Austerity

This thesis explores the gendered impact of austerity, contributing to an enhanced understanding of women’s experiences of austerity. It approaches austerity as a set of coexisting ideological (moral–political–economic) discourses and policies, that construct gender in particular ways, and that have particular gendered social effects. This thesis argues that it is vital to understand the workings of the state and the wider historical legacies that helped to produce inequalities through material and symbolic violence, since it is this context which frames how austerity is lived and felt in the everyday. This thesis thus examines the symbiotic relationship between the states production and legitimisation of austerity, and the ways in which it is experienced and articulated by young women in their everyday lives. Exploratory and interpretative in nature, this study draws on interviews and group discussions with sixty-one young women from different classed and ‘racial’ backgrounds, aged...

This article shows how a specific set of Italian economic ideas, which
were first formulated in the first half of the twentieth century and later espoused by a network of economists from Bocconi University, Milan, came to play an important role in shaping European policy responses to the Great Recession and establishing the doctrine of ‘expansionary austerity.’ It argues that two factors – the formalization of these ideas in the language of mainstream economics and the establishment of professional networks that operated across a host of linked ecologies – contributed to their influence. The result was a ‘boomerang effect’, or a transfer of economic
ideas from the European periphery to centers of policy-making power and back again. This phenomenon is understudied in the existing political economy literature, which tends to assume that ideational traffic is one-way, with ideas originating in centers of power and traveling from there to the periphery.

In this chapter, I ask whether fiscal austerity since the global financial crisis can help explain the growth in anti-immigrant sentiment that undergirds right-wing populism, focusing in particular on the United States and the United Kingdom. This empirical question also speaks to a theoretical issue central to populism scholarship: What conditions lead populism to take on nationalist and reactionary characteristics rather than a politics of inclusion and distributive justice?

Drawing on Thomas Edsall’s (2012) idea of the politics of scarcity, I will suggest that fiscal austerity since the global financial crisis contributed to citizens’ sense of scarcity of public goods and services, including in the areas of social housing, healthcare, and education. Nationalist political entrepreneurs found in this sense of scarcity an opportunity to scapegoat groups they define as falling outside the national community, simultaneously redirecting blame away from the project of austerity itself.

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) made deep cuts to legal aid in the UK from April 2013, withdrawing state aid from almost all private family cases. The authors carried out a micro-study of solicitors providing legal aid and Citizens Advice Bureaux in the Kent and London areas to investigate the impact of the LASPO cuts. Findings from this scoping study suggest that legal aid firms have closed or merged, that legal aid work is often partially carried out in solicitors' own time, that 'unbundled' services for litigants in person (LiPs) are increasingly common, and that family cases are being complicated and extended by the new ubiquity of the LiP. Respondents suggest that litigants may increasingly be 'giving up' on pursuing their cases, with clear implications for financial justice as well as contact with children. Further studies are required to further analyse the financial and affective impact of the cuts and the distribution of losses and difficulties between genders, but the study suggests that increasing post-separation poverty, debt and capital losses are likely to increase in the post-LASPO environment and that firms and bureaux are having to find various methods of dealing with clients abandoned by the state.

This chapter examines the discursive constructions of debt, deficits and austerity in service to neoliberal globalization. Drawing in particular upon the relatively recent turn toward austerity in Europe as enforced by the “troika” of the European Commission, IMF and European Central Bank, and the continuing “deficit crisis” in the United States, I argue that indeed, there is a crisis, but that the crisis is a continuation of the “there is no alternative” to capitalism discourse, or a crisis of imagination. I argue for the potential of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s debt refusal campaign to provide a much-needed alternative to the neoliberal austerity discourse.

Hungary is a major player in the European sex trade, not only as a host country for sex tourism and domestic punters, but also as a major provider of the labour force that works in western European countries. The scarcer the economic opportunities in a region, the more likely locals are to enter the trade and end up either providing or managing sexual services far from home. A vicious cycle of destitution locks large numbers of Hungarian women into sex work. Moving to western Europe to avoid prosecution, their vulnerability and isolation only increases.

In The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte bring together the voices of campaigners and academics to show that rather than stimulating economic growth, austerity policies have led to a dismantling of the social systems that operated as a buffer against economic hardship, exposing austerity to be a form of systematic violence.

Covering a range of famous cases of institutional violence in Britain, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, the risks faced by people on workfare schemes, community violence in Northern Ireland and cuts to the regulation of social protection, are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking expose of the myriad ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.

O Brasil apresenta enormes desigualdades, que se manifestam também no acesso aos direitos sociais. Historicamente o acesso à educação superior no Brasil foi altamente restrito à elite econômica, majoritariamente branca, das Unidades da Federação mais ricas do país. No entanto, entre 2002 e 2014, período de crescimento econômico e de políticas voltadas para a ampliação das instituições/vagas de educação superior e para a inclusão social, houve importantes mudanças nesse setor. Qual a extensão destas mudanças? De que forma as políticas públicas contribuíram para essas mudanças? Quais as perspectivas para a educação superior considerando a reversão de parte destas políticas? Neste contexto, a tese trata da desigualdade no acesso à educação superior brasileira nas perspectivas de renda, raça/cor e regional. Seu objetivo é avaliar a evolução recente do acesso da população brasileira à educação superior assim como o perfil dos estudantes tendo em vista o conjunto de políticas públicas direcionadas para a educação superior. Os dados mostram que, de 2001 a 2015, houve ampliação da representatividade dos negros como estudantes, do número de estudantes em outras Unidades da Federação que não as do eixo Sul-Sudeste-Brasília e do percentual de estudantes de renda baixa (apesar de a renda per capita domiciliar ter crescido expressivamente neste período), entre outras mudanças. A hipótese é de que o período recente revela uma convergência entre o perfil do estudante em direção ao perfil médio da população brasileira, o que configura uma democratização do acesso à educação superior, ainda que ainda persistam importantes desigualdades. Isso decorre de uma combinação virtuosa de crescimento econômico, redução de desigualdades e políticas públicas voltadas para a educação superior. Adicionalmente, busca-se mostrar que esse processo de inclusão pode estar ameaçado por políticas de austeridade fiscal, em especial a Emenda Constitucional 95, assim como pela reversão de parte das políticas públicas responsáveis pelo processo de inclusão. A tese é composta por 4 capítulos: O primeiro capítulo analisa a relação da desigualdade com o capitalismo, que pode se reproduzir ou se limitar pelo acesso à educação e pelo papel das políticas públicas e como tais desigualdades se manifestam no Brasil e se refletem nos indicadores de acesso à ES no Brasil; O segundo capítulo analisa a estrutura e institucionalidade da ES no Brasil a partir da redemocratização e nas políticas adotadas a partir do século XXI; O terceiro capítulo discute, a partir de dados secundários e dos microdados da PNAD, as mudanças no perfil dos estudantes da ES no século XXI, em especial nos quesitos renda, cor/raça e região, até o ano de 2015, com uma comparação à mudança do perfil dos estudantes indianos no mesmo período; O quarto capítulo discute o conceito de austeridade, sua aplicação no Brasil, seus efeitos nas políticas públicas e no perfil dos estudantes (com uso dos dados da PNADC anual (2012 – 2017), e outras ameaças às políticas públicas.

Current debates on austerity often forget that these policies are almost 100 years old. This paper explores how the combination of austerity and technocracy acted as a powerful tool to secure the compliance of European countries to socio-economic stabilization after WWI. Austerity emerged as an economic, moral and technocratic message as economic experts sought to educate the restless post-war civil society. This paper analyses primary austerity documents from the international economic conferences of Brussels (1920) and Genoa (1922). In addition I use a case study of Italy (1922-1925) to show how austerity succeeded under the first years of Fascism, when the government authorized prominent economics professors to implement the international financial codes devised at Brussels and Genoa. This essay considers the scientific writings of De Stefani, Ricci and Pantaleoni to examine the theoretical roots of the technocratic nature of austerity.

This chapter reviews three books published in 2018 centering on disability and resistance. It is organized into five sections. The first, ‘Resistance, Disability, and Democracy’, summarizes debates about the political obligations of disability studies, and outlines how disability justice is replacing the former emphasis on rights. The second section, ‘Academic Perspectives’, reviews the provocative collection Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies, volume 1, identifying areas of contention and raising questions about the field’s current direction. The third section, ‘Activist Perspectives’, reviews Alice Wong’s collection Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People. The fourth section, ‘Beyond Identity’, reviews Robert McRuer’s Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance. The concluding section, ‘An Abbreviated Manifesto’, asserts the vital role of disability justice in establishing alternatives to neoliberalism, resisting tyranny, and achieving democracy.

Considering the current situation arising from a neoliberal market policy, renewed by the strengthening of ultraliberal principles and austerity measures, already established and under way, this article presents a reflection on the direct repercussion of this scenario in the processes of normative constructions. In this sense, it explores the hypothesis that this scenario of setbacks, in reality, results in normative deconstructions, which has reduced, especially, the protection of the vulnerable and of fundamental social rights, as is the case of Federal Law 13.465/ 2017, which deals with regularization in Brazil.

In line with interest in varieties of capitalism, one might expect to find varieties of austerity. This is confirmed by the historical record: austerity has different origins, dynamics, and effects in different periods; and by comparisons in the same periods. Another source of variation is how (and how far) pursuit of austerity re-articulates the economic and political in terms of policy, politics, and polity. This chapter explores these issues through cultural political economy (CPE). This heterodox theoretical approach takes the cultural turn seriously but not one-sidedly in the critique of political economy. It can be said to combine interest in the economic, political and social imaginaries that shape capital accumulation and state projects with a critical analysis of the changing articulation of the economic and political in capitalist social formations. After brief comments in these terms on austerity policies in the ‘golden age’ of Atlantic Fordism, the analysis concentrates on post-Fordist accumulation regimes. To illustrate the variegation of austerity policies, politics and political transformation in this context, the US and UK serve as exemplars of neoliberal finance-dominated accumulation. Attention then turns to economic and fisco-financial crises in Continental Europe as organised in the shadow of a German-led neo-mercantilist bloc. European efforts to address contagion effects from the North Atlantic Financial Crisis (NAFC) as well as the Eurozone’s sui generis crisis dynamics involve other forms of austerity policies and politics. This is illustrated from Germany and Greece. The conclusion considers the limits to neoliberal austerity and the catastrophic equilibrium of forces that is blocking efforts to overcome them.

F*ck May 68, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Radical Past from 1968 to Today

Session 1: History is a Weapon

June 8, 2018

Department of History, University of Liverpool

https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/circumnavigating-the-past-foreclosing-the-future-commemoration-of-the-radical-past-in-the-amnesiac-present/

AGAINST SATANISM VOLUME 5 - Satanic Economics and the Satanic Principle of Poverty - Michael Hudson written by Satchidanand

Here we have the best of the best papers by Michael Hudson showing that the current economics are fabulous finanancial capitalism, whereas what built America and what is building China now is Infrastructure capitalism.

The key is that the Satanic Religion and its recruiting cults of Freemasonry and the Crowlean Sexual Ritual Ordo Templi Orientis are Fake Gangs, created by men as a technique to conquer the world.

The Ancient Satanic Enemy who counts meditation and the mind control psychic arts as one of its main planks of World Domination has used Satanic Infil-Traitors for 10,000 years in every Organisation - Religion, Left and Right Politics, Dynastic Families, Geopolitics, Economics, Universities, Intelligence Services, Think Tanks, Banking, International Companies, Global Warming, Eugenics..

And Banking Infiltration by Satanic Banksters supported by the False Fabulous Science of Economics..

And this book pricks the bubble of Fake Satanic Economics because Godly people could never set up the World banking and economic system described in these pages.

Only Satanists could create a system which is against the evolution of Humanity to the Stars.

Instead, the Satanic Banksters promote the Principle of Poverty, barefoot, back on the reservation, in debt to the company store.

"Whenever you have a misunderstanding of reality year after year, decade after decade, and now for a century, when a false picture of the economy is painted you can be sure that there is a special interest benefiting.

A false picture of reality does not happen by nature; it is subsidised, bought and paid for. And the banking sector has subsidised a junk economics that is taught in the universities, broadcast from your newspapers, mouthed by the politicians, whose election they sponsor, to try to make you believe, that you’re living on Mars in a different kind of a world—instead of the actual country that you’re living in— and to pretend that there is no financial class that is trying to grab what belongs to the public at large.

This is what ends up with a difference between central bank creation by the government with the government aims of economic growth and full employment, as compared with commercial bank credit that aims at economic shrinkage, at austerity, at lower wages, at lower output, so that it can do to you what the commercial banks are doing to Greece, to say give us your ports and your land and your tourist areas and your water and sewer systems, so we can charge you for water and sewer.

And we can take the money that you had expected to get in pensions and we can scale it down, so that we can pay ourselves.

(c. 56:10) “This is what it took an army in times past. And today it’s done without an army, as long as you will be passive and believe the science-fiction of the world that banks are painting. Thank you. [Applause]”

Professor Michael Hudson

"That is what I mean by misdirection. They want your eyes off those things and on their manufactured scandals and tragedies. And they want your eyes on Trump and Mercer and May and Macron and Gates and Buffett and Bezos and other fake and petty billionaires.

They want your eyes off the banks and huge investment groups and Intelligence agencies run by the trillionaire families that really run the world.

As far as possible they want you lost in a vast trivia game of meaningless details and names and personalities, where all your “knowledge” is just rote propaganda for a dummed down population.

They want your eyes off the trillionaire families that never appear on the Forbes list, that really run the world."

Miles Mathis

In the wake of the euro-zone crisis, and the banking and economic crisis, many European countries have experienced an increase in the government debt load. The governments of Europe acting under the pressure of the troika, consisting of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF, have pledged to austerity policies in the hope that reducing government spending and raising taxes would alleviate the debt burden, and improve consumer and investor confidence and export, leading to the anticipated economic recovery. This paper studies the social and economic consequences of austerity policies in seven European countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus, Ireland, UK and Latvia), and argues that the austerity policies in Europe have deteriorated rather than improved the fate of the European economies; increased rather than decreased the national debt; and raised rather than alleviated social suffering through enormous cutbacks in the social welfare, health care and education systems; the lay-off of many public-sector workers; the increase of the unemployment rate; labor market reforms that made employment relationships more insecure and reduced wages; a deterioration in overall health; a rise in suicide and depression rates; and a rise in social unrest. The paper also offers alternatives to the current impasse in the Eurozone, including a cancellation of debts; a tax increase on the wealthy; a break-up of the euro-zone followed by currency devaluation in the periphery; the increase in domestic consumption in the surplus countries, such as Germany, and a stimulus program for the periphery; and the creation of a EU fiscal union.

Con "Un borghese piccolo piccolo" Mario Monicelli presenta uno degli spaccati cinematografici più interessanti della società italiana del 1977: anno di crisi socio-economica e anche di crisi dell’etica piccolo-borghese, rappresentata nel film dal protagonista Giovanni Vivaldi. L’esaurimento del miracolo economico, il passaggio dalla “produzione” al “consumo”, la precarietà sono infatti i temi principali della pellicola che narra dell’evoluzione morale del protagonista che, per “sistemare” il figlio Mario con un lavoro stabile, accetta ogni compromesso. Il suo sogno però non avrà buon fine: l’insensata uccisione di Mario avvenuta propria quando stava per essere assunto rappresenta il definitivo fallimento delle idee miglioriste fin ad allora in voga in Italia e la trasformazione irrevocabile in atto nel Paese.

In the context of a volume on Immiseration Capitalism and Education: Austerity, Resistance and Revolt (ed. Dave Hill, 2013), this chapter, written from a vantage in Bulgaria in the summer of 2013, develops sixteen interlocking focus points or working propositions in looking at neoliberalism implanted on the ruins of Eastern bloc ‘real existing socialism’ (Realsozialismus) and its many decades of lived experience, and its impact on education. “Capitalism reborn in Bulgaria and elsewhere in Europe’s recolonized East is re-riveting and retrofitting “the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock” under Capital’s colonial comeback, with mounting mass pauperization, an “accumulation of wealth at one pole … ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole” (Marx, 1976/1867:799). The article foregrounds this paradigmatic conjuncture, its contradictions across a range of diverse countries that lost the Cold War, in post-socialist freefall since the “obscure disaster” (Badiou, 2003/1998) of 1989. These countries have in fact been turned in varying degrees (some with a vengeance) into a “testing ground of an extremely aggressive form of neoliberal social engineering, an attempt to violently impose a change in social paradigm” (Sotiris, this volume), a metamorphosis in political and economic paradigms at the hands of the IMF, EU―and a nouveau riche comprador bourgeoisie and coterie of oligarchs―that has transmuted key segments of the Eastern European  nouveau-capitalist world into a vast societal poorhouse for many ordinary citizens. There is a special focus on Bulgaria as exemplar, a country to which the author is especially attached over many years with deep affection for its people, teaching at university level.
A probing article highly critical of American education summer 2016 by Rich Gibson, 'Why Have School? Blood and Money Versus Reason' (counterpunch, 16 Aug 2016, is in the same class-conscious, Marxist spirit and ethos as the 14 chapters in the book edited by Dave Hill on Immiseration Capitalism and Education, see http://goo.gl/N9xAC1 .

Europe's response to the sovereign debt crisis in Southern Europe has been premised on the idea that these states can return to growth through internal devaluation and fiscal consolidation. This article explores the distributive consequences of that strategy in Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. We argue that standard measures of poverty do not capture the deterioration in living standards as fully as anchored poverty. Moreover, we show that inequality trends conceal considerable re-ranking within the income distribution: those who were rich in 2012 had got richer in 2009-12, but those who were rich in 2009 lost ground in 2009-12. We find that in all four countries the new poor include significantly fewer pensioners and more unemployed workers, and are considerably poorer than the old poor had been. We demonstrate that there was significant variation in the magnitude and design of austerity, with Italy imposing a far smaller adjustment than Spain, and Portugal achieving less inequality in spite of robust fiscal consolidation. Nevertheless, even when austerity measures were designed to reduce inequality by compressing incomes downward, their second-order macro-economic effects ultimately increased inequality (except in Portugal). In the last section, we explore the political reasons for this variation.

Κατοικία στην Ελλάδα: επιπτώσεις της λιτότητας και προοπτικές A Π Ρ Ι Λ Ι Ο Σ 2 0 1 9 04 05 Η παρούσα μελέτη παρουσιάζει την τρέχουσα κατάσταση στον τομέα της κατοικίας στην Ελλάδα, έπειτα από οκτώ χρόνια εφαρμογής σκληρών πολιτικών λιτότητας, εστιαζόμενη ιδιαίτερα στο διάστημα των τεσσάρων τελευταίων χρόνων, από το 2015 έως σήμερα, περίοδο σημαντικών αλλαγών, υπό τη διακυβέρνηση του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ. Μια περίοδο που σημαδεύτηκε, μεταξύ άλλων, από την εφαρμογή και τη λήξη του τρίτου μνημονίου, την έξαρση των προσφυγικών ροών και την ανάκαμψη κλάδων της οικονομίας, όπως ο τουρισμός.

The prolonged economic downturn since the onset of
the global financial crisis in 2008 and the subsequent
European sovereign debt crises continue to take a toll on
Europeans. Alongside diminished growth and depressed
rates of public and private investments, the erosion of
public trust in national and EU institutions has been one
of the most striking features of the post-crisis world.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) as the EU’s
development bank has a particularly important role to play
in this context. The 2012 capital increase is testimony
to the need to mobilise funds in times of strained public
budgets, which may be multiplied via the EIB. Similarly,
based on the analysis of persistently low public and
private investment as compared to pre-crisis levels,
Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker promised
an “investment offensive” upon taking office, with the
European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) as the
main innovation. The investment fund was set up in
record time and uses the leveraged EU budget as a
guarantee to absorb any first losses private investors
may incur under projects selected, so as to mobilise
private investments that would otherwise have
been discouraged.
The use of the EU budget necessitates a higher
standard of accountability, especially in a politically
charged environment in which the European Union as
a whole is increasingly questioned. The development of
elements of participatory democracy can and should be
complemented with a demonstrative push for proactive
transparency and openness on the part of EU institutions,
including the EIB. This push that may well serve the
interest of the institutions in ensuring that citizens
appreciate their value added more than has previously
been the case.

In this context, the present study aims to assess the
transparency, integrity and accountability mechanisms
in place at the EIB.

In this unfinished rough powerpoint for a series of lectures I explore why the United States is markedly different from other representative democracies and welfare states.  I trace the tradition of using a combination of bribery and corruption of the Congress and Judiciary, and violence and racist terror as a means of marginalizing organized labour and frustrating democratic control.  I explore how the contemporary crisis of social inequality, political corruption and racist authoritarian government long predates Trump, first emerging after Reconstruction in the Kleptocracy of the Gilded Age, receding somewhat under Roosevelt's leadership and with the Bretton Woods consensus, only to re-emerge with the Reagan revolution and the political triumph of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, and the radicalism of the 1960s.  On the foreign policy side, the resurgent power of the oligarchy within the country and the brutal repression of the poor and marginalization of labour and the voices of the black radical tradition, symbolized by the ruins of Detroit and the South Bronx, would be matched by the consolidation of the policies of the so-called Washington Consensus.  This policy approach, enforced by the IMF, World Bank, and American military force and paramilitary violence, is often sold as Globalization, critiqued as Neo-liberalism, but might more accurately be described as a return to racist colonialism of the filibusters, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.  The talk, which is intended to engage non-academic audiences and avoid jargon and theory, ought to be read in conjunction with Richard Iton's Solidarity Blues, and WIlkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level.

Since 2008 there has been an empirically observable rise in young British men sharing images of their worked-out bodies on social media platforms. This article draws on interviews with men who engage in this popular cultural practice to suggest that it is an embodied and mediated response to the precarious structures of feeling produced by neoliberal austerity. It begins by arguing that as young men’s traditional breadwinning capacities are being eroded in a post-financial crisis austerity economy, increasing numbers of them are turning to sharing images of their worked out bodies as a way of feeling valuable. Moreover, by speaking to men who engage in this practice, it becomes possible to map the affective contradictions of inhabiting the precarious spaces of austerity culture. The article concludes by suggesting that within these affective contradictions lies the potential of resistance to neoliberalism’s ongoing territorialisation of everyday life.

Si à première vue la Confédération syndicale européenne des syndicats (CES) semble être bien insérée au sein du dispositif institutionnel de l'Union européenne, elle n'a pu néanmoins contrecarrer une dynamique du laisser faire/laisser passer, devenue le moteur de la construction européenne avec le projet de marché intérieur de 1985, qui a conduit à la dévalorisation du droit du travail et du droit syndical, dynamique fortement renforcée lors du tournant de la gouvernance économique de 2011. Dans ce contexte, la CES est de plus en plus impuissante à peser sur l'orientation des politiques européennes comme elle semble impuissante à dépasser ses blocages internes liés à sa composition fortement hétérogène.

This paper contributes to our understanding of caring for someone with dementia in the context of cuts to publicly funded social care by approaching the issue from the perspective of carers, who emphasise the important role justice plays in determining wellbeing. I draw on a qualitative analysis of carer accounts to argue that we would be well placed to adopt an approach based on Prilleltensky’s (2012: 1) conceptualisation of ‘wellness as fairness’. This would move us beyond individualistic, positivist notions of carer wellbeing currently dominating the literature to more socially constructed and determined ones thus bridging the gap between subjective wellbeing and those aspects of a setting or social policy that are health giving.

In looking at the other side of the crisis regarding solidarity networks in Greece, this piece provides an introductory overview for a special section of SA/AS that deals with topical issues such as the effects of austerity measures. It serves as the introduction to the special section on solidarity networks in Social Anthropology, edited by H. Cabot and Th. Rakopoulos.

Abstract: This paper is concerned with mythology and ideology in media coverage of the financial crisis. I argue that the Mail Online’s ‘critical’ discourse of bankers is a mythological construction of the trickster, which causes ideological and discursive dilemmas for the Mail as a right wing news source. Some stories featuring the banker as trickster suppressed discussions of systemic failings in the financial system. However, other instances mobilised systemic questions and concerns about global trading and the free market. By conducting a Critical Discourse Analysis of Mail Online news stories I show that the Mail’s criticism of bankers does not reflect an ideological compromise or opposition to the systemic design and ideals of free market capitalism. Rather, paradoxical mechanisms occur when the Mail represents bankers as the immoral individuals (tricksters) who take advantage of the system: whilst these criticisms call for some form of punishment or legislation to control the problem, there is reluctance to compromise free market values or legitimise state regulation of the banking sector. The complex characteristics of trickster figures in the stories analysed demonstrate current dilemmas and anxieties about the power and practices of financial institutions. Whether bankers are the genius providers of wealth or the reckless destroyers of economies, their ridicule highlights a sensitive balance of values and interests in journalistic storytelling. As Radin argued, “If we laugh at [the trickster], he grins at us. What happens to him happens to us” (1955:169).  If it is true that we need the expertise of bankers to recover in the global market then this provides another dilemma for publics, politicians and storytellers to consider.

keywords: mythology; ideology; bankers; trickster; critical discourse analysis

While being an indicator of a well-regulated economy, public markets also function as spaces of socialization, cultural representation and a formative factor for community identities. In addition, a new trend in the specific field of study has emerged in the past ten years that approaches the institution of public markets as an expression of informal practices, cooperative economy and resistance to the ongoing commercialization and privatization of urban space. A case as such has been the historic municipal market of Kypseli, one of Athens' most vibrant and densely populated districts. This paper seeks to explore the different stages of social agency and those public initiatives associated with the communal space of Kypseli Market by addressing the following question: How these forces have attempted to reintroduce the space's character and functionality as a response to the challenges of privatization, commercialization and social exclusion of underprivileged groups of people, namely refugees, migrants and members of lower class stratification?

The complex chains of decisions that produce disasters like the Grenfell Tower fire are not readily described as 'violence'. 'Violence' is something that remains largely understood in popular consciousness, and in sociology, as an interpersonal phenomenon, and as the result of a deliberate attempt to cause harm. This is largely because our understanding of violence is always somehow connected to legal concepts and principles. In this article, we argue that the Grenfell fire was produced by a form of collective decision-making that we describe as institutional violence; it reflects the routine order and detached administration of a form of violence that is intimately connected to a more insidious targeting of subject groups and populations in ways that produce and increase the likelihood of other, ongoing, violent circumstances occurring.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, austerity has been deployed as a public policy geared towards reducing sovereign debt and restoring economic order, on the one hand, and descried as an example of punitive moralizing by political and economic elites, on the other. This article challenges the economic understanding of the concept of austerity. Some recent examples from popular culture are adduced to indicate societal dissatisfaction with the accumulation of material things, examples of what has been called 'the new minimalism'. Contextualizing this phenomenon within a culture of intensive consumption, it is argued here that there is a history of austerity as an aversion to ostentation and excess in western tradition that runs from the Stoics through to recent pronouncements by Pope Francis and that provides a vantage point from which to question the economistic deployment of the term. When understood in this way, the austere can be seen to carry an important political meaning today and may contribute to the sorts of transformation necessary in order to reduce material demand on a societal scale. This article is part of the themed issue 'Material demand reduction'.

This paper assesses how gender, housing, austerity and the right to the city interrelate with reference to female lone parents from East London, the site of the 2012 Olympic Games. In so doing, the paper draws upon qualitative research undertaken with lone parent mothers living in temporary accommodation. The women's housing experiences are embedded within a deepening of neoliberal welfare cutbacks and restructuring under what Peck (2012) has called 'austerity urbanism'. Although the mother's lives are based in East London where they have extended family and where many of them grew up, they have either been moved, or face the prospect of being moved, out of the area and even beyond the city limits into suburban South East England. Rather than basking in the much trumpeted 2012 Games regeneration 'legacy', these women's right to live in East London, close to their support networks, is being eroded.

With the mass media companies in Greece and the subsequent advertising expenditure exhibiting an indiscriminate downfall from 2008 and onwards, due to the heavy austerity fiscal measures imposed by the troika, we are in a completely different and uncharted situation than a few years ago. The remaining mainstream mass media were strongly servile to, and supportive of the pro-memorandum policies, as a kind of mechanism for the imposition of coercive dilemmas in Greek society, transforming crucial political questions into an unquestionable one-way street (TINA). The “free market” reforms had the obvious outcome of depressing the earnings of working people, and weakening-to the breaking point- the role of the state. Voices in favor of support for the Greek people were heard all over the world, from the “Occupy…” movements in the USA to Spain (“indignados”), and through petitions circulating worldwide via the new technologies. Through neoliberal fairy tales, i.e. the imposition and the rationale of unprecedented measures, via the mainstream subjugated global media, the neoliberal elites tried to counter, by diktats, the more than visible, daily opposition to policies aiming to destroy a country while pretending to save it. And the most crucial question of all is: “If Greece succumbs, who will be the next one?”

Since the global financial crisis offshore finance centres (OFCs) have been faced with unprecedented and unremitting pressure from leading states, international organisations and civil society organisations to enhance the transparency of their tax regimes. Superficially the age of austerity, characterised by large and sustained public deficits and popular revulsion against multinational corporations and rich individuals abusing the tax system, appear to have vaporised the obstacles that previously stood in the way of attempts to deliver a robust global tax transparency regime. The G20s pledge to ‘end the era of banking secrecy’ and the OECD’s boast of orchestrating a ‘revolution’ a global tax transparency prompted excited talk of the ‘end of offshore’. Unfortunately this is considerably at odds with the empirical evidence which has seen OFCs continue to thrive in the era of austerity. This paper will seek to argue that the origins of the offshore financial system lie in demands by leading states, international financial institutions and corporate actors for instruments to manage the instabilities and contradictions intrinsic to the neo-liberal economic project. The resilience of offshore financial centres and tax havens reflects responses to the financial crisis, of which austerity is an integral part, that have perpetuated the neo-liberal model. Although many leading actors have made a rhetorical commitment to a clampdown the reality is that offshore financial instruments are central to the delivery of the austerity policies to which they are likewise pledged. The paper therefore predicts that offshore finance will continue to flourish in the age of austerity.

A discussão sobre o desenvolvimento econômico no Brasil está associada à criação e institucionalização da economia como disciplina acadêmica e profissão, e às especificidades do desenvolvimento capitalista no país. O artigo propõe que o  pensamento econômico brasileiro deve ser analisado levando-se em conta seus aspectos históricos e institucionais. Recupera-se criticamente uma agenda de pesquisa gerada nos anos 1990 que explora o papel político dos economistas e discute a centralidade das instituições econômicas como estabilizadoras da democracia em países latino-americanos. Para então, refletir sobre os regimes de conhecimento pró e antiausteridade no Brasil.

The article proposes that the Brazilian economic thinking should be understood
through its historical and institutional aspects. The debate on economic development in Brazil is connected to economics constitution as academic field and its professionalization, and to the specific way capitalism has developed in this country. This paper seeks to recover critically a line of investigation developed in the 90’s on the role of economists as political actors and discusses the centrality of economic institutions as democracy stabilizers mainly in Latin American countries. Thereafter, it considers the pro and antiausterity knowledge regimes constitution in Brazil.

This paper set out to explore and outline why social work services are justifiable in times of austerity. The main purpose of this discourse was to critically argue for the continued importance of social work services during times of financial difficulty, and as such this paper draws upon recent events in Ireland during the last recession, between 2008 and 2013, which served to increase unemployment and poverty. In exploring this topic, this paper draws upon a range of secondary sources to outline the highly pertinent role which the social work profession plays in helping address issues of discrimination, marginalisation, inequality and poverty, issues which are only enhanced during times of economic hardship and austerity policies. This paper concludes that the importance of the social work profession during times of austerity actually increases as policies seek to constrain government spending and aid in further marginalising vulnerable groups in Irish society. This paper is thus highly relevant in adding to the field of knowledge within social work by validating the role it has to play within society, particularly during times of austerity and economic constraints in order to support those most at need in society.