If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Out of the State

 

If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Out of the State

The New Red State Right: The Right to Cruelty

“[I]n order to provide good jobs, we need to not put businesses out of business." 

 Florida State Legislator Republican Rep. Tiffany Esposito Against Expanding Worker Protection from Excessive Heat

How do I despise thee, let me count the ways. From cutbacks, limitations and outright withdrawals, too many red states reject embracing Medicaid, leaving millions without access to healthcare. Despite statutes likely to be held unconstitutional, several red states allow police to arrest and detain people who look like they might be undocumented aliens and do everything in their power to make sure minorities cannot vote (or their votes do not count)… including offering bottles of water to folks waiting in long lines to vote. With the horrific result of women facing serious pregnancy-related medical issues (many life-threatening) or potentially children born of rape or incest, wildly unpopular strict abortion bans (with no or limited exceptions and threats of arresting physician who want to help) are all over red America.

Barbed wire and untrained local national guard and cops, with guns and clear histories of bigotry, are now being charged to round up and detain desperate immigrants (mostly people of color), as part of byzantine ad hoc local substitute for an bipartisan immigration policy that has not been able to survive Congress since 1986. They separate young children from parents, shipping busloads of confused and “ready to work at anything” immigrants off to blue states.

That the cartel-driven civil strife that these folks are running from are fully enabled by a combination of cash from American drug users and the “easy to buy and smuggle south” American guns, is never discussed. That the greenhouse effect that has dried up so much farmland in Latin America, sending farmers looking for how to survive, was substantially driven by the major industrial polluters since the late 19th century, in which the United States was the major source of carbon effluents, is not even hinted at. They’re not taking our jobs. Very, very few are criminals. And we have a severe labor shortage of lower-level workers. But hate, bigotry, conspiracy theories, “us vs them” polarization and out-and-out lying are the stuff, the very heart of MAGA politics.

Indeed, the new inscription on the Statue of Liberty should read: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, So that I may detain, abuse and reject them.” As blue states may be generous in minimum wages and worker protection, even for US citizens, red states are going the other way, to allow corporate America to eliminate worker safety to make more money… even as their efforts just might kill or permanently impair many in their labor force.

Writing for the April 16th USA Today, Samantha Neely and Anthony Robledo address a red state on steroids adding more burdens to ordinary workers: “Florida will become the second state [after Texas] to stop local governments from requiring heat protection for outdoor workers after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 433… The law, which DeSantis signed last week, goes into effect on July 1 and establishes multiple restrictions for city and county governments, including the ability to set heat exposure requirements not already required under state or federal law…

“Around two million people in Florida work in outdoor jobs, from construction to agriculture, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. On average, the state's summer can reach up to 95 degrees, with the humidity and blazing sun making it feel well over 100 at times… ‘Whereas local governments have started to adopt their own workplace heat exposure requirements, some of which apply only to specific industries, which ignore the individual responsibility of an employee to follow relevant guidelines and to protect himself or herself from heat-related illnesses, and rely on fines and penalties assessed on employers to fund the enforcement of such requirements,’ according to the bill.”

What is fascinating and horrifying at the same time is the apparent embrace of judgmentalism, cruelty, hatred, violence (from gun control to the death penalty), bigotry and separation of “us” (the White Christian Nationalists) as the good force and the “them” (Democrats, minorities and people of color) as the evil intruders trying to distort true American values. Trump is now campaigning well beyond his “victim” mantra into telling the world that he has been selected by Jesus Christ himself (see the above campaign image) to be President.

This is now MAGA evangelical doctrine, even though anyone who has ever read the New Testament (the purported road map for Christians) and follows its dictates, could never accept the above policies and call himself or herself a Christian. After Easter Sunday, ex-President Donald Trump declared that Election Day would be called “Christian Visibility Day” – a not-so-veiled reference to the conservative-led uproar over Trans Visibility Day (touted by Joe Biden) which fell on Easter. Biden’s proclamation prompted Trump’s claims that the administration was “trying to cancel Christianity,” despite Biden’s himself being Roman Catholic. The rising MAGA/Trump hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness are staggering!

I’m Peter Dekom, and to use Christianity as a political tool to embrace values that would be more appropriate in a satanic handbook simply disgusts me.