The mean team.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist

The new slogan of the rightwing nuts is "Come on team, let's get mean!"

They're pumping up Team GOP to pound the bejeezus out of America's millions of unemployed workers. Far from a game, this is real, and it's a moral abomination.

I've been unemployed before, and I can tell you it's a misery--all the more so today, when there are far more people out of work than there are job openings. This leaves millions of our fellow Americans mired in the debilitating misery of long-term unemployment.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But that's not miserable enough for a feral breed of Ayn Randian zealots who are punishing the jobless for ... well, for their joblessness. In this perverse universe, unemployment benefits and other poverty-prevention programs are sapping our nation's vitality by allowing "moochers" to live the life of Riley.

The GOP's budget demigod in the U.S. House, Representative Paul Ryan, expressed this dogma in a fanciful homily deriding America's safety net as "a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency." This from a guy who has spent practically all of his adult life in the sweet-swaying hammock of Congressional privilege, presently drawing $174,000 a year from Old Uncle Sugar.

As ridiculous and just plain mean as this attitude is, it plays well in the insanity that now defines the debate in Republican primary elections. And many states are succumbing to this pound-the-poor screed by frenetically slashing unemployment benefits.

Behind this faux-philosophical push are the smiling barons of corporate America. Without jobless payments, you see, desperate millions will be forced into whatever low-wage, no-benefit, dead-end jobs the barons design.

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, they feel free to slash America's already tattered safety net, leaving more holes than net for the workaday majority of Americans.

For a look at how shameful these privileged powers have become, go no further than North Carolina. Until...