Social Insecurity

Social Insecurity PDF Author: James W. Russell
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807012564
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
How 401(k)s have gutted retirement security, from charging exorbitant hidden fees to failing to replace the income of traditional pensions Named one of PW's Top 10 for Business & Economics A retirement crisis is looming. In 2008, as the 401(k) fallout rippled across the country, horrified holders watched 25 percent of their funds evaporate overnight. Average 401(k) balances for those approaching retirement are too small to generate more than $4,000 in annual retirement income, and experts predict that nearly half of middle-class workers will be poor or near poor in retirement. But long before the recession, signs were mounting that few people would ever be able to accumulate enough wealth on their own to ensure financial security later in life. This hasn’t always been the case. Each generation of workers since the nineteenth century has had more retirement security than the previous generation. That is, until 1981, when shaky 401(k) plans began replacing traditional pensions. For the last thirty years, we’ve been advised that the best way to build one’s nest egg is to heavily invest in 401(k)-type programs, even though such plans were originally designed to be a supplement to rather than the basis for retirement. This financial experiment, promoted by neoliberals and aggressively peddled by Wall Street, has now come full circle, with tens of millions of Americans discovering that they would have been better off under traditional pension plans long since replaced. As James W. Russell explains, this do-it-yourself retirement system—in which individuals with modest incomes are expected to invest large sums of capital in order to reap the same rewards as high-end money managers—isn’t working. Social Insecurity tells the story of a massive and international retirement robbery—a substantial transfer of wealth from everyday workers to Wall Street financiers via tremendously costly hidden fees. Russell traces what amounts to a perfect swindle, from its ideological origins at Milton Friedman’s infamous Chicago School to its implementation in Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship and its adoption in America through Reaganomics. Enraging yet hopeful, Russell offers concrete ideas on how individuals and society can arrest this downward spiral.

Social Insecurity

Social Insecurity PDF Author: James W. Russell
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807012564
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
How 401(k)s have gutted retirement security, from charging exorbitant hidden fees to failing to replace the income of traditional pensions Named one of PW's Top 10 for Business & Economics A retirement crisis is looming. In 2008, as the 401(k) fallout rippled across the country, horrified holders watched 25 percent of their funds evaporate overnight. Average 401(k) balances for those approaching retirement are too small to generate more than $4,000 in annual retirement income, and experts predict that nearly half of middle-class workers will be poor or near poor in retirement. But long before the recession, signs were mounting that few people would ever be able to accumulate enough wealth on their own to ensure financial security later in life. This hasn’t always been the case. Each generation of workers since the nineteenth century has had more retirement security than the previous generation. That is, until 1981, when shaky 401(k) plans began replacing traditional pensions. For the last thirty years, we’ve been advised that the best way to build one’s nest egg is to heavily invest in 401(k)-type programs, even though such plans were originally designed to be a supplement to rather than the basis for retirement. This financial experiment, promoted by neoliberals and aggressively peddled by Wall Street, has now come full circle, with tens of millions of Americans discovering that they would have been better off under traditional pension plans long since replaced. As James W. Russell explains, this do-it-yourself retirement system—in which individuals with modest incomes are expected to invest large sums of capital in order to reap the same rewards as high-end money managers—isn’t working. Social Insecurity tells the story of a massive and international retirement robbery—a substantial transfer of wealth from everyday workers to Wall Street financiers via tremendously costly hidden fees. Russell traces what amounts to a perfect swindle, from its ideological origins at Milton Friedman’s infamous Chicago School to its implementation in Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship and its adoption in America through Reaganomics. Enraging yet hopeful, Russell offers concrete ideas on how individuals and society can arrest this downward spiral.

Punishing the Poor

Punishing the Poor PDF Author: Loïc Wacquant
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392259
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures—the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”—and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Visit the author’s website.

Migration and Insecurity

Migration and Insecurity PDF Author: Niklaus Steiner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415665493
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Migration and Insecurity addressess an important but rarely considered aspect of migration: how are migrants and refugees received in their new homes? What defines inclusion and exclusion for migrants, and how does this affect the concept of 'belonging' in a transnational society? In these essays, the distinguished contributors discuss the places in which migrants and refugees construct and experience their belonging, and situate this discussion in the context of the international system and government policy. Chapters interrogate the notion of ...

Accumulating Insecurity

Accumulating Insecurity PDF Author: Shelley Feldman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820339512
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Accumulating Insecurity examines the relationship between two vitally important contemporary phenomena: a fixation on security that justifies global military engagements and the militarization of civilian life, and the dramatic increase in day-to-day insecurity associated with contemporary crises in health care, housing, incarceration, personal debt, and unemployment. Contributors to the volume explore how violence is used to maintain conditions for accumulating capital. Across world regions violence is manifested in the increasingly strained, often terrifying, circumstances in which people struggle to socially reproduce themselves. Security is often sought through armaments and containment, which can lead to the impoverishment rather than the nourishment of laboring bodies. Under increasingly precarious conditions, governments oversee the movements of people, rather than scrutinize and regulate the highly volatile movements of capital. They often do so through practices that condone dispossession in the name of economic and political security.

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America PDF Author: Ian Gough
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521834193
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Book Description
Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world where states suffer problems of governance and labour markets are imperfect and partial. Other welfare regimes therefore prevail involving non-state actors such as landlords, moneylenders and patrons. This book seeks to develop a conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regime in a range of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and makes an important contribution to the literature by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America.

Manufactured Insecurity

Manufactured Insecurity PDF Author: Esther Sullivan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520968352
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Manufactured Insecurity is the first book of its kind to provide an in-depth investigation of the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for an entire class of low-income residents. Drawing on rich ethnographic data collected before, during, and after mobile home park closures and community-wide evictions in Florida and Texas—the two states with the largest mobile home populations—Manufactured Insecurity forces social scientists and policymakers to respond to a fundamental question: how do the poor access and retain secure housing in the face of widespread poverty, deepening inequality, and scarce legal protection? With important contributions to urban sociology, housing studies, planning, and public policy, the book provides a broader understanding of inequality and social welfare in the United States today.

Healthy Me, Healthy Us

Healthy Me, Healthy Us PDF Author: Les Parrott
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 140020786X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
#1 New York Times bestselling authors and renowned psychologists Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott share the single most important secret to happy relationships. Relationships are rife with disappointment--but they are also the primary source of personal happiness. So it is no surprise that the number one question Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott hear over and over is, What's the single most important thing you can do for your relationships? After over twenty-five years of researching, writing, and speaking on this subject, in Healthy Me, Healthy Us the Parrotts have whittled down their answer to the truth contained in this single sentence: if you try to build intimacy with another person before you have gotten whole on your own, all your relationships become an attempt to complete yourself. Relationship skills, tips, and tactics? Sure. They have their place. But meaningful relationships--the kind we all long for--grow from something deeper, something stronger, something that has more to do with being than doing. This groundbreaking book provides the three hallmarks to psychological, emotional, and spiritual health, pointing the way to true and lasting wholeness that can revolutionize every relationship you attempt to build.

A World of Insecurity

A World of Insecurity PDF Author: Pranab Bardhan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674287584
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
An ambitious account of the corrosion of liberal democracy in rich and poor countries alike, arguing that antidemocratic sentiment reflects fear of material and cultural loss, not a critique of liberalism’s failure to deliver equality, and suggesting possible ways out. The retreat of liberal democracy in the twenty-first century has been impossible to ignore. From Wisconsin to Warsaw, Budapest to Bangalore, the public is turning against pluralism and liberal institutions and instead professing unapologetic nationalism and majoritarianism. Critics of inequality argue that this is a predictable response to failures of capitalism and liberalism, but Pranab Bardhan, a development economist, sees things differently. The problem is not inequality but insecurity—financial and cultural. Bardhan notes that antidemocratic movements have taken root globally in a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic groups. In the United States, older, less-educated, rural populations have withdrawn from democracy. But in India, the prevailing Hindu Nationalists enjoy the support of educated, aspirational urban youth. And in Europe, antidemocratic populists firmly back the welfare state (but for nonimmigrants). What is consistent among antidemocrats is fear of losing what they have. That could be money but is most often national pride and culture and the comfort of tradition. A World of Insecurity argues for context-sensitive responses. Some, like universal basic income schemes, are better suited to poor countries. Others, like worker empowerment and international coordination, have broader appeal. But improving material security won’t be enough to sustain democracy. Nor, Bardhan writes, should we be tempted by the ultimately hollow lure of China’s authoritarian model. He urges liberals to adopt at least a grudging respect for fellow citizens’ local attachments. By affirming civic forms of community pride, we might hope to temper cultural anxieties before they become pathological.

Regime Stability, Social Insecurity and Bauxite Mining in Guinea

Regime Stability, Social Insecurity and Bauxite Mining in Guinea PDF Author: Penda Diallo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000752100
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
This book explores how bauxite mining has affected local and national political dynamics in Guinea over the past 55 years, providing an overview of mining interactions with social, economic and political spheres. Guinea is amongst the world’s top producers of bauxite, and the country’s rich mineral presence has numerous implications on local communities and national policy. Guinea is an interesting and highly relevant case study in assessing the impact of bauxite mining on regime stability and social insecurity. The author offers a clear understanding of the role of mining during the Touré and Conté regimes and analyses how changes since the election of Condé in 2010 have affected the socio-political and economic development of Guinea. The author also offers analysis on how bauxite mining has led to the emergence of new forms of social contracts, sustained by mining companies instead of the state. Finally, the book argues that understanding the stabilising and destabilising potential of mining is key to ensuring long-term, sustainable, stable and inclusive growth of mineral-resource-rich countries. The book concludes by highlighting the relevance of the findings in Guinea for the wider African extractives sector. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including those working in the areas of African studies, political science, political economy, sustainable development and corporate social responsibility. The book will be relevant for academics, business actors, NGOs, policy-makers and students interested in the African mining sector.

Rhetorics of Insecurity

Rhetorics of Insecurity PDF Author: Zeynep Gambetti
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814708439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In Rhetorics of Insecurity, Zeynep Gambetti and Marcial Godoy-Anativia bring together a select group of scholars to investigate the societal ramifications of the present-day concern with security in diverse contexts and geographies. The essays claim that discourses and practices of security actually breed insecurity, rather than merely being responses to the latter. By relating the binary of security/insecurity to the binary of neoliberalism/neoconservatism, the contributors to this volume reveal the tensions inherent in the proliferation of individualism and the concurrent deployment of techniques of societal regulation around the globe. Chapters explore the phenomena of indistinction, reversal of terms, ambiguity, and confusion in security discourses. Scholars of diverse backgrounds interpret the paradoxical simultaneity of the suspension and enforcement of the law through a variety of theoretical and ethnographic approaches, and they explore the formation and transformation of forms of belonging and exclusion. Ultimately, the volume as a whole aims to understand one crucial question: whether securitized neoliberalism effectively spells the end of political liberalism as we know it today. Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory at Bogazici University, Istanbul. Marcial Godoy-Anativia is Associate Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, where he serves as coeditor of its online journal e-misférica.