An analysis of pending legislation in dozens of US states makes clear that both the Republican and Democratic parties are pursuing an agenda whose central aim is to eradicate the ability of workers to resist wage and budget cutting. The primary difference is that the Democratic-sponsored legislation maintains a role for the union bureaucracies in implementing the cuts, while a number of Republican bills aim to weaken or destroy the unions outright.This latter point is very well expressed. Since WWII when a massive attack was waged against militant labor leaders as a part of the McCarthy right-wing campaigns to rid the US of most of the labor and civil rights gains made by ordinary people in the 1930s, the US ruling class has steadily weakened the unions over the decades to where they largely consist of privileged union bureaucracies who preside over mere vestiges of what once existed. The right-wing mostly ensconced in the Republican Party want to get rid of these vestiges while the Democrats want to preserve them. The Democrats presided over the globalization of capitalism that has resulted in the shipping of much of our economy and jobs to cheap labor overseas. The two parties are simply two branches of the ruling capitalist class, and pursue slightly different strategies to extract more profits from working people.
The recent aggressive attacks of public workers may be exactly what is needed to wake up working people to the war that has been waged against them since WWII. This stealth attack aided and abetted by the Democratic Party has been very successful. It has obscured the reality of the class war and weakened unions to an empty shell of what they were while greatly increasing the power of corporations and their owners, the one-percent of Americans who now essentially "own" the US.
We presently face a powerful ruling class that has used the so-called "war on terrorism" to create a legal framework of a police state (the Patriot Acts). This has given them an arrogance and sense of omnipotence that, I believe, has fueled their current coordinated drive to crush public worker unions as a first step to destroy what is left of organized labor.
