Senate Republicans: No Jobs For You, America (SEIU)

Senate Republicans: No Jobs For You, America

By Kate Thomas

This afternoon, the U.S. Senate failed to break a filibuster which prevented a $60 billion jobs infrastructure bill from coming up for an up-or-down vote.

According to U.S. Department of Transportation estimates, the "Rebuild America Jobs Act" would have created roughly 800,000 jobs. All 47 Republican Senators voted to block the bill as well as the motion to proceed--preventing even a debate on the bill to take place.

"As our nation's infrastructure falls apart before our eyes, some Senators shamefully chose to side with millionaires rather than putting Americans to work rebuilding our bridges, roads and railways," said SEIU President Mary Kay Henry in a statement issued after the U.S. Senate vote. "These Senators have shown once again that the interests of the top 1 percent are more important than those of their own unemployed constituents."

This is the third jobs bill Congressional Republicans have voted down in the last month.

I see that the Service Employees' International Union is twittering:

Twitter / @SEIU:: #GOP blocks 3rd #jobs bill, show interests of top %1 more important than their own unemployed constituents: http://seiu.cc/rpHv8h

The situation is even worse than that. The Republicans are not just acting against the interests of the 99% and for the interests of the 1%. The Republicans are acting in the interests of nobody at all:

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It is true that the interests of the 1% differ from the interests of the rest of Americans in four particulars:

• The 1% have an enormous material interest in making the tax system less progressive.
  
  
• The 1% have a long-run material interest in hypnotizing Americans into believing that the current distribution of income and wealth is in some sense "deserved" or "just".
  
  
• The 1% have a short-run ideal interest in being reassured that they are in fact good people whose wealth and incomes are deserved and just.
  
  
• The 1% have a short-run material interest in not being reminded that it was the actions of many of them that played the key role in breaking the economy.

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