Today in What Government Is For

You know who collects the data from doctors and clinics and hospitals all over the state, figures out when cases of dangerous diseases are increasing and gets the word out to parents, caregivers, teachers, doctors, hospitals and others who need that information? 

Government employees, that’s who.  State workers.  The ones Governor Matt "Connecticut Yankee Lying Coward" Bevin is planning to get rid of.  By the thousand.

From the Kentucky Department of Public Health, housed in the Cabinet for Health and Family Services:

Kentucky experienced a rise in reported cases of pertussis, also known as whooping cough, at the end of 2015, with public health officials reporting 87 cases of the illness between August and December. Pertussis is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by bacteria and is transmitted through respiratory droplets from sneezing, coughing or talking. This vaccine-preventable disease can be deadly to infants too young to have been fully vaccinated, so it’s especially important for parents and caregivers of young children to be up-to-date on immunizations.

You know how many private corporations are capable of handling that responsibility?  None, that's how many.  Not that that will stop Bevin from giving millions of taxpayers dollars to one to fuck up the job.

Matt Bevin Killing Kentucky Jobs and Bragging About It

Funny how when jerb-creeters like Bevin shut down government programs and cancel government services they never mention the thousands of jobs they are killing.

And if you don't consider government jobs to be "real" jobs, you might try explaining why the biggest employer in almost every county in Kentucky is the public school system.

From the AP:

Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin has notified federal authorities he plans to dismantle the state's health insurance exchange.

Bevin campaigned on a pledge to get rid of the exchange, known as kynect. It was authorized by an executive order from his predecessor, Democrat Steve Beshear.

The Courier-Journal (http://cjky.it/1N3zPNI ) reported Monday that Bevin's Dec. 30 letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell said he wants to wind down the state exchange and transition Kentuckians to the federal site to shop for insurance. The letter said he wants the transition to occur "as soon as practicable."

The state exchange remains open. The changes won't affect anyone shopping for insurance for the current enrollment period, which ends Jan. 31. Anyone who signed up for Medicaid coverage through the kynect site also won't be affected.

kynect directly employs hundreds of taxpaying Kentuckians throughout the Commonwealth - more than most private employers, including the Lying Coward himself.

From the Lane Report:

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Jan. 21, 2014) — Xerox is hiring more than 75 new full-time customer care employees to support kynect, the state’s Health Benefit Exchange.

The kynect contact center, a major component of the Affordable Care Act, received approximately 195,000 calls in December 2013, up from 85,610 in November. The dramatic call volume increase prompted the addition of 77 customer care agents by Xerox.

Xerox customer care agents will offer assistance via phone, chat and email to Kentuckians navigating the online application process for obtaining health insurance through kynect. Agents will also assist citizens without Internet access in completing and filing applications.

Hiring has already begun and continues through Jan. 29. Xerox is seeking candidates with six months of customer center experience or equivalent customer service experience.

From Community Action agencies:

Community Action Kentucky and 12 Community Action Affiliates are proud to have been selected by the Kentucky Health Benefit Exchange to serve as "kynectors" to assist consumers with enrollment for healthcare benefits through kynect, Kentucky's Healthcare Connection. The role of these kynectors is to provide education services and enrollment assistance to individuals for Qualified Health Plans, Medicaid or the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP). Qualifying small businesses with 2-50 employees will be eligible to participate in SHOP.

Community Action Kentucky through their Community Action affiliates will conduct public education, and outreach activities to raise awareness of insurance affordability programs and coverage options; distribute fair and impartial information about available health plans; facilitate enrollment in health plans; provide referrals to any applicable office in the event of complaints and/or appeals, and provide guidance in modifying coverage, if appropriate.

Kentuckians will be able to compare and select insurance plans and find out if they qualify for programs like Medicaid and KCHIP. Individuals will find out if they qualify for payment assistance and special discounts on deductibles, copays and co-insurance. kynect will also be able to assist small businesses with enrolling their employees in health plans, and businesses with fewer than 25 employees may qualify for tax credits.

Eliminating kynect is going to throw thousands of Kentuckians, including children, onto the tender mercies of the social safety net that the Lying Coward thinks only moochers need. 

But faux-libertarians don't care about people who aren't already rich and Connecticut Yankee Bevin doesn't care about Kentucky.

Except for how much he can steal from it to give to his rich friends.

Only Government Spending Will Save Your Middle-Class Ass

Why can't you live on what you make any more?  Austerity, which transfers trillions of your tax dollars every year up to billionaire motherfuckers like donald trump instead of spending it on teachers and janitors and mental health counselors and firefighters and home health aids.

Kevin Drum:

I don't really have any good hook for posting this chart, but it's one of the most important ones you'll ever see. It's from the Wall Street Journal and it shows total government spending (state + local + federal) during the recession and its aftermath:

For about a year following the Obama stimulus, total spending was a bit higher than average for recession spending. But after that, spending fell steadily rather than rising, as it has after every previous recession. The result: a sluggish recovery, persistent long-term unemployment, and anemic wage growth.

Instead of responding to a historically bad recession with a historically strong stimulus, we responded with the weakest stimulus ever. Government spending is now more than 25 percentage points lower than normal. If you want to know why the recovery has been so feeble and unsteady, this is it. Republican presidential candidates, please take note.

QOTD

Betty Reid Soskin, 92:

I find myself at a stage where I have outlived my rage without losing my passion.

Read the whole thing.

Blame Government Incompetence on the Contractors

There is quite simply no advantage to hiring private contractors to do the work of government: nothing but higher costs, worse outcomes and massive corruption. Cancel all the contracts and hire employees directly. That restores full accountability.

Digby:

Henry Farrell had an interesting post last month over at Crooked Timber about the new book by Colin Crouch called Making Capitalism Fit For Society that's well worth reading.

Otherwise put, it’s a good example of Crouch’s critique of neo-liberal efforts to ‘shrink’ government – that in practice it is less about free markets than the handing over of government functions to well connected businesses.

Outsourcing is … justified on the grounds that private firms bring new expertise, but an examination of the expertise base of the main private contractors shows that the same firms keep appearing in different sectors … The expertise of these corporations, their core business, lies in knowing how to win government contracts, not in the substantive knowledge of the services they provide. … This explains how and why they extend across such a sprawl of activities, the only link among which is the government contract-winning process. Typically, these firms will have former politicians and senior civil servants on their boards of directors, and will often be generous funders of political parties. This, too is part of their core business. It is very difficult to see how ultimate service users gain anything from this kind of managed competition.

This is true of our vaunted, high tech surveillance sector as well.

Farrell observes the parallels between this system and feudalism and what he calls "Old Corruption" and it's worth reading the remainder of his post for that discussion.

To me, it seems obvious that the "contractor state" cannot be defended on democratic or capitalistic grounds. It certainly shows that simply outsourcing various necessary functions inevitably leads to corruption --- as any 7th grader should be able to predict. That this concept of "reinventing government" was pushed by certain New Democrats on the basis of gibberish makes it even more astonishing that it's taken so long to be exposed for what it is: patronage for rich (mostly) white guys who all know each other. How sad that health care reform had to be the ultimate guinea pig.

The good news is that we didn't let these incompetent middle men take over Social Security and Medicare. Yet.

Lazy Stupid Bureaucrats Ripping Off the Taxpayers

The circumstances may be unusual but the dedication is not. I'm not sure you can explain to people who have never worked in public service what it means to know that however lowly your job, you are a public servant and that doing your job is important to the smooth running of the nation.

From Salon:

Neither wind nor snow nor government shutdown could keep Rapid City, S.D.’s National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologists from showing up at the office during the unseasonably early blizzard that hit the region with record-setting snowfall this weekend. Climate Central got its hand on a memo sent from Rapid City’s NWS forecast office to Central Region Headquarters Sunday morning (they also decoded some of the abbreviated language for us):

Access to the office is still blocked. Two employees were able to hike in around some obstructions, but it is not possible to drive out of the parking lot due to snow drifts and downed trees in the neighborhood. The SOO (one who hiked in) is attempting to take two stranded employees home this morning. One forecaster hiked in for his mid shift last night, and I sent him home so he can come back tonight. Of the three who are on duty at this time, two have been here since 7 a.m. Friday, and I have been here since 3 p.m. Friday. We have two NWR (NOAA Weather Radio) transmitters down: Terry Peak and Rapid City. We have three ASOSs (Automated Surface Observing Stations) down: IEN (Pine Ridge, S.D.), RAP (Rapid City, S.D.), and PHP (Philip, S.D.).

We are on commercial power which has been stable since yesterday evening. Rapid City is pretty much paralyzed, and recovery and repair operations are in full swing. We have heard that the governor called in the national guard. Conference call briefing expected to take place later this morning. There is some concern about the potential for flooding with temperatures warming up quickly tomorrow and melting off the large snowpack. we have 1 to 4 inches of liquid equivalent on the ground and a big rain storm in the models for Friday. 8:09 a.m. MDT

In case you missed it:  because of the repug temper tantrum, those people hiking through monster snowpiles in order to make sure that Rapid City residents get timely, accurate weather reports during a weather crisis are not getting paid.

It's Our Goverrnment That Makes America Exceptional

C_R_eature at Wonkette, on how the government shutdown is destroying science:

Do you know something that makes this country exceptional? It’s not Exxon, oil companies are transnational. It’s not Goldman-Sachs, because there’s shady folks pushing piles of other people’s money around in every nation. It certainly isn’t trust fund fascists, since oligarchs are everywhere too. It’s our government’s agencies and the people who choose to work at them that’s exceptional.

Over the years this country has existed, we have painstakingly assembled a network of excellent institutions that has ensured our success. Our federal laboratories and institutional research partners are the envy of the world. This is our birthright and our true national treasure. Federal Agencies, and the federal employees who work at them, manage our resources, look after our health, see that our food is safe, maintain our security and keep our rivers from exploding into flame. They’re the folks that rush in with supplies and money when they’re hit by disasters. They watch out for storms, volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis. They scan the skies for asteroids that could wipe out our civilization. They’re the real Atlases that hold our society up and they take a torrent of abuse from misguided, ungrateful people who don’t think the jobs they do should exist at all.

It isn’t a popular viewpoint these days, but I think that it’s patriotic to be proud of our institutions and grateful of the work our Federal employees do. It should be patriotic to let them do their jobs. It should be patriotic to value their work, not to invent conspiracies to discredit it. It should be patriotic to pay them, at the very least.

It should be patriotic to want our government to work, not work to make our government fail.

The Public Pension "Crisis" Is Just the Latest Unprosecuted Wall Street Crime

There is no repository of public funds that the banksters have not looted with impunity so that taxpayers have to not only suffer the loss of their money, but pay double to replace what Wall Street stole.

In Kentucky, nonprofit agencies lured into the state pension system are filing suit to get out before they lose every last penny.

Mike Wynn at the Courier:

Two more quasi-governmental agencies have filed suit to pull out of the state’s troubled retirement system, arguing that they should have never been allowed to join the pension plan more than a decade ago.

Frontier Housing in Morehead and Housing Oriented Ministries Established for Service in Whitesburg filed the joint complaint in Franklin Circuit Court last week.

They are asking a judge to declare them ineligible to participate in the County Employees Retirement System, which faces more than $6.2 billion in unfunded liabilities.

SNIP

CERS is the largest of several pension plans at Kentucky Retirement Systems — the pension program for state and local workers that has $17 billion in unfunded liabilities and administers one of the worst-funded plans in the nation.

In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi explains how Wall Street is stealing funds for public pensions.

Or watch the video as Matt Taibbi joins Amy Goodman, and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! to discuss his new article.

Matt Taibbi: "The primary focus of my piece, there were a couple of things. Number one, how did these funds come to be broke the first place? I think everyone realizes that states are in fiscal crises or having trouble paying out their obligations to workers. One of the reasons is that at least 14 states have not been making their annual required contributions to the pension fund for years and years and years. So essentially, they have been illegally borrowing from these pension funds, sometimes going back decades. Another focus of the piece was the solution that a lot of sort of Wall Street funded think tanks are coming up with now is to get higher returns by putting these funds into alternative investments like hedge funds. In a lot of cases what I’m finding is that the fees that states are paying for these new hedge funds and these new types of alternatives investments are actually roughly equal to the cuts that they are taking from workers. Like in the state of Rhode Island, for instance, they have frozen the cost of living adjustment and the frozen cola roughly equals the fees that they’re paying to hedge funds in that state. So essentially it is a wealth transfer from teachers, cops, and firemen to billionaire hedge-funders."

 Time to face facts: Wall Street is no longer an asset to the U.S. or world economy, if it ever was.  It is now a monster liability that we can no longer afford.

Imprison everybody involved in financial speculation, confiscate all their assets, burn Wall Street to the ground and salt the earth so nothing rises there again.

Joe Biden is a Class Act

Old Handsome Joe 2016.

TPM:

Vice President Joe Biden reached out to the park ranger who was chewed out by a Republican congressman on Wednesday at the World War II memorial in Washington.

"I'm proud of you," Biden told the ranger over the phone. The call was announced on the vice president's official Twitter feed.

If you've ever worked for a living, if you've ever had to tolerate an asshole publicly humiliating you for doing your job, if you've ever had a boss who genuinely appreciated your work, you don't need to know anything else about the difference between Democrats and republicans.

Public Employee AynRandy Hates Public Employees

From Down with Tyranny:



Think Progress: 

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) — who has relied on taxpayer funded health care since 2011 — plans to offer a constitutional amendment that would prohibit tax dollars from subsidizing the health care of government employees and require all federal workers to purchase insurance through the exchanges included in the Affordable Care Act.

The proposal comes as the senator still appears to be enrolled in government subsidized health care coverage.

“My amendment says basically that everybody including Justice Roberts — who seems to be such a fan of Obamacare — gets it too,” Paul told the Daily Caller. “See, right now, Justice Roberts is still continuing to have federal employee health insurance subsidized by the taxpayer,” Paul said. “And if he likes Obamacare so much, I’m going to give him an amendment that gives Obamacare to Justice Roberts.”

Translation: "Nyah, nyah, nyah, NYAH, nyah."

Wonkette explains:

See, Obamacare allows people who do not have health insurance to acquire health insurance through the magic of legislation that was passed by Congress and thumbs-upped by the Supreme Court. If you already have health insurance through your employer, good for you! Carry on! If you do not have health insurance through your employer, guess what? Now you can get some! That way, if you get sick, you do not have to die penniless from lack of access to health care — like, oh, say, this one dude who worked for Rand Paul’s dad that one time.

Obamacare is not about how much you love it and want to marry it and have all its gaybies. It’s not about the Supreme Court making you do anything. It’s just a way for all those Americans who have no way of getting their hands on health insurance to, you know, do that. Which wasn’t a problem back when it was the Heritage Foundation’s idea. But now that Obama’s name is on it, Republicans hate it and hate anyone who doesn’t hate it, and they think they’ve figured out a really super duper clever way of making some kind of point — we are not sure what kind, but there’s a point in there somewhere maybe. They will try to amend Obamacare SO HARD until it is a plan in which all Americans must participate, which makes them even dumber than they look because that starts to sound little bit like that universal health care some of us bleeding heart fascist marxist commie tree-hugging latte-sippers were arguing for to begin with.

Checkmate, assholes.

Farmer Plea Deal Opens Door to Widespread Theft from Taxpayers

18 months of likely probation plus restitution and fines amounting to a fraction of what he actually stole? That's an invitation to every half-wit crook in state government to steal everything you can.

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

Former Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer has entered into agreements with federal and state prosecutors, and the Executive Branch Ethics Commission, that would resolve all charges against him, his attorney said Thursday in a news release.

If the courts and ethics commission approve, the former University of Kentucky basketball star will plead guilty to two counts and receive a sentence in federal court in the range of 21 to 27 months, Frankfort attorney J. Guthrie True said in the release.

Farmer also will agree to pay restitution and an ethics fine totaling $125,000 and will receive a concurrent one-year sentence in state court, True said.

Farmer treated his elected position like a blank check and the state employees assigned to his department like personal servants. He deserves years in a maximum security prison and millions of dollars in crippling punitive fines.

What he did was just an exaggerated version of what elected officials in Kentucky have been getting away with for two hundred and twenty-one years. Which is exactly why Farmer's punishment must be so terrifyingly severe that it will finally start detering these motherfuckers.

Repug Austerity Harming Public Safety in Kentucky

For four and half years, congressional repugs have refused to fund President Obama's requests for stimulus programs that would prevent state government layoffs like these. And Kentuckians keep suffering for it.

Valerie Honeycutt-Spears at the Herald:

Kentucky State Police Commissioner Rodney Brewer confirmed Monday that the agency had laid off 20 troopers as a result of a projected $5.8 million budget shortfall.

Brewer said the troopers laid off Friday were involved in the Trooper R program, which brought veteran troopers out of retirement and back on patrol for up to five years on an annual contract. The troopers who were laid off had signed new contracts July 1, Brewer said.

He said he started the Trooper R program, which state lawmakers approved in 2009, to save the state money. The retired troopers were rehired at a starting salary, and there were no training costs associated with hiring them.

Eight of 16 Kentucky State Police posts were affected by Friday's layoffs. Five troopers were laid off at Hazard, four at London, three at Frankfort, two each at Ashland, Harlan and Elizabethtown and one each at the Bowling Green and Pikeville posts, Brewer said. "In late May or early June, we began to do some forecasting on our budget for fiscal year 2014," which runs July 1, 2013, through June 30, 2014, said Brewer.

In late July, state police officials realized there was a projected $5.8 million shortfall for fiscal year 2014. The overall annual budget is $184 million.

"There weren't many options on the table," Brewer said, noting that more than 90 percent of the state police budget consists of salaries and benefits, vehicles and fuel. The layoffs will save $1.25 million, said Brewer.

The Trooper R program had been "a big boost" for Kentucky State Police because of severe manpower shortages, he said. Even before Friday's layoffs, Kentucky State Police suffered from a manpower shortage of about 100 troopers, he said.

Yes, the conservative plan to reduce government to the point that every citizen needs an arsenal of military weapons to protect herself is going swimmingly.

I Support Public School Teachers

Because the Chicago Teachers Union strike is just the beginning of a long fight against public school Deform: against replacing actual teaching with high-stakes testing; against using tax dollars to enrich charter and voucher con artists; against using crumbling schools and impoverished students to punish teachers; against eliminating public employee unions and crippling public education.

Which side are you on?

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money ends a passionate plea with this:

The Chicago Teachers Union deserves the world because they take kids like me out of working-class families and help them fulfill their dreams. Those who attack them place themselves on the other side of the class divide, on the side that promotes social inequality and the side that provides no incentives for good teachers to stay in working-class schools since poor test scores, largely a result of poverty, will cost them their job. They claim to help children but don’t understand poor public schools; they claim to support policies that will improve education but promote ideas that will enrich capitalists at the expense of students.

And these pundits, these people who have never worried about money a single day in their lives, who were born with a silver foot in their mouth to quote Ann Richards, claim to support unions but never actually provide that support when working or middle-class people decide that enough is enough and walk off their jobs for the betterment of themselves, their families, and their community. And that makes me very, very angry. To quote Campos from yesterday’s post on Yglesias’ commentary, “Look, either you support this strike or you don’t. If you don’t support it on the merits then come out and say so, and why. If you do support it, then say so, and why.”

Indeed. You are either on the side of teachers or on the side of those who will crush their union. In the middle of the strike, there is no gray area. Which side are you on? I side with the people who changed my life.

Me, too.  I became a writer because of a hard-ass English teacher who refused to cut me any slack. Maybe ten percent of the students in that rural Kentucky high school went on to college, but every one of us did so because of a teacher who made the difference.

UPDATE: Charles Pierce is on the ground covering the strike and just nailing the anti-teacher deformers to the fucking wall.

Voting Union in Lexington, Kentucky

Because they know who has their backs, and it's not the city council.

Beverly Fortune at the Herald:

City sanitation workers voted Tuesday to organize and form a union.

They may become members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a union with 1.6 million members and about 4,000 local units in the United States and Puerto Rico.

Of 165 waste management workers who were eligible, 121 voted Tuesday. To unionize, 50 percent plus one had to vote yes, said Fayette County Clerk Don Blevins, who conducted the election. The vote was 95-26 in favor.

Sanitation worker Dean Chambers said that with a union, many of his co-workers would feel empowered to speak out. "The only way they can get their views heard now is to go to council and speak for three minutes. This way we have a little more power," he said.

Lexington's sanitation workers did not have to suffer the attacks and firings that greet private-sector attempts to organize. For those millions of workers, a new movement seeks to make labor organizing a civil right, earning the same employment protections as race, sex and religion.

Learn more here.

Sign the petition here.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/07/31/2278933/lexington-sanitation-workers-vote.html#storylink=cpy

"All Hands On Deck"

Speaking of things only government can do ....



 Full transcript here.

Are Firefighters People?

 Firefighters are about to become the most important public employees in the country, if they haven't already. We would be smart to take extra-good care of them.

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

As brutal wildfires spread in Colorado, federal fighters, along with state and local first responders, are doing everything they can to deal with the disaster.

But Sarah Kliff noted a detail yesterday that I did not know: thousands of federal firefighters do not have health insurance.

SNIP

For what it's worth, the Affordable Care Act would extend health care subsidies to these firefighters -- many of whom make modest salaries between $25,000 and $35,000 a year -- making insurance affordable for them in 2014.

SNIP

Postscript: Incidentally, didn't Mitt Romney and his campaign just spend a week telling voters it's absurd of President Obama to want to hire more firefighters? Given the developments, maybe that wasn't the smartest thing Romney has ever done?

Update: John Lauer, a 27-year-old member of a Colorado-based "hotshot" crew, is one of the uninsured first responders, and he's created a petition on Change.org in support of health benefits for firefighters. As of this afternoon, it has a little over 116,000 signatures.

Support New Public Workers Union in Lexington

More than police, more even than firefighters, the single most critical category of public employees is sanitation workers. Because when the garbage doesn't get picked up and hauled away, chaos reigns.

Phil N. Ferrill at Barefoot and Progressive:

(Yesterday), the Lexington sanitation workers seeking to join AFSCME launched a Facebook page for supporters of their drive to unionize. This seems like to spot to find out all the happenings with that campaign.

If you’re on Facebook, go like it!

No word from the city yet on the workers’ request for a union election, but, under the ordinance allowing city workers to collectively bargain, the city has until May 10 to respond.

DC Repugs Aren't Only Ones Sabotaging the Economy

If the infant recovery suffocates in its crib, you can thank the repug governors and legislators Disappointed Democrats let take over in the states in 2010.

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), who's likely to be considered for his party's vice presidential slot this year, raised an interesting argument yesterday while trying to spin the latest economic news.

"I'm glad the economy is starting to recover, but I think it's because of what Republican governors are doing in their states, not because of the president."

Just at the surface, once prominent Republican leaders tell national television audiences that the economy is recovering under President Obama, the GOP is effectively giving away the store, or at least most of it.

But the more one scrutinizes McDonnell's new talking points, the less persuasive they appear. To hear the Virginia governor tell it, the economy is improving because of Republican governors, but whether McDonnell likes it or not, the current evidence points to a national recovery. There are 20 Democratic governors, including Democratic chief executives in two of nation's three largest states, and their economies are improving, too.

For that matter, there's ample reason to believe McDonnell has it backwards. One of the factors holding back the economy over the last year is the shrinking public sector, and the deliberate layoffs of thousands of government employees. Governors from both parties have contributed to this -- since states can't run deficits, they generally haven't had much of a choice -- but it's the GOP governors who've put austerity measures at the top of their respective to-do lists.

That doesn't boost the economy; it does the opposite.

Indeed, there's a degree of irony hearing McDonnell make the argument in the first place: thanks to money his state receives from Washington, Virginia has seen its government payrolls grow, even while most states slash public-sector jobs.

As McDonnell auditions for national office, he'll have to do better than this.

War on Public Employees Also the War on Women

As it is the war on African-Americans. Motherfuckers have spent the last 40 years building a steep slope back to the Dark Ages, and now they're rolling the boulder of American civilization to the top to send it crashing down to a place where only the 1 percent of the 1 percent will survive.

From The Nation:

But since the start of the recovery in June 2009, men’s unemployment has dropped 2.2 percentage points, while women’s unemployment has essentially flat-lined—rising slightly from 7.6 percent in June 2009.

The bad news is that although men lost 70 percent of the 7.5 million jobs that were eliminated between December 2007 and June 2009, men have won 92 percent of the 1.9 million jobs that have been created since then. From “man-cession” we’ve gone to “man-covery.”

One reason is that women represent 57 percent of workers in the public sector (compared with 48 percent in the private sector, where the gains are). They hold a disproportionate share of state and local government jobs—exactly those levels of government that have been shedding workers by the shipload.

As the National Women’s Law Center reports:

Since the recovery began in June 2009, women have now gained 150,000 jobs—a positive change, but still not enough. Why? Because a gain of 150,000 jobs is equal to just eight percent of the more than 1.9 million net jobs the economy has added in the recovery. Women’s shockingly small share of the job growth is because they’ve suffered a disproportionate share of the job losses in the public sector—nearly 70 percent—and have enjoyed less than a quarter of the private sector gains.

Women are finding it harder to find work, and they’re still being paid less than men when they are working. Across the board, women earned on average 78.2 percent of what men earned in 20099 according to the US Census. Even in female-dominated workplaces, men were paid better.

Make abortion impossible, take away contraception, ensure basic health care is too expensive, destroy their children's schools and bar them from any but dead-end, minimum-wage jobs ... now you've got women just where you need them to be: powerless.

Public Jobs Grow the Economy, and Only Government Creates Them

Here's the definition of a job in terms of what it does for the economy: a job compensates workers with money that workers can and do spend on shelter, food, transportation, clothing, appliances and entertainment - spending that profits businesses that then hire more workers, creating a virtuous cycle of economic growth.

By that definition, there is no difference between public jobs and private jobs: both pay workers money that workers spend in businesses that pay other workers.

To repugs, of course, the definition of a job is "cage in which corporations exploit workers in order to enrich the corporation."

Public jobs don't exploit workers or enrich corporations (at least not directly), so repugs don't consider them jobs at all.

Which doesn't change the reality.

Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly:

At Stateline, Pamela Prah asks a good question with respect to what voters will be hearing from gubernatorial candidates this year and in 2014: can they create jobs?

The general, bipartisan answer is “not as much as they would often have you think,” insofar as governors and aspirants to that position (and for that matter, state legislators) often pretend to have leverage over national and global macroeconomic trends they do not actually possess. Thus, when the economy is booming, they take credit for it as much as possible, and when it’s in the tank, they offer often-symbolic, sometimes-magical proposals to do something about it.

But as on so many topics, the idea that all gubernatorial “job-creating” ideas are equally questionable can quickly become an exercise in false equivalency. Conservatives often propose public subsidies to “attract businesses” or simply assert that state-level tax cuts will stimulate the private-sector economy in a particular place. At best, corporate subsidies, particularly if they are offered as inducements to individual “investors,” run a very high risk of simply offering windfalls to companies who would make such investments in any case for other, more fundamental reasons (i.e., proximity to markets or suppliers, or the availability of a work-force with suitable skills). And even if they “work” in attracting capital to a particular location, from a national point of view they represent a zero-sum game and encourage race-to-the-bottom gaming of state policymakers. Meanwhile, there is little or no evidence that lowering state taxes can have a stimulative effect that is anything more than a drop in the bucket in terms of overall economic conditions. The one sure thing is that to the extent that subsidies reduce public revenues, they will require offsetting reductions in expenditures that really do have a negative impact on jobs, not to mention the social goods that state spending on education, health care, environmental protection, etc., are aimed at producing.

On the flip side of the equation, proposals to provide jobs by direct state spending (e.g, for public works) may be a bad idea for one reason or another, but they do in fact provide jobs. More importantly in terms of the decisions actually being made by state policymakers in the current budgetary climate, reductions in state spending that involve layoffs of public employees have become a major drag on the national economy. You can argue (as many conservative politicians do) that public-sector jobs, or private-sector jobs directly created by government spending, are not as “good” or even as “real” as private-sector jobs generated without public investments, but you cannot pretend they don’t exist.

So in practice, state policymakers who deliberately cut public-sector employment or other forms of public investment in order to pursue vague notions of supply-side stimulus, or poorly targeted race-to-the-bottom corporate subsidies, are usually trading tangible jobs (not to mention public services) for fairy dust. Bad as federal-level conservative economic policies often look to progressives, they make vastly greater sense than their mini-me equivalents in state capitals.