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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The War Metaphor

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The War Metaphor:


The War Metaphor

The war metaphor has been badly overused-- war on drugs, war on poverty -- but it still holds up in some cases. Dean Baker's Huffington piece, for example, describes The War on Public Sector Workers this way:
Politicians across the country are using heaping doses of the politics of envy to try to arouse the anger of workers. However, their targets are not the corporate CEOs pulling down tens of millions of dollars a year in pay and bonuses. Nor is it the Wall Street crew that got incredibly rich inflating the housing bubble and then took government handouts to stay alive through the bust. The targets of these politicians' wrath are school teachers, firefighters and other public sector workers.
The Republican's war on women is also very real, although it is often a bi-partisan war. It includes austerity and budget cutting which has pushed millions of women out of their jobs and crushed the living standards of their families. Most of the public sector workers listed above are women. Then there's the revived assault on the rights