John Van Hecke, Minnesota 2020
In short order, the General Assistance Medical Care (GAMC) program will expire and 32,000 aid recipients will be transferred to the Minnesota Care health insurance program because the Minnesota State House of Representatives failed to override Governor Tim Pawlenty's veto of the program extension. We knew this was coming. The final vote contained all the drama of, say, the tide receding.
What happened and who's responsible?
Robert Naiman, Common Dreams
Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Ken Mitchell
“The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.” — Noam Chomsky
David DeGraw, AmpedStatus
This is the second-part of a six-part report: The Rise of the Economic Elit
As a record number of US citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening; how did we get to this point?
The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on US workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970 - 2000. With the lion’s share of increased profits going to the CEOs, this pay ratio dramatically rose to $90 for CEOs to $1 for the average worker.
As ridiculous as that seems, an in-depth study in 2004 on the explosion of CEO pay revealed that, including stock options and other benefits, CEO pay is more accurately $500 to $1.
Related:

Robert Reich, Salon.com
I had dinner the other night with a Democratic pollster who told me Dems are heading toward next fall's mid-term elections with a serious enthusiasm gap: The Republican base is fired up. The Dem base is packing up.
The Dem base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on everything the Dem base cares about. For a year now it's been nothing but compromises, watered-down ideas, weakened provisions, wider loopholes, softened regulations.