Two and a half years after the Wall Street collapse and multi-trillion dollar bail-out of corporate swindlers, the ruling class is carrying out a savage and unprecedented assault on the living standards and basic social rights of tens of millions of working class families in the United States...
What is unfolding in the United States is a social counter-revolution—the ruthless and systematic destruction of the fundamental gains and social rights won by the working class over a century of struggle...One study estimates that
a proposal from Republicans to cut Medicaid—which the Obama administration has refrained from publicly criticizing—would raise the number of people without coverage by 44 million over the next decade. State governments throughout the country, bankrupted by the economic crisis and starved of resources by the federal government, are carrying out their own sharp cuts in services and eligibility.
Public education, a central concern of progressive movements in the United States for over 150 years, is being dismantled...closing public schools, expanding private charter schools, increasing class sizes, laying off thousands of teachers, and imposing sharp cuts in pay and benefits...public colleges and universities are raising tuition to levels unaffordable to the vast majority of working class youth.
At the same time, recent data confirms that
there is no letup in the jobs crisis in the United States. Persistent mass unemployment is being used by corporations as an opportunity to drive down wages and slash benefits... Michigan has already shortened the length of benefits to 20 weeks, excluding federal emergency relief. The Florida legislature passed a similar measure this week.
State governments have passed legislation targeting the basic right to collectively resist the demands of the corporations and states. Several states...have followed the lead of Wisconsin in passing laws that rip up existing contracts with state employees and prohibit strikes.
With extraordinary speed, the ruling class is working to destroy whatever remains of the social reforms of the 20th Century... http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/pers-m13.shtml