Henry A. Giroux — Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies

Right-wing calls for austerity suggest more than a market-driven desire to punish the poor, working class and middle class by distributing wealth upwards to the 1%. They also point to a politics of disposability in which the social provisions, public spheres and institutions that nourish democratic values and social relations are being dismantled, including public and higher education. Neoliberal austerity policies embody an ideology that produces both zones of abandonment and forms of social and civil death while also infusing society with a culture of increasing hardship. It also makes clear that the weapons of class warfare do not reside only in oppressive modes of state terrorism such as the militarization of the police, but also in policies that inflict misery, immiseration and suffering on the vast majority of the population.…

Truthout | News Analysis
Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies
Henry A. Giroux | McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

What American Universities Can Learn From The Cooperative Mondragon University

Davydd Greenwood, an anthropologist at Cornell, puts it this way:

 What is being done now is to collapse education into vocational training, teaching into a fee-for-service form of employment, and research only as a profit generator. The faculty are being put on term contracts and administration is now a career with big salaries and great distance from the places where value is actually being produced. The overall result is the consolidation of a two class system: elite education for economic and political elites and vocational education for the masses.

There are better ways. Mondragon is one of them.

SolidarityEconomy.net
What American Universities Can Learn From The Cooperative Mondragon University
Editors

Miles Corak — Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility

The summer issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives will feature a collection of articles on inequality and the top 1%, some of which are now being circulated by the authors.

The paper by Tony Atkinson and his coauthors, “The top 1 percent in international and historical perspective,” is available in this post, and Greg Mankiw has posted a copy of his paper, “Defending the One Percent“, on his blog.

My contribution to the collection is based on the notion that the inequality literature has paid little attention to the intergenerational consequences of increasing top income shares, and it can be read as a counterpoint to Mankiw’s piece, or at least to his claim that inequality of opportunity is not a reason to worry about the top 1%.

Here is the close to final draft: Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility. But if you just want a quick read, an excerpt from the conclusion follows. Either way, feedback is—as always—welcomed.

Economics for Public Policy
Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility
Miles Corak | Professor of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa
(h/t Paul Krugman at The Conscience of a Liberal)

“Laws and government may be considered in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor and preserve for themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence”
—Adam Smith, Lectures On Jurisprudence, 1762-3; iv, 21-2, p. 208

This is what democracy is supposed to correct according to the myth. However, reading the Founding Fathers leads to the opposite viewpoint, which is why the US and other "liberal democracies" are actually republics. The result for the most part has been continuation of inequality due to the power and class structure. While some conventional economists are finally willing to talk about inequality, almost none of them are willing yet to talk about power.

Christian Science Monitor — Researchers argue Britain now has seven distinct classes

'New affluent workers' and 'precariats'? Britain's classes get makeover (via The Christian Science Monitor)

Copyright ImageClick to View A new survey of 166,000 Britons found that instead of the three traditional classes – upper, middle, and working – that are prominent in shows like 'Downton Abbey,' shown at left, now there are seven distinct strata.(PBS/AP) Britain's infamous class system has become…