Michael Parenti Blog

Free-Market Medicine--A Personal Account by Michael Parenti

2012-01-23T18:25:00.000-08:00

Free-Market Medicine—A Personal Account
by Michael Parenti

When I recently went to Alta Bates hospital for surgery, I discovered that legal procedures take precedence over medical ones. I had to sign intimidating statements about financial counseling, indemnity, patient responsibilities, consent to treatment, use of electronic technologies, and the like.

One of these documents committed me to the following: “The hospital pathologist is hereby authorized to use his/her discretion in disposing of any member, organ, or other tissue removed from my person during the procedure.” Any member? Any organ?

The next day I returned for the actual operation. While playing Frank Sinatra recordings, the surgeon went to work cutting open several layers of my abdomen in order to secure my intestines with a permanent mesh implant. Afterward I spent two hours in the recovery room. “I feel like I’ve been in a knife fight,” I told one nurse. “It’s called surgery,” she explained.

Then, while still pumped up with anesthetics and medications, I was rolled out into the street. The street? Yes, some few hours after surgery they send you home. In countries that have socialized medicine (there I said it), a van might be waiting with trained personnel to help you to your abode.

Not so in free-market America. Your presurgery agreement specifies in boldface that you must have “a responsible adult acquaintance” (as opposed to an irresponsible teenage stranger) take you home in a private vehicle. I kept thinking, what happens to those unfortunates who have no one to bundle them away? Do they languish endlessly in the hospital driveway until the nasty weather finishes them off?

You are not allowed to call a taxi. Were a taxi driver to cause you any harm, you could hold the hospital legally responsible. Again it’s a matter of liability and lawyers, not health and doctors.

One of the two friends who helped me up the steps to my house then went off to Walgreen’s to buy the powerful antibiotics I had to take every four hours for two days. I dislike how antibiotics destroy the “good bacteria” that our bodies produce, and how they help create dangerous strains of super-resistant bacteria. I kept thinking of a recent finding: excessive reliance on medical drugs kills more Americans than all illegal narcotics combined.

So why did I have to take antibiotics? Because, as everyone kept telling me, hospitals are seriously unsafe places overrun with Staph infections and other super bugs. It’s a matter of self-protection.

Two days after surgery I noticed a dark red discoloration on my lower abdomen indicating internal bleeding. I was supposed to get a follow-up call from a nurse who would check on how I was doing. But the call might never come because the staff was planning a walkout. “We have no contract,” one of them had told me when I was in the recovery room. So now the nurses are on strike---and I’m left on my own to divine what my internal bleeding is all about. What fun.

Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. A nurse did call me despite the walkout. Yes, she said, it was internal bleeding, but it was to be expected. My surgeon called later in the day to confirm this opinion. Death was not yet knocking.

A few days later, there were massive nurses strikes on both coasts. Among other things, the nurses were complaining about “being disrespected by a corporate hospital culture that demands sacrifices from patients and those who provide their care, but pays executives millions of dollars.” (New York Times, 16 December 2011). One cold-blooded management negotiator was quoted as saying, “We have the money. We just don’t have the will to give it to you” (ibid.).

As for the doctors, both my surgeon and my general practitioner (GP) are among the victims, not the perpetrators, of today’s corporate medical system. My GP explained that it is an endless fight to get insurance companies to pay for services they supposedly cover. Feeling less like a doctor and more like a bill collector, my GP found he could no longer engage in endless telephone struggles with insurance companies.

There are 1,500 medical insurance companies in America, all madly dedicated to maximizing profits by increasing premiums and withholding payments. The medical industry in toto is the nation’s largest and most profitable business, with an annual health bill of about $1 trillion.

Along with the giant insurance and giant pharmaceutical companies, the greatest profiteers are the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), notorious for charging steep monthly payments while underpaying their staffs and requiring their doctors to spend less time with each patient, sometimes even withholding necessary treatment.

I am without private insurance. And my Medicare goes just so far. Like many other doctors, my GP no longer accepts Medicare. For a number of years now, Medicare payments to physicians have remained relatively unchanged while costs of running a practice (staff, office space, insurance) have steadily increased. So now my GP’s patients have to pay in full upon every visit—which is not always easy to do.

Our health system mirrors our class system. At the base of the pyramid are the very poor. Many of them suffer through long hours in emergency rooms only to be turned away with a useless or harmful prescription. No wonder “the United States has the worst record among industrialized nations in treating preventable deaths” (Healthcare-NOW! 1 December 2011).

Too often the very poor get no care at all. They simply die of whatever illness assails them because they cannot afford treatment. An acquaintance of mine told me how her mother died of AIDS because she could not afford the medications that might have kept her alive.

In Houston I once got talking with a limousine driver, a young African-American man, who remarked that both his parents had died of cancer without ever receiving any treatment. “They just died,” he said with a pain in his voice that I can still hear.

Living just above the poor in the class pyramid are the embattled middle class. They watch medical coverage disappear while paying out costly amounts to the profit-driven insurance companies. I was able to get surgery at Alta Bates only because I am old enough to have Medicare and have enough disposable income to meet the co-payment.

For my out-patient operation, the hospital charged Medicare $19,466. Of this, Medicare paid $2,527. And I was billed $644. The hospital then writes off the unpaid balance thus saving considerable sums in taxes (amounting to an indirect subsidy from the rest of us taxpayers). Had I no Medicare coverage, I would have had to pay the entire $19,466.

I was informed by the hospital that the $19,466 charge covers only hospital costs for equipment, technicians, supplies, and room. So besides the $644, I will have to pay for any pathologists, surgical assistants, and anesthesiologists who performed additional services. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

How much does my surgeon earn? Not much at all. He gets about $400 to $500 for everything, including my pre-op and post-op visits and the surgery itself, an exacting undertaking that requires skills of the highest sort. He also has to maintain insurance, an office, an assistant, and an increasing load of paperwork.

My surgeon pointed out to me, “If you ask people how much I make on an operation like yours, they will say $4000 to $5000, and be wrong by a factor of ten.” He noted that in a recent speech President Obama criticized a surgeon for charging $30,000 to replace a knee cap. “The surgeon gets a minute fraction of that amount,” my doctor pointed out.

To make matters worse, there is talk about cutting Medicare payments to physicians by 27 percent. If this happens, it is going to be increasingly difficult to find a surgeon who will take Medicare. Still worse, the private insurance companies will join in squeezing the physicians for still more profits.

I was able to meet my payment ($644) not only because my operation was heavily subsidized by Medicare but because it was a one-day “ambulatory surgery.” I don’t know how I would fare if I had to undergo prolonged and extremely costly treatment.

So much for life in the middle class. At the very top of the class pyramid are the 1%, those who don’t have to worry about any of this, the superrich who have money enough for all kinds of state-of-the-art treatments at the very finest therapeutic centers around the world, complete with luxury suites with gourmet menus.

Among the medically privileged are members of Congress and the U.S. president. They pay nothing. They are treated at top-grade facilities. They enjoy, how shall we put it, socialized medicine. No conservative lawmakers have held fast to their free-market principles by refusing to accept this publicly funded, medical treatment.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, cheerfully announced that medical care is not a human right; it should be “market determined just like food and shelter.” Nobody has a higher opinion of John Mackey than I, and I think he is a greed-driven, union-busting bloodsucker. Nevertheless I will give him credit for candidly admitting his dedication to a dehumanized profit pathology.

The U.S. medical system costs many times more than what is spent in socialized systems, but it delivers much less in the way of quality care and cure. That’s the way it is intended to be. The goal of any free-market service---be it utilities, housing, transportation, education, or health care---is not to maximize performance but to maximize profits often at the expense of performance.

If profits are high, then the system is working just fine---for the 1%. But for us 99%, the profit lust is itself the heart of the problem.

© Michael Parenti, 2011
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Michael Parenti’s recent books include: The Face of Imperialism (2011); God and His Demons ( 2010); Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2004). For further information, visit: www.MichaelParenti.org.

An Opinon About the Opinion-Makers by Michael Parenti

2012-01-02T21:20:00.000-08:00

Jill Pletcher and Mary Magnuson (two of my favorite FB people) were speculating as to what might be my opinion of Chris Hedges. I think Hedges makes a valuable contribution. He goes over issues and topics that some of us have dealt with for many years. It is familiar terrain but also nice to have a fresh verve injected into it, the enthusiasm of the recent convert. Plus he brings his own idiom and experience to it.

I differ from him in regard to his view (resembling Michael Moore's view) that capitalism "has lost its way." As that argument goes, earlier capitalism was okay but this corporate monster has become something that cannot be countenanced, etc. I agree of course that it is a corporate monster but I also think that earlier capitalism was pretty rotten in its own way: y'know, 8-year-old kids working 14-hour-days, widespread typhoid epidemics, massive underemployment, starvation wages, etc.

Perhaps Hedges and Moore are thinking about capitalism after WW II, with the postwar prosperity and "historical compromise" with labor. In that case, their argument is a little more understandable but it still does not hold, since even then the 1% was at war with the 99%, albeit with less of the systematic confidence and brutal persistence displayed today.

Also, Jill wrote, "Dr. Michael Parenti would wholeheartedly support Hedges comments on Yugoslavia." That surprised me. In Hedges' early book about war correspondence, as I recall, he supported the destructive war against Yugoslavia which broke that country into a cluster of shattered, right-wing, mini republics where everything is privatized and deregulated and (almost) everyone is poor. Hedges just couldn't stop demonizing the Serbs and Milosevic in that most ill-informed but de rigueur way that does shore up one's legitimacy with the liberal centrists.

Maybe Jill is referring to a more recent opinion of Hedges. I hear that some people on the left ,who stood shoulder to shoulder with NATO, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House (Clinton) in delivering death and destruction on Yugoslavia, now are having second thoughts. Maybe Hedges is one of them. I wonder how he stands on Libya.

In any case more important than what I think about this or that other left commentator is what do YOU think about what is being said. Fashioning a reasoned argument is always a superior path to political liberation (both mental and collective) than embracing the latest name as the authoritative source. I am happy to say that people like Jill and Mary keep all of us on our toes as they forge ahead, determined to make sense out of the madness.

Must We Adore Vaclav Havel? by Michael Parenti

2011-12-18T19:30:00.000-08:00

Vaclav Havel died recently and the mainstream media has been filled with adulatory obits. Here is something I wrote about him many years ago. It gives the reader a more substantive view of what Havel really stood for.

From Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds (1997) pp. 97-99:

Must We Adore Vaclav Havel? by Michael Parenti

No figure among the capitalist restorationists in the East has won more adulation from U.S. officials, media pundits, and academics than Vaclav Havel, a playwright who became the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia and later president of the Czech Republic. The many left-leaning people who also admire Havel seem to have overlooked some things about him: his reactionary religious obscurantism, his undemocratic suppression of leftist opponents, and his profound dedication to economic inequality and unrestrained free-market capitalism.

Raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a wealthy and fervently anticommunist family, Havel denounced democracy's "cult of objectivity and statistical average" and the idea that rational, collective social efforts should be applied to solving the environmental crisis. He called for a new breed of political leader who would rely less on "rational, cognitive thinking," show "humility in the face of the mysterious order of the Being," and "trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world." Apparently, this new breed of leader would be a superior elitist cogitator, not unlike Plato's philosopher, endowed with a "sense of transcendental responsibility" and "archetypal wisdom." Havel never explained how this transcendent archetypal wisdom would translate into actual policy decisions, and for whose benefit at whose expense.

Havel called for efforts to preserve the Christian family in the Christian nation. Presenting himself as a man of peace and stating that he would never sell arms to oppressive regimes, he sold weapons to the Philippines and the fascist regime in Thailand. In June 1994, General Pinochet, the man who butchered Chilean democracy, was reported to be arms shopping in Czechoslovakia - with no audible objections from Havel.

Havel joined wholeheartedly in George Bush's Gulf War, an enterprise that killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. In 1991, along with other [e]astern European pro-capitalist leaders, Havel voted with the United States to condemn human rights violations in Cuba. But he has never uttered a word of condemnation of rights violations in El Salvador, Columbia, Indonesia, or any other U.S. client state.

In 1992, while president of Czechoslovakia, Havel, the great democrat, demanded that parliament be suspended and he be allowed to rule by edict, the better to ram through free-market "reforms." That same year, he signed a law that made the advocacy of communism a felony with a penalty of up to eight years imprisonment. He claimed the Czech constitution required him to sign it. In fact, as he knew, the law violated the Charter of Human Rights which is incorporated into the Czech constitution. In any case, it did not require his signature to become law. in 1995, he supported and signed another undemocratic law barring communists and former communists from employment in public agencies.

The propagation of anticommunism has remained a top priority for Havel. He led "a frantic international campaign" to keep in operation two U.S.-financed, cold war radio stations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, so they could continue saturating Eastern Europe with their anticommunist propaganda.

Under Havel's government, a law was passed making it a crime to propagate national, religious, and CLASS hatred. In effect, criticisms of big moneyed interests were now illegal, being unjustifiably lumped with ethnic and religious bigotry. Havel's government warned labor unions not to involve themselves in politics. Some militant unions had their property taken from them and handed over to compliant company unions.

In 1995, Havel announced that the 'revolution' against communism would not be complete until everything was privatized. Havel's government liquidated the properties of the Socialist Union of Youth - which included camp sites, recreation halls, and cultural and scientific facilities for children - putting the properties under the management of five joint stock companies, at the expense of the youth who were left to roam the streets.

Under Czech privatization and "restitution" programs, factories, shops, estates, homes, and much of the public land was sold at bargain prices to foreign and domestic capitalists. In the Czech and Slovak republics, former aristocrats or their heirs were being given back all lands their families had held before 1918 under the Austro-Hungarian empire, dispossessing the previous occupants and sending many of them into destitution. Havel himself took personal ownership of public properties that had belonged to his family forty years before.

While presenting himself as a man dedicated to doing good for others, he did well for himself. For all these reasons some of us do not have warm fuzzy feelings toward Vaclav Havel.

-- Michael Parenti

Occupy America by Michael Parenti

2011-11-08T23:06:00.000-08:00

Occupy America by Michael Parenti

Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement spread across the United States to 70 major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar actions emerged in scores of other nations.

For the first two weeks, the corporate-owned mainstream media along with NPR did what they usually do with progressive protests: they ignored them. These were the same media that had given the Tea Party supporters saturation coverage for weeks on end, ordaining them “a major political force.”

The most common and effective mode of news repression is omission. By saying nothing or next to nothing about dissenting events, movements, candidates, or incidents, the media consign them to oblivion. When the Occupy movement spread across the country and could no longer be ignored, the media moved to the second manipulative method: trivialization and marginalization.

So we heard that the protestors were unclear about what they were protesting and they were “far removed from the mainstream.” Media cameras focused on the clown who danced on Wall Street in full-blown circus costume and the youths who pounded bongo drums: “a carnival atmosphere” “youngsters out on a spree,” with “no connection to the millions of middle Americans” who supposedly watched with puzzlement and alarm.

Such coverage, again, was in sharp contrast to the respectful reportage accorded the Tea Party. House Majority Leader, the reactionary Republican Eric Cantor, described the Occupy movement as “growing mobs.” This is the same Cantor who hailed the Tea Party as an unexcelled affirmation of democracy.

The big November 2 demonstration in Oakland that succeeded in closing the port was reported by many media outlets, almost all of whom focused on the violence against property committed by a few small groups. Many of those perpetrators were appearing for the first time at the Oakland site. Some were suspected of being undercover police provocateurs. Their actions seemed timed to overshadow the successful shutdown of the nation’s fifth largest port.

Time and again, the media made the protestors the issue rather than the things they were protesting. The occupiers were falsely described as hippie holdovers and mindless youthful activists. In fact, there was a wide range of ages, socio-ethnic backgrounds, and lifestyles, from homeless to well-paid professionals, along with substantial numbers of labor union members. Far from being a jumble of confused loudmouths prone to violence, they held general assemblies, organized themselves into committees, and systematically took care of encampment questions, food, security, and sanitation.

One unnoticed community protest was Occupy Walnut Creek. For those who don’t know, Walnut Creek is a comfortable conservative suburb in northern California (with no known record of revolutionary insurrections). Only one local TV station gave Occupy Walnut Creek brief attention, noting that about 400 people were participating, average age between 40 and 50, no clowns, no bongos. Participants admitted that they lived fairly prosperous lives but still felt a kinship with the millions of Americans who were enduring an economic battering. Here was a contingent of affluent but rebellious “middle Americans” yet Walnut Creek never got mentioned in the national media, as far as I know.

The Occupy movement has promulgated a variety of messages. With a daring plunge into class realities, the occupiers talk of the 1% who are exploiting the 99%, a brilliant propaganda formula, simple to use, yet saying so much, now widely embraced even by some media commentators. The protestors carried signs condemning the republic’s terrible underemployment and the empire’s endless wars, the environmental abuses perpetrated by giant corporations, the tax loopholes enjoyed by oil companies, the growing inequality of incomes, and the banksters and other gangsters who feed so lavishly from the public trough.

Some occupiers even denounced capitalism as a system and hailed socialism as a humane alternative. In all, the Occupy movement revealed an awareness of systemic politico-economic injustices not usually seen in U.S. protests. Remember, the initial and prime target was Wall Street, finance capital’s home base.

The mainstream news outlets not only control opinions but even more so opinion visibility, which in turn allows them to limit the parameters of public discourse. This makes it all the more imperative for ordinary people to join together in demonstrations, hoping thereby to maximize the visibility and impact of their opinions. The goal is to break through the near monopoly of conservative orthodoxy maintained by the “liberal” media.

So demonstrations are important. They have an energizing effect on would-be protestors, bringing together many who previously had thought themselves alone and voiceless. Demonstrations bring democracy into the streets. They highlight issues that have too long been buried. They mobilize numbers, giving a show of strength, reminding the plutocracy perched at the apex that the pyramid is rumbling.

But demonstrations should evolve into other forms of action. This has already been happening with the Occupy movement. It is more than a demonstration because its protestors did not go home at the end of the day. In substantial numbers they remained downtown, putting their bodies on the line, imposing a discomfort on officialdom just by their numbers and presence.

At a number of Occupy sites there have been civil disobedience actions, followed by arrests. In various cities the police have been unleashed with violent results that sometimes have backfired. In Oakland ex-Marine Scott Olsen was hit by a police teargas canister that busted his skull and left him hospitalized and unable to speak for a week. At best, he faces a long slow recovery. The day after Olsen was hit, hundreds of indignant new protestors joined the Occupy Oakland site. Police brutality incites a public reaction, often bringing more people out, just the opposite of what officials want.

Where does this movement go? What is to be done? The answers are already arising from the actions of the 99%:

--Discourage military recruitment and support conscientious objectors. Starve the empire of its legions. Organize massive tax resistance in protest of corrupt, wasteful, unlawful, and destructive Pentagon spending.

--Transfer funds from corporate banks to credit unions and community banks. Support programs that assist the unemployed and the dispossessed. It was Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s embattled finance minister who declared: “Salvate il popolo, non le banche” (“Save the people, not the banks”). It would be nice to hear such sentiments emanating from the U.S. Treasury Department or the White House.

--Coordinate actions with organized labor. Unions still are the 99%’s largest and best financed groups. Consider what was done in Oakland: occupiers joined with longshoremen, truckers, and other workers to close the port. Already there are plans for a general strike in various communities. Such actions improve greatly if organized labor is playing a role.

--We need new electoral strategies, a viable third party, proportional representation, and even a new Constitution, one that establishes firm rules for an egalitarian democracy and is not a rigmarole designed to protect the moneyed class. The call for a constitutional convention (a perfectly legitimate procedure under the present U.S. Constitution) seems long overdue.

--Perhaps most of all, we need ideological education regarding the relationship between wealth and power, the nature of capitalism, and the crimes of an unbridled profit-driven financial system. And again the occupiers seem to be moving in that direction: in early November 2011, people nationwide began gathering to join teach-ins on “How the 1% Crashed the Economy.”

We need to explicitly invite the African-American, Latino, Native-American, Arab/Persian-American, and Asian-American communities into the fight, reminding everyone that the Great Recession victimizes everyone but comes down especially hard on the ethnic poor.

We need to educate ourselves regarding the beneficial realities of publicly owned nonprofit utilities, publicly directed environmental protections, public nonprofit medical services and hospitals, public libraries, schools, colleges, housing, and transportation--all those things that work so well, better known in some quarters as socialism.

There is much to do. Still it is rather impressive how the battle is already being waged on so many fronts. Meanwhile the corporate media ignore the content of our protest while continuing to fulminate about the occupiers’ violent ways and lack of a precise agenda.

Do not for one moment think that the top policymakers and plutocrats don’t care what you think. That is the only thing about you that wins their concern. They don’t care about the quality of the air you breathe or the water you drink, or how happy or unhappy or stressed and unhealthy or poor you might be. But they do want to know your thoughts about public affairs, if only to get a handle on your mind. Every day they launch waves of disinformation to bloat your brains, from the Pentagon to Fox News without stint.

When the people liberate their own minds and take a hard clear look at what the 1% is doing and what the 99% should be doing, then serious stuff begins to happen. It is already happening. It may eventually fade away or it may create a new chapter in our history. Even if it does not achieve its major goals, the Occupy movement has already registered upon our rulers the anger and unhappiness of a populace betrayed.

Michael Parenti Debunks the New Wrold Order in Lecture Series on The Attack on Yugoslavia

2011-11-08T01:13:00.000-08:00

Dr. Parenti to Speak on Occupy Wall Street on the radio

2011-10-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

Sunday Oct. 3rd on the radio. Details available here:

http://www.kdvs.org/show-info/1838?date=2011-10-02

Lies, War and Empire Part 1

2011-10-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Michael Parenti's talk on Profit Pathology and its alternatives

2011-10-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

Combining thoughts on Imperialist Intervention and Class: Interview

2011-10-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

Michael Parenti's Amazon.com page

2011-09-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

Please visit Michael Parenti's Amazon.com page where many of his books (at least those still in print) are available!

http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Parenti/e/B000APNF70

Class Warfare Indeed! by Michael Parenti

2011-09-29T13:07:00.000-07:00

Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have been denouncing as “class warfare” any attempt at criticizing and restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial expropriation.

The moneyed class in this country has been doing class warfare on our heads and on those who came before us for more than two centuries. But when we point that out, when we use terms like class warfare, class conflict, and class struggle to describe the system of exploitation we live under—our indictments are dismissed out of hand and denounced as Marxist ideological ranting, foul and divisive.

Amanda Gilson put it perfectly in a posting on my Facebook page: “[T]he concept of ‘class warfare’ has been hi-jacked by the wrong class (the ruling class). The wealthy have been waging war silently and inconspicuously against the middle and the poor classes for decades! Now that the middle and poor classes have begun to fight back, it is like, the rich want to try to call foul---the game was fine when they were the only ones playing it.”

The reactionary rich always denied that they themselves were involved in class warfare. Indeed, they insisted no such thing existed in our harmonious prosperous society. Those of us who kept talking about the realities of class inequality and class exploitation were readily denounced. Such concepts were not tolerated and were dismissed as ideologically inspired.

In fact, class itself is something of a verboten word. In the mainstream media, in political life, and in academia, the use of the term “class” has long been frowned upon. You make your listeners uneasy (“Is the speaker a Marxist?”). If you talk about class exploitation and class inequity, you will likely not get far in your journalism career or in political life or in academia (especially in fields like political science and economics).

So instead of working class, we hear of “working families” or “blue collar” and “white collar employees”. Instead of lower class we hear of “inner city poor” and “low-income elderly.” Instead of the capitalist owning class, we hear of the “more affluent” or the “upper quintile.” Don’t take my word for it, just listen to any Obama speech. (Often Obama settles for an even more cozy and muted term: folks, as in “Folks are strugglin’ along.”)

“Class” is used with impunity and approval only when it has that magic neutralizing adjective “middle” attached to it. The middle class is an acceptable mainstream concept because it usually does not sharpen our sense of class struggle; it dilutes and muffles critical consciousness. If everyone in America is middle class (except for a few superrich and a minor stratum of very poor), there is little room for any awareness of class conflict.

That may be changing with the Great Recession and the sharp decline of the middle class (and decline of the more solvent elements of the working class). The concept of middle class no longer serves as a neutralizer when it itself becomes an undeniable victim.

“Class” is also allowed to be used with limited application when it is part of the holy trinity of race, gender, and class. Used in that way, it is reduced to a demographic trait related to life style, education level, and income level. In forty years of what was called “identity politics” and “culture wars,” class as a concept was reduced to something of secondary importance. All sorts of "leftists" told us how we needed to think anew, how we had to realize that class was not as important as race or gender or culture.

I was one of those who thought these various concepts should not be treated as being mutually exclusive of each other. In fact, they are interactive. Thus racism and sexism have always proved functional for class oppression. Furthermore, I pointed out (and continue to point out), that in the social sciences and among those who see class as just another component of “identity politics,” the concept of class is treated as nothing more than a set of demographic traits. But there is another definition of class that has been overlooked.

Class should also be seen as a social relationship relating to wealth and social power, involving a conflict of material interests between those who own and those who work for those who own. Without benefit of reason or research, this latter usage of class is often dismissed out of hand as “Marxist.” The narrow reductionist mainstream view of class keeps us from seeing the extent of economic inequality and the severity of class exploitation in society, allowing many researchers and political commentators to mistakenly assume that U.S. society has no deep class divisions or class conflicts of interest.

We should think of class not primarily as a demographic trait but as a relationship to the means of production, as a relationship to power and wealth. Class as in slaveholder and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker. Class as in class conflict and class warfare.

And who knows, once we learn to talk about the realities of class power, we are on our way to talking critically about capitalism, another verboten word in the public realm. And once we start a critical discourse about capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared to act against it and defend our own democratic and communal interests.

Connection to many of Dr. Parenti's articles on another site

2011-09-21T16:41:00.000-07:00

http://en.wordpress.com/tag/michael-parenti-on-dandelion-salad/

The Iraq War Is a Smashing Success by Michael Parenti

2011-09-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

A reader recently reported on my Facebook wall that President George Bush had admitted to singer Tony Bennett that the Iraq war had been a "mistake." I beg to differ.

The Iraq war has not been a mistake. There was a miscalculation, it being assumed that the US invasion would be quick, easy and dearly welcomed by appreciative Iraqis. Instead the US has faced a bitter, destructive, protracted and costly conflict. There was a "mistake" in terms of operational expectations but Bush achieved what he intended and Obama is faithfully carrying on with the mission. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld think tank, Project for a New American Century, had called for an invasion of Iraq over a year before 9/11. Iraq had to be taken out either with a quick easy war or a long tough one. In any case, the invasion and destruction of Iraq was not a "mistake."

The US destroyed a country that had the audacity to retain control of its own oil supply, kept its entire economy under state control (rather than private corporate ownership), and did not invite the IMF or the giant transnational corporations in. Iraq charted an independent course under a dictator who originally had served the CIA, and had destroyed the left progressive democracy that existed in Iraq since the 1958 revolution. But Saddam then retained control of the country's resources instead of throwing everything wide open to western investors.

Saddam also got out of line on oil quotas (wanting an equitable share of the international market). And he decided to drop the US dollar as the reserve currency and use the Euro instead. So he and his country have been correctly destroyed in keeping with the interests of the US-led global empire. Everything is now privatized, deregulated, devastated and poor--as with Yugoslavia and soon with Libya. Mission accomplished. Pace Tony. Read my book THE FACE OF IMPERIALISM if you ever find time.

Michael Parenti's own website online!

2011-09-16T23:54:00.000-07:00

http://michaelparenti.org/

Michael Parenti :: De moord op Julius Caesar - goddeau.com :: magazine over muziek en andere

2011-09-16T23:42:00.000-07:00

Michael Parenti :: De moord op Julius Caesar - goddeau.com :: magazine over muziek en andere

Michael Parenti has his own channel on Youtube!

2011-09-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

Please click the link below to find a great collection of Dr. Parenti's videos available in a single location on Youtubehttp://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelParentiOrg!

Michael Parenti on Venezuela

2011-09-16T15:51:00.000-07:00

The September 11 Orgy by Michael Parenti

2011-09-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

From Michael Parenti, 12 September 2011

For more than a week--and extending into September 12 and probably continuing a while longer-- the media have saturated the airwaves with 9/11 stories including sad tragic tales of friends of people who knew relatives who were lost or affected in some way by the terrible attacks of ten years ago. We kept hearing how we as a people and a nation "were never the same after 9/11." (So might as well go bomb Afghanistan for ten years and destroy Iraq and now Libya.)

Again and again we heard "What were you doing when you first heard the news?" "How did it make you feel to confront such a loss? "Do you still grieve for him or have you achieved closure?" "And what of that generation that was too young to remember 9/11? What are they thinking now?" and on and on, all day, all week.

The whole world is repeatedly expected to give sympathy and admiration to America the Great, the nation that sustained this tremendous 9/11 loss yet gathered itself together and met the enemy (whoever that might be). Overlooked in all this is the fact that other nations continue to experience equally horrible attacks, if not even more bloody and costly in lives than America's endlessly observed and mourned 9/11. And the US military is often the perpetrator.

Chile suffered a 9/11 of its own (literally September 11, 1973) when that country's democracy was smashed by a Chilean military trained, advised, directed, armed, and financed by the US Pentagon and CIA, with many thousands arrested, tortured, and executed over a period of years without stint. And there was the destruction of Yugoslavia by 78 days of US aerial attacks, economic sanctions, and US-financed secessionist wars. And now the thorough destruction of Iraq with over a million casualties, transforming it from the most prosperous country in the Middle East to one of the very poorest and most devastated in the world.

And what of the natural disasters: the tsunami that rocked Fukushima leaving over 20,000
dead or missing, with a nuclear disaster that some say is worse than Chernobyl--treated like just another disaster story. And earlier tsunamis and earthquakes and famines that have taken many thousands of lives in Southeast Asia, Haiti, Chile, and elsewhere. And what of Bhopal where a culpable, profiteering, criminally negligent Union Carbide corporation brought utter misery and death to hundreds of thousands of innocents.

As for our own 9/11, if the authorities really feel as deeply about it as they say, then why don't they launch an investigation of the whole tragedy (not that dog and pony 9/11 commission engineered by George W.) so that we might be able to answer some of the questions that still haunt. And while feeling the utmost compassion for our 9/11 losses, we need the US government and US media to show some awareness that we are not the only country on this planet, that there are other tragedies endured by other nations, often far worse than 9/11, often perpetrated by US imperialist authorities, the very same authorities that read mournful inspirational passages at Ground Zero.

Dr. Parenti discusses his book, Contrary Notions

2011-09-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

http://fora.tv/2008/01/17/Michael_Parenti_Discusses_Contrary_Notions

Find Michael Parenti's books on Amazon

2011-09-10T16:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Parenti/e

Search | IndieBound

2011-09-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.indiebound.org/hybrid?filter0=michael+parenti&x=0&y=0

TUC Radio: Newest Programs

2011-09-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.tucradio.org/parenti.html#Parenti

2011-09-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.houseofnubian.com/IBS/SimpleCat/Shelf/ASP/Hierarchy/010G.html

2011-09-10T15:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.epo.be/uitgeverij/boekinfo_auteur.php?isbn=9789064454752http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2997430557994363097

Conference with Michael Parenti; 14 Sept 10:00 - 15 Sept 16:00 Utah

2011-09-07T15:27:00.000-07:00

"What is Capitalism?" Conference with Michael Parenti

Utah Valley University Room SC213 A, 800 West University Parkway, Orem, UT

created by; Gregory Lucero for; Revolutionary Students Union

The Revolutionary Students Union along with The Utah Democracy Project, UVU Honors Program, Peace and Justice Studies, and the School for Humanities and Social Sciences will be hosting a conference on capitalism and the impact it has on various aspects of our life. Our key note speaker will be Michael Parenti who is a respected academic and commentator. He will be delivering a talk on Thursday called "Profit Pathology and Its Alternatives." We hope you'll join us for the discussion about capitalism. You can find the entire conference list below.

10:00-11:00 Can the World Survive?: Capitalism and the Environment
11:00-12:00 System of a Down Turn: The relationship between Capitalism and the Ressession

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-2:00 The High Cost of War: Capitalism and War Profiteering
2:00-3:00 Is Equality Under the Market Possible?: Capitalism and Social Justice
3:00-4:00 Investing in Poverty: Capitalism and the Developing World
4:00-6:00 End of Poverty

Thursday (Sept. 15)
10:00-11:15 Selling Education: How Does Capitalism Change the Education System?
11:30-12:45 Profit Pathology and Its Alternatives Michael Parenti

1:00-2:15 Lunch

2:30-3:45 The Price of Beauty: What are the Effects of Capitalism on Art

Interview conducted by Seigfried Barazov on The Face of Imperialism

2011-09-04T23:19:00.000-07:00

The Gangster Nature of the State --in 6 parts

2011-09-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

Capitalism's Self Inflicted Apocalypse

2011-09-04T18:07:00.000-07:00

How Wealth Creates Poverty 2007

2011-09-04T17:28:00.000-07:00

The Face of Imperialism-Michael Parenti- part 1

2011-09-04T16:09:00.000-07:00