#élite

#Coronavirus travel bans force African #elites to rely on local healthcare
▻https://www.france24.com/en/20200404-coronavirus-african-elites-who-once-flew-abroad-now-face-local-he

https://s.france24.com/media/display/3b3864e4-75e1-11ea-b93f-005056bff430/w:1240/p:16x9/000_1Q648X.jpg

The coronavirus pandemic could narrow one gaping inequality in Africa, where some heads of state and other elite jet off to Europe or Asia for health care unavailable in their nations. As countries including their own impose dramatic travel restrictions, they might have to take their chances at home.

Comment ont fait l’#Allemagne et la #Corée_du_Sud pour éviter le cadenassage de la population et par conséquent l’effondrement productif ?

D’abord ce sont deux pays où le nombre de #lits de soin intensif est très élevé.

https://i.imgur.com/pF5XVU5.png

►https://www.latribune.fr/economie/france/covid-19-la-france-n-a-que-trois-lits-en-soins-intensifs-pour-1-000-habita

Probablement parce que les élites françaises (les hauts fonctionnaires, les corps) n’ont aucune #formation_scientifique (merci les Grandes Ecoles), l’#urgence de produire des #tests en masse n’est pas apparue ici. En Allemagne oui :

▻https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article206504969/Coronavirus-Fast-20-000-Infektionen-in-Deutschland.html

Pendant que la France lisait dans les entrailles de poulet, l’Allemagne pariait sur des tests en grand nombre permettant de conserver l’activité sociale du pays…

Elle pariait aussi sur la #réquisition d’un palais des congrès pour isoler les malades :
▻https://www.berlin.de/special/gesundheit-und-beauty/nachrichten/berlin/6114250-5504681-coronavirus-krankenhaus-auf-messegelaend.html

A nouveau, on ne peut que constater la pertinence de la politique de prévention opérée et la capacité de production qui va avec, et une recherche qui tourne. Or leur système idéologique est identique.

La médiocrité du personnel politique et de la haute fonction publique ?

« L’école, la caste, la tradition, avaient bâti autour d’eux un mur d’ignorance et d’erreur. » (L’Etrange Défaite, Marc Bloch).

La France paye le vieil héritage technocratique napoléonien qui tient les #élites éloignées de la #science et du #raisonnement.

▻https://twitter.com/Gjpvernant/status/1241136586454155264
#soins_intensifs #système_de_santé #hôpitaux #France #dépistage

ping @reka @fil @simplicissimus

Crédit de #recherche... #saupoudrer ou #concentrer dans les mains d’une #élite de chercheur·es ?

Je regroupe ici quelques liens que j’ai déjà mentionné sur seenthis, mais ça me sert à retrouver les éléments de réponse pour cette question précise qui est souvent posée...

Ce qui me fait réagir c’est notamment cette phrase

#Serge_Haroche, professeur honoraire au Collège de France : Il faut que le système gratifie ceux qui sont à la pointe de la recherche. Si les crédits sont saupoudrés sur l’ensemble du système, ça ne sera pas suffisant. La recherche est une activité élitiste, qui n’a rien à voir avec la démocratie. Il faut que le système prenne en compte cela.

▻http://www.sauvonsluniversite.fr/spip.php?article8673

Page wiki du personnage en question :

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Serge_Haroche_1_2012.jpg/240px-Serge_Haroche_1_2012.jpg

–----------

LES REPONSES :

1ère réponse de #François_Métivier
#François_Métivier sur le système de #production_scientifique optimale :

« Dans un système à productivité marginale décroissante (= où ça coûte de + en + cher de faire publier un chercheur), l’optimum c’est de diviser le budget également entre tous les chercheurs »

Deux leçons à tirer :
1. Fermons l’#ANR
2. Il faudrait faire confiance aux chercheurs sans s’embêter avec des #appels_à_projets

C’est dans cette vidéo : ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuOCfASFp7M

–---

2ème réponse...
Un article scientifique collectif :
Concentration of research funding leads to decreasing marginal returns

In most countries, basic research is supported by research councils that select, after peer review, the individuals or teams that are to receive funding. Unfortunately, the number of grants these research councils can allocate is not infinite and, in most cases, a minority of the researchers receive the majority of the funds. However, evidence as to whether this is an optimal way of distributing available funds is mixed. The purpose of this study is to measure the relation between the amount of funding provided to 12,720 researchers in Quebec over a fifteen year period (1998-2012) and their scientific output and impact from 2000 to 2013. Our results show that both in terms of the quantity of papers produced and of their scientific impact, the concentration of research funding in the hands of a so-called “elite” of researchers generally produces diminishing marginal returns. Also, we find that the most funded researchers do not stand out in terms of output and scientific impact.

►https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07396

#concentration #répartition #budget #crédit #efficacité #université #facs #savoirs #savoir #connaissances

Le plafond de classe dans les métiers culturels
▻http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Sam-Friedman-Daniel-Laurison-class-ceiling-Why-pays-privileged.html

À propos de : Sam Friedman et Daniel Laurison, The class ceiling : Why it pays to be privileged. Policy Press. Deux sociologues anglais mettent en lumière ce qu’ils appellent un plafond de classe à partir d’une enquête minutieuse dans les métiers culturels de Londres : une barrière à la mobilité liée à l’origine populaire des personnes qui investissent ces mondes.

#Société #élites #culture #Bourdieu
▻https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/docx/20200309_coulangeon.docx

Serfs of Academe

https://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/peterson_1-031220.jpg

Adjunct, a novel by Geoff Cebula, is a love letter to academia, a self-help book, a learned disquisition on an obscure genre of Italian film, and a surprisingly affecting satire-cum-horror-comedy. In other words, exactly the kind of strange, unlucrative, interdisciplinary work that university presses, if they take any risks at all, should exist to print. Given the parlous state of academic publishing—with Stanford University Press nearly shutting down and all but a few presses ordered to turn profits or else—it should perhaps come as no surprise that one of the best recent books on the contemporary university was instead self-published on Amazon. Cebula, a scholar of Slavic literature who finished his Ph.D. in 2016 and then taught in a variety of contingent positions, learned his lesson. Adjunct became the leading entry in the rapidly expanding genre of academic “quit-lit,” the lovelorn farewell letters from those who’ve broken up with the university for good. Rather than continue to try for a tenure-track teaching gig, Cebula’s moved on and is now studying law.

The novel’s heroine, Elena Malatesta, is an instructor of Italian at Bellwether College, an academically nondescript institution located somewhere in the northeast. Her teaching load—the number of officially designated “credit hours” per semester—has been reduced to just barely over half-time, allowing the college to offer minimum benefits even though her work seems to take up all of her day. Recently, the college has been advised to make still deeper cuts to the language departments, which are said to not only distract students but to actively harm them by inducing an interest in anything other than lucre. Elena responds with a mixture of paranoia and dark comedy: after the cuts there will be only so many jobs in languages left—maybe the Hindi teacher, anxious about her own position, is conspiring to bump her off? Then Elena had better launch a preemptive strike: this could be a “kill or be killed” situation.

Like a good slasher flick, Adjunct proceeds through misdirection and red herrings, pointing to one potential perp after another—does the department chair have a knife?—to keep the reader as anxious as Elena, while her colleagues, first to her delight and then alarm, begin disappearing. Conveniently, Elena’s own research centers on Italian giallo films, which combine elements of suspense and horror and are one of the cinematic sources for American classics like Halloween (1978), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Scream (1996). As she flees into the safe confines of her office hours—the attackers’ only fear seems to be endangering the college’s primary profit source, the students—she thinks of the films she has assigned to her class and the ways they mirror her own predicament. A giallo, Elena thinks, depicts a world where the “circumstances determining who would live or die were completely ridiculous,” a life of “pervasive contingency”—“contingent” being the most common term for part-time and contract-based academic labor. This is why horror, for Cebula, becomes the natural genre through which to depict the life of the contemporary adjunct, which is to say, the majority of academic workers today.

One suspects that Cebula’s inspiration for this lark came directly from genuine academic horror stories. Among the best known involves an adjunct at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh who taught French for twenty-five years, her salary never rising above $20,000, before dying nearly homeless in 2013 at the age of eighty-three, her classes cut, with no retirement benefits or health insurance. At San José State University in Silicon Valley, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, one English teacher lives out of her car, grading papers after dark by headlamp and keeping things neat so as to “avoid suspicion.” Another adjunct in an unidentified “large US city,” reports The Guardian, turned to sex work rather than lose her apartment.

Though these stories are extreme, they are illustrative of the current academic workplace. According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, 25 percent of part-time faculty nationally rely on public assistance programs. In 1969, 78 percent of instructional staff at US institutions of higher education were tenured or on the tenure track; today, after decades of institutional expansion amid stagnant or dwindling budgets, the figure is 33 percent. More than one million workers now serve as nonpermanent faculty in the US, constituting 50 percent of the instructional workforce at public Ph.D.-granting institutions, 56 percent at public masters degree–granting institutions, 62 percent at public bachelors degree–granting institutions, 83 percent at public community colleges, and 93 percent at for-profit institutions.

To account for these developments, some may look to the increasing age of retirement of tenure-track faculty, which now stands at well over seventy. But, anecdotally at least, the reason many tenured faculty wait so long to retire may be the knowledge that they will not be replaced—when a Victorian poetry professor calls it quits, so, at many institutions, does her entire subfield. Who wants to know they will be the last person to teach a seminar on Tennyson? Others will blame the explosion of nonacademic staff: between 1975 and 2005, the number of full-time faculty in US higher education increased by 51 percent, while the number of administrators increased by 85 percent and the number of nonmanagerial professional staff increased by 240 percent. Such criticism can easily become unfair, as when teachers resent other workers who have taken over some of their old tasks—in fact sparing them chores like advising or curricula development—or when they act as though the university could do without programs that have made possible greater openness (such as Title IX officers and support for first-generation students).

The clearest cause for the poor pay and job insecurity of today’s adjuncts is the decline in public support for higher education. Between 1990 and 2010, state investment per student dropped by 26 percent, even as costs per student increased. In most state budgets, “mandatory” spending for health care and K–12 schools steadily crowded out the single largest “discretionary” item, higher education. But if cuts in public support have been the clearest source of the crisis in academia, the reason the brunt of that crisis has fallen on adjuncts is a matter of quite specific power relations. Since the 1980s there has been a craze across the American workplace for cost-saving by “downsizing” management. But in private industry, there is strong evidence that initial cuts were rapidly followed by further hires, with the result that there were increases in both the relative number of managers and the pay they received, along with higher returns to shareholders—all paid for through reduced worker salaries and increased job insecurity.1

Although the evidence is less clear in the academy, an analogous process appears to have been at work. Just as business managers in private industry squeezed workers to satisfy ever more demanding shareholders, taking home a cut for themselves in the process, so university administrators have reduced teacher pay and increased job insecurity in an effort to make possible expansions in operations that typically resulted in yet more administrative and professional staff, and higher salaries for those who directed them. In this process, teachers, because of their commitment to their jobs and the relative nontransferability of their skills, were simply more exploitable than, say, financial compliance officers. Notably, between 1975 and 2005, the proportion of part-time administrators in higher education decreased from 4 percent to 3 percent, even as the proportion of part-time adjuncts exploded. As one college vice-president advised a group of adjuncts at a large community college in the 2000s (the specific details are left vague for fear of retaliation), “You should realize that you are not considered faculty, or even people. You are units of flexibility.”

This is a story common across the American economy since the 1980s, and one should remember that the squeeze is being felt not only in higher education. A number of studies advocate for a sense of solidarity between workers in the academy and in the larger economy. Joe Berry, in his landmark book on unionizing adjuncts, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower (2005), notes that the characteristics that might make academic workers appear out of place in traditional labor unions—their high levels of education and strong personal commitments to their jobs—can allow them, in a society where 65 percent of young adults have some college education, to serve as “prototypes for the new union members of the future.”

Raewyn Connell, an emerita professor of sociology at the University of Sydney and veteran union activist, makes a similar argument in The Good University. At most institutions, she writes, the academic staff and the operations staff share a love for their work, a dedication to the students, and a sense that their labor serves the common good—a firm ground, she hopes, upon which to build a full-scale industrial union, bringing together all the workers in the sector into one overarching organization.

Nonetheless, one of the reasons many adjuncts stay in poorly paid jobs is the dream of a position that would lead to tenure, and it is in the competition for such positions that the academic workplace may become distinctively terrible. “This is what faculty life looks like now,” Herb Childress writes in The Adjunct Underclass, “living in hope about the promises that are made to keep everyone quiet”—the whisper in an adjunct’s ear that “there may be a tenure-track line ahead.” The numbers, of course, belie such promises. To take the field of history, in 2017–2018 there were an average of 122 applications for each tenure-track position, with some openings receiving almost seven hundred applications. Instead of a market, the tenure-track labor system has come to resemble a lottery—“a supreme arbiter,” as Cebula writes in his slasher novel, “the magic of which [is] only confirmed by the seeming arbitrariness of its judgments.”

Behind these numbers lies a larger structural transformation. As recently as the 1990s, there were largely two separate strata at which tenure-track hiring tended to occur: a national-level market with Ph.D.s from the magic circle of highly advantaged “top programs” migrating to less highly ranked research universities (the University of Washington hiring from UC Berkeley, for example), and a number of regional markets fed by Ph.D.s from regional centers (Western Washington University hiring from the University of Washington). Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, in many humanities fields at least, these markets increasingly came to overlap; in the past decade, they have all but unified, with Ph.D.s from schools like Princeton and Berkeley now fighting over nearly every tenure-track job at four-year institutions across the country.

Yet even with the movement of national markets into regional ones, there still are not enough positions for graduates from the most prestigious programs—let alone for all the other Ph.D.s produced each year. The American Historical Association has published the most complete statistics on career outcomes available in any humanities discipline, and its database, “Where Historians Work,” shows that in the field of modern American history, to take one example, only 56 percent of Ph.D.s at roughly the top ten programs from 2004–2008 attained tenure-track positions at four-year institutions—a figure that dropped to 48 percent for the 2009–2014 Ph.D. cohort, as the job market crashed after the recession and failed to recover. (Job listings across the humanities remained down 31 percent between 2007 and 2016.)2 There are, however, around 150 universities offering history Ph.D.s in the US, and at a sample of mid-level institutions the proportion of graduates who found such jobs declined from 35 percent to 26 percent. In other words, while the national and regional job markets have become more unified, the outcomes for graduates of the most privileged programs have nonetheless declined—even as these Ph.D.s appear to have further crowded out the graduates of less well-off institutions. Both the academically rich and the academically poor are getting poorer together, although some of those at the top are maintaining their positions, to a significant degree, at the expense of those at the bottom.

The prospect of a full-time position may be a standard way to pacify contingent employees across the contemporary workplace, but there are few other sectors in which the differences in pay, prestige, or job security are as large as between contingent and core staff in the academy. There is also no other field in which one trains, on average, for eight years—with around half of one’s peers failing to complete the degree—only to line up a poorly paid, insecure position, or else embark on a series of wide-ranging travels to take up short-term jobs (postdoc positions have nearly tripled in the humanities since 1996) in the hope that you may eventually get lucky and attain a permanent position. Pursuing a life in academia has become more like trying to become a professional athlete or a star musician than a doctor, a lawyer, or even a typical service sector worker. Little wonder that there are articles in mainstream publications like Slate with headlines such as “Getting a Literature Ph.D. Will Turn You into an Emotional Trainwreck, Not a Professor.”

Circumstances are not much better in many of the social sciences than in the humanities, and while career prospects outside of academia are more attractive for those in STEM fields, there have been severe drops in the proportion of STEM Ph.D.s securing postdocs and, for those who want to stay in the academy, tenure-track positions. This is one reason graduate student unions have recently found success at institutions like Brandeis, Columbia, Harvard, and Tufts. A decade ago, when unions tried to organize graduate-worker bargaining units that stretched across entire universities, STEM students saw their interests as fundamentally different from those of students in the social sciences and humanities. Now, prospective Ph.D.s across the university find themselves facing comparable—if by no means identical—prospects.
2.

Public discussion of the academic labor crisis has remained limited over the past decade, although progressive candidates in the 2020 presidential election have made the economics of college education a major focus. In 2011 Occupy Wall Street defined student debt and medical bankruptcy as the chief afflictions of the “99 percent.” In 2015 Bernie Sanders, in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, included free public college along with Medicare for All and a $15 minimum wage in his stump speeches. Sanders’s College for All Act now demands that institutions increase the proportion of tenure-track faculty to an astonishing 75 percent; Elizabeth Warren, similarly, has put forward proposals that would strengthen the workplace rights of insecure workers across the economy and make college tuition-free for all—a universal program that, unlike Medicare for All, she has not yet walked back. But it’s all too easy to imagine how this dream of increasing access to higher education could be built on the backs of adjuncts. In 2015 President Obama proposed making community college effectively free, based on the model of a highly touted program at Pellissippi State Community College in Tennessee, the institution where Obama announced the plan. A full 57 percent of its instructional staff are on part-time contracts.

Demands for free college have been driven in part by nostalgia for the social safety net of the midcentury United States. “In those days,” Sanders observes of his own youth, “public colleges and universities were virtually free,” which is why, he argues, the elimination of tuition should not be considered a radical idea. But the golden age of higher education, when increasing enrollments were matched by increasing public funds, salaries, and secure positions, was remarkably short, roughly 1950 to 1980, and coincided with the period economists call the Great Compression (for the reductions in economic inequality) and historians call the New Deal Order (for the normalization of union contracts and social benefits). College enrollment grew from 3.5 million in 1960 to 12 million in 1980, while community college enrollment boomed from 400,000 to 4 million.

The great majority of these students attended public institutions, or private institutions using federal grants, and thanks to steady increases in public funding the cost of college attendance remained stable relative to family income. Looking back on this inspirational if deeply imperfect era (one need only consider the position of African-Americans and women), it is easy to conclude that the only salvation for higher education as a whole, and adjuncts in particular, will be an improved version of the egalitarian model that briefly flowered thanks to the New Deal—not piecemeal, as with student debt relief or free college proposals, but wholesale.

Among the most promising starting points for such a transformation are Joe Berry’s and Raewyn Connell’s observations about the overlap between the struggles of academe and those of the larger service sector economy. The rise of unions for instructional staff in higher education has been limited by the Supreme Court’s NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago (1979) and NLRB v. Yeshiva (1980) decisions, which held that teachers at religious institutions and tenure-track faculty at private institutions did not fall under the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board. It is for this reason that in 2012, 25 percent of teachers at public four-year colleges, where state law determines bargaining rights, were unionized, while only 7 percent of teachers at private institutions had joined unions.

But starting in 2013 the Service Employees International Union began a campaign focused on private institutions, which to date has organized 54,000 faculty and graduate students at more than sixty campuses. The United Auto Workers (under their “Uniting Academic Workers” campaign) and the American Federation of Teachers have been organizing faculty and graduate students as well, and the lessons from a few of these campaigns have been collected in Professors in the Gig Economy. These organizing drives were aided by decisions from the Obama-era NLRB, which held that instructors in nonreligious departments at religious institutions and non-tenure-track faculty generally (as well as graduate students) fell under its jurisdiction. So far, union victories for adjuncts have included salary increases as high as 90 percent, greater job stability, paid parental leave, sick leave, dependent health care benefits, retirement benefits, caps on course sizes, fairer teaching evaluation processes, and substantial professional development funds.

Such wins have redounded to the benefit of not only the workers involved: recent studies suggest that one of the main reasons for declines in student outcomes has been the rise of part-time teachers. As one rallying cry has it, “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.” With K–12 unions leading a widely publicized teachers’ movement in recent years—there were more workers on strike or locked out across the American economy in 2018 than in any year since 1986—it is not hard to imagine that strikes by adjuncts, who are if anything more exploited, could be the next decisive moment in the rise of a newly militant labor movement across the entire service sector.

But union organizing on its own can go only so far. A union drive can redress some of the balance of power between managers and workers in higher education, but the dramatic cuts in public financial support remain. Solving the adjunct crisis will require the reform of higher education in toto, and this will be impossible until political leaders are brought to recognize the sector’s ambiguous function in the contemporary American political economy. Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, a Green New Deal, the rollback of mass incarceration, the repeal of Citizens United, the expansion of voting rights—these proposals are all unambiguously egalitarian. But while higher education is frequently presented as a path to the middle class, the system as a whole—with its fine gradations between institutions that are, in the words of one standard application guidebook, “most competitive,” “highly competitive,” “very competitive,” “competitive,” “less competitive,” and the vast domain of the “noncompetitive”—now does far more to reflect the American class system than it does to equalize it.

One sign that the connection between higher education and egalitarianism has come under strain is the growing number of exposés of the “myth of meritocracy.” But while public attention may focus on the illegal fraud uncovered in the 2019 college admissions sting, and pundits point to the legal fraud that is the long-standing admissions advantage for alumni’s children, the real scandal—in which such preferences constitute little more than a rounding error—is that a majority of Ivy League colleges regularly admit more students from the top one percent of families than they do from the entire bottom 60 percent. A still deeper analysis, offered in exhaustive form in Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap, suggests that inequalities in higher education, and education more generally, do not just reflect broader changes in economic inequality but actively work to make those inequalities more extreme. It is no accident, on this view, that the wage premium for college graduates, after declining in the 1970s, began its steep and continuing ascent around 1980, when income inequality more generally began its long march upward. Between 1980 and 2005, the wage premium for recent college graduates relative to high school graduates more than doubled, and as of 2018 the average college graduate received wages 80 percent higher than those of the average high school graduate.

Nonetheless, to this day higher education retains its image as a social equalizer. One of the primary reasons may be the Democratic Party’s peculiar attraction to policies that can appear egalitarian but that predominately work to the benefit of the top percentiles. At midcentury, Thomas Frank argues in Listen, Liberal, higher education occupied a relatively small part of the political imagination of the Democratic Party; it was only in the 1980s and 1990s, as the party moved to the right, that it became a fixture in the speeches of Democratic candidates.

A central episode in this shift, carefully documented in Suzanne Mettler’s Degrees of Inequality, was Bill Clinton’s decision to promote a tax credit for higher education during the 1996 election. Signed into law in 1997, these credits were opposed by no less a figure than Clinton’s Wall Street–friendly treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, as a handout to the well-off. But for Clinton and his political advisers, the class-skewed nature of the program’s benefits was a feature, not a bug. In a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that serves as an emblem for the political economy of higher education throughout this period, Clinton accurately claimed the programs would be open to all, even as he knew that their structure channeled benefits to the well-off. There was never any doubt that the credits would be used mostly by families in upper income brackets, and their main effect, later studies demonstrated, was to lead colleges to increase tuition prices. By the 2000s, Clinton’s tax credits cost nearly as much to provide as the entire Pell Grant program for low-income students—a fact that did not prevent Obama from further expanding the credits in 2009.

Sanders and Warren, perhaps hoping to mitigate the association of higher education with the rich, limit the funds appropriated in their proposed plans to public institutions (as well as some historically black and minority-oriented private institutions). But it is not only Harvard, Stanford, and the other “Ivy Plus” institutions that have been at the center of the post-1980 Democratic embrace of inequality under the ostensibly egalitarian cover of higher education; it is also public institutions like the University of Michigan, where expenses for out-of-state students (49 percent of the entering class) run $64,000 a year, and where the median family income, whether for in-state or out-of-state students, is $154,000. It is these kinds of inequities that can make public investment in higher education appear, not entirely incorrectly, as a kind of kickback for the top percentiles.

One solution, proposed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and recently promoted by Pete Buttigieg on the campaign trail, would limit benefits so that no aid flows to the children of the wealthy. Buttigieg has argued that proposals to entirely eliminate college tuition would result in “turning off half the country” in an election; political expedience aside, he has also argued that means-testing is the best “governing strategy.” But while this may represent an economically efficient approach, and would certainly be more egalitarian than the Clinton and Obama tax credits, the main lesson of public policy over the past sixty years is that means-tested benefits, in contrast with universal programs like Social Security and Medicare, become stigmatized and lose public support through their association with the poor. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained in one recent tweet, “Universal public systems are designed to benefit EVERYBODY!… Everyone contributes and everyone enjoys. We don’t ban the rich from public schools, firefighters, or libraries because they are public goods.” If fixing the adjunct crisis is to become feasible—which is to say, if we are to envision a new era of more democratic higher education—a College for All policy must be made universally available, while addressing the part the university has played in producing and legitimating the rise of inequality.

Ironically enough, it is the Republicans who have pointed the way toward such a policy, by enacting a 1.4 percent tax in 2017 on the investment returns of institutions with small student bodies and large endowments. Introduced to pay for tax cuts for the rich, the origins of this program should not obscure its potential. The endowment tax is an institutional counterpart to the wealth tax proposed by Warren and Sanders. The law also offers a clear way to escape the tax, although one that would require well-endowed institutions to radically change their approach to education. If an institution does not want to see its endowment returns diminished, it can simply become less elite and admit more students.

Princeton, for instance, could escape the tax by becoming just a bit less elite than Berkeley (43,000 students) or UCLA (46,000 students)—both among the top-ranked universities in the world—and increasing its student body from eight thousand students to 52,000 students (Princeton’s endowment is $26 billion, and the law only applies to endowments over $500,000 per student). While some might feel that changes of this scale would alter the character of the institution, much the same was said when the old pastoral training grounds of the northeast first became modern research universities—and when those same institutions began to admit women and more people of color. One Princeton undergraduate in 1942 claimed that “the Negroes are not improved by their admission to a group with relatively high standards, but the group is corrupted to the lower level of the new members.” An alumnus in 1969 said, “Let’s be frank. Girls are being sent to Princeton less to educate them than to pacify, placate, and amuse the boys who are now there.” A more ambitious College for All bill might apply demands concerning student-to-endowment ratios to all federal funding, forcing colleges and universities, whether public or private, to stop hoarding resources if they want public support.

Unfortunately, if recent attempts at reform are any guide, a more likely outcome is not a diminishment of higher education’s role in producing inequality but the enshrinement of a way of thinking that will increase the forces that have brought on the adjunct crisis: “accountability.” For a fearful example of what this can look like, one need only consider the United Kingdom, which from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair to David Cameron raised tuition, lowered the academic quality of its universities, and further ratcheted up the demands on teachers by quantifying every element of education in the most reductive ways possible, whether the total number of times other scholars cite an article or the measurable economic impact of research. In 2013 Obama promoted an approach to accountability that would have set the United States down a similar path, proposing to rank American colleges “on who’s offering the best value so that students and taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck,” with the chief metric being “how well do…graduates do in the workforce?”

Sanders and Warren have done much to put forward policies that insist on the wide-reaching public goods offered by higher education, proposing to cancel virtually all student debt along with eliminating tuition at public institutions. But while Sanders and Warren have described higher education as a “right” and “basic need,” both have otherwise struggled to find a language with which to defend these proposals. Even Sanders, in an otherwise forceful statement accompanying the latest version of his College for All Act, offered little more than the market-oriented argument that “when our young people are competing with workers from around the world, we have got to have the best educated workforce possible.” Warren, similarly, often resorts to financial rhetoric, saying, “We need to make an investment in our future, and the best way to do that is to make an investment in the public education of our children.”

The political theorist Wendy Brown, in Undoing the Demos, offers a model of the kind of rhetoric that would go much further to argue for higher education as a necessary public good. After World War II, she writes, “extending liberal arts education from the elite to the many was nothing short of a radical democratic event”; a new offer of college to all should not hinge on economic results but on the promise to bring about “an order in which the masses would be educated for freedom.” If these words anticipate the revolution in public language that we need in order to advance toward social democracy for both teachers and students, Christopher Newfield, in The Great Mistake, provides a helpfully detailed vision for how to get there. Market-oriented thinking has fatally undermined the grounds on which public investment in higher education can be defended, he argues. Champions of an egalitarian university—publicly minded unions, mobilized students, or enlightened administrators—must show through every reform how higher education already does or can be brought to serve the public good, by, for instance, shedding outside contracts with self-interested businesses, reducing tuition and debt to provide broad-based opportunity, or pushing back against racial and gender inequalities.

Sanders’s and Warren’s proposals point in this direction, and while the barriers to success in the event that either enters the White House will remain enormous—the US Senate not least among them—one has to hope that if their plans were to approach passage, the cancellation of student debt and the elimination of tuition at public institutions would be combined with an additional set of policies, and a new political language, that would not only reduce students’ financial exigencies but also bring equity to the academic workplace and radically lessen the way higher education drives inequality in the US. This can only be achieved by building movements, not simply making plans, and in this respect Sanders clearly has an advantage. If something like this vision succeeded, the university would become neither an engine of inequality nor a growth machine for human capital; it would represent a foundation for an economically and culturally progressive egalitarian democracy—achieved as much through the efforts of teachers, students, and staff as through the passage of any particular law or the election of any political leader. If the adjunct crisis can be not just mitigated but solved, this is how it will happen.

►https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/12/adjuncts-serfs-of-academe

–-------

Commentaire de Morgane Jouvenet reçu via la mailing-list de mobilisation contre les réformes dans le monde universitaire :

Un récent article de la New York Review of Books nous offre un nouvel aperçu du “modèle” (rires) universitaire états-unien :

►https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/12/adjuncts-serfs-of-academe. Signé par Charles Petersen, il montre encore une fois l’ampleur des dégâts provoqués par l’organisation du marché du travail académique et l’évolution des budgets des universités aux États-Unis - ou pourquoi l’horreur peut être considérée par certaines de leurs actrices et acteurs comme “le genre qui s’impose lorsque l’on veut dépeindre aujourd’hui la vie du prof assistant [adjunct], i.e. celle de la majorité des universitaires d’aujourd’hui”.

Morceaux choisis (sur l’état du marché du travail et des condition de travail universitaire - l’autre partie de l’article concerne l’échec des universités dans la lutte contre la reproduction sociale) :

– “According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, 25 percent of part-time faculty nationally rely on public assistance programs”.

– “In 1969, 78 percent of instructional staff at US institutions of higher education were tenured or on the tenure track; today, after decades of institutional expansion amid stagnant or dwindling budgets, the figure is 33 percent. More than one million workers now serve as nonpermanent faculty in the US, constituting 50 percent of the instructional workforce at public Ph.D.-granting institutions, 56 percent at public masters degree–granting institutions, 62 percent at public bachelors degree–granting institutions, 83 percent at public community colleges, and 93 percent at for-profit institutions (...) The clearest cause for the poor pay and job insecurity of today’s adjuncts is the decline in public support for higher education”.

– “University administrators have reduced teacher pay and increased job insecurity in an effort to make possible expansions in operations that typically resulted in yet more administrative and professional staff, and higher salaries for those who directed them”.

– “Both the academically rich and the academically poor are getting poorer together, although some of those at the top are maintaining their positions, to a significant degree, at the expense of those at the bottom”

– “Pursuing a life in academia has become more like trying to become a professional athlete or a star musician than a doctor, a lawyer, or even a typical service sector worker.”

– “A decade ago, when unions tried to organize graduate-worker bargaining units that stretched across entire universities, STEM [science, technologie, ingénierie et mathématiques] students saw their interests as fundamentally different from those of students in the social sciences and humanities. Now, prospective Ph.D.s across the university find themselves facing comparable—if by no means identical—prospects”.

– “Market-oriented thinking has fatally undermined the grounds on which public investment in higher education can be defended”.

Le texte se termine toutefois sur une lueur d’espoir, en évoquant les idées (et promesses électorales) de E. Warren et B. Sanders pour les universités.

#USA #Etats-Unis #université #conditions_de_travail #travail #universités #précarité #précarisation #tenure_track #budget #insécurité_professionnelle #paupérisation #salaires #ESR #enseignement_supérieur

–----

Ajouté à cette métaliste :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/824281

Une partie de l’#aide_au_développement des pays pauvres est détournée vers les paradis fiscaux

Trois chercheurs ont étudié les #flux_financiers de vingt-deux Etats, dans un rapport publié par la Banque mondiale.

C’est en découvrant qu’une hausse des #cours_du_pétrole entraînait un afflux de capitaux vers les paradis fiscaux que #Bob_Rijkers, économiste à la #Banque_mondiale, a eu cette idée de recherche : et si l’aide au développement produisait les mêmes effets ? La réponse est oui.

A la question « Les élites captent-elles l’aide au développement ? », le rapport publié, mardi 18 février, par la Banque mondiale (►http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/493201582052636710/pdf/Elite-Capture-of-Foreign-Aid-Evidence-from-Offshore-Bank-Accoun) conclut : « Les versements d’aides vers les pays les plus dépendants coïncident avec une augmentation importante de #transferts vers des #centres_financiers_offshore connus pour leur opacité et leur gestion privée de fortune. »

Autrement dit, une partie de l’#aide_publique_au_développement dans les pays pauvres est détournée vers les paradis fiscaux. Le #taux_de_fuite présumée s’élève en moyenne à 7,5 %.

Un article publié, le 13 février, par le magazine britannique The Economist laisse entendre que les hauts responsables de la Banque mondiale n’ont pas franchement apprécié les conclusions des trois chercheurs, dont deux sont indépendants. La publication du #rapport aurait été bloquée, en novembre 2019, par l’état-major de l’institution dont le siège est à Washington, ce qui aurait précipité le départ de son économiste en chef, #Pinelopi_Goldberg, qui a annoncé sa démission, début février, seulement quinze mois après sa nomination.

« Coïncidence » plutôt qu’un lien de causalité

« Il est possible que la Banque mondiale l’ait irritée en décidant de bloquer la publication d’une étude de son équipe », écrit The Economist, citant d’autres hypothèses, comme la réorganisation de la Banque, qui place désormais l’économiste en chef sous la tutelle de la nouvelle directrice opérationnelle, Mari Pangestu. Dans le courriel envoyé le 5 février en interne pour annoncer sa démission, et auquel Le Monde a eu accès, Mme Goldberg reconnaît seulement que sa décision était « difficile » à prendre, mais qu’il était temps pour elle de retourner enseigner à l’université américaine de Yale (Connecticut).

#Niels_Johannesen, l’un des coauteurs de l’étude, qui enseigne à l’université de Copenhague et n’est pas employé à la Banque mondiale, l’a d’abord mise en ligne sur son site Internet, avant de la retirer quelques jours plus tard, afin qu’elle soit modifiée et, finalement, approuvée cette semaine par l’Institution.

Dans la première version, les auteurs expliquent que les versements d’aides sont la « cause » des transferts d’argent vers les #centres_offshore, tandis que dans la version finale, ils préfèrent évoquer une « #coïncidence » plutôt qu’un #lien_de_causalité. « Les modifications ont été approuvées par les auteurs, et je suis satisfait du résultat final », tient à préciser Niels Johannesen. Dans un communiqué publié, mardi 18 février, la Banque mondiale, qui publie près de 400 études chaque année, explique « prendre très au sérieux la corruption et les risques fiduciaires qui lui sont liés ».

Les chercheurs ont croisé les données de la #Banque_des_règlements_internationaux (#BRI), à savoir les flux financiers entre les paradis fiscaux et vingt-deux pays pauvres, avec les #déboursements que ces derniers reçoivent de la Banque mondiale. Les deux coïncident sur un intervalle trimestriel. Les pays pauvres qui reçoivent une aide publique au développement équivalente à 1 % de leur produit intérieur brut voient leurs transferts vers les centres offshore augmenter en moyenne de 3 % par rapport à ceux qui ne reçoivent aucune assistance.

« Elites économiques »

Les auteurs ont éliminé d’autres hypothèses pouvant expliquer ces transferts massifs. Ils ont vérifié qu’aucun événement exceptionnel, comme une crise économique ou une catastrophe naturelle, ne justifiait une sortie de capitaux plus élevée que d’ordinaire, et ont constaté que cette hausse ne bénéficiait pas à d’autres centres financiers plus transparents, comme l’Allemagne ou la France.

Vingt-deux pays pauvres, dont une majorité se trouvent en #Afrique, ont été inclus dans l’étude pour donner à l’échantillon une taille suffisamment importante, d’où la difficulté d’en tirer des leçons sur un pays en particulier. Autre limite : les données sont collectées à partir de 1990 et ne vont pas au-delà de 2010. « Certains pays sont réticents à ce que la BRI nous fournisse des données récentes », regrette M. Johannesen.

Malgré toutes ces limitations, les auteurs de l’étude estiment qu’« il est presque certain que les bénéficiaires de cet argent, envoyé vers les centres offshore au moment où leur pays reçoit une aide au développement, appartiennent à l’élite économique ». Les populations de ces pays pauvres ne détiennent souvent aucun compte bancaire, encore moins à l’étranger.

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/02/21/dans-les-pays-pauvres-le-versement-de-l-aide-au-developpement-coincide-avec-
#développement #coopération_au_développement #paradis_fiscaux #corruption #follow_the_money #détournement_d'argent #APD

signalé par @isskein
ping @reka @simplicissimus @fil

Le #new_york_times, #pravda de l’#élite #Davos

Tony Karon sur Twitter : ““Possible Russian interference”? New standards of gutter journalism from nytimes as the Pravda of the Davos class works up its #Sanders smear game ▻https://t.co/LcZkDrZhOx via @NYTimes” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/TonyKaron/status/1231254629469564932

“#liberal”

Jad Chaaban د. جاد شعبان sur Twitter : "The distinction Lebanese banks put between “fresh dollars” and “current account dollars” is the biggest organized theft this country has ever witnessed." / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/JadChaaban/status/1224313383157145600

#voleurs « #élites » #Liban #banques #banksters

La piste américaine se confirme pour la cession d’actifs de défense sensibles | Les Echos
▻https://www.lesechos.fr/industrie-services/air-defense/la-piste-americaine-se-confirme-pour-la-cession-dactifs-de-defense-sensible

https://media.lesechos.com/api/v1/images/view/5e2ab6ced286c23a776265f6/1280x720/0602629683860-web-tete.jpg

De sources concordantes, au moins trois industriels américains sont sur les rangs pour prendre le contrôle de Photonis, leader mondial de la vision nocturne. Safran et Thales ont décliné l’appel des pouvoirs publics à candidater. Dans un courrier adressé aux députés inquiets de cette cession et de celle de Latécoère, le Premier ministre s’en remet à l’examen par Bercy.

L’alerte lancée auprès du Premier ministre par les députés afin de maintenir sous bannière tricolore des actifs du secteur de la défense qu’ils jugent stratégiques, n’a pas, à ce stade, été suivie d’effet.

Mais l’Etat poursuit aussi « des objectifs ambitieux en matière d’attractivité de notre économie auprès des investisseurs étrangers », a-t-il écrit. Le Premier ministre renvoie au « suivi particulièrement attentif » mené par Bercy dans le cadre du contrôle des investissements étrangers en France, durci par un nouveau décret . « Les pouvoirs d’injonction et de sanction du ministre chargé de l’économie ont été renforcés tout en améliorant la transparence du contrôle », promet-il.

#économie #défense #intérêts_stratégiques

Book review of The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/they-wanted-to-remake-the-world-instead-we-got-president-trump/2020/01/10/00b84096-32fc-11ea-91fd-82d4e04a3fac_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/EU3HZX9ZldB3OR8EoQDQ6HNC0ig=/1440x0/smart/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/AOY25LBTEEI6VFY3IO7MH74YMA.jpg

The Cold War mind-set, in Bacevich’s telling, came with certain disciplining features. Because the Soviet Union was always out there, doing its own thing, American statesmen could not be as reckless as they might otherwise have been, and American citizens were forced to live up to some modicum of their own oft-stated virtues. But the Cold War also constituted a “tragedy of towering proportions,” Bacevich writes, 40-plus years of “folly and waste,” all to create the greatest buildup of lethal force in human history . The proper response, when it came to an end, would have been “reflection, remorse, repentance, even restitution.” Instead, an “intoxicated #elite” rushed ahead into the 21st century, giddy with its own power and wealth, sure that it could now, at last, remake the world in America’s image.

What emerged from this enthusiasm, Bacevich argues, was a dreary new post-Cold War consensus, built around a commitment to neoliberal economics at home and abroad, backed by American military supremacy and an increasingly powerful White House. Technology was supposed to bring it all together, as smart bombs and drones replaced messy human warfare. And everyone was supposed to win: America, the world, the poor, the rich, the cause of human freedom. Bacevich likens the late 1990s to the moment when Dorothy and her “Wizard of Oz” companions arrive at the yellow brick road, convinced that their troubles have come to an end. We all know how well that turned out.

#Etats-unis #néolibéralisme #pouvoir

Macron nomme le président de BlackRock officier de la Légion d’Honneur en pleine réforme des retraites
▻https://www.revolutionpermanente.fr/Macron-nomme-le-president-de-BlackRock-officier-de-la-Legion-d-

Le cas Gabriel Matzneff ou l’inversion du rapport à la transgression
▻https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-theorie/la-transition-culturelle-du-jeudi-26-decembre-2019

Ceux qui défendaient jadis à gauche le cas du "philopède" Matzneff, non seulement au nom de la supériorité de la littérature sur la morale, mais aussi au nom d’une libération des mœurs et des individus, le faisaient contre des ligues de vertus moralistes conservatrices. Aujourd’hui, c’est sur la très conservatrice Radio Courtoisie que Matzneff est encore invité, dans un hebdomadaire ancré à droite comme Le Point, ou sur le plateau de la chaîne Russia Today pour dénoncer, comme il le faisait il y a quelques semaines, « le retour de l’ordre moral, qui nous vient des sectes puritaines américaines ».

enfin bon, ça fait bien quinze ans que ça dure cette « inversion »...

Joshua Landis sur Twitter :

"The #Hariri family has earned $108 million between 2006 & 2015 from interest on the public debt. Lebanon’s “political #elites control 43% of assets in Lebanon’s commercial banking sector,” JadChaaban of AUB has calculated. Quoted by @ursulind in ▻https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/12/02/the-lebanese-street-asks-which-is-stronger-sect-or-hunger” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/joshua_landis/status/1203736756283170816

#Liban #mafia

Romaric Godin : « Les élites néolibérales ne veulent plus transiger avec le corps social »
►https://lvsl.fr/romaric-godin-les-elites-neoliberales-ne-veulent-plus-transiger-avec-le-corps-s

Nous avons retrouvé Romaric Godin au siège de Médiapart, dans le XIIe arrondissement parisien. Journaliste économique, passé par « La Tribune » où ses analyses hétérodoxes l’ont fait connaître, il travaille désormais pour le site d’actualité dirigé par Edwy Plenel. En septembre dernier, il publie son premier livre « La guerre sociale en France. Aux sources économiques de la démocratie autoritaire » paru aux éditions La Découverte. Dans cet essai, il développe ce qui constitue selon lui la spécificité du moment Macron et analyse les racines sociales et économiques profondes qui ont présidé à l’avènement du néolibéralisme autoritaire qu’il dépeint. Source : Le vent se (...)

Emmanuel #Macron « Je n’aime pas le mot de #démocratie parce que ça donne le sentiment que le peuple aurait le pouvoir » — Le Gorafi.fr Gorafi News Network
▻http://www.legorafi.fr/2019/10/07/emmanuel-macron-je-naime-pas-le-mot-de-democratie-parce-que-ca-donne-le-sen

http://www.legorafi.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Emmanuel_Macron_2017-05-29_cropped-e1518524455810.jpg

Le grand retour de la question sociale | Alternatives Economiques
▻https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/grand-retour-de-question-sociale/00089577

https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/sites/default/files/public/styles/for_social_networks/public/field/image/rea_272702_022.jpg?itok=s9FpteHk

« La vague de #populisme qui submerge le monde occidental est soulevée par un vent de #mépris. » La troisième édition du rapport sur les #inégalités en #France, publiée hier, a une saveur particulière. Un goût amer, quand on la met en regard du résultat des élections européennes. Le mépris dont parle Louis Maurin, directeur de l’Observatoire des inégalités, c’est le dédain de la France qui gagne à l’encontre de la France qui « fume des clopes et roule au diesel », brocardée en son temps par l’ancien porte-parole du gouvernement Benjamin Griveaux. C’est la morgue avec laquelle une certaine #gauche embourgeoisée stigmatise la « France moche », celle qui arpente les rayons des supermarchés et reste scotchée à la télé. C’est l’arrogance d’une #élite qui s’arc-boute sur ses #privilèges et refuse d’entendre parler de ceux qui galèrent.

James J. Zogby sur Twitter : “Listening to pundits & reading the press, one thing comes thru clearly: #BernieSanders isn’t just running against 24 other Dems, he’s running against the mainstream media & the political #elites. They’ve been fawning over others & dismissing him since 2015. Not a fair fight.” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/jjz1600/status/1144273410563985408

#guerre_à_la_dissidence #dissidence #MSM

#Suisse : Des riverains excédés par les Ferrari à Gstaad
▻http://www.lessentiel.lu/fr/news/europe/story/des-riverains-excedes-par-les-ferrari-a-gstaad-13732125

Depuis plusieurs jours, des propriétaires de bolides se rassemblent sur l’aérodrome de Gstaad, en Suisse, pour tester leur voiture. Les habitants n’en peuvent plus.

Le week-end prolongé de l’Ascension n’a pas été synonyme de repos et de détente pour tout le monde. Les habitants de Saanen bei Gstaad, en Suisse, ont dû supporter des nuisances sonores causées par des Ferrari à l’aérodrome voisin. Depuis la semaine passée, plusieurs propriétaires de bolides se donnent en effet rendez-vous tous les jours pour tester la puissance de leur voiture. Et le rugissement des moteurs est perceptible loin à la ronde.

https://www.20min.ch/images/content/2/0/3/20316948/8/teaserbreit.jpg

Selon divers habitants de la région, les essais débutent aux alentours de 9h et se terminent vers 18h. « Les Ferrari roulent chaque 15 à 30 minutes et essaient d’atteindre les 300 km/h », s’énerve un riverain domicilié non-loin de l’aérodrome : « Le bruit est juste insupportable ».

« Là, ça dure depuis près d’une semaine »
Ce qui énerve aussi les habitants, c’est de ne pas avoir été averti du rassemblement par la commune : « Si l’événement n’avait eu lieu qu’un seul jour, j’aurais encore pu le comprendre. Mais là, ça dure depuis près d’une semaine. » L’autorité communale confie que l’événement a été sous-estimé. À la base, il devait s’agir de simples essais de Ferrari et non d’un rassemblement de personnes aisées venues pour rouler à vive allure avec leurs bolides.

Les organisateurs, eux, n’ont, pour l’heure, pas officiellement réagi. On ignore jusqu’à quand la manifestation durera.

#nuisances les #émigrés_fiscaux, #milliardaires, s’emmerdent à #Gstaad (là ou était domicilié fiscalement Johnny Hallyday) #Société #élite #élites

#Bilderberg, l’entre-soi des puissants au-delà des fantasmes
▻https://lemediapresse.fr/economie/bilderberg-lentre-soi-des-puissants-au-dela-des-fantasmes

Les quelques lettres suffisent à remplir des pages et des pages de théories imaginatives et de sites internet parfois obscurs. Groupe #secret composé d’illuminatis ou de francs-maçons, réunion occulte d’atlantistes, expression ultime du #Néolibéralisme mondialisé ? Les réunions annuelles et opaques du groupe Bilderberg réunissent les personnalités politiques, économiques et médiatiques les plus influentes d’Europe et d’Amérique du Nord et cristallisent tous les fantasmes. Décryptage.

#Économie #Politique #Société #élite #élites #Capitalisme #Complot #Complotisme #Complotiste #démocratie #Europe #libéralisme #réseaux #transparence #UE

Die Integration der Bundeswehr BERLIN (Eigener Bericht) - Bei ihrer...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/9023915

Die Integration der Bundeswehr

BERLIN (Eigener Bericht) - Bei ihrer #Propaganda zur #Rekrutierung Jugendlicher rückt die #Bundeswehr zunehmend auf gezielte Tötungen spezialisierte #Sonderkommandos in den Vordergrund. Jüngster Ausdruck dieser Entwicklung ist ein Werbevideo, das auf den Social-Media-Kanälen der deutschen Streitkräfte abgerufen werden kann. Zu sehen sind hier #Elitesoldaten der #Fallschirmjäger, die nicht nur den “Häuser- und Ortskampf” in einem fiktiven Interventionsgebiet, sondern auch den “selektiven Schuss” auf feindliche Kombattanten trainieren.

▻https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/7933

Dass die Bundeswehr bei allerlei Sauereien bereits mitmischt, unsere #Regierung das #Völkerrecht mit Füßen tritt und sich an illegalen Kriegen beteiligt, ist ja hinlänglich bekannt. (...)

#Elite gathering reveals anxiety over ‘class war’ and ‘#revolution’
Financial Times 2 mai 2019

The Milken Institute’s annual gathering of the investment, business and political elites this week featured big names from US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin to David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs.

[..,]

Despite widespread optimism about the outlook for the US economy and financial markets, some of the biggest names on Wall Street and in corporate America revealed their anxiety about the health of the economic model that made them millionaires and billionaires.

Mr Milken himself, whose conference was known as the predators’ ball when he ruled over the booming junk bond market of the 1980s, was among those fretfully revisiting a debate that has not loomed so large since before the fall of the Berlin Wall: whether capitalism’s supremacy is threatened by creeping socialism.

Mr Milken played a video of Thatcher from two years before she became UK prime minister. “Capitalism has a moral basis,” she declared, and “to be free, you have to be capitalist”. Applause rippled through the ballroom.

In the run-up to the conference, essays by Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase about the case for reforming capitalism to sustain it have been widely shared. Executives are paying close attention to what one investment company CEO called “the shift left of the Democratic party”, personified by 2020 presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the social media success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist elected to Congress last year.

Former Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt issued his own rallying cry as he sat beside Ivanka Trump to discuss the conference theme of “driving shared prosperity”.

“I’m concerned with this notion that somehow socialism’s going to creep back in, because capitalism is the source of our collective wealth as a country,” Mr Schmidt said, urging his fellow capitalists to get the message out that “it’s working”.

Mr Milken asked Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel, why young Americans seemed to have lost faith in the free market, flashing up a poll on the screen behind them which showed 44 per cent of millennials saying they would prefer to live in a socialist country.

“You and I grew up in a different era, where the cold war was waking up and there was a great debate in America about the strengths and weaknesses of socialism as compared to the economic freedom that we enjoy in our country,” Mr Griffin replied, saying that they had “seen that question answered” with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The younger generation that support socialism are “people who don’t know history”, he said.

Guggenheim Partners’ Alan Schwartz put the risks of rising income inequality more starkly. “You take the average person . . . they’re just basically saying something that used to be 50:50 is now 60:40; it’s not working for me,” he told another conference session, pointing to the gap between wage growth and the growth of corporate profits.

“If you look at the rightwing and the leftwing, what’s really coming is class warfare,” he warned. “Throughout centuries what we’ve seen when the masses think the elites have too much, one of two things happens: legislation to redistribute the wealth . . . or revolution to redistribute poverty. Those are the two choices historically and debating it back and forth, saying ‘no, it’s capitalism; no, it’s socialism’ is what creates revolution.”

There was less discussion of the prospect of higher taxes on America’s wealthiest, which some Democrats have proposed to finance an agenda many executives support, such as investing in education, infrastructure and retraining a workforce threatened by technological disruption and globalisation.

One top investment company executive echoed the common view among the conference’s wealthy speakers: “ Punitive #redistribution won’t work.”

But another financial services executive, who donated to Hillary Clinton’s US presidential campaign in 2016, told the Financial Times: “ I’d pay 5 per cent more in tax to make the world a slightly less scary place .”

#capitalisme #anxiété #capitalistes

Nikki Haley joins Boeing board | TheHill
▻https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/aviation/441705-nikki-haley-joins-boeing-board

https://thehill.com/sites/default/files/nikkihaley_1.jpg

#porte_tournante #guerres ’#élite’ #collusion #intérêts_privés

President Trump Called Jimmy Carter To Talk About China : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/2019/04/15/713495558/president-trump-called-former-president-jimmy-carter-to-talk-about-china

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2019/04/15/gettyimages-632278976_wide-65f801ade4dd27b0dcd11cab273f322f0273555f.jpg?s=1400

Earlier this year, Carter sent Trump a letter with some advice about managing the U.S.-China relationship. Carter oversaw the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries 40 years ago.

On Saturday evening, Trump called Carter to talk about it. It was the first time they’d spoken, Carter said. He said Trump told him that he is particularly concerned about how China is “getting ahead of us.”

Carter said he agreed with Trump on this issue.

“And do you know why?” Carter said. “I normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war,” he said. (China and Vietnam actually fought a brief border war in early 1979, weeks after U.S. relations with China were normalized.)

Carter said the United States is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world”

#guerres “#élite” #états-unis

Privatisations : la République en marché - #DATAGUEULE 88
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hYR2o1--8s

Tout doit disparaître... surtout les limites ! Depuis 30 ans, les privatisations, à défaut d’inverser la spirale de la dette, déséquilibrent le rapport de force entre Etat et grandes entreprises à la table des négociations. Infrastructures, télécoms, BTP, eau ... les géants des marchés voient leur empire s’élargir dans un nombre croissant de secteurs vitaux. Cédant le pas et ses actifs au nom de la performance ou de l’efficacité, sans autre preuve qu’un dogme bien appris, la collectivité publique voit se dissoudre l’intérêt général dans une somme d’intérêts privés ... dont elle s’oblige à payer les pots cassés par des contrats où elle se prive de ses prérogatives. Mais comment donc les agents de l’Etat ont-ils fini par se convaincre qu’il ne servait à rien ?

De riches parents américains pris dans un vaste scandale universitaire Loïc Pialat/oang - 15 Mars 2019 - RTS
▻https://www.rts.ch/info/monde/10291184-de-riches-parents-americains-pris-dans-un-vaste-scandale-universitaire.

Un immense scandale secoue certaines des universités les plus prestigieuses des Etats-Unis et fait la Une de tous les médias américains. C’est, selon le FBI, la plus grande fraude dans l’histoire universitaire du pays.

Une trentaine de très riches parents ont été interpellés et inculpés il y a quelques jours. Ils sont accusés d’avoir payé des pots de vin, de parfois plusieurs centaines de milliers de francs, pour que leurs enfants puissent être admis dans ces établissements d’élite.

http://www.objets-de-legende.fr/files/2017/12/motarboard-histoire.png

Système basé sur deux moyens de tricher
La fraude, basée essentiellement sur deux techniques, a duré pendant près de dix ans, entre 2011 et début 2019.

Le premier moyen était de tricher au tests SAT, passés par tous les lycéens américains et qui servent de base aux établissements universitaires pour sélectionner les élèves. La triche consistait à envoyer une autre personne, plus douée, passer le test avec la complicité d’employés corrompus qui détournaient le regard. Il était possible aussi de demander plus de temps pour que l’élève passe le test en prétextant des difficultés d’apprentissage.

L’autre approche était de payer certains entraîneurs des nombreuses équipes universitaires, pour qu’ils recommandent des étudiants à l’établissement. Ces derniers ont en effet souvent le droit à un quota d’étudiants moins brillants mais performants sur le terrain. Reste que les élèves concernés n’avaient rien d’athlétique : les parents et leurs complices ont falsifié leur CV en inventant des performances inexistantes. Ils ont même parfois trafiqué des photos de leurs enfants avec un logiciel, en récupérant celles d’athlètes sur internet.

Le « conseiller » au cœur du scandale
Tout le système reposait sur un homme, William Rick Singer, qui conseille depuis longtemps les parents pour préparer un dossier d’admission. La profession est en pleine croissance aux Etats-Unis, tant l’entrée dans les plus grandes universités devient sélective.

Ce Californien d’une soixantaine d’années avait en fait créé un faux organe de charité, The Key Foundation, à qui les parents versaient de fortes sommes d’argent. En huit ans, il a ainsi amassé quelque 25 millions de francs, une somme dont il se servait pour corrompre employés et coaches. Les parents, eux, pouvaient déduire les montants versés de leurs impôts - ce qui est déjà en soi un délit.

Une « Desperate Housewife » sur la sellette
Felicity Huffman a été inculpée devant une cour fédérale de Los Angeles. [AFP] Et si les médias américains parlent tant de cette affaire, c’est parce que des célébrités figurent parmi les parents poursuivis. L’actrice Felicity Huffman, connue pour son rôle dans la série « Desperate Housewives », a ainsi versé 15’000 dollars pour truquer le test de sa fille. On trouve également Lori Loughlin, qui jouait le rôle de Tante Becky dans la sitcom « La fête à la maison », très populaire dans les années 90. Elle et son mari ont donné 500’000 dollars pour que leurs deux filles soient admises à l’Université de Californie du Sud (USC) en les faisant passer pour des membres de l’équipe d’aviron alors qu’elles n’ont jamais ramé de leur vie.

Les universités en cause - USC, UCLA, Yale, Georgetown ou Stanford - comptent parmi les meilleures au monde. Dans le cas de Stanford, le taux d’admission est inférieur à 5%, ce qui signifie que des étudiants ont pris la place d’autres, plus méritants.

C’est la preuve, pour l’opinion publique, que la méritocratie est un mythe et que tout peut s’acheter, même son entrée dans ces établissements d’élite. Cet état de fait crée un immense sentiment d’injustice.

Déjà des conséquences professionnelles
En attendant d’éventuelles peines de prison, l’actrice Lori Laughlin a déjà été renvoyée de projets qu’elle devait tourner pour la chaîne de télévision Hallmark. Plusieurs entraîneurs ont été par ailleurs suspendus ou licenciés.

Les écoles et les élèves, en revanche, ne devraient pas être poursuivis. Mais deux étudiantes de Stanford, qui n’ont rien à voir avec le scandale, ont lancé une procédure devant les tribunaux, estimant que cette affaire va dévaloriser leur diplôme auprès des employeurs.

#USA #université #oligarchie #triche #fraude #méritocratie #élite