Daylight time has begun. Republicans continue to try to turn their clocks back 120 years.  Democrats continue to turn the clock forward to try to help us catch up to the rest of the industrialized world.

After campaigning on creating jobs, Republicans at both the state and national levels have done everything they can to not only lose jobs or send them overseas, they are also working their collective asses off to cut wages and benefits. Talk about a bait and switch. Isn’t there a law against that?
 
Terry Branstad is positioning himself as a “moderate” in the so-called public unions controversy. Branstad claims he is not going as far as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. I guess by that he means he isn’t getting calls from the Koch brothers directly. Don’t be fooled by this ‘moderate’ stance. Branstad would do everything he could to wreck unions if he had the votes in the senate.

When you go to the polls in 2012, don’t forget that we are but a heart beat or a stroke away from becoming another Ohio or Michigan where the governor can actually declare an emergency in a town and turn the running of that town over to a corporation. How does having Blackwater (excuse me – Xe) running your town sound?

Naomi Klein pretty much predicted that scenarios like the current union crushing would be attempted by those in service to the wealthy in her book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”  I saw her on Democracy Now! last Wednesday.
 
One of the components of the Shock Doctrine is a crisis to which right-wing ideological prescriptions are applied. In the current case, the crisis (we're broke!) was created by those in power specifically to be able to apply their prescriptions (union-busting). For instance, neither Iowa nor Wisconsin had a financial crisis until HUGE tax cuts were given to corporations and the wealthy. Now they have a major revenue shortfall, and raising revenues is verboten in disaster capitalism, unless it is on the poor or middle class. Ms. Klein wrote this book many years ago and it seems like she got their recipe down to a T.
 
In her DN! interview she talks about how the forces of disaster capitalism are already being gathered to deal with climate change. No doubt the horrendous Japanese situation presents an appetizing morsel also.
 
Speaking of privatizing public services, keep an eye on things like public water systems. The privatizers have had their collective eyes on such systems for a long time. What? A glass of water costs a buck out of my own tap????
 
Given all this, I often wonder who would ever vote for a Republican. While they speak pretty words during the election, once elected they are all about destroying the New Deal and transferring wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. This has been done recently with tax bailouts, illegal wars and laws that favor corporations – not to mention the worst Supreme Court decision in history.
 
Yet they still win elections and I can’t understand why. Part of it is owning the voting machines and process for voting. And a good part of it is getting people to vote against their best interests by dividing groups to fight amongst themselves.

The only ones who should be voting for Republicans are, as George W. put it himself, “the haves and the have-mores.”

So Mr. Boehner, if everything is on the table, why have I not heard discussion of raising revenues using surtaxes on high income, or tariffs on items that could be made in the US, or higher inheritance taxes? Tax cuts for the rich have proven to be a disaster when it comes to creating jobs.