GOP Tactic: Intramural Class Warfare

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/gop_tactic_intramural_class_warfare_20110228/

GOP Tactic: Intramural Class Warfare

Posted on Mar 1, 2011

By Richard Reeves

snip//

But, seizing the circumstances of hard times, the Republicans are promoting and provoking intramural class warfare. They are pitting what is left of the private-sector middle class against the public-sector middle class. It is a brilliant tactic, backed up by what Republicans themselves define as “fuzzy math.” But actually it is not about math; it is about mobilizing resentment and envy. And the rich are totally out of this intramural class war.

I happen to have spent most of my life working for myself, but I have been a member of three unions: the Newspaper Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Screen Actors Guild. I have not been impressed with the leadership and policies of any of them, but they were the price of admission for the work I wanted to do.

Still, I am pro-union for the most basic of reasons. Individual workers would not have and many do not have common-sense protections, beginning with wage stability and good working conditions and employee benefits. My own work experience probably explains my feelings. Out of college, I went to work as an engineer for Ingersoll Rand, an important supplier of heavy equipment for construction and production. It was not long before I realized that most of my fellow workers were unhappy people, terrified of the whims of management, much less the ownership.

snip//

So, the breaking of the unions is knocking middle-class workers, private and public, back toward the Gilded Age, as the rich continue to get richer and the middle class gets poorer. If the financier Jay Gould, a great buyer of politicians, was a spokesman for that time, this is what he said as he hired strikebreakers in an 1886 railroad strike: “I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”

[nebenaube]

1. Wi GOP goal:

http://kristenemery.com/2011/02/23/does-governor-scott-walker-have-a-smoking-gun-buried-in-the-budget-bill/