The Attack on Pensions and the End of the American Dream

Posted on June 7, 2012 at 3:50 pm by Bob Cesca

My Thursday column is appropriately angry. RT and Like often!

The debt and deficit are evidently making American voters more insane and more self-defeating than they usually are. Conservatives, conservative financiers, anti-Obama zealots and a ridiculously complicit press corp have tapped into an easily-fooled, low-information population of Americans and convinced them that budgetary issues are way, way, way more dangerous than they really are.

Consequently, voters are helping to destroy the last remaining sliver of the American dream: pensions for government workers.

Not only did Wisconsin voters re-elect Scott Walker this week, hammering the final nail in coffin for government workers there. But in San Jose and San Diego, California, voters passed anti-pension ballot initiatives with landslide margins. CONTINUED HERE…

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  • Ned F

    Why should us taxpayers pay for lazy government worker’s pensions while we work 50 hours a week and have to provide for our own. They should join the race to the bottom like the rest of us. Yup.

    On my local PBS show the other day, they were talking about job prospects for recent grads. A woman called in to say how happy she was that she found a job utilizing her new master’s degree. She said it payed 32,000. She was happy, thrilled. 32K was starting salary for a legal secretary or beginning plumber 10 years ago. You can’t rent a decent apartment around here for that.

  • D_C_Wilson

    Wisconsin was proof that the GOP’s divide and conquer strategy is working. Now that they’ve pitted private sector workers against public sector workers, the next phase will probably to pit teachers against firemen and police officers.

    • Brutlyhonest

      He tried to pit the firemen and police against each other by excluding the FD & PD employees.

      Divide and conquer worked to pit the poor against the really, really poor. One thing the thugs understand is human (at least US) nature, and they use that knowledge very effectively to manipulate people. It’s kind of brilliant while also insidious.

  • D_C_Wilson

    The American Dream died in January 1981 when Saint Ron began the 30+ year assault on the middle class. This is just the double-tap to keep the zombie from rising again.

  • trgahan

    The two California votes remind me of Michael Lewis’s recent book “Boomerang.” He spends 80% of the book detailing all the financial incompetence, corruption, and trickery that created Europe’s part of the 2008 economic downturn. Then ends the book detailing how America may find itself in the same situation as he detailed about Ireland, Iceland, and Greece if it does not crack down on….public sector unions.

  • mhr52

    You just want to spend spend spend like the money just grows on trees and there are unlimited rich people with bottomless pockets.