The New Elite: Dark Nights Rising

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

There is a new elite on the rise. Unlike the old traditional elite, America’s new elite lives no longer from inheritance and breeding but on achievement. The old elite was based on land, property, and factories. The new elite is very different. This elite has gone through a rigorous training regime – all the way up to elite universities in the Ivy League – to arrive at highly selective elite jobs.

The old elite was defined by what Thorstein Veblen called leisure and conspicuous consumption (1899). The new elite is a working elite. It has to work – mostly in elite professions – to earn money. The new elite’s employment is located in a relatively narrow spectrum of occupations separating the new elite from non-elite, i.e. white-collar workers in middle-class employment. The new elite finds employment mainly in three main categories: in management – CEOs (cf. JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon got $31.5 million in 2020), CFOs, top-management, etc.; in finance (hedge fund managers such as Jim Simons with a net worth of $23.5bn – not million – billion!); and in elite law firms like Wachtell, for example.

Having gone to elite day-care centres, elite kindergartens, elite pre-schools, elite primary schools and elite high-schools, the new elite arrives at elite colleges as a jumping-board to elite postgraduate universities. For example, at Harvard and Yale, more students come from households in the top 1% of the income distribution than from the entire bottom half, writes Daniel Markovits in The Meritocracy Trap. Markovits also sees the new elite as being trapped because of its constant exposure to elite training, prep-schools, private tutors, etc.; the relentlessness of examinations and assessments; and eventually, the harshness of stressful burn-out jobs at the top of the income pyramid.

In sharp contrast to 18^th and 19^th century Satanic Mills run by the old elite, the new elite works in what might be called elite white-collar salt mines creating unbearable levels of workplace stress, anxiety, cocaine use, alcoholism, and rafts of other work-related stressors. These are symptoms and illnesses of high-pressure jobs. In other words, from birth to death, the new elite is trapped in a gold cage.

Semantically, it creates an elite language that denies ordinary workers a language through which they can understand and articulate the pathologies of contemporary capitalism. Linguistically, it cements the increasing exclusion of middle-class and the working class. Perhaps more importantly, workers have become victims without a language of victimhood. This is a significant achievement of corporate capitalism.

Simultaneously, media capitalism adds more gloss on glossy jobs for the new elite while simultaneously justifying joblessness, wage stagnation, and precarious employment in gloomy jobs. Increasingly, it also creates mass unemployment for workers and the middle-class. The increased alienation and exclusion of workers and the middle-class paralleled by the concentration of power in the hands of the new elite means precisely what Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis once noted,

we can have a democratic society or

we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few.

We cannot have both

The new elite is about concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few. And those few – the new elite – justify the system for which they have been trained and worked so hard for many long hours. What was once known as standard office hours – 9am-5pm – has muted for the new elite into a work regime that begins at 9am or earlier on one day and runs through to 5am on the next day with email checking during breakfast and late-night conference calls.

Exemplifying such work regimes is Amazon’s turbocharged corporate Darwinism with unreasonably high expectations on its elite staff as well as its underpaid and harshly exploited warehouse workers. It is as Amazon boss Bezos once said, you can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose just two out of three. Implementing his relentless work regime, Amazon runs a continual performance improvement algorithm on its own staff. It is a remote-control super-surveillance panopticon relentlessly scrutinising and always ready to get rid of workers deemed unproductive.

In many areas, the rise of the new elite is a zero-sum game – I win you lose. It clearly identifies the so-called “losers”. Overall, the share of national income of workers has fallen. It came as predicted by those who understand neoliberalism. Shifting wealth away from workers and towards capital during the last decades was paralleled by the rise of neoliberalism, around the middle of the last century. Simultaneously, stock prices which can be roughly seen as capturing the income made by capital have far outstripped the wages of ordinary workers. In other words, neoliberalism and the rise of the new elite have vacuumed wealth upwards. To camouflage this neoliberal propaganda, corporate media invented the infamous trickle-down economics. In short, the rich are made richer, while the poor are made poorer.

Not surprisingly, somewhere in the range of 40 to 50 million Americans suffer from material deprivation. Of course, this has been purposefully engineered through a neoliberal tax policy, for example. In the USA, the top tax rate has fallen by more than half. It has cut taxes for the rich that was over 90% throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Neoliberal politicians reduced top tax rates to 70% starting when Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981. Today it is below 40%, and in some cases, it is way below that.

The new elite can hire creative tax lawyers and accountants who know the deliberately installed loopholes so that the new elite can reduce their taxes further. As a consequence, someone like Donald Trump, who Forbes estimates to have $2.5bn – $2,500,000,000 – paid a meagre $750.- in taxes. Trump pays less taxes than those voting for him! As the new elite is made richer and richer, the government takes a smaller and smaller share of their wealth.

Worse, the annual probability that a middle-class family who has suffered a significant financial reversal, defined as a decline in income, drop by more than 50% doubled between 1970 and 2000. For those children born into such families, it does not get better when they enter underprivileged schools. A poor child, in a poor school district, in a poor state, receives about $8,000 worth of schooling annually.

Compared to a middle-class child, in a middle-income school district receives about $12,000. At the same time, a middle-class child in a wealthy school district receives $18,000. A rich child in a wealthy school district receives $27,000. And now to the new elite. The very affluent children attending an elite private school receive $75,000 worth of schooling per year. The poor kid has lost before the race begins. There is no level playing field. Such stark disadvantages are cloaked through rafts of ideologies pretending that everyone has the same opportunities and the same chance in life.

Of course, the inequality in schooling is further exacerbated through private tutoring needed to pass entry exams into elite schools and elite universities. One test preparation tutoring company, for example, catering to elite students in New York City charges $1,500 for a ninety-minute Skype tutoring session. With a father on $15/hr – minimum wage, for example, it takes him 100 hours of work to pay for the 90 minutes training. The poor simply have no chance. The “$1,500-for-90-minute-tutoring” elite child in New York is not alone. Globally the private tutoring market has exceeded $100bn. This is what the new elite spends to get their children into elite schools, elite universities, and eventually into elite professions.

These are very serious numbers – $100bn. The new elite wants, pays for, and gets real education rather than gimmicks, ploys, exam tactics, and cheap trickery. Instead of teaching elite students how to simply take entry exams, they are tutored to become better at what the test measures. They develop superior abilities to read comprehensively, think coherently, process numbers, and use their brains most effectively under exam conditions.

Elite tutoring delivers results. Elite children who are consistently involved in extracurricular tutoring are 70% more likely to go to high-quality colleges compared to children who are only occasionally involved in tutoring. Even more critical is the staggering 400% higher likelihood of getting into elite colleges/universities compared to children who do not engage in such activities. In addition to elite tutoring, the income and achievement gap measured by SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) is staggering. Here are two examples:

1) students from families earning over $200,000 per year – top 5% – score 388 points higher than students from families earning less than $20,000 per year – the bottom 20%; and

2) students whose parents hold graduate degrees (top 10%) score 395 points higher than students whose parents have not completed high school – the bottom 15%.

Education stratifies. It does not unify, nor does it create equality. The new elite simply out-educates the middle-class by more and more, year after year after year. The outcomes of this system systematically favour the new elite in many ways. The top twenty private high schools as ranked by Forbes send 30% of their graduates to the Ivy League, Stanford, and MIT alone. These schools also send two-thirds of their graduates to colleges and universities ranked in the top 25 in their categories.

Of course, the entire system is tilted toward the elite as 37% of all college students now come from households in the top 25% of the income distribution. In short, a college education is no longer for the working class and the poor – if it ever was. The share of all bachelor’s degrees handed out to students from that bottom quarter was just 10% in 2014 – down from a meagre 12% in 1970. There is no school-to-college pipeline for the poor – just a school-to-prison pipeline.

The new elite will not go to prison. Prison is for the poor. Instead, the rich attend the most selective private universities. At elite universities, more freshmen have fathers who are medical doctors than those with fathers that are hourly workers, teachers, clergy, farmers, and soldiers combined. Top universities are increasingly closed off to the middle-class. Across the Ivy League, Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke, more students come from families in the top 1% of the income distribution bracket than from the entire bottom half. The clear-cut “wealth elite university” link is mind-numbing.

Once in an elite university, it gets even better for the already privileged students. Elite colleges spend much more on training their wealthy students than non-elite colleges spend on training for their less rich students. Additionally, for many middle-class students, an undergraduate education is as good as it gets. However, for the new elite, their elite undergraduate degree is merely an intermediate step towards attending another elite university for their postgraduate education. That is, elite universities, for most elite students, only serves as a tool obtain a postgraduate degree needed to gain top employment as a CEO, CFO or hedge fund manager.

At the same time, education becomes removed from a civil, if not, a human right. It is no longer a civic duty of the state — hyper-individualism reigns. Education is individualised and moved onto the individual person. Even companies and corporations ride the trend towards individualisation of education and training as the average US company invests less than 2% of its payroll budget on workplace training.

Moving workplace training for elite jobs out of the workplace and into elite universities alters the socioeconomic composition of people receiving such training. Training and education become a factor for the elite rather than the working class and increasing less for the middle-class. Increasingly the focus is on training rather than education. The difference between training and education is that you can train a dog, but you cannot educate a dog. It moves elite education towards the wealthy.

Much of this creates a cycle in which the new elite reproduces itself by sending their children to the elite school, colleges, and universities that they themselves have attended. Elite students attending elite professional schools (business and law schools, etc.) received their BAs at elite colleges. Their pipeline is somewhat different from the poor’s school-to-prison pipeline.

These self-reproducing elite’s make up the engine that sustains the privileged. It excludes poor and middle-class children from future income and status. The system no longer promotes equality of social and economic opportunity. As training and education become exclusive rather than inclusive, elite children systematically outperform middle-class children. They outperform not just the poor, but the middle class and they do so at each stage of their education.

In short, poor and middle-class students face more social, educational, and financial obstacles to graduate from college than students from elite families don’t. Such an unfair education system means there are no longer enough high-achieving high school graduates from outside the elite to make a positive impact at elite colleges. The elite has effectively insulated itself. Non-elite students can no longer compete with the thousands of hours and millions of dollars invested in elite children by their elite parents.

Increasingly, monetary wealth and educational achievement work together. In that way, the wealthy and highest performing students are now overwhelmingly one and the same. Unlike the traditional elite’s, land, factories, and inheritance, for the new elite, education assumes the role breeding played in aristocratic regimes. Now, there is a new monopoly that elite families exercise over pathways into income and status. As any monopoly demands, their monopoly increasing excludes others – poor and middle-class children are barred from elite training and entry into high-paying work.

With their educational monopoly in place, the new elite can flaunt the ideology of “equal opportunity” because it no longer exists. Equal opportunity has become a mere ideology that sustains the elite. With next to no chance in rigorous entrance examinations, the middle-class is increasingly excluded. All the while, it is told there is an equal opportunity, and hard work will pay off. Yet, these entry examinations systematically favour well-prepared candidates. The majority of admitted students now engage in so-called “test preparation services” to help improve their scores. It comes at a price the middle-class hardly, and the poor cannot afford.

Today’s elite children are exposed to a rather, relentless, merciless, and harsh system. They diligently study and doggedly train. They are under constant stress to measure up to the next test, the next admission competition, the next examination, and the next assessment. All of these conditions prepare the elite to work in highly competitive employment in adulthood. Before they know it, they have become Excellent Sheep.

Since the seminal book Schooling in Capitalist America, things have gotten worse. Today, the new elite’s children – just as working-class and middle-class children at lower levels – are conditioned to accept the domination of capital “before” even entering the workforce. Today, the well-conditioned acceptance of hierarchy, domination, and authority applies to elite children as well.

Much of this has rather dire consequences for the poor and the middle-class. Middle-class jobs are increasingly eliminated. Simultaneously, jobs for the poor are made even worse. At work, managerial control is smoothed and consistently move onto technology. The adjacent ideology makes these technologies appear neutral, and if possible, even natural.

Meanwhile, middle-level managers are successively eliminated. The new elite no longer has any use for them. Technological advances in computing, the Internet, and algorithms – algorithmic management – in measuring employees, surveillance, communication, and data analysis gives elite managers immense powers of scrutiny and command over workers. Such algorithms are indeed Weapons of Math Destruction.

Next to Amazon, one of the best-known examples using algorithms is Uber. Uber’s use of algorithms furnishes the über-surveillance power of a relatively small elite group of top managers. It enables them to watch Uber’s thousands of employees directly. At Uber, algorithm coordinates the work of hundreds of thousands of drivers. Most of these drivers have never met a single Uber middle manager.

Corporations such as Uber no longer require vast sections of middle management to manage the link between business strategies set by top management and the implementation of such a strategy that is assigned to workers. In the very near future, the corporate restructuring will eliminate or at least shrink middle-management substantially. It will diminish unnecessary, unwarranted, and often rather incompetent white-collar middle managers. With that layers of managers reporting to managers will be gone.

Instead of this, elite consulting firms will tell elite managers in large corporations how to use algorithmic management. These elite managers no longer seek to automate line workers away, but how to automate the middle manager’s job away. There is a rather massive change already on the way. It consciously plans and operationalises a massive corporate clean-out of middle managers.

This is made possible because of new managerial technologies capable of culling middle-management. It is merely a surplus that is no longer required. It is made redundant by new technologies. This has been the case ever since the birth of capitalism. What is new is that it is set to hit middle-management and inevitably, the middle-class.

Finally, corporate consulting firms, like McKinsey Global Institute, have already predicted a dramatic shift away from middle-management. It predicted that nearly one-third of the US workforce will be displaced through automation and algorithms by the year 2030. These are not manual production workers. Significantly, it will be middle-management and mid-skilled jobs that are lost.

It is the new elite that is driving this process. This is a self-reproducing elite based on elite training at elite universities and business schools ready to find employment in elite corporations. According to Daniel Markovits, this new elite operates with the motto, we are all in this together, but some pigs are smarter than other pigs and deserve more money.

How much exploitation does Narendra Modi’s popularity cost?

Annesha Mukherjee & Satyaki Dasgupta

The popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi saw a rise according to India Today’s ‘Mood of the Nation’ poll. Similar results were also observed in Gaon Connection-Lok Niti-CSDS survey. Some of the economic policies that his popular government has introduced since the advent of COVID-19 include three Bills on agricultural market reforms, three labour code bills, and auctioning off coal mines for commercial mining.

These policies are in confirmation with the mainstream economic theories which discourage government intervention because it leads to inefficiency in the market. These theories advocate for flexible labour laws which are claimed to encourage private investment, employment opportunities and economic growth. Along similar lines, the India INC has supported the changes in labour laws because they enable employers to operate more ‘freely’. Moving towards free markets for agricultural produce by doing away with any kind of government intervention, is supposed to ensure greater prosperity for the Indian farmers. Additionally, privatisation of coal mines is expected to facilitate the Ease of Doing Business in India.

To be able to appreciate the full impact of these policies, it is imperative to understand the workings of the prevalent system. This system has in its heart the profit-maximising motive of big industrialists. In the labour market of our economy, on one hand there are workers who have only their labour to sell, and on the other hand are these big industrialists who require this labour for their production process. However, the latter also hold private ownership of factories, machineries, and other such factors of production, making them capital-owners and allowing them a higher bargaining power than the workers. The profit-maximising motive of capitalists can be served by minimising the wages to be paid to workers over which they have direct control, unlike other costs of production like rents which are often determined exogenously. Any technological progresses made increases the productivity of the workers. But, without a corresponding increase in workers; wages, any increase in productivity and hence, profits, is accrued only to the capitalists. Thus, in such a system, it is always in the interests of capitalists to keep workers’ compensations at a minimum, thereby exploiting them, because that necessarily translates into higher profits. Some properties of such a system at work can be observed in the phenomena of increase income inequality, increase in temporary contractual employment and lower wage shares.

When we view the functioning of our economy through this lens, we understand that the policies advocated by conventional economic theories essentially gives the right to capitalists to maximise their profits through greater exploitation of workers. With the introduction of new agricultural, labour and mining policies, the government is merely acting as a facilitator in this process.

Impact on Coal Miners and Tribals

One of the new government policies is the auctioning off of forty coal mining blocks in Eastern and Central India, which were ‘off limits’ till now. Workers in coal mines generally work in very harsh, unsafe and precarious conditions. On owning the coal mines, capitalists will have no incentive to provide safety precautions or even higher compensations to the workers. In fact, they might even employ women and children at extremely low wages. In the absence of government intervention and in a bid to reduce their costs, capitalists will only seek to maximise their profits through greater exploitation of coal miners.

With the aim of expanding their production process, capitalists might acquire the neighbouring coal-rich areas which are typically inhabited by tribals, thereby dispossessing them of their land and livelihood. Although the process of dispossessing tribals from their land is not a new phenomenon, the government was earlier responsible for rehabilitating them. However, with the government relieving itself of its responsibilities, capitalists will have no such incentive since they are not accountable to people. Consequently, being dispossessed from their lands and having only their labour to sell, the tribals will join the ranks of the swelling pool of unemployed labour force. This is expected to push down wages. The entire process of dispossessing tribals will only serve to aggravate their impoverishment.

Thus, with the auctioning off of coal mines, the rights of the tribals over their lands stands unacknowledged. The inhabitants now stand at the risk of being dispossessed in the name of development, which is now supposed to be furthered by capitalists. The introduction of this policy shows that the government is merely acting as a lapdog of the capitalists, and any further investments made in these coal mines necessitates the impoverishment of the workers in the mines, and of the tribals who have been inhabiting these lands till now.

Impact on Farmers

One of the many criticisms of the newly introduced Farm Bills is the apprehension of a corporate take-over of agricultural produce. These corporates are effectively the big capitalists we have been referring to in our article till now. It is being argued that these policies will phase out the Minimum Support Price (MSP) provided to farmers, which would earlier be regulated by the government. However, with the possible doing away of the MSP, hoarding of farm produce by big capitalists, and no regulation of essential food prices, the prices of agriculture produce in general, and of essential food in particular, will be now dictated entirely by these capitalists. Consequently, an overall increase in the prices is expected, thereby leading to a fall in real wages.

Additionally, with the phasing away of MSP and the mandi system, there will be no administering of the prices received by famers for their produce. As a result, this will have a considerable impact on the small and marginal farmers who constitute 75 percent of the farmers in India. It will become increasingly difficult for them to meet their costs of production due to lower prices received for their produce. In effect, they might be compelled to sell their lands. Some of them might end up as casual workers in the agricultural sector, while others might give up farming altogether. Either way, once they sell their lands, they will be joining the burgeoning unemployed labour force, because similar to the case of dispossessed tribals, they too will have only their labour to sell.

Thus, introduction of the new Farm Bills is yet another government policy which is heavily skewed towards the big capitalists, with increasing impoverishment of the famers – through their loss of livelihood and by reducing them to penury.

Impact on workers

The three new labour bills have been introduced with the motivation of facilitating the Ease of Doing Business in India. One essential way in which this is being done is by easing the procedure for the capitalists to hire and fire their workers. This is primarily paving the way for greater contractualisation of the workforce. The temporary nature of contracts smoothens the process of firing workers, while the provision of minimum or no social security benefits encourages capitalists to hire workers. Contractualisation is thus one of the many ways of making labour laws flexible, which is often claimed to encourage investments, employment and hence, economic growth. But what is often ignored in the process is how it increases the vulnerability of the workers due to no income or job security. In fact, the assumption that workers will be hired elsewhere immediately after being fired from a job or after the termination of their contract, is presumptuous in the context of the Indian economy which has been witnessing jobless growth for quite some time now.

By reducing the cost of hiring workers, increasing contractualisation leads to falling wage share of workers and consistently increasing profit share of the capitalists. Moreover, the proposals of increasing working hours made by some states shows that the achievements of decades of workers’ struggle are being attacked directly. Along with contractualisation, the requirement of increased percentage of employees to form trade unions in workplaces, will further reduce the bargaining power of the working class as a whole. This will aggravate the vulnerability and docility of workers, since they will be increasingly dispensable to the whims and fancies of capital.

Thus, we can see the socio-economic impact of capitalism as two sides of the same coin. On one side there is the constant promotion of ‘Ease of Doing Business’ by hankering for new investments through tax incentives and other supply-side policies. On the other side, there is the associated vulnerability, docility and exploitation of the working class. Therefore, anybody who sympathises with the recent migrant crisis, cannot be in favour of any pro-capitalist policies. When the government acts as a broker for capitalists with the introduction of new policies in crucial sectors of our economy, it may help the Prime Minister’s popularity but it also legitimises the exploitation of workers, who are the most indispensable part of the society.

Parenting: The puzzle explained

Nadeem Khan

Greek philosopher Plato had once said that the upbringing of a child should start before his birth. Although he primarily focused on prenatal gymnastics, a specific component of it pointed towards parenting education. Children feel comfortable when parents exhibit confidence, which gives them a feeling of being in safe hands. Anxiety and insecurity brings discomfort in the relationship, which is damaging for a smooth parenting process. Most of the parenting experts and family counselors generally believe that the parenting style chosen affects the behavior and performance in every aspect. Most young parents are often clueless about parenting issues, especially when there are no elders to guide them. Often there are diametrically opposite opinions about parenting styles to be followed, be it exclusively or mixed. Hence, it becomes interesting to segregate different parenting styles and investigate a chosen style’s suitability in obtaining a desired result.

Parenting styles

Similarities between various parenting methods form the parenting styles. The extent of adoption of these styles vary between different ethnic and socio-economical groups. Some prominent parenting styles are assertive, adjustive, indifferent, and balanced.

Assertive/Authoritative/Disciplinarian

It was a popular style of the last few decades. It is characterized by more emphasis on discipline with utter disregard for any flexibility. Rules of discipline are often left unexplained with absolutely no scope for the child to discuss it with parents. This style is often the reason for friction within the family. With society’s development and a more communicative school curriculum, every child wants to communicate more often with the parents. Most of the time, children express a desire to know the reasons for disciplinary rules and related expectations.  Children from these families often fear authority and lack self-confidence. They end up being a cog in the system devoid of any initiative or independent thinking. Whenever put in a challenging situation, they take time to gather strength and put any tangible results on the table.

Adjustive/Accommodative/Flexible

Presently highly popular and often recommended style of parenting experts. The essence of this style is freedom of communication, which results in developing a reason-based thought process. It adds to their self-confidence, which gets reflected in every stage of their career.

Children from these families take authority as their friends who are there to help him. Hence, there should be no fear of authority. These kids exhibit self-starter’s behavior, booming confidently, and out to achieve anything. They are not shy of taking risks and exhibiting initiative whenever necessary.

Children brought up with this style are often seen questioning doctors in a diagnosis appointment or interacting with a cop or fireman with a relative ease.

Indifferent/Aloof/Separated

This style is relatively less chosen. Here parents generally remain uninvolved with a child’s upbringing because of many reasons. It is common in families who are either super-rich or very poor. It is seen that parents are so much immersed in their professional routine that they have no time to look at their kids’ upbringing. However, many times parents remain aloof as they are not sure of their responsibilities in proper upbringing.

Children brought up with this style are very independent and strong-headed. They show resistance to any change both in personal and professional life. Hence, they often result in being called “uncoachable,” hence a misfit for any organization. Their personality shows some misadjustment in behavior patterns as well as in discipline building.

Balanced/Harmonious/Even-steven

This approach involves taking a judicious mix of all the styles mentioned above. Many times the situation is the boss. Hence, the style adopted is in line with the situation. Results obtained with this approach are often not well defined. However, it is still the most widely accepted style. Most parents agree that it is always better to train for an independent existence, but with proper monitoring. It is better if one of the parents adopts a given style and another one a different one to ensure a proper mix. These roles can also be reversed between parents depending on the situation at hand.

Complex situations

Parenting becomes a challenge in complex situations and requires out of the box solution. An example of a possible complicated situation can be of Parenting as a single parent. This situation may arrive because of a spouse’s unfortunate death, divorce, or other spouse’s distant job placement. Here solution has to be different. Any adopted style has to be on the foundation of specific necessary measures. These measures are essential if the desired results are to be obtained.

In families who have experienced divorce, the child must not be allowed to have any negative feelings about other parents. Similarly, in families where one parent is mostly out of town because of work, the child must understand the importance of this sacrifice. It will help the child develop the importance of having a complete family. This thought process will eventually pass to the next generation. It is essential to spend as much possible time with the child physically. It can be playing physical sports or any other joint activity such as cooking in the kitchen. Joint activity helps in the processing of emotions of a child. A feeling of belongingness to the family gets imbibed as well. A gradual delegation of responsibilities is also essential. It helps in relieving some stress of single-parent plus child also remains within a disciplined routine. There is no reason for having a child develop irresponsible behavior just for being with a single parent.  After these measures have been taken, any adopted parenting style will yield the desired result. Sometimes being a single parent brings more comfort in terms of stress, freedom of time, and even more money. It is all but necessary then that these advantages are translated into more comfort and proper upbringing.

Equally complicated is the situation where children have to be brought up by their Grandparents. This unfortunate situation may arise due to parents’ sudden death, incarceration, mental sickness, or drug addiction. Grandparents must not let any negativity crop up in kids’ minds about the parents if they are alive and cannot be with them. Children should be made to understand the reasons for parents’ absence from their lives for the time being. Grandparents should provide total warmth and affection to the children, but this should not spoil them. Grandchildren should never be allowed to have a feeling that they can get away with their Grandparents. Like the immediate children, they should have structured lives with discipline. Therefore, Grandparents should exercise their authority as and when required.

Parents should be clear about their child’s life milestones and desired results. The child’s personality must be compatible with the chosen parenting style. External advice is helpful, but parents should finally decide as they are better aware of the child’s temperament, neighborhood, and school environment. Parenting does become a challenge when a child is in teens. Hence, external advice can be explored if required. Knowledge about parenting styles is helpful as it makes parents more involved and accountable. Discussion with other parents is also helpful and reassuring. Children are the most significant asset for any family. Hence, it becomes necessary that no stone is left unturned in their upbringing.

A Convergence of Calamities

Nick Turse

Record Numbers of War-Displaced to Be Dwarfed by Those Driven From Their Homes by Climate Change

I saw them for only a few seconds. One glimpse and they were gone. The young woman wore a brown headwrap, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and a long pink, red, and blue floral-patterned skirt. She held the reins of the donkey pulling her rust-pink cart. Across her lap lay an infant. Perched beside her at the edge of the metal wagon was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than eight. Some firewood, rugs, woven mats, rolled-up clothing or sheets, a dark green plastic tub, and an oversized plastic jerry can were lashed to the bed of the cart. Three goats tied to the rear of it ambled along behind.

They found themselves, as I did, on a hot, dusty road slowly being choked by families who had hastily hitched up their donkeys and piled whatever they could — kindling, sleeping mats, cooking pots — into sun-bleached carts or bush taxis. And they were the lucky ones. Many had simply set out on foot. Young boys tended small herds of recalcitrant goats. Women toted dazed toddlers.  In the rare shade of a roadside tree, a family had stopped and a middle-aged man hung his head, holding it in one hand.

Earlier this year, I traveled that ochre-dirt road in Burkina Faso, a tiny landlocked nation in the African Sahel once known for having the largest film festival on the continent. Now, it’s the site of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Those people were streaming down the main road from Barsalogho about 100 miles north of the capital, Ouagadougou, toward Kaya, a market town whose population has almost doubled this year, due to the displaced. Across the country’s northern stretches, other Burkinabe (as citizens are known) were making similar journeys toward towns offering only the most uncertain kinds of refuge. They were victims of a war without a name, a battle between Islamist militants who murder and massacre without compunction and armed forces that kill more civilians than militants.

I’ve witnessed variations of this wretched scene before — exhausted, upended families evicted by machete-wielding militiamen or Kalashnikov-carrying government troops, or the mercenaries of a warlord; dust-caked traumatized people plodding down lonesome highways, fleeing artillery strikes, smoldering villages, or towns dotted with moldering corpses. Sometimes motorbikes pull the carts. Sometimes, young girls carry the jerry cans on their heads. Sometimes, people flee with nothing more than what they’re wearing. Sometimes, they cross national borders and become refugees or, as in Burkina Faso, become internally displaced persons, or IDPs, in their own homeland. Whatever the particulars, such scenes are increasingly commonplace in our world and so, in the worst possible way, unremarkable. And though you would hardly know it in the United States, that’s what also makes them, collectively, one of the signature stories of our time.

At least 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, persecution, or other forms of public disorder over the last decade, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That’s about one in every 97 people on the planet, roughly one percent of humanity. If such war victims had been given their own state to homestead, it would be the 14th largest nation, population-wise, in the world.

By the end of June, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an additional 4.8 million people had been uprooted by conflict, with the most devastating increases in Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso. Yet, as dismal as these numbers may be, they’re set to be dwarfed by people displaced by another signature story of our time: climate change.

Already, shocking numbers have been put to flight by fires, derechos, and super storms, and so much worse is yet to come, according to experts. A recent forecast suggests that, by the year 2050, the number of people driven from their homes by ecological catastrophes could be 900% greater than the 100 million forced to flee conflicts over the last decade.

Worse Than World War II

Women, children, and men driven from their homes by conflict have been a defining feature of modern warfare. For almost a century now, combat correspondents have witnessed such scenes again and again. “Newly routed civilians, now homeless like the others with no idea of where they would next sleep or eat, with all their future lives an uncertainty, trudged back from the fighting zone,” the legendary Eric Sevareid reported, while covering Italy for CBS News during World War II. “A dust-covered girl clung desperately to a heavy, squirming burlap sack. The pig inside was squealing faintly. Tears made streaks down the girl’s face. No one moved to help her…”

The Second World War was a cataclysmic conflagration involving 70 nations and 70 million combatants. Fighting stretched across three continents in unparalleled destructive fury, including terror bombing, countless massacres, two atomic attacks, and the killing of 60 million people, most of them civilians, including six million Jews in a genocide known as the Holocaust. Another 60 million were displaced, more than the population of Italy (then the ninth-largest country in the world). An unprecedented global war causing unimaginable suffering, it nonetheless left far fewer people homeless than the 79.5 million displaced by conflicts and crises as 2019 ended.

How can violence-displaced people already exceed World War II’s total by almost 20 million (without even counting the nearly five million more added in the first half of 2020)?

The answer: these days, you can’t go home again.

In May 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. By the beginning of September, the war in the Pacific was over, too. A month later, most of Europe’s displaced — including more than two million refugees from the Soviet Union, 1.5 million French, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch, and hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Poles, and others — had already returned home. A little more than a million people, mostly Eastern Europeans, still found themselves stranded in camps overseen by occupying forces and the United Nations.

Today, according to UNHCR, ever fewer war refugees and IDPs are able to rebuild their lives. In the 1990s, an average of 1.5 million refugees were able to return home annually. For the last 10 years, that number has dropped to around 385,000. Today, about 77% of the world’s refugees are trapped in long-term displacement situations thanks to forever wars like the conflict in Afghanistan that, in its multiple iterations, is now in its sixth decade.

War on (of and for) Terror

One of the most dramatic drivers of displacement over the last 20 years, according to researchers from Brown University’s Costs of War project, has been that conflict in Afghanistan and the seven other “most violent wars the U.S. military has launched or participated in since 2001.” In the wake of the killing of 2,974 people by al-Qaeda militants that September 11th and the decision of George W. Bush’s administration to launch a Global War on Terror, conflicts the United States initiated, escalated, or participated in — specifically, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — have displaced between 37 million and 59 million people.

While U.S. troops have also seen combat in Burkina Faso and Washington has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of “security assistance” into that country, its displaced aren’t even counted in the Costs of War tally. And yet there’s a clear link between the U.S.-backed overthrow of Libya’s autocrat, Muammar Qaddafi, in 2011 and Burkina Faso’s desperate state today. “Ever since the West assassinated Qaddafi, and I’m conscious of using that particular word, Libya has been completely destabilized,” Chérif Sy, Burkina Faso’s defense minister, explained in a 2019 interview. “While at the same time it was the country with the most guns. It has become an arms cache for the region.”

Those arms helped destabilize neighboring Mali and led to a 2012 coup by a U.S.-trained officer. Two years later, another U.S.-trained officer seized power in Burkina Faso during a popular uprising. This year, yet another U.S.-trained officer overthrew yet another government in Mali. All the while, terrorist attacks have been ravaging the region. “The Sahel has seen the most dramatic escalation of violence since mid-2017,” according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution.

In 2005, Burkina Faso didn’t even warrant mention in the “Africa Overview” section of the State Department’s annual report on terrorism. Still, more than 15 separate American security assistance programs were brought to bear there — about $100 million in the last two years alone. Meanwhile, militant Islamist violence in the country has skyrocketed from just three attacks in 2015 to 516 in the 12 months from mid-2019 to mid-2020, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center.

Compounding Crises to Come

The violence in Burkina Faso has led to a cascade of compounding crises. Around one million Burkinabe are now displaced, a 1,500% increase since last January, and the number only keeps rising. So do the attacks and the fatalities. And this is just the beginning, since Burkina Faso finds itself on the frontlines of yet another crisis, a global disaster that’s expected to generate levels of displacement that will dwarf today’s historic figures.

Burkina Faso has been battered by desertification and environmental degradation since at least the 1960s. In 1973, a drought led to the deaths of 100,000 people there and in five other nations of the Sahel. Severe drought and hunger struck again in the mid-1980s and aid agencies began privately warning that those living in the north of the country would need to move southward as farming became ever less feasible. By the early 2000s, despite persistent droughts, the cattle population of the country had doubled, leading to increasing ethnic conflict between Mossi farmers and Fulani cattle herders. The war now tearing the country apart largely divides along those same ethnic lines.

In 2010, Bassiaka Dao, the president of the confederation of farmers in Burkina Faso, told the United Nations news agency, IRIN, that the impacts of climate change had been noticeable for years and were getting worse. As the decade wore on, rising temperatures and new rainfall patterns — droughts followed by flash floods — increasingly drove farmers from their villages, while desertification swelled the populations of urban centers.

In a report published earlier this year, William Chemaly of the Global Protection Cluster, a network of nongovernmental organizations, international aid groups, and United Nations agencies, noted that in Burkina Faso “climate change is crippling livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurity, and intensifying armed conflict and violent extremism.”

Sitting at the edge of the Sahara Desert, the country has long faced ecological adversity that’s only worsening as the frontlines of climate change steadily spread across the planet. Forecasts now warn of increasing ecological disasters and resource wars supercharging the already surging phenomenon of global displacement. According to a recent report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, two billion people already face uncertain access to sufficient food — a number set to jump to 3.5 billion by 2050. Another one billion “live in countries that do not have the current resilience to deal with the ecological changes they are expected to face in the future.” The report warns that the global climate crisis may displace as many as 1.2 billion people by 2050.

On the Road to Kaya

I don’t know what happened to the mother and two children I spotted on the road to Kaya. If they ended up like the scores of people I spoke with in that market town, now bulging with displaced people, they’re facing a difficult time. Rents are high, jobs scarce, government assistance all but nil. People there are living on the edge of catastrophe, dependent on relatives and the kindness of new neighbors with little to spare themselves. Some, driven by want, are even heading back into the conflict zone, risking death to gather firewood.

Kaya can’t deal with the massive influx of people forced from their homes by Islamist militants. Burkina Faso can’t deal with the one million people already displaced by conflict. And the world can’t deal with the almost 80 million people already driven from their homes by violence. So how will we cope with 1.2 billion people — nearly the population of China or India — likely to be displaced by climate driven-conflicts, water wars, increasing ecological devastation, and other unnatural disasters in the next 30 years?

In the decades ahead, ever more of us will find ourselves on roads like the one to Kaya, running from the devastation of raging wildfires or uncontrolled floodwaters, successive hurricanes or supercharged cyclones, withering droughts, spiraling conflicts, or the next life-altering pandemic. As a reporter, I’ve already been on that road. Pray you’re the one speeding by in the four-wheel-drive vehicle and not the one choking in the dust, driving the donkey cart.

Pandemic, recovery efforts and significance of good governance in Bangladesh

Amir Mohammad Sayem

Good governance, a much talked–about concept in political and development discourse in the contemporary world and closely related to the concept of ‘governance’ that usually indicates the process of decision–making and the process by which decisions are implemented, is obviously crucial to successfully deal with catastrophic situations caused by the COVID–19. But there is a clear paucity of good governance in Bangladesh, which was rapidly developing in economic and some other terms until the beginning of the pandemic, despite the fact that the government is occasionally prompt on this. In fact, poor governance exists with all of its indicators such as participation, consensus, accountability, transparency, responsiveness, effectiveness and efficiency, equitability and inclusiveness, and the rule of law.

But criticisms against mal-governance mounted at the time of the pandemic. According to available sources including electronic and print media, some remarkable allegations of poor governance practices appeared during the pandemic are corruption in purchase of N–95 masks, a lack of transparency in the procurement process of medical equipments, negligence in providing health services to COVID–19 patients, fake certifications on COVID–19 tests, inequitable distribution of food aids and financial assistance, ineffective and inefficient planning and coordination of government efforts or a lack of adequate social participation, and political considerations in the preparation of the list of beneficiaries. Even though the government later comes to be serious to address corruption, mal-governance practices can still make it difficult to mitigate impacts of the pandemic as desired.

The government obviously took some good steps — ranging from health response to socio–economic recovery — including massive economic stimulus worth more than 1.1 lakh crore BDT with 20 packages, which are now being implemented. But the undeniable fact is that millions lost their income sources including jobs and businesses owing to the pandemic, started in March 2020, even if many have already reengaged economically — and many others are waiting for income opportunities. There are also challenges of equitable disbursement of stimulus packages, dealing with the possible second wave of the pandemic and distribution of vaccine doses. Under such a context, accountable, transparent and responsive governance and effective and efficient use of limited material and non–material resources are very crucial for making all efforts — current and future — successful as expected.

But the fact is that securing good governance is obviously not possible all on a sudden, since mal-governance practices exist in government, semi–government, private and non–government organizations. In government sector in particular, poor governance is practiced from the highest tier to the lowest, even if its levels and forms differ. Despite there is a lack of adequate understanding of actor specific contributions, it is now crystal clear that different groups or individuals — political leaders, government officials, businessmen and others — varyingly contribute, directly or indirectly, to poor governance practices in diverse sectors and sub–sectors at national and local stage. Obviously, diverse groups or individuals, benefitted by and responsible for inadequate accountability, transparency, responsiveness and some other indicators of poor governance practices, are somehow powerful.

Furthermore, the culture of mal-governance, which is rendered as the outcome of underlying social, economic, administrative, political and cultural factors including the political culture of blame game, the culture of bribery and nepotism, the culture of hegemony, tendency to protect affiliated party men, economic insufficiency, bureaucratic mentality, inadequate emphasis on training needs and inadequate or no consideration of recommendations made for addressing mal-governance practices have been going on for decades. In spite of the fact that some improvements are made on several underlying causes, these still remain scant for stimulating any desired changes in good governance indicators in the country. Under such circumstances, diverse practices of poor governance widely — and, sometimes, oddly — seen at the very crisis moment of the pandemic are unsurprising.

The optimistic side is that many quarters including some political leaders of the ruling party, opposition parties, civil society and mass people presently want good governance more than ever, at least for dealing with the pandemic and its rippling impacts. Of course, this seems an opportunity that should be optimally used by the government, which has already taken some drastic efforts to address corruption with its declared zero tolerance policy; but it is simultaneously undeniable to take into account that any remarkable improvement in good governance situation ideally necessitates significant changes in all of its indicators everywhere. As expected, the government should put emphasis on transparency, accountability and responsiveness in all purchase acts, medical and other services, loan disbursements and other recovery activities as much as possible.

In this respect, both governmental and political party–based steps are obviously crucial. In my opinion, the anti–corruption commission (national anti-corruption watchdog), law–enforcement agencies and other significant government machineries should be more engaged at this moment aiming at ensuring transparency, accountability and responsiveness in government, private and other sectors. Of course, strengthened — but consistent — departmental monitoring of health response and economic and other revitalization steps with or without the formation of a strong national taskforce especially to oversee all recovery efforts may also bring out some good outcomes in economic, social and other aspects with some significant improvements in good governance practices in Bangladesh. But reflections of earnestness of the government are incontrovertibly pivotal here.

Unavoidably,  ruling party leaders, compared to oppositions, are usually more involved with corruption and contribute to some other sorts of mal-governance practices including lack of accountability and transparency in many countries and Bangladesh has no exception in this respect. In fact, some political representatives including Union Parishad Chairman and Members — mostly from the ruling party — were criticized to be engaged with misappropriation of distribution of reliefs and subsidized rice in different localities. Unsurprisingly, corrupt leaders from local to national level may not be discouraged from continuing malpractices in the coming days and may increase the possibility of failure of recovery efforts, unless party–based steps are strengthened. As expected, political seriousness and commitment of are obviously critical.

Obviously, a national framework or guideline for the improvement of good governance may be of special significance in Bangladesh, which has huge economic, human resource and other potentials but cannot realize as desired because of widespread poor governance and some other reasons. Such a framework that can help mitigate poor governance at present and in the future needs to aim at improving good governance in planned manner at all sectors — government, semi–government, private and others — with short, medium and long term efforts. But, and above all, it is undeniable that nothing may reduce widespread mal-governance practices in the short and long run without visionary and effective leadership capable of making desired progress reflecting commitment and honesty.

German schools become coronavirus hotspots: 300,000 students in quarantine

Gregor Link & Markus Salzmann

The enormously high infection rates in Germany leave no doubt that the “partial lockdown” imposed by the federal government is not slowing down infections, even slightly. Although COVID-19 deaths are rising dramatically and hospitals are on the verge of collapse, the federal and state governments in Germany are continuing their policy of “herd immunity.”

At 21,866 on November 12, new infections were slightly below the peak of 23,399 on November 7. However, this is not necessarily due to fewer infections, but rather to a lack of laboratory capacity—with declining numbers of tests performed and delays in reporting due to the severe overloading of health authorities. While the number of laboratories processing tests remained unchanged, the percentage of positive results last week was 7.26 percent. Eight weeks earlier, it had been 0.77 percent.

Classroom in Dortmund, Germany, August 13, 2020 (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)

Numerous cities and municipalities are reporting new daily highs. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI)—the German government’s health agency—has recorded more than 700,000 proven infections. The number of deaths is also rising, with 261 reported on a single day. The situation in intensive care units is dramatic. On a single day, the number of patients requiring artificial respiration rose by 37. Physicians largely agree that capacities will be exhausted by the beginning of next month at the latest.

To conceal the true extent of the infection, Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) has presented a “new coronavirus strategy.” Accordingly, only those who have symptoms, belong to a risk group or work in the nursing and health care sector, for example, should be tested. “And someone who has no symptoms and is otherwise a contact person does not need to be tested,” Spahn told the ARD programme “Report from Berlin” on Sunday evening.

This attitude is criminal. It has been proven that even without acute symptoms, serious health consequences can occur because of an infection, which is why a credible collection of data is essential for pandemic control. Since the spring, it has been known that laboratory testing capacities would not be adequate if the number of infections rose higher. Nevertheless, nothing has been done about it. Now, the government is using this circumstance to push the figures downward in its calculations.

Even in old people’s homes and nursing homes, which have been severely affected since the beginning of the pandemic and where outbreaks usually have fatal consequences, there is insufficient testing. Rapid coronavirus tests are to be used in the facilities to relieve the burden on laboratories. “Staff shortages and sometimes long delivery times make implementation difficult,” however, as the television network WDR reports. In North Rhine-Westphalia alone, a thousand residents and just as many nursing staff in old people’s and nursing homes have become infected with the pathogen.

Although several studies show that the closure of schools, day-care centres and non-essential businesses effectively slow down the increase of infections, governments in Germany and Europe flatly reject such closures.

Despite the warnings made by numerous scientists, schools should remain open “come hell or high water,” according to Heinz-Peter Meidinger, president of the Teachers’ Association. Yet schools are becoming breeding grounds for the virus. While 50,000 pupils were in quarantine at the end of September, the number has now risen to more than 300,000. Also, around 30,000 teachers are currently in quarantine. This is only the tip of the iceberg. According to current antibody studies, more than six times as many school children have become infected than was previously assumed.

Politicians of all parties support the continuation of targeted screening. It is correct to maintain in-person teaching as long as possible, according to the chairperson of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder (federal states), Stefanie Hubig (Social Democratic Party, SPD). Susanne Eisenmann (CDU), state education minister in Baden-Württemberg, declared that there was no “reason for panic.”

The Ida-Ehre-Schule in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel has recorded the largest outbreak at a school in Germany to date. A spokesperson for the school authorities announced that a total of 55 people had tested positive. The affected pupils came from 25 classes, which have now been completely quarantined by the health authorities. Teachers, students, and parents have strongly criticized Hamburg’s Education Senator (state minister), Ties Rabe (SPD). Rabe is considered a hardliner, and despite rising coronavirus numbers, he continues to be a fervent advocate of in-person teaching. According to the Hamburger Abendblatt, he is “at peace” with himself despite the disastrous number of infections.

In Austria, where the authorities again reported more than 7,500 new infections on Wednesday, leading scientists from various disciplines have issued a statement calling for a “much stricter lockdown” and an “immediate closure of all schools.”

Among the signatories are the mathematician Peter Markowich, computer scientist Georg Gottlob and physicists Christoph Nägerl and Erich Gornik—all of them winners of the Wittgenstein Prize, the highest scientific honour in Austria. The scientists see “according to all the scientific evidence, for weeks, Austria is moving unchecked into the catastrophe of overloaded hospitals, where doctors have to make triage decisions and let patients die untreated.”

The closing of schools would be “certainly a significant contribution” and “one of the most effective individual measures of all.” They conclude, “All those who are now speaking out against school closure must say that they are in favour of triage [i.e., treating some patients and letting others die], at the latest by November 18.” Although the number of infections in schools is also rising rapidly in Austria, the government of the conservative Austrian Peoples Party (ÖVP) and the Greens support in-person teaching.

In Germany, too, federal and state governments are well aware that schools and day-care centres are bases for the spread of COVID-19. For example, Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek (CDU) told the Rheinische Post, the regional daily paper, on Tuesday that “full attendance at classes” was “naturally” associated with the “danger of mutual infection … which can also be carried home.”

Tübingen’s Mayor Boris Palmer (Greens) is among the most aggressive advocates of a policy of keeping schools and day-care centres open. Last week, Palmer said that it was “fundamentally important” to “keep schools and day-care centres open” and added, “But this will inevitably lead to a greater number of coronavirus infections among the younger generation.”

Palmer went on to explain that those who were no longer of working age are particularly at risk. “We simply have to be clear: People over 80 have died [at a rate] 500 times that of those under 40. This virus is extremely age discriminatory. Complaining about it is of no use.” He appealed to the “personal responsibility” of old and previously ill people to behave with caution amid the spreading pandemic. The “concern that coronavirus could be more deadly than influenza,” Palmer said, falsely, had “not been confirmed.”

At the time of the first peak of the pandemic, Palmer had already expressed the deeply foul view on a Sat.1 television network breakfast talk show that in German hospitals, “people [may be saved] who would have died in six months anyway—due to their age or previous illnesses.”

Thuringia’s Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (Left Party) has also taken the lead among the lockdown opponents and expressly praised the Swedish government’s herd immunity policy.

Despite clear findings on the benefits of using face masks, there is no obligation to wear them in the classroom in Thuringia’s schools—just as in most other German states. In contrast to schools in some other states, those in Thuringia also receive no support whatsoever for the purchase of air filtration systems—even though the state parents’ and student representatives had demanded them in the wake of falling temperatures.

As public broadcaster MDR reported, the Ministry of Education will “not financially support the purchase of air purifiers in schools.” A spokesman for the education ministry told the station that “no state funds are available for this” and that a corresponding support programme was “not known” to the ministry. Education and Sports Minister Helmut Holter (Left Party) added that the state’s special funds were also “all accounted for.”

Meanwhile, Michael Bauer, head of intensive care medicine at Jena University Hospital, warned that the number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care units in Thuringia could double in the next two weeks.