I was listening to NPR this morning and they had a brief report on
unemployment benefits paid by states. They had an economist from the
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on to describe the basic facts. Well,
NPR had a few quotes from the EPI guy to lay out the basic problem:
unemployment insurance in almost all states is woefully inadequate to
sustain people through times of unemployment, and very unequal from
state to state (it's especially bad in California, which ranks *last*
among all states, AND is a very expensive place to live). BUT, and
here's a key technique in a well-functioning propaganda system: when
it came to describing WHY this might be so, they essentially silenced
the EPI economist, and turned to one from the business-friendly
think-tank, the Brookings Institution, who basically said this was
because states want workers to look really hard to find work. In
other words, a non-explanation of the problem that somehow seems to
imply that it is the lazy workers who need to be prodded by scanty
benefits to find their next job. No mention of the demand by
BUSINESS that their employees be forced to depend on nobody but
BUSINESS for their welfare. That helps to make workers SUBSERVIENT TO
BUSINESS NEEDS. No mention of this very important relationship was
allowed to be heard.
This of course is quite typical with any number of topics: each topic
is treated *sui generis* and the common thread linking many of our
social problems --- the ineluctable GREED of BUSINESS --- is never
mentioned, and this makes it appear to people that instead of having
ONE basic problem, we have countless pain-in-the-ass problems that
have no common thread, thus making EVEN THINKING ABOUT A SOLUTION
difficult or impossible, and so people just TURN OFF and remain
disgusted --- at what they are not exactly sure.
The EPI report on unemployment, if you're interested, is at:
http://www.epinet.org/Issuebriefs/ib169.html
Apologies for the gratuitous ALL CAPS, but as one who has recently
found himself out of work, I felt I deserved the luxury.
Bill
