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This article examines the relationship between income concentration and policy outputs that determine the generosity of two major state-level safety net programs: unemployment insurance and cash social assistance. Using a difference in differences framework, it tests the degree to which the top 1 percent share is associated with benefit replacement rates for these programs during the period 1978–2010. The results suggest that higher state income inequality lowers those states’ welfare benefits significantly in ways consistent with a “plutocracy” hypothesis that has been suggested in work by scholars such as Bartels, Bonica, Gilens, and Page. The results are robust to controls for several alternative explanations for benefit generosity, including citizen ideology, party control of government, fiscal pressure on programs, state racial heterogeneity, and public opinion liberalism. The results thus support the notion that growing income concentration at the very top undermines social protection policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confronting extreme inequality requires disrupting the ways that cultures legitimate concentrations of wealth and curtailing the political advantages that wealth confers. Can theology do that? Belief-centered critiques of capitalism as sinful largely fail; however, certain forms of practical economic dissent, when undertaken as spiritual practices, can corrode the interior disciplines of plutocratic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic inequality, particularly in the areas of income and wealth, has been steadily expanding in the United States. This reality is an issue for other nations as well. This article examines reasons why economic inequality deserves more attention from moral theologians. It also reviews recent literature on the topic and the need to restore equality of opportunity as a genuine aspect of American life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unplanned, exponential economic growth has been the liberal standard for evaluating economies, societies and effectiveness of political leaders and for addressing problems of all sorts. In the later twentieth century, the American conservative movement revived market liberalism to restore growth after the long post-World War II boom ended. The neoliberal policy regime stressed the growth imperative to the exclusion of other social ends, which were alleged to undermine innovation and growth. Neoliberalism conflates growth with development, precludes sustainable growth, and trends toward plutocratic dedemocratization. This immoderate policy regime denies the reality of the commons and disregards the interdependence of nature and culture and individual and society. This paper addresses crisis tendencies, which have been exacerbated by neoliberal policies, and concludes with a departure point for an alternative. John Dewey's naturalism stressed the need to secure the commons, biotic and social, and to balance individualism with community, efficiency with social justice, and markets with planning to cultivate uncoerced cooperation and preserve democracy, in the face of crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically analyses two key debates about police and policing: the problematic definition of their role, and how they can be rendered democratically accountable. Both issues have been radically altered through the profound transformation of policing produced by the last three decades of neo-liberal hegemony. The article focuses on how this has developed in England and Wales, although there are parallels with other jurisdictions. The complex role of the police has been distilled down to criminal catching. Accountability has become accountancy, under the auspices of New Public Management. The current British Coalition government’s tendentious ‘austerity’ measures make these perennial problems especially acute. The Coalition purports to be democratizing police accountability through elected Police and Crime Commissioners. These claims are critically analysed in principle, but how they work out in practice is hard to prophesy. It is suggested they may play out in ways that frustrate their architects’ hopes, due to the continuing baleful consequences of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

1977. We meet Ngowuka, waterspirit priestess of an indigenous healing tradition, on Bolo Island within Okrikan precincts of the Niger Delta. Further visits over the years entail experiences not easily analyzed. An exception is the process of buruao body painting, on which this essay focuses, eventually mandala-like to remain an evanescent simulacrum of the spirit-saturated natural world of Ngowuka and her congeners. As global oil prices surge and subside, transnational companies and Nigeria's military plutocracy hang on, whereas people living along shores from which the oil is pumped sink into destitution. Conjointly, Nguwuka in her own world falters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benjamin D. Hennig and Danny Dorling map the contours of the world's plutocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]