Tag Archives: koch

Stacy Summary:    Compare the facts below to the highly emotional and irrational language of propagandized hate that many cut and paste in the comment threads.

• The economy has been bad for both private and public sector workers for decades

Here is a chart comparing real hourly wage growth for college graduates working in private and state/local sectors compared with productivity growth from 1989-2010.

The great trick of the last few years has been convincing private and public-sector workers that their interests somehow diverge from one another.

The effort to raise one or another up as a privileged class is smart politics on the part of those who want elections dominated purely by corporations, but it doesn’t point toward any answers for either group. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Walker agenda — which plenty of other governors would like to emulate — is to take both benefits and power away from public-sector employees, and then use the political space opened up by weakening unions to tilt policy toward corporate interests and away from poorer constituencies. That’s a world in which both private and public-sector workers end up worse off.