What Republicans are doing from Madison, Wis., to Washington, D.C., is waging a war against workers that will destroy a million jobs for Americans.
The GOP is waging a war against teachers, against firefighters, against police, against programs that create jobs, against men and women who hunger for jobs, against pay equity for women, and against the economic recovery that has only begun.
I will guarantee that when the full budget proposals of House Republicans are added to the full budget proposals of Republican governors, leading and objective analysts will conclude that a million American jobs will be lost.
The Republicans are not engaging in deficit reduction, they are fomenting a political civil war based on an ideology that is radical and extreme compared not only to generations of Democrats, but to generations of the most respected Republicans who never proposed anything like what Republicans are proposing today.
Just watch the House Republicans, voting in rapid fire on amendments they could not have had the time to read, attacking one program after another in a campaign that will destroy jobs America needs.
This is not a war against deficits, it is a war against collective bargaining, a war against job-creating programs, a war against the very idea of government creating jobs.
In many cases this is a war against policies that help women, a war against pay equity for women, a war against new jobs for women and a war against poor women and their daughters and sons.
In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt, under pressure from what was called the conservative coalition of that time, supported cutbacks in spending that caused a relapse of Depression-era conditions at the very moment the economy was recovering. Republicans would repeat that disastrous mistake today.
There are plenty of good ways to lower the deficit, but destroying jobs with ideologically extreme attacks on programs that create jobs is a disastrous attack of epic and historic proportions.
The Republican Speaker might say so be it when jobs are destroyed, but a program that would destroy a million jobs is bad for workers, bad for jobs and bad for America.
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity... these are the principles of the people, the principles that are under assault by the reactionary right. We the people are being constantly slandered and subverted as enemies to capital, as enemies to an economy that we bolster, but that the corporate interests and their Republican lackeys broke through deregulation and rampant corruption and mismanagement.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created equal... not just the wealthy, not just the politically connected, not just those who own property, or businesses, or play the stock market like it's their own private casino... ALL Americans are equal, and they have inalienable rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness... and that they are not the equivalent of capital. The American people do not exist to make stockholders wealthy. The American people do not exist to be scapegoated and abused and manipulated and turned against each other.
The GOP and its economic backers broke our economy and caused a recession. We will no longer allow them to blame us for it.