I started the day with this story in the Times (how great that the corporate media so faithfully completes their assigned propaganda!), and because it made me so grumpy, was happy to turn on This Week With Christiane Amanpour and see Donna Brazile knock back George Will's Very Serious Take on public employees' unions. Would that our president were as good at standing up for working people!
WILL: There is one national resonance from this, however. In New York City, the issue is tangled up with the question, and it's an open question, whether the public employees union to make a job action point sabotaged street collection. I believe -- and this is entirely tangled up with the state bankruptcy -- that the issue of public employees and their dominance of blue states is going to be the biggest issue in this country for the next several years.
BRAZILE: No, they're the scapegoat, George. I mean, when you start cutting state budgets and city budgets, and you start cutting snowplows, and you start cutting the amount of salt that you have stored, that has a real impact on people's lives.
And, you know, the one thing -- in terms of Brooklyn and some of the -- you know, the other boroughs -- they didn't get snowplowed for two, three days, and so they were upset when Mayor Bloomberg went out and said, "Hey, everything is fine." And they're like, we have kids who are -- who need hospital treatment, but they can't -- the ambulance cannot get there.
George, I know that's the new baby on -- on the wish list, to cut all of these budgets, but when they start cutting these state budgets, people are going to feel it.
This, in a nutshell, is the problem with the how Democrats and Republicans govern. It sounds fiscally responsible to cut costs, to shrink the size of the government when speaking in the abstract. But when something happens, Americans WANT to rely on the government to take care of these necessities. Public employees didn't cause the "Snowpocalypse". But the constant drumming to cut costs to the bare bones (and sometimes even whittle those bones down further) shows you the danger of not having the resources when you need it.
