Recruiting America to War on Itself

Recruiting America to War on Itself

By Michael Winship
February 25, 2011

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/022511b.html

Editor’s Note: In defiance of logic and fairness, the Republican Party and the major U.S. news media have chosen to let the Wall Street big fish off the hook for causing today’s fiscal crisis and put the blame on the little fish – the teachers, the firefighters and other public workers.

Some Democrats are fighting back (though others are hiding in the reeds), but the biggest disappointment may be how successful the Right has been in rallying many working- and middle-class Americans to support this war on public employee unions, as Michael Winship notes in this guest essay

EXCERPT:

Walker and such leading lights of the GOP leadership as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, among others, have decided that public employee unions make great punching bags, effective scapegoats for an outraged electorate and a satisfactory diversion from the real culprits of this grim, economic melodrama -- the Simon Legrees of banking and finance who got us into this meltdown mess in the first place.

As Josh Dorner reported on the progressive ThinkProgress website this week, "Instead of making the tough choices necessary to help their states weather the current crisis with some semblance of the social safety net and basic government services intact, Republican governors are instead using it as an opportunity to advance several longtime GOP projects: union busting, draconian cuts to social programs, and massive corporate tax breaks.