Archive for May 2025

Dr. Jeff Karabanow is a Professor of Social Work at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Today, largesse once again represents a potent form of government coercion. A devil’s bargain is on the table, with freedom up for sale—a bargain involving unconscionable conditions: losing largesse is the price paid for asserting constitutional rights. That was the lesson taught at Columbia University (above) last month, an example of the unfreedom so worrying to Reich a half century ago. At Columbia, $400 million purchased the abandonment of a lot of academic freedom, a deal prompting some belated university repentance about ill-gotten gains and avowals of independence.

The knowledge, skills and expertise of social workers must be fully recognised throughout the Commission’s work. Social workers play a vital role in adult social care, particularly in promoting rights-based, person-centred care and support planning, using professional judgement to balance individual needs, safeguarding duties, and the promotion of independence. Prevention, early intervention, integration across services, and effective safeguarding must be central pillars of any future vision for adult social care.

The two ruling parties sold the con of neoliberalism to deindustrialize the country, impose punishing austerity, eradicate the freedoms to organize and gut regulations to protect the public from exploitation. They empowered corporations to pillage and consolidate their wealth and power, giving rise to monopoly capitalism and some of the greatest levels of income inequality and wealth inequality in American history. The banks, communications, oil, weapons, agricultural and food industries guarantee profits by fixing prices, skirting or even abolishing financial, health and environmental protections, and abusing their workers….The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called this form of government “inverted totalitarianism.” Inverted totalitarianism retains the institutions, symbols, iconography, and language of the old capitalist democracy, but internally corporations have seized all the levers of power to accrue ever greater profits and political control. It uses the international legal system to plunder resources in the developing world, including the overthrow of governments that challenge corporate dominance. It prioritizes profit over justice. It weakens labor laws and eviscerates workers’ protections and rights…. There is a word for those who did this to us.

Traitors.