“Around 60 percent of Harvard families pay an average of $12,000 per year.”
Lower on the same page:
“If your family income is less than $65,000, your parents pay nothing.
For families earning between $65,000 and $150,000, the expected contribution is between zero and 10 percent of your annual income.
Families earning more than $150,000 may still qualify for financial aid.
For more than 90 percent of American and international families, Harvard costs the same or less than the U.S. public universities.”
I’m afraid that there is only one group among whom economics brings blood lust, and it’s the people you’re describing. (edited here to clarify subject)
Amazingly, that’s the same group whose limited imaginations cause them to assume everyone else (but not them, no no no, it’s everyone else) is as lustful, selfish, duplicitous, mendacious, and selfish as they themselves are. Did I mention selfish?
Troll alert! Just keep on moving, nothing to see here!
(Random troll, off topic, talking about every other post but this one, except he didn’t mention cats, (strange), criticizing people for reading boing boing and here reading it (must be keeps coming back for the cat posts (No way to know, just guessing (Sorry for all the nested parenthesis!))))
I believe that I did say that only a few countries were unaffected by the enlightenment hence for most of western Europe they actually were affected and the stratification was partly or even mostly broken down. Your mention of the French revolution was exactly my point, the French threw off the old order. Rome was great if you were a citizen, otherwise you were probably a slave in a culture who reveled in slavery. The overall point was that from Roman imperial slavery the melt was slow though picked up at a few points to what we have now, but unfortunately we may have passed the high water mark and may be on a downward path.
Not to undermine your main point, but isn’t this what you get today?
Isn’t this the reason that independents are irrelevant? Which then means that you must align yourself to the republican or democratic platform if you even want to dream of getting elected?
No. The point I’m making is that even there, the wealth of the 1% is ultimately used to maintain the social order that secures and maintains their grossly inequitable economic stature.
Providing reduced costs for the elite education of a few peasants does nothing to challenge the mythical notion that the U.S. is a meritocracy, let alone help to effectively correct the social order. Instead, it enables the primary beneficiaries of a rigged system, and their sycophants, to point to those few lucky peasants as further “evidence” that the U.S. is a meritocracy (“If they made it, you can too!” etc., ad nauseam). It also allows for guilt reduction among the obscenely wealthy, allowing those with some shred of conscience to think that they and their beloved alma mater have at least let a few scraps fall off the table into the ever-hungry mouths of the scrabbling hordes below.
Well, you should understand that in practice the Zapatistas are not taking anymore responsability of their community than they were before the uprising. which is to say, the people involved have always taken care of their community even before there was any modern day Zapatistas to speak of.
The disenfranchisement of the Indigenous people of Mexico has always been at the core of their fight, meaning their fight was, in a sense, about having the goverment acknowledge them as Mexicans who would want to engage with the modern world in a meaningful sense and not as a demographic to be isolated and then ignored.
So, they’re still ignored, and they’re organizing themselves and taking care of themselves as they’ve always had to. Which is a long post to say that they never actually had to tell the goverment to fuck off in order to organize, they did it to be recognized.
If you want to see what happens when the goverment gets told to fuck off, a good example would be the vigilante situation in Michoacan.
But with both zapatistas and vigilantes, its never really been about political power, not for the masses being mobilized anyway, but about security.
So taking about the USA now, its pretty clear that an armed uprising (which is what the zapatistas had to do to get started) is a bad idea so I wouldn’t suggest taking your cues from them anyway.
I’m dissatisfied with this expression: The lesser of two evils.
If group A is evil, and group B is evil as well, and we know they will both continue to be evil for the foreseeable future, can one of them be lesser, given that neither group will ever be any less evil than they are now?
That is to say, isn’t the Democratic “progressive social stance” just a carrot on a stick?
This comes to mind especially since social acceptance of gays and minorities are not being led by policies enacted by this group as far as I am aware.
If any political group wants to get the “gay marriage acceptance” merit badge (Yes, I’m aware that the boy scouts are, umm… Nevermind!) then they’re all too late since the gay rights activist groups are the ones doing the heavy lifting, and gay people themselves are showing themselves for what they are, people, and this is what is making acceptance happen. Stopping, strike that, delaying this from being codified into law is about all that bigots can do now.
Which is to say that seems to me that calling one group less evil than the other doesn’t do anything but perpetuate the evilness of that group.
That’s a nice little logical construct you’ve got there. Evidence of top 1% advantages is, obviously, damning in the extreme. But! Any evidence of opportunities available to those not in the top 1% is equally as damning – it’s all there only to serve as a talking point for the “primary beneficiaries” and their “sycophants.”
I’ll take a “No True Scotsman” fallacy for $200, Alex.
Incidentally, if 60% of students at Harvard are paying $12,000 or less per year, their household income averages to about $120K. Certainly high – top 15% of US households – but nowhere near the income levels of the top 1%.
If the inherited wealth isn’t generating income, does it figure in the discussion at all?
Unless you’re thinking of a scenario where the inherited wealth is being used as an income reserve of a sort, to be partly liquidated as the need arises. I don’t know how significant such events would be in terms of skewing a group’s household income statistics – presumably that would heavily depend on the frequency of such events – but this is also decidedly self-limiting, as the reserve can only diminish over time.
Obviously. I dare disagree with you, thus I must be an Agent of The Oppressors ™. Come back when you have something more relevant than ad hominems to contribute to the discussion.
