publishedmedium:boston review

All in the Family Debt | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/melinda-cooper-all-family-debt

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The poor laws went on to see several iterations both in England and America. The early American colonies imported them virtually word for word and later incorporated them into state legal systems. But despite the many policy tweaks and changes that have occurred since, one element of the original poor laws has remained stubbornly in place: the foundational role of familial responsibility. Indeed, save for a brief respite in the 1960s, American social welfare policy and ideology has maintained a persistent—and damaging—attachment to that framework. Some ramifications are obvious—such as when legal relationships of spousal support and paternity are enforced without consent from either party—but some are more nuanced. The current crises of tuition costs and college debt, for instance, are the downstream effects of limiting a free public good and reinstating “familial responsibility.”

#famille #dettes

How to Think About #Empire | Boston Review
►http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture-global-justice/arundhati-roy-avni-sejpal-challenging-%E2%80%9Cpost-%E2%80%9D-postcolo

https://bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/arundhati%20roy%20boston%20review.jpg

Another “update” that we ought to think about is that new technology could ensure that the world no longer needs a vast working class. What will then emerge is a restive population of people who play no part in economic activity—a surplus population if you like, one that will need to be managed and controlled. Our digital coordinates will ensure that controlling us is easy. Our movements, friendships, relationships, bank accounts, access to money, food, education, healthcare, information (fake, as well as real), even our desires and feelings—all of it is increasingly surveilled and policed by forces we are hardly aware of. How long will it be before the elite of the world feel that almost all the world’s problems could be solved if only they could get rid of that #surplus #population? If only they could delicately annihilate specific populations in specific ways—using humane and democratic methods, of course. Preferably in the name of justice and liberty. Nothing on an industrial scale, like gas chambers or Fat Men and Little Boys. What else are smart nukes and germ warfare for?

Lost Radicals | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/eric-mann-michael-dawson-radical-black-left-history

http://bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/Mann-LoC-feature.jpg

Michael C. Dawson’s important new book Blacks In and Out of the Left expands on Jamal’s diagnosis by characterizing one of its sources: the abandonment of the Black Power movement by white liberals and social democrats who claimed that a black-led movement was inconsistent with their “universalist” ambitions. Yet Dawson’s history shows the immense unifying power that black groups had. They brought together marginalized groups, created networks of support, and built a creative community. Indeed, restoring black politics means restoring a multinational, multiracial left.

In the ’60s many liberal whites believed black separatism threatened the possibility of a unified left. This belief led a generation of white leftist writers to attack the achievements of the black liberation movement, resulting in the repression, distortion, and caricature of the historical record of black leadership. In this context, Dawson’s frontal challenge to liberal and social democratic pontificates and his passionate defense of the black revolutionary tradition is a great gift to all students, especially black youth who have been robbed of their own history. Dawson brings to life the complexity of building a black and multi-racial left and highlights the profound achievements of black leaders and organizations that were purged from popular history. He emphasizes several important leaders who are too-little known today: Hubert Harrison, Cyril Briggs, Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, W.E.B DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, and Fannie Lou Hamer. By reminding us that black revolutionary action has a long and influential tradition that extends well beyond the ’60s, Dawson challenges the white intellectuals who saw the unification of minority groups as a threat to their own interests. Here, for example, is Todd Gitlin:

“In the late 1960s, the principle of separate organizations on behalf of distinct interests raged throughout ‘the movement’ with amazing speed. On the model of black demands came those of feminists, Chicanos, American Indians, gays, lesbians. One grouping after another insisted on the recognition of difference and the protection of their separate and distinct spheres. . . . from the 1970s on, left-wing universalism was profoundly demoralized.”

As discouraged as white social democratic males may have felt, their domination caused a similar reaction among the revolutionary forces. Separation from the imposed universalism of the imperialist enlightenment allowed black groups to establish their own leadership, explore their own cultures, and use their own identities as the basis for self-determination. For most, separation was not separatism but an attempt to integrate self-determination into the multiracial, world struggle for socialist revolution. Indeed, the common future envisioned by blacks, Chicanos, and American Indians also attracted many whites. Rather than fracturing the left, black radicalism’s internationalist perspective provided an alternative to a universalism that was not universal.

Empire’s Racketeers | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/politics/wajahat-ali-pankaj-mishra-empires-racketeers

http://bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/mishra-768x480.jpg

The answer to the many problems, inadequacies, and dangers of democracy should never be less democracy.

#démocratie

What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism? | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism

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This essay is the introduction to Boston Review’s new print issue, Forum I, titled Race Capitalism Justice. Inspired by Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, this themed issue is a critical handbook for racial justice in the age of Trump. Order your copy today.

Cedric J. Robinson’s passing this summer at the age of seventy-five went virtually unnoticed. Professor emeritus of political science and black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and arguably one of the most original political theorists of his generation, no major U.S. newspaper determined that Robinson’s passing merited even a single paragraph. Although he deliberately avoided the pitfalls of intellectual celebrity, his influence was greater than perhaps he may have realized. Today’s insurgent black movements against state violence and mass incarceration call for an end to “racial capitalism” and see their work as part of a “black radical tradition”—terms associated with Robinson’s work.

#capitalisme #capitalisme_racial

Monopoly Men | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/k-sabeel-rahman-monopoly-men

http://bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/bezosfinal1.jpg

Amazon. Google. Facebook. Twitter. These are the most powerful and influential tech platforms of the modern economy, and the headlines over the last few weeks underscore the degree to which these firms have accumulated an outsized influence on our economic, political, and social life. To many, including acting FTC Chair Maureen Ohlhausen, the status quo is great: the benefits to consumers—from cheap prices to easy access to information to rapid delivery of goods and services—outweigh greater regulation, lest policymakers undermine Silicon Valley innovation.

But the recent controversies suggest a very different perspective—that private power is increasingly concentrated among a handful of tech platforms, representing a major challenge to the survival of our democracy and the potential for a more dynamic and inclusive economic order. A growing clamor from both the left and right has created a sense of “blood in the water,” and suggests that Silicon Valley’s long honeymoon may finally be over.

The danger of the “platform power” accumulated by Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter arises from their ability to control the foundational infrastructure of our economic, informational, and political life. Even if they didn’t spend a dime on lobbying or influencing elected officials, this power would still pose a grave threat to democracy and economic opportunity. The fact that these companies provide enormously popular and useful goods and services is indisputable—but also beside the point. The central issue here is not simply the value for the consumer. Instead it is vast, unaccountable private power over the foundations of contemporary society and politics. In a word, the central issue is democracy.

It was this deeper problem of power—not merely the impacts on prices or the consumer experience—that motivated reformers such as Brandeis to develop whole new institutions and legal regimes: antitrust laws to break up monopolies, public utility regulation to assure fair prices and nondiscrimination on “common carriers” such as railroads, the creation of the FTC itself, and much of President Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal push to establish governmental regulatory agencies charged with overseeing finance, market competition, and labor.

But the late twentieth century saw a widespread shift away from the New Deal ethos. Starting in the 1970s, intellectual critiques of economic regulation highlighted the likelihood of corruption, capture, and inefficiency, while scholars in economics espoused the virtues of self-regulation, growth-optimization, and efficient markets. In these intellectual constructs big business and the conservative right found support for their attacks on the New Deal edifice, and in the 1980s and 1990s, we saw the bipartisan adoption of a deregulatory ethic—including in market competition policy.

These cultural currents—the skepticism of government as corrupt at worst and inefficient at best, the belief in private enterprise and the virtues of “free markets,” and a commitment to delivering for consumers above the broader social and political repercussions—suffuses our current political economic discourse. The Brandeis-ian critique of private power has been wholly absent in recent decades and nowhere is this absence more pronounced than in the worldview of Silicon Valley.

In our current moment, it is as if technological innovation has been divorced from the corporations that profit from it. Through these rose-colored glasses, technology is seen as a good in itself, promising efficiency, delivering new wonders to consumers, running laps around otherwise stale and plodding government institutions. Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have been able to resist corporate criticism (until recently, that is) by emphasizing their cultural and ideational commitment to the consumer and to innovation. They have casted themselves as the vanguards of social progress, the future’s cavalry who should not be constrained by government regulation because they offer a better mode of social order than the government itself.

But as the anxieties of the last few months indicate, this image does not capture reality. Indeed, these technology platforms are not just “innovators,” nor are they ordinary corporations anymore. They are better seen and understood as privately controlled infrastructure, the underlying backbone for much of our economic, social, and political life. Such control and influence brings with it the ability to skew, rig, or otherwise manage these systems—all outside the kinds of checks and balances we would expect to accompany such power.

This kind of infrastructural power also explains the myriad concerns about how platforms might taint, skew, or undermine our political system itself—concerns that extend well beyond the ability of these firms to lobby inside the Beltway. Even before the 2016 election, a number of studies and scholars raised the concern that Facebook and Google could swing elections if they wanted to by manipulating their search and feed algorithms. Through subtle and unnoticeable tweaks, these companies could place search results for some political candidates or viewpoints above others, impacting the flow of information enough to influence voters.

Given our reality, it would be helpful to think of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter as the new “utilities” of the modern era. Today the idea of “public utility” conjures images of rate regulation and electric utility bureaucracies. But for Progressive Era reformers, public utility was a broad concept that, at its heart, was about creating regulations to ensure adequate checks and balances on private actors who had come to control the basic necessities of life, from telecommunications to transit to water. This historical tradition helps us identify what kinds of private power are especially troubling. The problem, ultimately, is not just raw “bigness,” or market capitalization. Rather, the central concern is about private control over infrastructure.

At a minimum Equifax’s data breach suggests a need for regulatory oversight imposing public obligations of data security, safety, and consumer protection on these firms. Some commentators have suggested an antitrust-style breaking up of credit reporting agencies while others have called for replacing the oligopoly altogether with public databases.

#Plateformes #Monopoles #Vectorialisme

Know Thy Futurist | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/cathy-oneil-know-thy-futurist

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Futurism is the American dream on overdrive: a disdain for the status quo and a belief that we can solve it all without unions, public education, and social safety nets.

#futurisme #Etats-Unis

The Moral Voice of Corporate America - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/moral-voice-ceos.html

Un article #sans_vergogne du « #progressiste » #new_york_times à la gloire des patrons d’entreprise, qui ne s’occuperaient de #politique que contraints et forcés...

Companies got political only under duress...

Une réponse ici :

Business as Usual : The Long History of Corporate Personhood | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/politics/lawrence-b-glickman-business-usual-long-history-corporate-personhood

The reality is that business “got political” a long time ago; indeed, it has consistently been one of the most powerful forces in American political life. How did this story come to be obscured?

Contingent No More

Academia is in the midst of an acute, unsustainable crisis. For those working in the higher-education industry, and increasingly for those outside of it, it has become impossible to ignore.

New generations of faculty and students crushed by unprecedented levels of debt; the increased precariousness of the academic labor force; the systematic devaluation of academic labor itself; the corporate-style structuring of higher education—something, somehow is going to give.

In spite of the cold facts—that “contingent faculty” make up more than 70 percent of the academic labor force, that the gap between doctorates awarded and jobs available is wider than ever, that the overwhelming majority of academic workers live in a state of economic insecurity—we remain individually hypnotized by the poisonous conviction that hard work is all we need, that the “best” people in the best programs produce the best work, etc.

The neoliberalization of higher education is every academic’s problem. This is the reality in which we are all participating, even those of us at “top” programs, even those of us who have reached the promised land of tenure. Not surprisingly, many at the top are mostly fine with it. But their eager complicity makes it all the more incumbent on the rest of us to recognize how deeply the current system skews all relevant outcomes—from the accrual of professional prestige to basic salary-and-benefit protections—in the favor of the already privileged.

▻https://thebaffler.com/the-poverty-of-theory/contingent-no-more

#université #crise #académie #néolibéralisme #néo-libéralisme #précarité #précarisation #travail #mythe #méritocratie #hiérarchie

Avec une belle et longue #bibliographie :

Resources for Resistance (an introductory bibliography) :

Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, “The ‘Wild West’ of Academic Publishing”

The Conversation, Articles on Academic Journal Debate

Hugh Gusterson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No“

Michael White, Pacific Standard, “How to Change the Centuries-Old Model of Academic Publishing”

Jonathan Gray, The Guardian, “It’s Time to Stand Up to Greedy Academic Publishers”

Jane C. Hu, The Atlantic, “Academics Want You to Read Their Work for Free”

Modern Languages Association, “The Future of Scholarly Publishing” (2002 Report)

American Council of Learned Societies, “Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing” (2003 Report)

Christover J. Broadhurst and Georgianna L. Martin (Eds.), “Radical Academia”? Understanding the Climate for Campus Activists

The Sociological Imagination, Radical Education Projects

Robin D.G. Kelley, Boston Review, “Black Study, Black Struggle”

Simon Batterbury, The Winnower, “Who Are the Radical Academics Today?“

Gwendolyn Beetham, Feministing, “The Academic Feminist: Summer at the Archives with Chicana Por Mi Raza (An Interview with Maria Cotera)”

The SIGJ2 Writing Collective, Antipode, “What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities”

Culum Canally, Antipode, “Timidity and the ‘Radical’ Academic Mind: A Response to the SIGJ2 Writing Collective”

Yasmin Nair, Current Affairs, “The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species“

Cary Nelson, American Association of University Professors, “A Faculty Agenda for Hard Times”

Jennifer Ruth, Remaking the University, “When Tenure-Track Faculty Take On the Problem of Adjunctification“

Thomas Duke, The Undercurrent, “The Cause of the Adjunct Crisis: How a Research Focus is Destroying Higher Education”

Debra Leigh Scott, Adjunct Nation, “How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.“

Mary Elizabeth Luka, Alison Harvey, Mél Hogan, Tamara Shepherd, Andrea Zeffiro, Studies in Social Justice, “Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’”

Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran, ACME, “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”

Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alexandra Juhasz, International Journal of Communications, “Feminist Labor in Media Studies/Communication”

Heather Fraser and Nik Taylor, Neoliberalization, Universities, and the Public Intellectual

Kevin Birmingham, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’”

Mac Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

Shannon Ikebe and Alexandra Holmstrom-Smith, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, “Union Democracy, Student Labor, and the Fight for Public Education”

Anonymous, Inside Higher Ed, “Treadmill to Oblivion”

Lucia Lorenzi, thoughts on mediocrity

Miya Tokumitsu, Jacobin, “In the Name of Love”

Sarah Kendzior, Vitae, “The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem”

Hamilton Nolan, Gawker, “The Horrifying Reality of the Academic Job Market”

Denise Cummins, PBS, “Why the Backlash against Adjuncts Is an Indictment of the Tenure System”

Christopher Newfield, American Association of University Professors, “Avoiding the Coming Higher Ed Wars”

Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, “Angela Davis, Freedom and the Politics of Higher Education”

Charles R. Hale (Ed.), Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Social Text, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses”

Ji-Young Um, #alt-academy, “On Being a Failed Professor: Lessons from the Margins and the Undercommons”

Undercommoning Collective, ROAR, “Undercommoning within, against, and beyond the University-as-Such”

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Is This What Democracy Looks Like?, “Not Your Academy: Occupation and the Future of Student Struggles“

Trish Kahle and Michael Billeaux, Jacobin, “Resisting the Corporate University”

Levi Gahman, ROAR, “Dismantling Neoliberal Education: A Lesson from the Zapatistas“

#résistance

Excellent papier de Cas Muddle, Boston Review, sur le caractère américain et non populiste du phénomène Trump :

[…]

“Though the Trump phenomenon is properly understood within the scope of American history, it is vportrayed as an aberration. In thousands of stories, U.S. readers are treated to comparisons with Adolf Hitler, Silvio Berlusconi, and Marine Le Pen, but much less so Huey Long, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan. Trump, implicitly or explicitly, is being presented as “un-American”; a European Fremdkörper (“foreign body”) in the American polity.”

[…]

“Though establishment Republicans have tried to distance themselves from Trump—much as op-ed writers have tried to distance the United States itself from Trump—the truth is that the party was shifting to the far right well before he entered the 2016 primaries. This is clearest at the state level, where Republicans, not third-party extremists, have been busy passing racist, misogynistic, and anti-gay legislation, such as legally pointless but politically potent sharia bans, laws curbing constitutionally protected access to abortion, and bills designed to protect discrimination against LGBT people. Many of these policies even predate the Tea Party movement, itself a symptom of a right turn underway in the GOP since the 1990s. Trump’s impending nomination can be seen as a powerful aftershock of the Tea Party, a grassroots mobilization whose impact is too-often minimized.”

[…]

“Trump, despite ample assertions to the contrary, is not a populist. Like European counterparts, he argues that “the elite” are uniformly corrupt. But unlike European politicians, he does not exalt the virtues of “the people.” Trump is not the Vox Populi (voice of The People) but the Vox Donaldus (voice of The Donald). Rather than claiming to offer common-sense solutions or follow the will of the people, Trump promises to make “better deals” because he knows “the art of the deal.”

[…]

“Trump stands in a long tradition of right-wing businessmen who present themselves as saviors of “the American way” and who are able to attract cross-class coalitions of supporters: Henry Ford, Robert W. Welch Jr., and Perot are just a few who have taken this approach.”

[…]

“If instead we take the history and traditions of U.S. radical-right politics more seriously, we will not only better understand the Trump phenomenon but also the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy in the United States.”

L’article complet: ▻https://tinyurl.com/zda5uvo

The Failure of Refugee Camps | Boston Review

▻http://bostonreview.net/world/elizabeth-dunn-failure-refugee-camps

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Skra, a camp in the Republic of Georgia, is considered one of the best refugee camps in the world. Although the cinderblock houses have electricity, there is no running water. Since the only source of heat is from the cottages’ small wood stoves, displaced people cut down most of the camp’s trees the first winter they lived there. Photo: Hannah Mintek.

Europe is currently encountering the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and North Africa, who are braving the seas in rickety boats, streaming around fences, and occupying train stations in their quest to resettle. It is being called a “crisis,” but the term suggests a problem that will end. Thanks to more frequent and savage civil wars around the world, the global population of displaced people has more than tripled in the last ten years, from 20 million to more than 60 million, a population almost the size of the United Kingdom. European politicians may not want to admit it, but they are struggling with the central problem of twenty-first century global politics. Climate change, political instability, and other factors virtually guarantee that this century will see many more people made into refugees or economic migrants.

#réfugiés #camps #hcr

Don’t Believe the Hype—We’re Not Even Close to Full Employment | Boston Review
▻https://bostonreview.net/blog/dean-baker-full-employment

Six Shots in #Michael_Brown | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/blog/michael-brown-ferguson-autopsy-simon-waxman

Brown was murdered by a white #police officer, the #Hollywood -ready personification of probity and self-sacrifice for the civic good. So every uncertainty will be magnified; every fault of Brown’s, no matter how irrelevant, will be marshaled against him; and every possible defense will be mustered on his killer’s behalf.

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“The Industry of Ideas”: Measuring the Impact of #Think_Tanks | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/blog/andrew-mayersohn-transparency-think-tanks-money-politics

Investigating money in politics is a little like studying dark matter: we have to make inferences about what we can’t detect from the behavior of things that we can see. While the “visible” universe of money in politics—mandatory disclosure of campaign contributions, some types of election spending, and lobbying—is sizeable in its own right, it represents only a fraction of the money spent on influencing government. Ken Silverstein’s recent e-book Pay to Play Think Tanks: Institutional Corruption and the Industry of Ideas (PDF) delves into the invisible world, demonstrating that influencers have plenty of other, less transparent tactics at their disposal.

(...)

... consider what (thanks to disclosure laws) we do know about money in politics. The 2012 congressional and presidential elections cost about $6.3 billion in reported spending, and state-level candidates raised another $3.1 billion (per the National Institute on Money in State Politics). About $3 billion in federal lobbying is disclosed every year. While these numbers appear large, they are small relative to the size of the U.S. economy, leading some political scientists to ask why, given the immense economic stakes, corporations and unions spend so little money on politics. Generally, they conclude that lobbying and donations matter at the margins but don’t determine policy outcomes all by themselves. Campaign contributions, for example, are not usually powerful enough to convince a congressperson to vote against his core ideology or his party’s line on a salient issue. Given that wealthy interests are still very good at getting their way, then, it makes sense to look at the aspects of money in politics beyond campaign contributions and lobbying to understand why.

(...)

Silverstein suggests disclosure as a remedy, arguing that think tanks should voluntarily publish their officials’ financial statements as well as their donor list, but provides little evidence that think tanks are worried enough about their credibility to do so. On the contrary, think tanks are probably more concerned about the loss of credibility that would come with disclosing donors and having the media and political opponents pore over the list for embarrassing details. Moreover, disclosure will do nothing to address Silverstein’s other concern, the transformation of think tanks from idea factories into partisan attack dogs. Medvetz’s argument suggests that think tanks simply have too much to gain by “binding” themselves – turning themselves into reliable sources for the media and allies for politicians – to care about the loss of their autonomy.

Studying the Rich | Boston Review

▻http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/mike-konczal-thomas-piketty-capital-studying-rich

In the 1790s, Frederick Eden, concerned about the economy and the realities of the poor, went into the British countryside and began to collect data on household budgets for poor agricultural laborers. He collected budgets himself, got additional data from “respectable clergymen,” and hired others to get even more. The results were published in a major, groundbreaking work, The State of the Poor, in 1797. In the end, Eden had eighty-six families worth of data.

http://www.bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/Piketty-photo_credit_Emmanuelle-Marchadour-web.jpg

It is easy to overlook the achievement of Thomas Piketty’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, as a work of economic history. Debates about the book have largely focused on inequality. But on any given page, there is data about the total level of private capital and the percentage of income paid out to labor in England from the 1700s onward, something that would have been impossible for early researchers like Eden to assemble or comprehend. Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. But beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book’s deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention and criticism. By understanding the initial debate over the book, we can examine what is at stake in how Capital is understood.

#thomas_piketty #économie #riches #pauvres #richesse #pauvreté

Inequality Kills | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/us/stephen-bezruchka-inequality-kills

If the culprit of the decline in health is not health care, are individual health-related behaviors, often blamed for the high death rates in some groups, causing our low ranking in health?

Apparently not. Americans smoke less than both men and women in the healthier countries, so tobacco, though important, is not a significant cause for our higher mortality. Diet and other similar individual behaviors prevalent in the United States also don’t account for our health disadvantage compared to other rich nations. When asked to identify solutions to our poor health status as a nation, many respond that we need more education. Many see education as the solution to a wide range of problems. But on average the U.S. population has more years of schooling than in any other country in the world. And while we spend a great deal of money on education, we don’t get much bang for those bucks.

(...)

There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist changing.

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High Inequality Results in More US Deaths than Tobacco, Car Crashes and Guns Combined | Blog, Q&A | BillMoyers.com
▻http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/19/high-inequality-results-in-more-us-deaths-than-tobacco-car-crashes-and-g

#inégalités #santé #mortalité #Etats-Unis

Does Reading Literature Make You More Moral ? | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/blog/paula-ml-moya-does-reading-literature-make-you-more-moral

Lost Radicals | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/eric-mann-michael-dawson-radical-black-left-history

Since the March on Washington fifty years ago, the condition of black people has deteriorated; today they are subject to injustices ranging from mass unemployment to mass incarceration. Yet gone is the rhetoric of militant hope, black liberation, and economic equality generated by the Third World revolutions five decades ago. It is difficult even to draw on the lessons and legacies of these revolutions, for the state suppression of radical organizations in the 1960s has extended into the suppression of their history. As Mumia Abu Jamal explained, young black people are suffering from “#menticide,” deprived of their tradition, its strategy and tactics, and the hope it provides.

Michael C. Dawson’s important new book Blacks In and Out of the Left, expands on Jamal’s diagnosis by characterizing one of its sources: the abandonment of the Black Power movement by white liberals and social democrats who claimed that a black-led movement was inconsistent with their “universalist” ambitions. Yet Dawson’s history shows the immense unifying power that black groups had. They brought together marginalized groups, created networks of support, and built a creative community. Indeed, restoring black politics means restoring a multinational, multiracial left.

#afro_américains

The Truth About GMOs | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/forum/pamela-ronald-gmo-food

Opening the Debate Pamela Ronald: Genetically modified foods are safe for humans and pose no special environmental risk. Yet there are serious policy questions to consider.

Boston Review — Wajahat Ali: Against the Brahmins (#Pankaj_Mishra)
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/BR38.3/wajahat_ali_pankaj_mishra.php

Wajahat Ali : Reflecting on recent events, could an argument be made that the disastrous Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis have shifted the axis of power from the United States to rising Asia?

Pankaj Mishra : I don’t think Asians and South Asians have much cause for celebration if power is indeed shifting to the East due to the disastrous blunders of the United States. One still has to ask, whose power? And to whom is it shifting and who in Asia will it eventually benefit? We Asians have shown ourselves very capable of making the same kind of mistakes. I write from Japan, which has its own history of militarism and imperialism, and where the ghost of nationalism is yet to be exorcised. And we know about South Asia’s inability to defuse its toxic nationalisms or provide a degree of social and economic justice to its billion-plus populations.

Boston Review — Lindsey Gilbert: The Networked Era (Michael Nielsen)
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.1/michael_nielsen_reinventing_discovery.php

Boston Review — John R. Bowen : Europeans Against Multiculturalism
►http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.4/john_r_bowen_european_multiculturalism_islam.php

But while it is hard to know what exactly the politicians of Europe mean when they talk about multiculturalism, one thing we do know is that the issues they raise—real or imagined—have complex historical roots that have little to do with ideologies of cultural difference. Blaming multiculturalism may be politically useful because of its populist appeal, but it is also politically dangerous because it attacks “an enemy within”: Islam and Muslims. Moreover, it misreads history. An intellectual corrective may help to diminish its malign impact.