US Senate oblivious to people’s needs
By JOSH RESNEK
The working people from this city we speak with every day are worried that without a new stimulus, and soon, jobs are going to permanently disappear, economic instability will intensify, and the nation’s recovery from the pandemic will be seriously threatened.
Everett has been hard hit by the pandemic and the subsequent closing down of the local economy.
It has been weeks since the partial reopening of the local economy. Many businesses have yet to get back to where they were before the pandemic hit in March. Government aid for smaller businesses is at an end right now.
The city government has laid off employees. In at least one instance, the city government has reneged on a promise to hire new employees, leaving those that expected to be hired in a lurch.
Some businesses have closed.
Many thousands of Everett residents have been out of work for months.
“Another stimulus would provide me and my family with an unemployment extension, the $1,200 stimulus grants and with free food, we can get by. Without government aid, surviving is made near to impossible,” said Santiago Vega, a cleaner for a local janitorial service. Vega worked in skyscrapers cleaning offices for 8 years before the pandemic hit.
“The lawyers don’t go to their offices in downtown Boston anymore so me and many others who clean their offices have lost our jobs. It is fairly impossible for me to find work.”
Many hundreds lineup for free food at three local food giveaway depots distributing tons of food to the needy and the poor in this city.
The city’s largest income producer, the Encore Boston Harbor Casino and Hotel remains crippled in its attempt to get back to normal with vastly reduced gamblers coming to the casino and the hotel, for the better part, mostly empty.
Restrictions placed upon the Encore casino/hotel by the state government have caused thousands to be laid off.
It is estimated at least 3,500 employees out of more than 5,000 originally hired have been let go since August.
The Everett city budget is straining under the weight of having too many expenses and not enough income.
Despite messaging from the head of the Federal Reserve Board calling for another stimulus as quickly as possible, the US Senate has been posturing.
“Too much new funding isn’t good for the national debt,” say many of the Republican members of the Senate.
Their collective concern is more about the national debt than the well-being of Americans during this difficult economic time.
Nearly every member of the US Senate is a multi-millionaire with no relationship whatsoever to the harsh reality of being a working-class hero in cities like Everett throughout the nation.
The declining economic situation for the working-class here and everywhere around the nation doesn’t appear to capture much interest with the rock-ribbed Republicans appearing to say, “Let them eat cake.”
That was the catchphrase Marie Antoinette used during the starvation period that preceded the political strife which led to the French Revolution.
The Republicans appear more concerned with the debt rising than feeding families out of work and running out of money.