Six Republican Senators unveiled their legislation yesterday to roll back the defense trigger from the debt limit deal, replacing the $600 billion in savings with other cuts. However, this is not a $600 billion deal; in fact, the Senators, led by John McCain, only delayed the first year of defense cuts at a cost of $109 billion. They achieved this through pay freezes and cuts to federal employees. Considering that members of the military are also federal employees, you’re basically sparing one set of federal employees for another.

Arizona Republicans are proposing a bill to strip public unions of collective bargaining rights and impose limits even more egregious than those adopted in Wisconsin. Even though it’s been strongly opposed elsewhere, it’s a strategy to defang unions and undermine political funding for the Democratic Party.

The President has a speech at this hour where he will call for the consolidation of several federal agencies to shrink the federal bureaucracy and save money, a return to the “age of austerity” Obama that has faded of late as the election nears and populism returns to the fore.

There is a depression going on in the public sector. When cops and firefighters and teachers and nurses lose their jobs, they lose purchasing power, the ability to hire private contractors or visit private businesses for the purchase of goods and services. Public employees don’t use a different currency; you cannot divorce them from the private sector.

The case, which the state Supreme Court threw out in a 4-3 ruling, included the participation of Michael Gableman, the Supreme Court justice who received thousands of dollars in free legal services from a high-powered conservative law firm in the state which frequently works on cases before the Court (in a fitting twist, Gableman secured the law firm’s services to defend him in an ethics case). In fact, Michael Best & Friedrich, the law firm in question, worked for the state and Walker’s administration in the case of the anti-union law. Gableman never recused himself from the case, and provided the deciding vote, overturning the ruling from a Dane County district court judge.

So let’s break this down. To pay for a tax cut that will hopefully increase consumer demand and help increase hiring, Republicans would – 1) fire hundreds of thousands of people, 2) freeze their pay (the opposite effect of a payroll tax cut, which operates as a wage increase), 3) put no-strings, volunteer peer pressure on millionaires to pay additional taxes (I’m sure there will be a high takeup for that), 4) means test a number of programs to ghetto-ize them as welfare, including unemployment benefits, which is particularly cruel, because once federal benefits kick in and you’ve been out of work 6 months, it doesn’t matter what you earned before, you’re in trouble.

As many as two million public sector workers are on strike against austerity and slashing pensions in Britain today. This is the biggest strike in Britain in 30 years, when the protests focused on another purveyor of austerity, Margaret Thatcher.

The Ohio campaign to defeat SB5, the anti-union bill, has really ramped up over the past couple weeks. And it turns out that when both sides get to make their arguments, the state of Ohio dislikes the stripping of collective bargaining rights and the right to strike, according to the latest polling.

Michael Bloomberg is trying to pull off a pretty neat trick. The billionaire mayor of New York City can blame his own police department for the growth of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which surged after incidents of police brutality and illegal arrests and will only continue to grow as his police continue to use nightsticks and pepper spray. But now, he’s claiming that the protests are costing municipal workers their jobs.

I’m a bit stunned by Ben Bernanke’s morning in America speech, so let me try to recover by looking at Wisconsin. Yesterday was the first day that elevated contributions to pensions and health care came out of the paychecks of public employees, as part of the anti-union bill. So protesters returned to the Capitol in Madison by the hundreds, chanting and demonstrating against the policy. After closing time, the Capitol Police struck back.