Democracy Dead in Wisconsin as US Jobless Claims at 20 Million Annual Pace
News could not be worse for the average unemployed and employed American these days. Wages down, Unions being busted, rights being stripped along with dignity and the American dream dying a slow, miserable death.
The problem: rich, corrupt politicians - what else? The question is What are “We the People” willing to do about this unacceptable ongoing conspiracy of middle class genocide by the corporate elite and their politician puppets?
From the Journal Star this week, in an Op-Ed by Robert Reich titled - The real news on jobs
Most of the jobs we've gained pay less than the jobs we've lost.
An analysis from the National Employment Law Project shows that the new jobs created since February 2010 (about 1.26 million) pay, on average, significantly lower wages than the 8.4 million jobs lost between January 2008 and February 2010.
The biggest losses during the Great Recession were jobs paying $19.05 to $31.40 an hour. By contrast, the biggest gains over the past year have been jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.
In other words, the big news isn't the slow return of jobs. It's the drop in pay.
For several years now, conservative economists have blamed high unemployment on the purported fact that many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech jobs market. So if we want more jobs, they say, we'll need to take wage and benefit cuts.
And that's exactly what Americans have been doing.
Employers have been demanding wage and benefit concessions from their unionized workers and usually getting them. Detroit is creating auto jobs again -- but new hires are getting about half the pay that autoworkers were getting before. Airline workers are taking home 30 percent to 50 percent less than they did years ago. And so on.
Conservatives say it's not enough. That's why unions have to be busted --
Millions of non-union workers also have had to accept cuts in pay and benefits just to keep their jobs. Their health benefits have been slashed, their employer pension contributions dramatically cut and their wages reduced or frozen.
Millions of other private-sector workers have been fired and then re-hired as contract workers to do almost exactly what they were doing before, but now without any benefits or job security.
Last night when the “deaf to the People” Republicans in Wisconsin’s State Senate used a procedural ploy to cram through a bill sharply curtailing collective bargaining rights for government workers - they proved beyond any doubt that they only care about making Americans poorer and worse off then they already are. It is now an undeniable fact that the American PEOPLE MUST SAVE THEMSELVES. We can no longer avoid massive demonstrations in the streets if we hope to survive and topple what is now a completely corrupt and oppressive US Government.
It is unrcontionable that the wealthiest Americans keep paying off the politicians to look out ONLY for their own, myopic interests and the US Supreme Court has become as corrupt an enemy of “The People” as Washington DC.
The Wisconsin legislation was separated from the budget measure on Wednesday to break a three-week stalemate created when the Democratic senators all went to Illinois to deny the chamber the 20-member quorum required to take up bills that appropriate funds. The quorum requirement for other kinds of legislation is smaller.
Once the bill was separated, the Republicans pushed the measure through the Senate in less than half an hour by a vote of 18-1, without any debate on the floor or a single Democrat in the room - officially declaring the DEATH of DEMOCRACY in the great state of Wisconsin.
Just last week Ohio pulled their own disgusting end run around proper democratic protocol by approving an even tougher measure that restricts the collective bargaining rights of roughly 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees, while Wisconsin's would affect about 175,000 workers and exempt police and firefighters. They did so by pushing that bill through 2 committees in one day in an unprecedented manner. When they did not have enough votes in each of two committees to pass the bill along, they replaced committee members immediately with other republicans they knew would support the “party UNION BUSTING line” - not once but TWICE on March the 3rd.
This is the sort of CRAP they pull in corrupt dictatorship type countries NOT what one expects from the American Democratic process. Henceforth this country is better described as the Republic(an) of American oppression rather than the United States in my opinion.
Adam Green of BoldProgressives.org - last night put it this way:
"CODE RED: Wisconsin's Republican senators just voted to pass Gov. Walker's anti-worker bill -- without Democrats present. They are bending the rules in order to break Wisconsin unions, and they need to be punished for this undemocratic action. We plan on working all night to prepare new online ads and radio ads -- and we'll buy more TV ads in the districts of Republican senators up for recall."
I say RECALL the lot of them and shut down the entire state. Let’s show them how little will get done if NOBODY in the drone worker class bothers to come to work at all.
BTW:
Wisconsin State Senate Republicans Took Hundreds Of Thousands In Government Farm Subsidies
MEANWHILE: New applications for state jobless benefits jumped by 26,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 397,000, the Labor Department reported this morning. Over the past four weeks claims have averaged 392,500, putting them near a three-year low.
That 3 year low still has the US rate of job loss at a pace of over 20 MILLION JOBS PER YEAR - do the math! [392,500 avg per week x 52 weeks = 20,384,000]
So even as unemployment remains at unacceptably outrageous levels, the few jobs that might be out there are paying below the poverty line in most areas. With the gas needed to get to work rapidly approaching $5 per gallon and the food required to sustain life costing us more everyday, how long until America is just another dual class society of the very rich vs the very poor? Come on folks there are so many more of us than them - let’s make it clear to the rich corrupt interests and their dutiful political pawns that we have had all we intend to take and FIGHT BACK NOW!
