How fked up is public discourse, pretty fked up if you ask me. All over the world, literally, unionised and non-unionised workers are being asked to take it on the chin for the GFC. Here is the money quote from the blog Naked Capitalism that lets the facts breath some fresh air:
If you live in the world according to the mainstream media, the row between state executives and unions is all about (by implication) greedy unions trying to preserve their perquisites when budget “realities” demand that they suffer. Consider this excerpt from a recent article New York Times article about the fight in New Jersey:
Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy.
Um, the “wounded economy” trashed the state budget? Funny how the article fails to point fingers at the real perp, which is the global financial crisis, brought to you by your friendly TBTF banks. Andrew Haldane, Executive Director of Financial Stability for the Bank of England estimated that the costs of the financial crisis was 1 to 5 times global GDP. If you were, as economists recommend, to try to tax them to recoup the cost of the damage they did over a period of 20 years, the charge would be over $1.5 trillion a year. That’s more than the market cap of the biggest global banks. Funny, their staff and executives got record bonuses in 2009. So maybe the unions have the wrong strategy. They need to screw up in a particularly destructive manner.
Relentlessly Progressive Political Economy 
Excuse my ignorance: what’s GFC? And, from the quote, what’s TBTF Banks? Thanks