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Something Ugly is Happening

Something ugly is happening.  


Wealth in this country is being concentrated in the top 1%-2% of the population.  The people who earn the most are paying taxes at a rate that is lower than people who are earning less.  


Faced with budget deficits, politicians cut tax rates on the richest people, and cut wages and benefits of working people, often in obvious offsets, and then plead that still more will have to be cut from wages and benefits of working people because the budget is still out of balance.


The newly elected Republican Governor of Wisconsin, with open backing from wealthy corporations and individuals, has just made it illegal for public employees to bargain collectively, which is a way to make it extremely difficult for working people to maintain, or gain, wages and benefits.  


In Ohio, the Republican Governor proposes, not just to eliminate collective bargaining, but the right to deprive small, financially stressed cities of the right to be cities, at all, and to unilaterally fire elected officials and to appoint whomever he wishes to run those municipalities.  


The Republican Party is openly and unashamedly working hard to concentrate as much money as possible at the top of the social scale, and to take that money from the salaries and taxes and benefits of working people, and even more, to eliminate the right of people to bargain collectively.  


And worst of all, a lot of people are agreeing to such god-awful measures.   A lot of working people are agreeing!  It is as if working people have completely forgotten a century of hard-fought, hard-gained rights to decent wages and benefits; as if they have completely forgotten the struggle to have people who make the most money pay a bigger share of the costs of a decent society.  It is as if working people agree that health care is a privilege for those who have a lot of money, not a human right.  It is as if they really agree that a good education might only be available for those who have a lot of money.  


What is this?  Have we lost our minds?  Our sense of decency?  Our sense of fair play?

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