General Mills Retreats an Inch on Its Mandatory Arbitration Overreach
Law Professor Adam Levitin argued that we peons should make counterclaims against General Mills’ overreaching arbitration policy.
Read more...Category Archives: Social policy
When Will Big Business Figure Out That the Education-Industrial Complex is Eating its Lunch?
Yves here. This post points out how parochial Corporate America has become in its looting. Look at how some not-very-large changes in approach would leave those fat cats much better off! And they wouldn’t be so terrible for the rest of us either.
Read more...How the Junk Food Industry Preys on the Young in Emerging Markets
How the junk food industry tries to get its way with young children in India.
Read more...Don Quijones: “Uncreative” Destruction – The Troika’s Hostile Takeover of Europe
How the Troika is overriding national constitutions and popular will to strip-mine Europe’s periphery countries on behalf of banks.
Read more...University of Southern Maine, Facing Organized Opposition from Students and Faculty, Rescinds Proposed Cuts
By Lambert Strether of Corrente. Good news, which I hope travels fast to other universities. Maine Sunday Telegram: University of Southern Maine President Theodora Kalikow on Friday rescinded the 12 faculty layoffs that had prompted weeks of protests, saying she’s open to alternative plans for finding up to $14 million in cuts. (I know! I […]
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Europe’s Latest Policy on Irish and Greek Banking losses – Two Swindles Too Similar for Comfort
The Irish and the Greeks are, in many ways, very different people. And yet, caught up in the Euro Crisis, their fortunes have become too close for comfort.
Read more...Can Protests at the University of Southern Maine Be the Flashpoint That Reverses the Mallification of American Higher Education?
University administrators want to corporatize higher education by making going to college more like going to the mall. And they’re using shock doctrine tactics to get their way.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Think Big, Think Bold – A Green New Deal
Yves here. One of the common frustrations expressed by the NC commentariat is that we spend a lot of time on diagnosis and not as much on solutions. I actually don’t think our emphasis on forensics and analysis is misplaced. Too often, people are uncomfortable with examining deep-seated problems and thus rush to devise remedies that are incomplete or worse, counterproductive.
A second frustration, which I sympathize with, is that many of the solutions recommended by economists to our current problems (income disparity, high unemployment, increasing looting of the private sector and government) is based on restoring growth, which will make redistribution and other measures less contentious. Readers correctly point out that more growth is a 20th century remedy, when the 21st century is faces with global warming (meaning an need to start containing and better yet, reducing energy consumption) and resource constraints.
Yanis Varoufakis addresses both issues in his outline of what he calls a “Green New Deal”.
Read more...US University Science: The Shopping Mall Model
US universities resemble high-end shopping malls. They use nice buildings and good reputations to attract good students and good faculty. To pay for this, external funding – once viewed as a luxury – is a necessary condition for tenure and promotion. This column argues that this model emerged at the initiative of universities not the federal government. Today’s stress is the harvest of what universities and faculty sowed in the 1950s and the 1960s.
Read more...Columbia Tosses Out Star Faculty Researchers for Failing to Pay 80% of Their Own Way
From a reader: “two eminent professors with decades of serious work have been dumped unceremoniously by Columbia because they could no longer bring in the grant millions for the university business to extract rent from. This is Ivy-league neoliberalism at its worst thanks to the spineless Democrats/Obama White House allowing government science funding to get pummeled while Bush’s tax cuts are preserved. “
Read more...Bill Moyers and Ian Haney Lopez Discuss the Use of the Race Card in Politics
This Bill Moyers segment provides an in-depth discussion of race. Lopez focuses on how both parties use what he calls the racial dog whistle to mobilize voters.
Read more...When “Job Creators” Create Lousy Jobs
On the increased reliance on short term, out of state labor.
Read more...What the Modern World Owes Slavery (It’s More Than Back Wages)
It’s tempting to turn our eyes from how the economics of slavery operated, but that system represented a huge amount of what one would now call the capital assets of that era, and some of the ways in which slaves were exploited are not often recognized in modern accounts.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism?
Yves here. Trust me, you must read this post. In its entirety. Varoufakis discusses the operation of “liberal democracy” as opposed to “classical democracy,”. and argues that voter apathy is a feature, not a bug. But the real meat is in his discussion of how the economic rights of laborers has changed over time and how that has had profound implications for democracy.
Read more...Will a $10 Minimum Wage Get All Working Americans Out of Poverty?
Yves here. This Real News Network segment discusses what many readers know all too well, that even a $10 minimum wage fails to provide an adequate standard of living, particularly for parents.
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