End-of-week news snippets about matters ranging from gender to race to moral analysis of the economic priorities of the American (and global) economies:
Astra Taylor, The Nation, on the gendering of the Internet:
Not surprisingly, then, well-off white men are wildly overrepresented both in the tech industry and online.
At Salon, David Daley talks to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. He asks,
The economy only gets tougher, inequality only worsens, and the response of white men in the South is to back the party of the 1 percent. Is it race? Gender? Fear?
Carter replies:
No, it’s race. It’s race.
Rachel Maddow on the years and years of white Southern backlash to the 1964 Civil Rights act and the 1965 Voting Rights act, and on the moral arc of history (video link):
It is one thing to tell the story of the people who were right. Part of understanding why it is such a big deal that they were right is remembering who was wrong. We forget to remember who was wrong, not jut who was right.
Paul Krugman, New York Times, lesson of Obamacare:
There’s an extraordinary ugliness of spirit abroad in today’s America, which health reform has brought out into the open. And that revelation, not reform itself — which is going pretty well — is the real Obamacare nightmare.
Steve Benen at the Maddow Blog reporting on what Jonathan Gruber recently said about the refusal of a number of states — many of them in the South — to permit Medicaid to be expanded and healthcare provided for millions of poor citizens under the Affordable Care Act
The economist [Jonathan Gruber] who helped design the Romney and Obama health care plans made a powerful condemnation of Republican opposition to Medicaid expansion: "It really is just almost awesome in its evilness."
Peter Z. Scheer at Truthdig on what the GOP Congress accomplished all in one day's work the past week:
Claiming to stand for "working families," Republicans in Congress voted down measures that would increase the minimum wage, protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination, broaden equal pay guarantees for women, and finally do something about mine safety four years after the Upper Big Branch disaster.
Josh Israel at Think Progress on who's behind the claim of some women that it's no big deal when women are paid less than me for equal work:
A ThinkProgress review of the most vociferous critics found that many had one thing in common: they work for organizations that have received significant funding from billionaire anti-government activists Charles and David Koch and their complex funding network.
Henri A. Giroux at Truthout on the neoliberal world of "disposability" (of everyone other than the 1%) that elites are in the process of building for all of us now:
These zones of hardship and terminal exclusion constitute a hallmark signature and intensification of a neoliberal politics of disposability that is relentless in the material and symbolic violence it wages against the 99% for the benefit of the new financial elite.
The graphic is from the Facebook page for Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book Half the Sky.
