Elites Waging Brutal Class War in America - Noam Chomsky

The business classes are very class-conscious—they’re fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition.

The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run society, more so than others. The business classes are very class-conscious—they’re fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition.

That’s why we have a sequester over the deficit and not over jobs, which is what really matters to the population. But it doesn’t matter to the banks, so the heck with it. It also illustrates the consider- able shredding of the whole system of democracy.

If you care about other people, that’s now a very dangerous idea.  The mantra is that you should become rich, but you shouldn’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that. In the United States, that’s called “libertarian” for some wild reason. I mean, it’s actually highly authoritarian.

The bottom 70% or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.  It’s not a big secret. Republicans try really hard to prevent people from voting, because the more people that vote, the more trouble they are in.

Private-sector unionization is very low, partly because, since Reagan, government has pretty much told employers, “You know you can violate the laws, and we’re not going to do anything about it.” Under Clinton, NAFTA offered a method for employers to illegally undermine labor organizing by threatening to move enterprises to Mexico.

When Obama declares a pay freeze for federal workers, that’s actually a tax on federal workers. It comes to the same thing, and, of course, this is right at the time we say that we can’t raise taxes on the very rich.

Take the last tax agreement where the Republicans claimed, “We already gave up tax increases.” Take a look at what happened. Raising the payroll tax, which is a tax on working people, is much more of a tax increase than raising taxes on the super-rich.

The full article is available here

Money, Needs and Resources - Miki Kashtan

Privilege works in part by masking the needs of others and habituating some segment of the population to having some of their needs met at the expense of others without even knowing this is so.

Every form of social organization includes in it implicit (or explicit) decisions about whose needs are prioritized, which needs are recognized and valued, and how resources are allocated towards meeting such needs.

Western economic theories resolve the question by not addressing it, or by assuming, implicitly, that the function of the system is to use the mechanisms of the market to meet pre-existing needs. We regularly reduce the question of whether or not human needs can be met to an empirical matter of market supply and demand.

Allocating resources on the basis of output equity is the method least tied to empathy. It’s a way of obscuring from view the fact that having fewer resources means we are less likely to be able to contribute, which means we receive less and continue to have our needs unmet. We have created a cycle which reinforces patterns of economic inequality while making them appear to be based on a just distribution. One result of such a system is insensitivity to others’ needs, and an overall decrease in empathy.

Privilege works in part by masking the needs of others and habituating some segment of the population to having some of their needs met at the expense of others without even knowing this is so. In particular, many people with privilege protect themselves from recognizing the effects of their privilege on others by attributing others’ suffering to their own actions. Thus the often-repeated talking point that people are poor because of not working hard enough.

Indeed, research indicates that people with lower income score better on measures of empathy than people of higher means. It is one thing to cultivate an abstract recognition that others have needs. It is a whole other matter for all of us who have access to privilege to give attention and consideration to how we might change our daily actions in order to be more responsive to others’ needs.

The full article is available here

ACA Hysteria: Don't Believe Canceled Insurance Hype - Michael Hiltzijk

It's time to tamp down the breathless indignation about these health plan cancellations.

Affordable Care Act critics (as well as governmentphobic corporate propagandists) are crying wolf, using the cancellation letters millions of Americans are receiving from their health insurers, informing them that their health plans won't conform to the new federal standards for health coverage as of Jan. 1.

Back in March, Consumer Reports published a study of many of these plans and placed them in a special category: "junk health insurance." Some plans, the magazine declared, may be worse than none at all.

It's time to tamp down the breathless indignation about these health plan cancellations. Many of the departing plans are being outlawed for good reason, and many of the customers losing them have no idea how much financial exposure they were saddled with in the old days. That's the real scandal in American health insurance, and the Affordable Care Act is designed, rightly, to fix it.

The full article is available here