austerity 
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SOURCE: New York Times
9/1/2021
What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run?
by Adam Tooze
The disjointed and haphazard global response to the COVID pandemic bodes poorly for the world's capacity for coordinated action to face inevitable crisies in the near future. The problem isn't a lack of means but a lack of commitment to collective action.
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SOURCE: Academe
5/4/2021
Visions against Politics
by Eileen Boris and Annelise Orleck
Historians Eileen Boris and Annelise Orleck are the guest editors of the spring edition of the AAUP's magazine focusing on the need for a New Deal for Higher Education. This is their introductory essay.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
4/6/2021
The Meaning of the Democrats’ Spending Spree
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Joe Biden supported a balanced budget amendment in 1995, ran as the "establishment" candidate in the Democratic primaries, and has been a regular advocate of bipartisanship. So why is his administration proposing the massive American Rescue Plan Act, and showing a willingness to act without securing Republican cooperation? A tour of recent history can explain.
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SOURCE: Salem News
3/24/2021
SSU Faculty Retrenchment Plan Accidentally Released
Salem (MA) State University's General Counsel disputed that a spreadsheet accidentally relased in response to a records request and circulated by a faculty member constitutes a plan to terminate faculty positions for budgetary reasons. Faculty argue that it is consistent with pressure they face to accept furloughs and doubt administration assurances that retrenchment is off the table.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
3/4/2021
The Deficit Hawks That Make Moderate Democrats Cower
The Commitee For a Responsible Federal Budget has lobbied both parties toward austerity policies for decades. Writer Alex Yablon examines the group's origins and impact beginning in the Clinton era.
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SOURCE: New York Times
2/15/2021
Biden and the Fed Leave 1970s Inflation Fears Behind
Biden's economic advisors appear to be treating unemployment, eviction and poverty wages as more serious problems than modest inflation, reversing decades of austerity-driven guidance.
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SOURCE: The Metropole
12/10/2020
The Growth Of Market-Oriented Urban Policy — A Review Of Neoliberal Cities
by Tracy Neumann
A new collection of essays seeks to develop a historical understanding and grounding for the often vague term "neoliberalism" through its transformation of urban space and politics.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
9/14/2020
Even the Republican ‘Skinny’ Relief Bill Failed. How is Such Unnecessary Suffering Justified?
by Margaret Somers
How is it that extra money incentivizes the rich to become paragons of moral virtue and economic rainmakers, whereas for working people it incentivizes them to become social parasites and economic saboteurs? How can there be one human nature for the 1%, and another for the rest of us?
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SOURCE: Vox
8/27/2020
Those who Like Government Least Govern Worst
Both George W. Bush and Donald Trump represent a Republican Party soaked in contempt for, and mistrust of, the federal government. When you don’t respect, or even like, the institution you lead, you lead it poorly. When that institution is incredibly, globally important — as the US government is — leading it poorly can invite global catastrophe.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
8/3/2020
Stop Worrying about Protecting ‘Taxpayers.’ That Isn’t the Government’s Job.
by Lawrence B. Glickman
"Taxpayerism has perverted our political culture by denying the existence of a common good — or, perhaps, more accurately, by falsely defining that good, and even freedom itself, as low taxes for the rich and for corporations."
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/29/2020
Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People.
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
If there were ever questions about whether poor and working-class African-Americans were disposable, there can be none now. It’s clear that state violence is not solely the preserve of the police.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/25/2020
They Survived the Worst Battles of World War II. And Died of the Virus.
The virus has spread in more than 40 veterans’ homes in more than 20 states, leading to the deaths of at least 300 people.
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SOURCE: The Correspondent
5/14/2020
The Neoliberal Era is Ending. What Comes Next?
by Rutger Bregman
From higher taxes for the wealthy to more robust government, the time has come for ideas that seemed impossible just months ago.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
4/30/2020
This is how Bad Things are for Museums: They Now Have a Green Light to Sell Off Their Art
The Association of Art Museum Directors has relaxed its guidelines against selling works of art for operating funds. Now, the notion of selling off a Claude Monet or two to plug a budgetary hole—or to fend off a total financial meltdown—is suddenly something to contemplate.
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SOURCE: Public Books
3/18/2020
College Worth Fighting For
by Ryan Boyd
Professors are in a class struggle, a real fight that cannot be won with critique alone.
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SOURCE: Aeon
10-20-16
In a highly indebted world, austerity is a permanent state of affairs
by Mark Blyth
Strip away all the electoral politics at the moment in the US, the UK, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, and there's one underlying question. It’s a creditor/debtor stand-off where the creditors have the whip hand.
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SOURCE: NYT
8-4-15
The Tough Love of ‘Austerity’
by Jennifer Szalai
When we talk about the need for austerity in Greece, the word conveys not just an economic but a moral requirement — a lesson that must be taught.
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SOURCE: BBC News
7-19-13
Amid Greek austerity, plunder of priceless treasures
The financial crisis in Greece has already had far-reaching consequences for many people, but now it is claiming a new casualty as some of the country's ancient treasures become a target for thieves.Detective Gergios Tsoukalis puffs nervously on his cigar. In the passenger's seat of a taxi, he grapples with four different mobile phones as he tries to co-ordinate the arrest of yet another antiquities smuggler.As the driver pulls into the port, he sees ahead of him that plainclothes police officers have already pounced on the unassuming man, who is completely shocked by the early-morning operation....
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Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
by Mark Blyth
Credit: Oxford University Press.This book has a rather unusual genesis. David McBride from Oxford University Press emailed me in July 2010 and asked me if I wanted to write a book about the turn to austerity in economic policy. I had been playing with a book idea called “The End of the Liberal World” for a while but really hadn't been getting all that far with it. Dave's offer seemed to be a ready-made alternative project. After all, someone had to write such a book, and since I had, as bankers say, “skin in the game” here, for reasons I shall elaborate below, I said yes. Shortly thereafter Geoffrey Kirkman, Associate Director of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, where I am a faculty fellow, wondered if there was anything that I would like to make into a short video. I say yes – I'd do something about this new book that I have agreed to write.
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SOURCE: Bloomberg Echoes
5-3-13
Andrew Edwards: How Austerity Pushed American Colonists to Revolt
Andrew Edwards is a PhD student in American history at Princeton University. The opinions expressed are his own.As the euro area tries to wrestle member states into fiscal submission through bailouts, austerity and capital controls, it would be well advised to consider a historical precedent: the American Revolution.In the early 18th century, North America held a role in the British Empire that was similar to the one occupied by Cyprus or Slovenia in the euro area today. Americans were slavers, smugglers, rumrunners and fanatics -- as “opulent, commercial, thriving” as they were irresponsible and fiscally profligate. But as the empire struggled to stay solvent after the Seven Years War, the government of Prime Minister George Grenville attempted to bring the colonists to heel in the name of fiscal austerity.“The Circumstances of the Times, the Necessities of the Country, and the Abilities of the Colonies, concur in requiring an American Revenue,” wrote Thomas Whately, a Grenville ally, in 1765.
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