For The Rich, Healthcare Is A Social Right

The Article: Health care is a social right, not a privilege for the rich by Jerry White in the World Socialist Web Site.

The Text: Last week’s three-day argument before the US Supreme Court on the Obama administration’s health care law was a demonstration of right-wing, pro-corporate politics on both sides of the official “debate.” Whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, all the big business politicians uphold the interests of profit-driven medicine, including the drug monopolies and giant insurance companies.

The Obama administration defended its reactionary “individual mandate” penalizing what it called “free riders,” i.e., low-paid workers who must resort to using emergency rooms because they cannot afford health insurance, and presented the new law as vital to cutting costs for both corporations and the government. One of its allies in the liberal wing of the high court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, made the revealing comment that the goal of the law was “to preserve a role for the private sector, for the private insurers” in the health care system.

The right-wing opponents of the Obama health care reform portrayed the latter as a “big government” social welfare scheme, and even, farcically, as a step towards socialized medicine. Their allies in the right wing of the Supreme Court suggested, particularly in their comments during the third day of argument, that they might use the case as an opportunity to attack the constitutionality of long-established social programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and even Social Security.

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Political Language: When Lies Become Truth

This is especially the case in election season.

Being A Woman In Pakistan

The Article: To Be a Woman in Pakistan: Six Stories of Abuse, Shame, and Survival by Zara Jamal in The Atlantic.

The Text: According to a 2011 poll of experts by the Thomson Reuters Foundation Poll, Pakistan is the third most dangerous country for women in the world. It cited the more than 1,000 women and girls murdered in “honor killings” every year and reported that 90 percent of Pakistani women suffer from domestic violence.

Westerners usually associate the plight of Pakistani women with religious oppression, but the reality is far more complicated. A certain mentality is deeply ingrained in strictly patriarchal societies like Pakistan. Poor and uneducated women must struggle daily for basic rights, recognition, and respect. They must live in a culture that defines them by the male figures in their lives, even though these women are often the breadwinners for their families.

Quietly, slowly, in piecemeal legal reforms, female empowerment is coming in Pakistan. You meet inspiring women daily here. Sympathetic employers sometimes give protection and assistance, as do other women who’ve fared better. NGOs and charitable organizations try to help empower women, but not all women take advantage of these resources. They fear their husbands, attracting unwanted attention, somehow hurting the honor of their families, or, often, they simply do not know that help exists. With female literacy at 36%, many women are too uneducated to know their rights.

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Abraham Lincoln On Corporations

Man had quite a few things right.

Is Democracy An Illusion?

The Article: What if democracy is just an illusion? by John Stoehr in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: Karl Marx never visited the United States, but he nevertheless understood the country, because he understood capitalism. As you know, there’s no American ideology that’s mightier than capitalism. Equality, justice and the rule of law are nice and all, but money talks.

In their 1846 book The German Ideology, Marx and co-author Frederick Engels took a look at human history and made a plain but controversial observation. In any given historical period, the ideas that people generally think are the best and most important ideas are usually the ideas of the people in charge. If you have a lot of money and own a lot of property, then you have the power to propagandise your worldview and you have incentive to avoid appearing as if you’re propagandising your worldview. Or, as Marx and Engels would put it: The ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.

The ideas of the one per cent become the dominant ideas because the one per cent convinces the 99 per cent that its ideas are the only rational and universally valid ideas. Consider free-market capitalism. The idea says that growth provides prosperity to all, that government governs best when it governs least, so there’s no need to discuss the redistribution of wealth. That’s neoliberalism and that idea has been the only acceptable economic policy since the Clinton era. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was its greatest champion. After the collapse of the housing market, he said he was dead wrong. Even so, the idea remains dominant. Why? Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but the ruling class happens to make a lot of money from a free market.

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