Scapegoating the Public Sector

[SHRED]

The politics of division.
Pitting the working class against themselves.

Oh how I despise the 0.01% ruling class.

At a time when so many are worried about obtaining or holding on to work, it’s difficult to rally around the guaranteed job security and high pensions of some privileged government employees. Not all public workers fit into this category, to be sure. But nonpublic workers who must struggle with the vagaries of private employment have seen more than enough examples of government employee unions, the last stronghold of organized labor, exercising their power to ensure what appears to be outsized compensation for their members.

Of course this argument is a red herring. The budget crises of state and municipal governments were not brought on by excessive pay to firemen, cops and other civil servants, but rather by a banking meltdown that has enriched those who engineered it. Housing values, and the local taxes dependent on them, are down because of financial shenanigans that wrapped mortgages into collateralized debt obligations, and that is the root cause of government red ink. But the job security and pensions of government employees make terribly convenient scapegoats at a time when so many Americans are lining up at food banks.

The electorate in Wisconsin, and San Diego and San Jose, Calif., that voted Tuesday against public employee unions were not expressing a rational response to the crisis, but rather a tantrum stoked by the lavishly financed demagogues of the right. The voters bought their story because the opportunism of the Democratic Party leadership has left progressives without a believable alternative to the tea party’s narrative. Indeed, job creation became a bigger issue than collective bargaining in the Wisconsin race, and the dismal national unemployment figures that came out just days before the election didn’t hurt the Republicans’ cause.

ARTICLE LINK:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democrats_failed_in_wisconsin_because_they_failed_wisconsin_20120607/

[lonestarnot]

1. K & R!

[Peregrine Took]

2. Scheer makes an excellent point.

The scapegoating of the public employees is monstrously unfair.

Its like there was a tornado on the block and people are mad and envious at you because your house didn't get hit.

Then they plot and plan as to how to bring it down brick by brick instead so, in the end, its not much better than their destroyed heaps.

Once upon a time government jobs were decent and anyone who wanted to could have applied for one. Open to all via Civil Service.