The GOPer Class War: Casualties and News from the Front

The news from the Front is more of the same: apparently defying a judge's second order, the Rabid Right government of Wisconsin is trying to go ahead with its union-busting law--while even admitting (or bragging) that this is exactly what it is: a union-busting law.

More salvos in the war on working people in Michigan, where a new law cuts unemployment benefits from 26 to 20 weeks, with similar bills in Florida and elsewhere.  All this is happening as income inequality continues to rise, and the consequences of it become clearer--not just on the poor, or the unemployed, but on the working middle class, and most dangerously on the possibilities of upward mobility through education and other efforts.  Without that, the American Dream is bullshit.

This is one of the conclusions of a PBS series on the subject.  A couple of interviews tell the practicalities.  One woman says she's been trying to go to college for 20 years, so she can get a better job, but she's always been stopped by the cost.  These days she has to skip meals to feed her family.  But the next interview was with a black woman who has graduate degrees.  So does her brother. Neither can find a job. Both are unemployed. 

The PBS series builds on a series published in Slate last fall.  It was the subject that the great Bob Herbert chose for his last New York Times column.  To the all-too familiar statistics, he adds this: "As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion."

But as he adds: "Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable."  That's been true since the 1980s and you have to wonder if people are in fact waking up now--thanks to the likes of the Wisconsin GOPers--or if this is the time that the nails go into the coffin of the American Dream.