Thanks to You Republican Tea Party Dummies, We're Losing Labor and the Middle Class.

The private sector has seen much better days, when more people were in unions, got higher pay, received comfortable retirement benefits and sustained a strong middle class life style.

But union bashing, "right to work" laws, global competition and Wall Street pretty much killed those glory years. But its economic twin, the public sector, remained stable and unionized. And for those politicians who enriched the private sectors bottom line with cheap labor and neo-liberal trade policies, the public sector represented a surviving part of the middle class. It was time to attack.

Here's AFL-CIO's Stephanie Bloomingdale with her take on the frontal assault on labor in Wisconsin:



The great quote going around the blogs, from Uppity Wisconsin, to MALcontends, is this great observation:

Former GOP staffer, Mike Lofgren:

Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and 'shareholder value,' the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be 'forced' to make hard choices' - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.