North Carolina’s Kafkaesque war on the unemployed

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Something profoundly awful has seeped into the top strata of American society: Our nation’s corporate and political elites have developed an immunity to shame.

It has become morally acceptable in those lofty circles to enrich themselves while turning their backs on the rest of us. Even more damning, the power elites now feel ethically free to slash America’s tattered safety net, leaving more holes than net for the workaday majority of Americans who’ve been knocked down by an ongoing economic disaster created by these very elites.

Welcome to North Carolina, the latest state to flaunt its shame-resistant political leadership, which now consists of corporate-funded tea party extremists who loathe the very idea of a safety net. They’ve been gutting everything from their public schools to health care, and now they’ve turned on their own citizens who’re out of work. In a state with the fifth-highest jobless rate in the country and with no recovery in sight, the right-wing governor and legislature recently whacked weekly unemployment benefits by a third and cut the number of weeks people can receive this essential aid.

That official minginess automatically disqualified the state from getting $700 million a year for long-term jobless payments from the federal government. Yet Gov. Pat McCrory issued a cockamamie, Kafkaesque claim that the gut job ensures that “‘our citizens’ unemployment safety net is secure,” while providing “an economic climate that allows job creators to start hiring again.” Yeah, we’ll all hold our breath until those “job creators” get going.

If ignorance is bliss, McCrory must be ecstatic. Meanwhile, his shameless immorality has unleashed a growing storm of weekly demonstrations at the capital. For information, link to the North Carolina Justice Center: www.ncjustice.org.

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This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.