Here I am at last week's Solidarity rally in downtown Asheville

A Facebook friend posted a link to an article that said the public sector is shedding jobs at an alarming rate. My friend, like many other Americans, thought that was a good thing.

Get rid of public jobs and your taxes go down, right? The private sector can pick up the services and then we don’t have to pay those high wages and benefits, plus it’s more efficient.

Only if you think Halliburton and the other no-bid contractors have saved us money in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Public sector jobs are jobs. If you fire public workers, you have that many more unemployed.

The only reason the right is attacking public workers is because they haven’t been able to bust those unions yet.

Fewer than 10 percent of private-sector employees are members of a union, and those who are enjoy a lot fewer benefits than they once did.  Meanwhile, their employers are raking in the money hand over fist.

When you privatize public services, the union workers lose their jobs and are replaced with people making a whole lot less money and often receiving few, if any, benefits. Meanwhile costs for the same services go up. There’s less oversight, which is just what the right wants.

The average public worker only has better benefits than the average private-sector employee because of the protection of the unions. Their salaries average about the same as private-sector workers — they used to average a lot less, but the private sector has lost a lot of ground since Reagan took office and this mad dash to privitization began.

Government is not bad. It is the most efficient provider of services such as police, fire and military protection, social services, roads and other infrastructure, education and more. Get rid of or privatize those services and you’ll get lower quality for a lot more money.

This sin’t about affordability; there’s plenty to go around — it’s just that most of it is being hoarded by the top 2 percent.

We weren’t paying attention as the private-sector unions were dismantled; we need to  now.

On Tuesday, the NC House of Representatives will vote on H115, the bill that hands over control of the health insurance exchange to Big Insurance and their allies. I’m still hoping it can be stopped, but there hasn’t been much attention paid by the media, even though we advocates have tried and tried to call attention to it. The Raleigh News & Observer did a story, but there has been nothing out here in the western end of the state.

There’s also a bill to deny low-interest student loans to community college students, who often attend community college for financial reasons. These are people who may already work for a living and are trying to train for a job that will support them better. Kids who go to private universities are more often from families with the money to afford college.

Another bill would take money away from public schools to pay for charter and private schools. A voucher for private school tuition just takes money from public schools that already are underfunded. It won’t improve education; in fact, it likely will make public education worse.

The legislature is ramming through all sorts of bad legislation in its first 100 days, hoping to change the state to a place where being poor is seen as a moral failure of some sort.

They believe government jobs should be cut, but those jobs are real jobs. To cut them means putting people out of work where they will collect unemployment compensation instead of paying taxes. That seems to be more expensive to me.

In fact, a lot of the social changes the right wants to make will cost taxpayers money or make things even harder on working-class  and poor Americans. Let’s say you cut money for free clinics, so people lose their access to care. It costs more than three times as much to treat them in the emergency room, and the care is less comprehensive. Remember, the emergency room only has to stabilize patients — to address the symptoms, not necessarily the cause.

If Planned Parenthood is cut, where do poor women go for annual checkups, contraceptives and prenatal care? It’s very likely that more babies will die from neglect than ever did from abortion at Planned Parenthood.

Even in Wisconsin, where the flap is all about the power of public employees to negotiate with the state, there are draconian measures in the bill to cut services and cut public jobs.

This is not about the budget at all; this is about whether the middle class even survives, both figuratively and literally.

Protests in Wisconsin have drawn tens of thousands, and sparked protests in cities nationwide.

I heard a great joke this morning: A corporate CEO, a Tea Party activist and a union representative are sitting at a table. In the middle is a plate with 12 cookies. The CEO reaches in and takes 11 of the cookies, then  turns to the Tea Party activist and says, “Watch out for that union guy; he’s about to take a piece of your cookie.”

It would be funnier of it weren’t so true. Right now, I see posts all over Facebook from friends who are fed up with the unions because of the abuses they’re suddenly hearing about.

This is the same thing the wealthy on the right did with health reform. They villify the Medicare system and other public and public-private hybrid systems around the world in an effort to make working people think any government involvement in health care would be a bad, bad, socialist, commie think to do.

What they don’t tell you is that our health system was rated 37th by the World Health Organization because so many poeople lack access to it. Our life expectancy is 19th in the world.

Now they’re doing it with unions. I noticed a couple of friends had a story about some kind of union “abuse” this morning, and I know it’s the same thing. They own so much of the media that it’s hard to get the word out that unions are the things that gave us weekends, 40-hour work weeks, AND access to health care through our jobs, at least until they began to be stripped of power.

That started with Ronald Reagan firing all the air-traffic controllers in the 1980s, stripping of them of the right to strike for better working conditions. At the newspaper where I worked at the time, all the “back shop” people — the ones who pasted up the paper and got it ready for printing — were firesd for striking. Years later, a court would reinstate them, but not with back pay.

Newspaper mogul Dean Singleton knew in 1985 that he could settle with the Teamsters Union and screw the rest of them. He was, and likely still is, very adept at union busting. Gannett, even though it didn’t have unions, was a good company to work for in 1986. People were treated pretty well so there would be no need for unions. That didn’t last. With no union to protect them, employees were asked to do more and more as their numbers decreased. In Asheville, about two-thirds of the employees of the Citizen-Times have been laid off in the last four years.

At the same time, unions in the private sector have become less and less powerful as employers like the Koch Brothers threated massive layoffs — or to move their entire operation to South America and lay everyone off — unless the unions capitulate to their demands.

Now they scream about how powerful the public unions are. Not so much as they used to be, but more than many private sector unions for hourly employees. In the 1950s through the 1970s, unions negotiated a living wage for people who worked. If you worked a full week, you made enough to live on and perhaps buy the products you made.

Reagan started the union-busting, and it has been very successful in the private sector. Now we have to defend the public employees’ unions so we can start to rebuild the private-sector unions.

Unions defend workers’ rights. They are not evil, they are essential.

We can’t let the right take away our rights with smear campaigns. When you see it, stand up for the unions. Stand strong. Don’t back down unless you want to go back to the days of the Industrial Revolution, before unions came to the defense of the workers.

I'm here with Doug Wingier, a longtime social activist.

Jobs, Planed Parenthood,living wages,  health reform — it’s all the same issue, really.

Big business wants to get rid of the unions so they don’t have to pay benefits or decent wages.  Planned Parenthood provides basic health care to millions of women across the country. It prevents many more infant deaths than it causes by keeping women healthy. I got my care there before I had insurance; I couldn’t have afforded it otherwise.

In North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield is trying to take control of the Health Benefits Exchange so it can minimize protections for the 1 million

Not a bad idea -- because it's pretty much the same thing mine said.

consumers who will have to buy from the exchange.

Bridgett McCurry was at the Planned Parenthood support rally Saturday in Asheville. I was at both that one and the Solidarity rally

The plan is to divide and conquer, as though human rights wasn’t running through all of this mess. We can’t let that happen. We all need to be at every rally hollering about all these issues.

I put on my old tie-dye shirt this morning so I can go to the solidarity rally downtown at noon.

We the people are being attacked on so many fronts it’s hard to know where to fight. The answer is we have to fight on all fronts and we have to be united.

Here in North Carolina, we don’t have the right of collective bargaining for public employees. I want things to move in the right direction in Wisconsin.

This is a “right-to-work” state, which means you really have no right to work. You can still be fired for being gay, or  or because the boss doesn’t ,like your face — or because you want to form a union.

For 30 years, big business and the politicians it owns have fought the unions, which are as important for organizing Democrats as the Koch Brothers and other fabulously wealthy business people are to the Republicans. If workers don’t have the union working for their interests, it’s easier to get people to vote against their own interests.

Unions in the private sector have been all but destroyed. Only 7 percent of workers belong to one.

Yes, they got corrupt at the top, but nowhere near as corrupt as Wall Street, and I don’t see that being busted up.

This is about taking power away from the people and consolidating it among only the wealthy. It is class warfare and it’s been going on since Ronald Reagan took office.

They say government is the problem, and it is for them. They don’t want anything interfering with their greed.