Lest We Forget

Before watching the Presidents address last night I watched the DVD "Taxi To the Dark Side."  It is a brutal documentary about the torture of prisoners held during the Bush administration.  It is not one to watch if you are sensitive to unspeakable cruelty. The bestial treatment of the prisoners is painful to watch.   Torture and homicide were well documented and not one single officer has been charged.  A few low level GI's were found guilty, but they obviously had to take their orders from the chain of command.

After it was over I sat there dumbfounded wondering why Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonazales, John Woo, and George W. Bush were not in the dock at the Hague right now for crimes against humanity.  There is no denying that they approved of the brutal and inhumane treatment of the prisoners.   They had condemned themselves with statements made on public TV.

The tragic fact is that they never got any useful information after authorizing torture.   This is a classic example of ideology run amok.  Contrary to all evidence of the lessons that should have  been learned from history, they believed that a person would give valuable information when tortured.  Of course, all they got was what they wanted to hear.  It never served any purpose and it isn't as if they weren't told that it was counter-productive.  They knew, but ignored the sage advice of some of their military commanders.  

I am sure that you remember that 'the then'  President Bush pardoned all of them, including himself, before leaving office.  I am not familiar with international law, but I wonder if that pardon extends beyond our shores.  And I do wonder if it is legal for anyone, even a president, to pardon himself. 

You may be wondering why I am bringing this old painful subject up when we have more pressing problems to write about.  I decided to write about it for two reasons.  1).  An editorial in this mornings New York Times relates to this story.  I am including excerpts from it.   2).  It relates to how ideology causes people to make terrible errors in judgment; specifically, I am thinking of gun control.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

A Case for Accountability

A court hearing this month in Manhattan turned on a subject that has mostly been missing in the legal response to former President George W. Bush’s abusive detention policies: some measure of accountability.

The focus of the hearing before Judge Alvin Hellerstein of Federal District Court was not torture itself but the Central Intelligence Agency’s deliberate destruction in 2005 of dozens of videotapes made three years earlier showing the brutal interrogation of high-level terrorism suspects, including the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. At the time, the agency had been ordered by Judge Hellerstein to preserve the tapes.

They were part of the evidence being sought in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act seeking details of prisoner mistreatment. Their destruction was seen as so egregious that the Bush administration felt compelled to order a special investigation when it was disclosed. 

In November, the special prosecutor handling that investigation, John Durham, decided against bringing criminal charges against any C.I.A. official. No details of his decision were provided, leaving it unclear why those involved were not charged with any crime. 

The C.I.A.’s decision to destroy the tapes — rather than submit them to the judge for a decision on whether to order their public release — was a serious affront to the court and the rule of law.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thinking about this gross miscarriage of justice led me to ruminating on how ideology twists minds into erroneous beliefs while ignoring facts.   I see the same thing happening now with Arizona's governor and many others of like mind on gun control.  Their ideology makes them believe the flawed perception that more guns in the hands of more people make them safer.   The story line goes something like this:  "If the students and teachers in the Columbine school had been armed the perpetrators would have been taken down and lives would have been saved."  The reality is, it happened so fast the the victims were shot before they would have had time to react.  Or the danger of some frightened teacher shooting wildly and hitting innocent kids could have resulted. 

No matter how you think it could have played out, the statistcs of factual real life dramas have proven that if you have a gun you are more likely to get shot.  I think some people like Ronald Reagan (sorry - I couldn't resist) confuse movies and TV with real life.  Statistics be damned; the NRA is determined to sell more guns and more ammunition for their backers with flawed information until we are all targets.  

My grandmother used to preach to me that justice triumphs and the good wins over evil.  Sorry, Grandma, but after living more years than I want to count I do not see it happening.   I will continue to fight for right, but I am getting tired of seeing the bad guys win.

 

A Fear

 Tucson cares and the proof is found in these photos of two different memorial sites started when Gabby was hospitalized.    (Borrowed from Move On).   They just keep growing and growing.  When the ambulance took Gabby from the hospital to the plane that carried her to Houston the streets were lined with well wishers and, as the ambulance went by, they applauded. They say she heard the applause and smiled and tears came to her eyes.  Both were wonderful signs of awareness.

Gabby Giffords is now in Houston and beginning her arduous rehabilitation program.  Her recovery has been near miraculous thanks to the A-1 care she has received from the beginning.  We all hope she has a full recovery and can resume her career representing Arizona.  However, I have one concern and it frightens me. To my knowledge, Gabby has not uttered a single word.  This may be due to the feeding tube and I sincerely hope that's the case.  If not, her ability to speak might be impaired as the bullet entered the part of her brain that controls speech.

I have first hand knowledge of what can happen when that part of the brain is damaged.  It may be time to tell the story of my husbands last months.

It all began on a sunny Sunday morning.  I was just getting dressed when my daughter came rushing into the room saying, "There's something wrong with Dad."  She was followed by my husband saying  "There's nothing wrong; my legs won't work right, but it will be all right."  I took one look at him and knew immediately that he had suffered a stroke.  I told him that, no, it wouldn't be all right and that we were going to the hospital.

We rushed him to the ER where he was admitted to the hospital.  I won't go into the months when the doctors falsely diagnosed the problem as an AV (Artery-Venous)  malformation.  After being released from the hospital he was getting physical therapy for the stroke and was trying very hard to do what was asked of him, but it wasn't helping.  He did not improve and was getting steadily worse.  

The doctors finally decided to do a tissue biopsy to find out what was wrong.  When they examined his brain they touched the part of the brain that controls speech.   He had multiple inoperable malignant brain tumors.  After the biopsy he only spoke twice; both times were when he was very emotional.  The first time was after the doctor told him he was terminal and the other time was when he was admitted to a nursing home. He was never able to speak again.

The doctor told me  the reason he had been able to speak those two times.  It seems that if a stroke or brain damaged person becomes very agitated it stimulates that  part of the brain so the patient is able to talk.  

The poor man was trapped in his body without being able to express his thoughts or fears or to make his needs known except by miming them.  As one side was paralyzed his ability to mime was limited also.  It had to be a living hell.

I pray that this is not the case with Gabby and that her wonderful voice is not stilled by this tragic event.   It has been 26 years since my husband was felled by cancer.  I know that they have learned much about the brain in the intervening years.   I am sure that they have more ways to stimulate the brain now.  Yet, I still have fear.

 Please keep sending good thoughts to this courageous woman as she fights to get well.

Need a Laugh?

 After the tragedy in Tucson and the sad emotions we all felt I decided we needed a laugh. I hope this tickles your funny bone.


O.M.G.,  I'm rich!

 

Silver in the Hair

Gold in the Teeth

Crystals in the Kidneys

Sugar in the Blood

Lead in the Ass

Iron in the Arteries

And an inexhaustible supply of Natural Gas.

I never thought I'd accumulate such wealth.

Tucson in the Crosshairs

 Unless there is a dramatic change in the news I am posting my last thoughts on the massacre in my adopted home.  So much has been written about the carnage and the reasons for it, that I cannot add much to the subject.  However, there are still a few things that I want to say.

Nearly the entire front section of today's local paper, The Arizona Daily Star is devoted to the ongoing story of Tucson's grief.  They are rightly featuring stories of the victims as well as keeping the city informed of all news. There are three memorial places where the citizens of Tucson are placing flowers, stuffed animals, candles, photos and notes of personal wishes.  This is a caring city and one that has the feel of a small town, although in reality  it is a sprawling large city.

First, the good news.  Gabby Giffords is still amazing her doctors with her recovery.  Although she is still listed as 'critical' she is moving both sides of her body and is following people with her eyes.  She is reported to be a fighter and it is obvious that this is true.  She is now undergoing extensive physical therapy.

Now the bad news:  Our governor and Republican legislators have learned nothing from this tragedy.   Governor Jan Brewer claims that the fault lies entirely with the shooter.  Her rationale  is that one insane individual is an isolated bump in the road and the fact that he didn't get the mental evaluation he needed is irrelevant. The prevailing gun culture and lax gun laws have nothing to do with the shooting, according to her twisted thinking.  In spite of statistics proving the fact that strict gun laws have cut gun murder rates by a large margin  in states and countries that have enacted them, that's her story and she's sticking with it.

The head of our' leggie' (ALA the late and great Molly Ivins) joins Brewer in the misbegotten thinking that more guns in the hands of more people makes them safer.  Just how does this work?  In one article there is the story that has not made national news.  A man was in the Safeway store buying cigarettes when he heard the pop pop pop of gun fire and someone yelling, "Shooter, shooter.  Get down".  He had a 9 mm pistol and he took the safety off and ran outside.  He saw a man with a gun standing over a man struggling on the ground.  He made a split second decision to not shoot the man and, if he had, he would have shot the man holding the gun.  The man holding a gun over a man on the gound was the man who took Loughner down and the man on the ground was Loughner.  He almost shot the wrong man.  This should be a lesson in what can go wrong when ordinary people are allowed to carry guns.  

The OK Corral is about to be reenacted over and over in Arizona.  The legislators have absolutely no plans to change our gun laws, no matter what the evidence is that more guns in more hands do not make you safer; the contrary is true. Ideology, the powerful NRA and money will defeat any efforts to change.

Tucson's  sheriff was reviled for stating the truth about Arizona.  We are one of 3 states where any adult can carry a concealed weapon without a permit.  (Alaska and Vermont being the other two). 

Most of you have probably read the Frank Rich article, but I am posting excerpts from it.  He is so sensible and, of course, I agree with his points 100%

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Frank Rich Op-Ed piece from the New York Times:

Did Loughner see Palin’s own most notorious contribution to the rancorous tone — her March 2010 Web graphic targeting Congressional districts? We have no idea — nor does it matter. But Giffords did. Her reaction to it — captured in an interview she did back then with Chuck Todd of MSNBC — was the most recycled, if least understood, video of last week. 

The week of that interview began with the House passing the health care bill on Sunday. Within hours, on Monday morning, vandals smashed the front door of Giffords’s office in Tucson. The Palin “target” map (and the accompanying Twitter dictum to “RELOAD”) went up on Tuesday, just one day after that vandalism — timing that was at best tone-deaf and at worst nastily provocative. Not just Giffords, but at least three other of the 20 members of Congress on the Palin map were also hit with vandalism or death threats.

In her MSNBC interview that Wednesday, Giffords said that Palin had put the “crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” adding that “when people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.” Chuck Todd then asked Giffords if “in fairness, campaign rhetoric and war rhetoric have been interchangeable for years.” She responded that colleagues who had been in the House “20, 30 years” had never seen vitriol this bad. But Todd moved on, and so did the Beltway. What’s the big deal about a little broken glass? Few wanted to see what Giffords saw — that the vandalism and death threats were the latest consequences of a tide of ugly insurrectionism that had been rising since the final weeks of the 2008 campaign and that had threatened to turn violent from the start. 

Giffords’s first brush with that reality had occurred some seven months before her office was vandalized — in the red-hot health care fever of August 2009. She had held another “Congress on Your Corner” meeting, at a Safeway in the town of Douglas. There the crowd’s rage and the dropping of a gun by one attendee prompted aides worried about her safety to summon the police. The Tucson Tea Party co-founder, Trent Humphries, told The Arizona Daily Star afterward that this was a lie, that “nobody was threatening Gabby.” After Loughner’s massacre, Humphries was still faulting her — this time for holding “an event in full view of the public with no security whatsoever.” 

Others on the right spent last week loudly protesting the politicization of tragedy. What was most revealing was how often they tried to rewrite the history of previous incidents having nothing to do with Loughner. A Palin aide claimed that her target map was only invoking a “surveyor’s symbol,” not gun sights. A Tucson Tea Party leader announced that the attack on Giffords’s office (never solved by the police) was probably caused by skateboarding kids. Mike Pence, a potential G.O.P. “values” candidate for president, told the C-Span audience that those bearing firearms at Congressional town hall meetings and Obama events (including one in Arizona that August of 2009) were no different from anti-Bush demonstrators “waving placards.” 

For macabre absurdity, it would seem hard to top Newt Gingrich, who wailed about leftists linking Loughner to the right as if he had not famously blamed a psychotic double-murder of 1994, Susan Smith’s drowning of her two sons in South Carolina, on “Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.” But Representative Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona, did top Newt. On “Meet the Press” last Sunday he implored us to “treat each other as fellow children of God” without acknowledging (or being questioned about) his 2009 diatribe branding Obama as “an enemy of humanity.” 

As the president said in Tucson, we lack not just civil discourse, but honest discourse. Much of last week’s televised bloviation was dishonest, dedicated to the pious, feel-good sentiment that both sides are equally culpable for the rage of the past two years. To construct this false equivalency, every left-leaning Web site and Democratic politician’s record was dutifully culled for incendiary invective. If that’s the standard, then both sides are equally at fault — rhetoric can indeed be as violent on the left as on the right. 

But that sidesteps the issue. This isn’t about angry blog posts or verbal fisticuffs. Since Obama’s ascension, we’ve seen repeated incidents of political violence. Just a short list would include the 2009 killing of three Pittsburgh police officers by a neo-Nazi Obama-hater; last year’s murder-suicide kamikaze attack on an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex.; and the California police shootout with an assailant plotting to attack an obscure liberal foundation obsessively vilified by Beck. 

That Loughner was likely insane, with no coherent ideological agenda, does not mean that a climate of antigovernment hysteria has no effect on him or other crazed loners out there. Nor does Loughner’s insanity mitigate the surge in unhinged political zealots acting out over the last two years. That’s why so many — on both the finger-pointing left and the hyper-defensive right — automatically assumed he must be another of them. 

A few unexpected voices have expressed alarm. After an antigovernment gunman struck at Washington’s Holocaust museum in June 2009, Shepard Smith of Fox News noted the rising vitriol in his e-mail traffic and warned on air that more “amped up” Americans could be “getting the gun out.” The former Bush administration speechwriter David Frum took on the “reckless right” that August, citing the incident at the Giffords Safeway event. But when a Department of Homeland Security report warned of far-right extremism and attacks by “lone wolves” that same summer, Gingrich called it a smear and John Boehner demanded an apology. 

Unless and until they (Republican politicians - my insertion) can match her (Gabby's) courage and speak out too, it’s hard to see what will change. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monday update:

Yeah !!!!  Gabby's condition has been upgraded to Serious and she is no longer considered critical. 

Guns or Butter?

In case you missed a great speech by our president last night, Move On posted it today.  You can see it by clicking on the following link.

http://pol.moveon.org/azobamaspeech.html?id=25807-6715535-qJ61vUx&t=3

I want to refer you to the following editorial in this morning's NYT.  It echoes my thoughts on gun control and is a sensible solution. 


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/opinion/13kristof.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

For those that say the genie is out of the bottle and there are so many guns out there we can never keep them out of the hands of criminals I want to refer you to a portion of this article that I found interesting.   It is in the next-to-the-last paragraph telling what Australia did to eliminate assault weapons and, therefore, reduce the number of murders.

My Take on Tucson's Tragedy

Since the tragic shooting in my adopted town a million words have been written and spoken about the climate of hate that has been part of our political system.  As has been repeatedly noted, we will never know exactly what motivated the shooter, Jared Loughner. 

I do not believe it is simply words that caused this terrible act.  I believe that there are three parts that resulted in the culmination of this tragedy that need to be addressed.  

1. Vile words of hate and vengeance have created an atmosphere that justifies a criminal act in the mind of a disturbed person.   When there is talk by politicians in the halls of congress of using the second amendment rights to solve a problem WE have a serious problem. 
   
2. 
   
3. Those on the 'right' are trying to distance themselves from the heated rhetoric that has  become a staple of the FOX network talking heads and of some of the Tea Party crowd.  It  simply won't wash, because we have all seen the guns at the Tea Party rally's, heard the hate spewed rants, and  seen the signs promoting this ugly emotion.  If we are aware of it, then it's logical that an  unbalanced person can be influenced by the words and might feel justified in carrying out the vile message.  It has been  proven that Jared intended to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords.  This was premeditated.
4.  
5. I was furious when I heard John Kyle (Republican Senator for AZ) criticize our Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, for (as Kyle put it) 'politicizing the shooting.'  It was politicized when a U. S, Congresswoman was shot.  That's why we called it an attempted assassination and not an attempted  murder.  Kyle is a  lawyer so he can't be excused for ignorance.  He is just an oily jerk.
   
6. 
   
7. The ease of obtaining a gun:  To me this is the issue that we should be concentrating on.

1. Our gun laws are so lax that they may as well not exist.  First and foremost:  unless you are a member of the military or law enforcement you have no reason to own an automatic weapon.  Those weapons are made to kill people and to kill as many people as possible rapidly.  There is no other use for them PERIOD.  They should be banned.
   
2.          
   
3. The powerful NRA lobby has so cowed our representatives, or bribed them with obscene contributions to their campaigns, that they even let the law expire (under George W. Bush) that made the manufacture and selling of extended ammunition clips illegal.  Now anyone can buy one and, therefore, kill a whole slew of innocent people before anyone has time to  react.
4. 
   
5. Mental Illness:  How many times after a massacre (such as the shooting of the students at Columbine High School) have we heard that the sign of mental illness was evident in the shooter(s) long before the evil act was carried out?  We need to educate people on the signs of mental illness so they will see that the sick receive the help they need before they go over the brink.
6.      
7. This must be followed up by better funding for mental illness.  It is shoved under the carpet when money is allocated for health care.  The result is that we are all at risk when a  demented person is free to carry out heinous deeds. 

It irritates me that most of the national media when telling of the victims state: The congresswoman was shot along with Judge Bolton and a  9 year old girl.  Why do they fail to mention the 3 women in their 70's and the young aide to Gabrielle who was to be married next year?  Not all are so dismissive of those victims, of course, but most are.  As Ronni would say, "What are they - chopped liver?"  One of those women was a blogger and was shot three times.  Her name is Ashleigh Burrows and she writes the blog The Burrow.

Please keep those who are the victims of this crime in your thoughts long after the news media move on to another story.  And help in any way that you can to prevent further carnage by demanding strong gun laws, toning down the rhetoric, and pushing for the funding of mental illness.

Our representatives should not be allowed to avoid these issues after the news dies down, as they have in the past.

(Please ignore the extra numbers.  I have tried in vain to edit this without them, but blog spot has it's own idea and I have failed to outwit it.)

 

Gabrielle Giffords

By now everyone has heard of the terrible tragedy that occurred today in my adopted home town, Tucson.  I am so saddened by this senseless shooting.  Gabby was the finest Senator Arizona ever had.  She never failed to respond to a letter, unlike my Republican Senators.  She fought long and hard for the underdog.

Our hearts go out to the families of the ones who were killed by a deranged 22 year old. And we pray for the recovery of Gabby and the others who were so brutally shot.  I can't say it as well as Alan Grayson did so I am reprinting his letter.

Gabby Giffords: A Few Words

Saturday, January 8, 2011 5:56 PM

From:

"Alan Grayson"

To:

darcostner@yahoo.com

A reporter called me a little while ago, and told me that 
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been shot at a public event. 
She is in critical condition.

I'm going to let others comment on what this means for 
America. I just want to say what it means to me.

Gabrielle Giffords and I served together on the House 
Committee on Science and Technology. She was the 
Chairman of the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics,
and I was a member of that subcommittee. Her D.C. office 
was one floor above mine.

I saw Gabby dozens, if not hundreds of times, during our 
two years together. And nearly every time that I can 
remember, she was smiling.

Gabby is one of the most cheerful, charming and engaging
people I have ever known. She's always looking on the 
bright side. She has something good to say about pretty
much everyone. Bad news never lays a glove on her. She
loves life, and all the people in it.

No matter what is going on in your life, after fifteen minutes 
with Gabby, you'll feel that you can touch the stars.

Everyone knew that Gabby would have a tough race in 2010.
(She actually won with 49% of the vote.) But I always thought 
that if each of her constituents could spend that fifteen minutes
with her, and see what she is really like, then she would win 
with 99.9% of the vote. (Same thing about Harry Teague of 
New Mexico, who lost, and a few others that I could name.) 
You would want her as your Congressman, because you would
want her as your friend.

I know nothing about the man who shot Gabby, and what was 
going through his mind when he did this. But I will tell you this - if
he shot Gabby out of hatred, then it wasn't Gabby he was shooting,
but rather some cartoon version of her, drawn by her political 
opposition. Because there is no way - NO WAY - that anyone who
really knows Gabby could hate her or hurt her. She is a kind, 
gentle soul.

My heart goes out to Mark Kelly, Gabby's husband, and the 
many, many people who love her. Gabby, we don't want to
lose you. Please stay here with us.

Alan Grayson

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~````

Day 2.  Gabby is still holding her own.  She has survived 
the first critical 24 hours.  Candle light vigils are being 
held at the hospital and at her headquarters.  Two churches 
are holding prayer services for her today.

The Arizona Daily Star's cartoonist, David Fitzsimmons, 
was interviewd on CNN and he said what most of us are 
thinking,  He said "the shooting was inevitable in a state
with an intense gun culture and politics that are to the
rabid right."  Although truer words were never spoken 
he had to write an apology in this morning's paper. 
I am sure the editor required it. I don't have an editor so
I will gladly repeat his words.  A state that allows concealed
weapons to be taken into a bar has lost it's soul and is
asking for tragedy.  


Not all Arizonan's are as unbalanced as Russell Pearce 
(The author of that disgusting immigration law) 
and Gov. Jan Brewer (the one who lets the poor and 
helpless die by not funding transplants).  Blame 
Maricopa County for foisting these unconscionable 
bunch of hard hearted Hannas on us.
outrage. 

Aftershock

I really tried to avoid all political news during the holidays.  I didn't want to spoil my good times by getting angry when I read what the Republicans were up to.  Of course, it's impossible to avoid news if you read a paper or watch TV, so I did my share of ranting. 

Now the honeymoon is over and I am paying attention to what is going on.  I am not sure how much more I can take without going berserk.   My last post was a wish list, but it is not going to happen.  Between the no-nothings that have been elected to represent us and the ideology of the Republican party we are, I fear, doomed. 

An example of what is happening is outlined in the following editorial  I can't say it any plainer so I am going to publish the entire article.

When I get caught up with the New Year obligations of getting my house in order I will write about my holiday and include some pictures.  How long it will take me is any one's guess.  Right now it is daunting, but I will get it done eventually.  I will also read your posts and see what you have been up to while I was away having fun.  Please bear with me as I am slowing down more and more.  

Now on to Robert Reich.

Robert Reich

Fmr. Secretary of Labor; Professor at Berkeley; Author, Aftershock: 'The Next Economy and America's Future'

Posted: January 5, 2011 09:14 PM (On the Huffington Post)

The Shameful Attack on Public Employees

In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they've earned.

But now the right is going after public employees.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It's far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public's work -- sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees -- to call them "faceless bureaucrats" and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican's Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that's too big.

Above all, Republicans don't want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.

But the right's argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unsupported assertions.

They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That's untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.

The Republican trick is to compare apples with oranges -- the average wage of public employees with the average wage of all private-sector employees. But only 23 percent of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48 percent of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be -- all need at least four years of college.

Compare apples to apples and and you'd see that over the last fifteen years the pay of public sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education. Public sector workers now earn 11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector, and local workers 12 percent less. (Even if you include health and retirement benefits, government employees still earn less than their private-sector counterparts with similar educations.)

Here's another whopper. Republicans say public-sector pensions are crippling the nation. They say politicians have given in to the demands of public unions who want only to fatten their members' retirement benefits without the public noticing. They charge that public-employee pensions obligations are out of control.

Some reforms do need to be made. Loopholes that allow public sector workers to "spike" their final salaries in order to get higher annuities must be closed. And no retired public employee should be allowed to "double dip," collecting more than one public pension.

But these are the exceptions. Most public employees don't have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year. Few would call that overly generous.

And most of that $19,000 isn't even on taxpayers' shoulders. While they're working, most public employees contribute a portion of their salaries into their pension plans. Taxpayers are directly responsible for only about 14 percent of public retirement benefits. Remember also that many public workers aren't covered by Social Security, so the government isn't contributing 6.25 of their pay into the Social Security fund as private employers would.

The solution is no less to slash public pensions than it is to slash private ones. It's for all employers to fully fund their pension plans.

The final Republican canard is that bargaining rights for public employees have caused state deficits to explode. In fact there's no relationship between states whose employees have bargaining rights and states with big deficits. Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights -- Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, for example, are running giant deficits of over 30 percent of spending. Many that give employees bargaining rights -- Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana -- have small deficits of less than 10 percent.

Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and working conditions, just like all employees do. They shouldn't have the right to strike if striking would imperil the public, but they should at least have a voice. They often know more about whether public programs are working, or how to make them work better, than political appointees who hold their offices for only a few years.

Don't get me wrong. When times are tough, public employees should have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else. And they are right now. Pay has been frozen for federal workers, and for many state workers across the country as well.

But isn't it curious that when it comes to sacrifice, Republicans don't include the richest people in America? To the contrary, they insist the rich should sacrifice even less, enjoying even larger tax cuts that expand public-sector deficits. That means fewer public services, and even more pressure on the wages and benefits of public employees.

It's only average workers -- both in the public and the private sectors -- who are being called upon to sacrifice.

This is what the current Republican attack on public-sector workers is really all about. Their version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They'd rather set average working people against one another -- comparing one group's modest incomes and benefits with another group's modest incomes and benefits -- than have Americans see that the top 1 percent is now raking in a bigger share of national income than at any time since 1928, and paying at a lower tax rate. And Republicans would rather you didn't know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.

Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

 

Auld Lang Syne

Happy New Year !!

 May 2011 be the year that sees an end to the Afghanistan war. 

May 2011 see the employment record jump to new highs and that all who want to work find  decent jobs.

May 2011 be the year when we all learn love and tolerance for our fellow man whether they live in a different country or have a different culture.

May 2011 be the year when our politicians put the country first instead of their own selfish interests.

May 2011 see the beginning of an end to poverty.

May 2011 see common sense prevail in our country.

May 2011 see an end to bigotry and injustice.

May 2011 be your best year yet.

Peace to all.  Have a wonderful 2011.