Robert Reich: "The Problem Is America's Richest 1% Are Raking It in -- Not Public Employee Pensions"

[kpete]

Robert Reich's Blog /
The Problem Is That America's Richest 1% Are Raking It in -- Not Public Employee Pensions
We can't let the conservatives pit private-sector workers against public servants -- it's a distraction from the ongoing huge wealth transfer to the richest Americans.
January 6, 2011 |

In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they’ve earned.

.......................

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work - sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees – to call them “faceless bureaucrats” and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican’s Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that’s too big.

........................

Above all, Republicans don’t want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.

more:
http://www.alternet.org/news/149435/the_problem_is_that_america%27s_richest_1%25_are_raking_it_in_--_not_public_employee_pensions/

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[kpete]

3. xchrom

i hardly ever reply or comment - but you always seem to have my back, so thank you and peace, kpete

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[4dsc]

4. Well until the Democratic Party gets someone who wants to lead

we'll continue to have party leaders are afraid to do the right thing.

[leftstreet]

5. K&R

[underpants]

6. The Memphis sanitation workers went on strike because it rained

“The strike began over the mistreatment of 22 sewer workers who reported for work on January 31, 1968, and were sent home when it began raining. White employees were not sent home. When the rain stopped after an hour or so, they continued to work and were paid for the full day, while the black workers lost a day’s pay. The next day, two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning city garbage truck. (They were trying to escape the pounding rain.)“


http://rhapsodyinbooks.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/february-12-1968-black-sanitation-workers-strike-in-memphis/