Georgia governor Brian Kemp has decided that Georgia should lead the way in killing its own citizens in order to get "back to work." While public health officials decry the move as premature, it's worth examining which businesses are allowed to reopen. Let's look at the text:
Kemp, a first-term governor, said he would allow gyms, barber shops, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys, among other businesses, to reopen on Friday, though they would be required to follow social distancing guidelines and screen their employees for signs of fever and respiratory illness.
Why those businesses? If anything, those are TERRIBLE choices to re-open. Tattoo parlors are literally involved with bodily fluids. Gym have people huffing and puffing and are filled with hard surfaces where the virus can survive for hours. Bowling alleys???
George Chidi offers a chillingly plausible interpretation for this order: Georgia has been stripping its social safety net to the frayed ends to keep taxes low and to hurt poor people. That's the clear priority of Republican social policy. Make being poor painful enough so that people will take any job and suffer any number of indignities to keep labor prices low for the convenience of richer people.
Georgia's unemployment funds will run out, and Kemp is trying to force people back to work so that he won't have to pay UI benefits. Even better, as Chidi lays out, if a beauty salon doesn't want to reopen, because the proprietor doesn't want to risk her life or the lives of her customers, then they are "voluntarily" out of work and don't qualify for UI benefits.
All these astroturf protests (again primarily if not exclusively targeting Democratic governors) are not about "freedom." They are about making people in various service industries risk their lives to provide conveniences for the moderately well-off.
As Adam Serwer has so eloquently summed up about Republican policy in Trumpistan: "The cruelty is the point."
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