Public employees are GOP's scapegoats
Robert Reich
In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to support them. That city 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.
But
now the right is going after public employees.
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 because of 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, firefighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees - to call them "faceless bureaucrats" and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling 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.But the right's argument is shot through with bad data, twisted evidence and unsupported assertions.
more...
http://www.sfgate.com/columns/reich/
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