(Laura Clawson)
The debt ceiling is obviously the story of the week, and it's a class warfare story as much as anything else. It's kind of
the class warfare story, really. The same people who pushed to defend tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires are turning the deficit created by those tax cuts into a financial crisis for the nation, one that can supposedly only be solved by major cuts to the programs working people have paid into through their lives and depend on. And if there's no resolution ... yeah, those same working people suffer again. Under the alternatives the Republicans deem acceptable, we lose no matter what.
Meanwhile, the FAA's partial shutdown, which under other circumstances would be a major story, is getting buried. Nearly 4,000 government employees and tens of thousands of private sector construction workers out of work, safety upgrades put on hold, and more than $200 million a week in lost tax revenue, all to force a standard on union elections by which no member of Congress would have been elected.
And of course second-quarter GDP growth was wretched.
Against those giant issues, the day-to-day little blows against workers seem like nothing, almost, but they're how we get to the place where the big stuff is possible, and stuff like Florida making it more difficult to file for unemployment or Detroit cutting pay and benefits for teachers and other school workers and the governor of Maine literally copying his regulatory agenda from lobbyist wishlists seems small in comparison.
So here are some of the blows, the victories and the ideas that made up the week in the war on workers and efforts to fight back:
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