Jordan Barab at Firedoglake has a compelling post entitled “America’s Public Employees: Live Like Slaves, Die Like Dogs” in which Mitch Daniels gets special mention for dissolving public employee collective bargaining rights as one of his first acts as Governor.

Barab describes what these folks do for us:

But why should public employees have the same rights that private sector employees have? Aren’t they pretty much just bureaucrats who work in nice clean offices with cushy benefits?

Hardly.

I ran the health and safety program for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) for 16 years, which means I became quite knowledgeable about what public employees actually do every day. And most of it ain’t pretty (nor is it well paying, especially where there’s no union): wading knee-deep through asphyxiating raw sewage in rat-infested sewers and wastewater treatment plants; taking care of our mentally ill in understaffed, under equipped, overcrowded violent institutions, teaching and driving buses in underfunded, crumbling inner-city schools; guarding the imprisoned refuse of society that most people didn’t even want to think about in understaffed, overcrowded prisons; laboring on the roads in the dead of night, mere inches away from speeding, hostile drivers; dealing with angry social service clients in understaffed, under funded agencies; dealing with the parents of abused children or inspecting housing in neighborhoods that armed police are reluctant to enter; taking care of this society’s poorest, sickest populations in understaffed, overcrowded public hospitals, — in other words, doing the invisible jobs that this society demands to maintain the comfortable style of living that most of us take for granted.

Barab then goes on to tell us why we should care, describing the “liberal” reaction to the New York City transit strike where many supported the strikers “in principle” but were nonetheless put out by having to be inconvenienced during the Christmas season. In addition, there was the resentment that organized public employees often have better pay and benefits than many public sector employees who are “better educated.”

People fell into the trap of assuming that because most workers these days get less than the transit workers in terms of pay and benefits (thanks Wal-Mart), that the transit workers should face reality, settle for less and just be happy they still have jobs. But they forget the important lesson of this globalized world: in a race to the bottom, there’s no finish line.

Tom Coyne has an AP article entitled “Arguments filed in Toll Road fight.” It more or less summarizes issues that had already been raised.

The plaintiffs argue that Articles 10 & 11 of Indiana’s Constitution were designed to prevent this sort of public/private partnership involved in this case.

The defendants want Judge Scopelitis to impose a $3.8 billion bond. To receive that sort of order, the defendants would have had to convince the Judge that the Indiana Finance Authority, which isn’t, strictly speaking, a government entity, is covered by the public lawsuit statute, that the plaintiffs are unlikely to prevail on the merits, and that the defendants would suffer more from bond not being required than the plaintiffs would suffer from the bond having been required.

On the last point, the State is claiming it would lose $3.8 billion if the lawsuit is allowed to proceed and it’s deal with the foreign consortium falls through. The plaintiffs, however, contend that if the state keeps the Toll Road and applies the same toll increases it would allow the private operators, it could collect more than $11 billion over the next 75 years.

The lawsuit argues that the Indiana Constitution says any proceeds from the Toll Road privatization must be used to pay down state debt.

I’d love to dissect this a little more, but my baby daughter is busily trying to kill herself, and I’d better make sure she survives long enough to enjoy a future of paying high tolls to travel the roads of Indiana — perhaps even the roads of the United States. According to this article, the U.S. House Transportation Committee is looking to hold a lovefest with Governor Daniels in the guise of a committee hearing inviting him to speak about how he “addressed the infrastructure funding shortfall in [Indiana] through a creative new mechanism” and to look into whether such deals are the future of infrastructure financing.

Hot on the heels of the study finding that Hoosiers are getting fatter (and smoking more), the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an editorial criticizing cuts in funding for diabetes research.

The American Diabetes Association estimates that nearly 21 million Americans have diabetes, 6.2 million of whom don’t know it. More and more people are diagnosed with diabetes at younger ages – including many children. Diabetes is the only major disease with a death rate that has risen 22 percent since 1990.

Yet the federal government has decided this is a good time to cut the diabetes research budgets at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Given the massive strain that diabetes already places on American’s rickety health care system, it’s hard to imagine how anybody could think that cutting research budgets is going to save the federal government money.

The proposed cuts aren’t large, but because the federal government currently allocates only about a quarter of what it spends on cancer research to study diabetes, health care advocates say the cuts will be more keenly felt in research programs around the country.

. . .

Often described as a “lifestyle disease,” Type 2 diabetes is nearly always a consequence of obesity, lousy diets and physical inactivity that causes the body to stop producing the insulin that regulates blood sugar levels.

I believe this is what they call being penny-wise and pound-foolish. It will save us a bit of money right now, but given what the government ends up spending on treating citizens with diabetes, it will probably cost us more money in the long run.