[PEN-L:32377] cutting & privatizing state services

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: cutting & privatizing state services

[was: RE: [PEN-L:32376] Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: economics on pen-l]

In addition, cutting state services such as education means that religious groups fill in the gap. Maybe Catholic education is pretty harmless (except to those students hit by nuns or sexually abused by priests), but Bob Jones University and similar fundamentalist organizations (e.g., Pepperdine University) are clearly not. The madrassas of Pakistan encouraged Wahhabbi (sp?) religion, while the fundamentalist religious groups provision of needed social services in Palestine encouraged the political power of Hamas and the like.

In the US and Western Europe, social-democratic parties and labor unions often provided the social programs that the state didn't. Maybe we'll see something like that in the future. Of course, I've always suspected that a major reason for welfare-state programs was to take them out of the hands of popular or leftist forces that threatened the status quo.

Jim

Gene Coyle:>
I share Soula Avramidis' insight and worry about natioanl chauvinism.
Separately, I see an environmental calamity close at hand, but I think
that it will tear humanity apart rather than bring it together.<

soula avramidis wrote:
> I refer back to an item that says that the conservative desocialising
> agenda is at work under George w. if so and I am sure cuts in social
> spending are abound, then to what degree is a fall in the average level
> of education of the American working class fosters ultra nationalism and
> imperial aggression abroad, or does it really matter how social spending
> goes in America since the ideological framework of education and
> everything else fosters a sort national chauvinism sentiment across
> classes, and therefore, in the absence of a strong counter
> internationalist ideology, nothing short of an environmental calamity
> will bring humanity together. at least in the foreseeable future.

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Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine