No surprise to me, and probably not to you, that states that cut their budgets most also lost the most jobs. How people think we can get out of the financial mess we are in without government spending is beyond me.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/06/27/255010/chart-states-cut-most-spending-jobs/
But then, it also looks like Obama is going to sell out the liberal/progressive wing of House Dems and negotiate a losing deal with the Repubs, austerity budgets, even though Repubs have signaled (because they have been told by the big banks) that they will approve the ahigher deficit ceiling.
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/168713-house-democrats-feel-jilted-by-the-president
Bernie Sanders makes it clear that the poor will be hungrier, the worker class will work harder for less and the middle class will shrink while the wealthier get wealthy with the deal that is about to be made on the deficit.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/27-11
KZ
In warfare, when you are winning, you do not let up, but press your advantage on as many fronts as possible. Overkill is necessary to break the spirit and demoralize the enemy. The 100 year battle of Capital and Labor is very nearly over and the vanquished middle class, born largely in the struggles of the labor movement, are now required to give back their borrowed personal and institutional gains.
Capital is triumphant! Factories move to the cheap labor markets of the third world; as many services, as can be, are outsourced in a similar fashion. Governments are denied needed revenues to fulfill their constitutional mandate to “promote the general welfare”. Individualism has triumphed over solidarity and we are all, increasingly, on our own.
College education is being priced out of the market for millions, and a crumbling infrastructure will ensure the look and feel of the third world, which our long forgotten inner cities have already succeeded in becoming . Gay marriage is a side show of progress when so many millions cannot afford to marry, establish secure homes, and raise their children in dignity and hope.
For all practical purposes God has not so much died as he has become irrelevant, along with the sneered at religious values of justice and fair play. These have been replaced with the quasi religion and value system of free market social Darwinism .. often supported by spineless traditional religions eager to accommodate powerful financial and institutional forces who worship this other god
And it’s not simply that we have lost hope. We just don’t believe in hope anymore or anything else other than what we can put in our pockets and keep. Someone once said that the US could easily be defeated from within. All you had to do was pay half the people to kill off the other half. There are many ways to kill people. Our congress, our corporations, and institutions have been going down that road for years. Witness the religious warfare that floods and pollutes our public airwaves.