Republicans throughout the land deliver for “freedom”. For rich people.
by digby
As we celebrate the return of the Republican “establishment” this morning, I mused over at Salon that perhaps we should give a little bit of thought to what it is these “establishment” Republicans are actually doing all over the country:
It’s the morning after a primary Election Day, the smoke has cleared and the pundits have spoken. They tell us that the portent for November is obvious and the 2016 election will be shaped by what happened in places like Kentucky and Georgia. What they are far less likely to discuss is what the result of elections mean for people in their real lives.
This piece by Corey Robin in the New York Times gives us a hint about what that might be. He talks about a recent study from Gordon Lafer, a political scientist from the University of Oregon who published a paper for the Economic Policy Institute on bills affecting workers all over the country. The bills involved unemployment insurance, sick days, childcare, minimum wage, child labor, collective bargaining, etc. These are meat and potatoes issues for hundreds of millions of Americans. And what he found was that across the board, where Republicans had the power, they passed legislation to roll back workers’ rights and make individual employees weaker in the workplace.
You will be surprised at the kind of nonsense these people are accomplishing. And as Corey Robin points out in his piece, this is all about creating a frightened and docile work force. It makes you think a little bit differently about why we’ve somehow managed to have such a weak recovery with ongoing high unemployment while the owners are doing better than ever.
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