up will lose their unemployment benefits. The regime is certainly much kinder to corporate giants and their top executives than they are with workers. Jeff Stein and Peter Whoriskey, reporting for the Washington Post yesterday, wrote that "A Federal Reserve program expected to begin within weeks will provide hundreds of billions in emergency aid to large American corporations without requiring them to save jobs or limit payments to executives and shareholders... Unlike other portions of the relief for American businesses, however, this aid will be exempt from rules passed by Congress requiring recipients to limit dividends, executive compensation and stock buybacks and does not direct the companies to maintain certain employment levels. Critics say the program could allow large companies that take the federal help to reward shareholders and executives without saving any jobs. The program was set up jointly by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin defended the corporate aid program, saying that the lack of restrictions on recipients had been discussed and agreed to by Congress. “This was highly discussed on a bipartisan basis. This was thought through carefully,” he said in an interview with the Washington Post. “What we agreed upon was direct loans would carry the restrictions, and the capital markets transactions would not carry the restrictions.”

Democrats asked for restrictions on how companies can use the money from the central bank’s bond purchases but were rebuffed by the administration during negotiations about the Cares Act, said a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY). The spokesman said Democrats won meaningful concessions from the administration on reporting transparency in the final agreement. (Transparency requirements do not apply to the small-business loans, the biggest business aid program rolled out to date.)

...Bharat Ramamurti, an aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who was appointed to the board overseeing the bailout, said in a statement: “Big corporations have shown time and again that they will put their shareholders and executives ahead of their workers if given the choice. That’s why I’m so concerned that the Treasury and the Fed have chosen to direct hundreds of billions of dollars to big companies with no strings attached.”

Speaking generally and not about this particular bamboozle by the regime, former Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) told the Washington Post that "I don’t know anyone who thinks that this is the future of the party." Flake was driven out of the Senate by Trump so his comments aren't coming as a surprise to anyone. But other Republicans smell the rot and failure and are beginning to distance themselves from the source. In yesterday's NY Times Trip Gabriel noted that when Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, began social distancing himself from Trump, his popularity rose.

For 40 years, Mike DeWine rose steadily if blandly up the ladder of Ohio politics, finally landing his dream job as governor. He took office last year as a familiar figure in the state, not because of any indelible political identify, but because, at 72, he had been around forever.

But the coronavirus crisis has made Mr. DeWine something that decades in elected offices never did: a household name. A Republican, he took early and bold actions to lock down his state, even as the head of his party, President Trump, dismissed the threat of the pandemic.

Mr. DeWine’s decisiveness-- closing schools before any governor in the country, postponing the state’s March 17 primary election to protect voters-- sent his popularity soaring. The folksy governor, previously best known for an annual ice cream social at his rural home, became something of a cult figure on social media. Ohioans tuned into his five-day-a-week briefings to celebrate “Wine With DeWine,” a ritual whose motto is “It’s 2 o’clock somewhere.”

Now, Mr. DeWine is charting a way out of the shutdown, taking cautious steps while facing pressure from business leaders, conservative activists and some Republican lawmakers who vociferously question the economic costs of a state in quarantine.

Seven weeks into the crisis, Mr. DeWine is being guided by health experts while avoiding partisan fissures over stay-at-home orders that have been encouraged by Mr. Trump, who hopes a rebounding economy will carry him to re-election. The Ohio governor is the rare Republican official who does not automatically fall in step with Mr. Trump, an independence he shares with two other Republican governors, Larry Hogan of Maryland and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, both of whom lead solidly Democratic states where bipartisanship is needed to survive. Unlike them, Mr. DeWine has gone his own way in a red-hued state.

He also split decidedly with Mr. Trump by encouraging a nearly all-mail primary election on Tuesday. While the president has spread the false claim that voting by mail entails “a lot” of fraud, Mr. DeWine pushed universal absentee ballots for voters’ safety. Ohio’s secretary of state on Monday called the effort a success, with nearly 1.5 million mail ballots cast.

...In a poll of Ohio voters released on Monday, 35 percent of Republicans said they were worried that the United States would take too long to loosen restrictions and that the economy would spiral further downward, compared with 14 percent of Democrats.

The poll, by Baldwin Wallace University, also showed overwhelming support for the governor. Eighty-five percent of respondents approved of his handling of the coronavirus, 89 percent said they trusted him as a source of information about the outbreak, and three out of four said he was doing a better job than Mr. Trump.

The poll also measured favorability among politicians. These were the favorable results among Ohio voters:

• DeWine- 75.1%
• Fauci- 59.9%
• Pence- 45.6%
• Trump- 43.1%
• Biden- 42.1%
• Cuomo- 37.6%

Related-- Alex Isenstadt reported in Politico that McConnell is telling Republican senators through the NRSC to stop defending Trump's coronavirus nonsense and just attack China instead. Trump flipped out so badly that his "political adviser Justin Clark told NRSC executive director Kevin McLaughlin that any Republican candidate who followed the memo’s advice shouldn’t expect the active support of the reelection campaign and risked losing the support of Republican voters." The NRSC backed down but Jonathan Swan pointed to another likely rift between Republican senators and Trump: infrastructure. On a conference call with his colleagues yesterday, McConnell "panned the idea of using a coronavirus stimulus bill to fund major infrastructure investment," something Trump sees as another way for him to loot the treasury.

On today's call, McConnell said he won't support infrastructure in a COVID-19 bill. "We need to keep the White House in the box," he told senators, according to two sources familiar with the call... This is not the first time McConnell has privately told his colleagues he's uncomfortable with the White House's attitude towards spending.

One of the sources said that on a call with senators last week, "McConnell was essentially saying that, while the president will be willing to spend any amount of money between now and November, it was going to be up to Senate Republicans to act like Republicans and resist crazy spending."

...McConnell blocked additional money to state and local governments in the last coronavirus bill. And he said it's time to think about the national debt.

McConnell is going to use aid to states and local governments as a bargaining chip to get the Democrats to agree to limiting employer liabilities for dead and injured workers.