The refusal to provide Å“very minimal living standards” to people in need is Å“just pure savagery.”
Prominent American academic and antiwar activist Noam Chomsky has said that US lawmakersâ„¢ refusal to extend unemployment benefits is Å“pure savagery.”
“The refusal to provide very minimal living standards to people who are caught in this monstrosity — that’s just pure savagery,” Chomsky said during an interview with HuffPost Live. “There’s no other word for it.”
On December 28, 1.3 million Americans lost their unemployment benefits after Congress failed to extend an emergency federal program under which jobless American workers received unemployment insurance payments.
Meanwhile, US lawmakers are set to announce a deal on a new multi-year farm bill that would cut $9 billion in funding for the food stamp program over the next ten years.
The cuts are a compromise between nearly $40 billion in cuts to the program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a $4 billion reduction approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate. The SNAP provides food stamps for nearly 48 million Americans.
However, Chomsky says inequality in the US and the politiciansâ„¢ failure to address it is nothing new but the product of decades of economic policies pursued by US elites.
“The general and very severe problem of the economy that’s staring us in the face … that has nothing to do with bad apples in Congress,” he told HuffPost.
Chomsky also criticized the two major political parties in the US, saying Democratsâ„¢ policy agenda is dominated by corporate interests while citing conservative scholar Norm Ornstein to describe the Republican Party as a party Å“drifted off the spectrum.”
“It used to be said years ago that the United States is a one-party state — the business party — with two factions, Democrats and Republicans,” he said. “That’s no longer true. It’s still a one-party state — the business party — but now it has only one faction. And it’s not Democrats, it’s moderate Republicans. The so-called New Democrats, who are the dominant force in the Democratic Party, are pretty much what used to be moderate Republicans a couple of decades ago. And the rest of the Republican Party has just drifted off the spectrum.”
A recent Gallup poll has shown that a record 42 percent of Americans have identified themselves as independent and not affiliated with either of the two major political parties.
Another Gallup poll, released in October, also showed that 60 percent of Americans said their country needed a third major party because the Democratic and Republican parties do such a poor job that they cannot adequately represent the American people.
AN/ISH
With permission
Source: Press TV