GOP vs. The People and Losing 700,000 jobs

Protests against Wisconsin's anti-labor measures spread across the country this weekend.  About 50,000 people demonstrated at other State capitals to join the 100,000 demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday.  The LA Times referred to the Madison rally as the largest demonstration there since the Vietnam War.  MoveOn.org helped organize the protests in the other states and prepared a photo gallery from the demonstrations. 

Notably lacking in Madison was any support for Governor Walker.  I guess the Koch brothers' billions couldn't bring many Tea-partiers to Wisconsin. 

Governor Walker of Wisconsin remains the poster boy for the anti-labor movement and continues to refuse to compromise on collective bargaining rights.  It is clearly a political move designed to damage the Democratic Party base - after all, the unions have conceded all of the financial terms.   So what we are moving towards, post-Citizens United, is an electoral process where corporations are free to spend all the money they want in support of a candidate.  On the other hand, unions, the traditional counter-weight to corporate money interests and the historical route for many into the middle class, are being broken.  Public sentiment is strongly against the GOP governor. 

As Robert Creamer phrased it neatly: "The battle of Wisconsin...has become a struggle about the dignity of middle class Americans -- about the principle of whether everyday people have the right to sit at a bargaining table and have a say about their wages, their working conditions, and their jobs...The radical right wing Republicans decided to strike now to destroy organized labor. They wanted to destroy it because it is the only institution in the country that prevents Wall Street and the largest international corporations from having their way with America."

To top this all off, an independent analysis released today has confirmed and now quantified what many of us have been saying since the House Republicans presented their proposal for the 2011 budget.  Adoption of their budget would destroy  700,000 jobs through 2012.  The analysis was by Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.  As reported in the Washington Post, Zandi "predicts that the GOP package would reduce economic growth by 0.5 percentage points this year, and by 0.2 percentage points in 2012, resulting in 700,000 fewer jobs by the end of next year."

Well, we have to the end of the week to see if the radicals in the Republican Party willl shut down the government in order to keep a budget that destroys 700,000 jobs.  How ridiculous can these people get?