Imagine a moral America. Americans treat each other as they want to be treated and respect everyone’s equal value. If you live elsewhere, imagine the same for your country.
We love our country, live good, compassionate lives, care for others as we care for ourselves, avoid both selfishness and self-sacrifice, improve ourselves and the world, are politically engaged, work to undo racism and all forms of oppressive domination, and nurture partnerships throughout society.
Read MoreEffective structures, a commitment to honor them, and mutual support for self-development can help nonprofit organizations cultivate productive partnerships. Members/clients can be partners with each other and with staff. Staff can be partners with each other, with members/clients, and with the governing board. Governing board members can be partners with each other and with staff.
In these ways, housing programs, community centers, activist organizations, faith communities, rehab centers, schools, and other nonprofits with a regular membership/client base can nurture self- and community empowerment — and serve as models for holistic and systemic transformation rooted in democratic hierarchies.
Read MoreIn August, 2021 Harry C. Boyte posted the following on Academia.edu and asked for feedback. Our exchange follows:
Background paper for “Tomorrow’s City Manager,” a session at the 2021 ICMA conference, October 3-6, 2021
Beyond the Vending Machine
Citizen professionals as agents and architects of a productive democracy
Harry C. Boyte, Institute for Public Life and Work, Augsburg University
Revitalizing the legacy of public work
The recently released United Nations report on climate, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls a “code red for humanity,” is a signature for the epoch. Climate change joins with Covid, polarization, rising inequality, intensifying bigotries, loneliness, and other vastly complex problems. No government can fix these by itself. Even to ameliorate them requires tapping energies and talents of diverse groups and generating widespread civic activation and civic responsibility.
To meet such challenges, we need what my colleagues and I call “public work,” effort by a diverse mix of people who work across lines of differences – partisan, racial, economic, religious and other -- to solve public problems and create our commonwealth. Here, the public work of the New Deal era is especially instructive.
Read MoreBy Eyal Press
After the recession in 2008, Harriet Krzykowski was hired as a mental health aide at the Dade Correctional Institution, a prison in South Florida. Her salary was modest — $12 an hour.
But the low pay bothered her far less than hearing about guards visiting abuse on the mentally ill prisoners entrusted to her care. Some of these prisoners were being starved, Ms. Krzykowski was told. Others were locked inside a scalding shower. Among the prisoners subjected to this sadistic punishment was Darren Rainey, a mentally ill man who collapsed in the stall and died. Autopsy photos later leaked to the press showed that much of the skin on Mr. Rainey’s chest, back and legs had peeled off.
Read MoreHow the politics of the 9/11 era produced Donald Trump.
I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” My guest today is somebody I’ve known almost as long as I’ve been in journalism. Spencer Ackerman is a leading national security reporter. He’s the author of the newsletter “Forever Wars,” he’s a contributing editor at The Daily Beast, and he’s a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that reported on Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations. But now he’s out with a new book, his first book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.”
The core premise of “Reign [of] Terror” is that the policies and the politics of the 9/11 era, they didn’t only wreak havoc on the Middle East, but they transformed America itself. And they transformed us so profoundly that we’ve stopped seeing the way they’ve reshaped our country and culture. Now it’s just the water we swim in. In Spencer’s telling, the core of the war on terror itself was this narrative, a narrative of fear.
By Michelle Cottle
When you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by the fire — whom do you expect to help take care of you? Family? Friends? Paid aides? All of the above?
The nation’s caregiving work force is fraying. Paid providers are overworked and undervalued, often forced to take on multiple jobs or turn to public assistance just to scrape by. Many family caregivers are struggling as well, sacrificing their own health and well-being to tend to loved ones for years on end. Consistent, skilled, affordable care is in short supply — and getting shorter — and those who provide it are shouldering an increasingly unsustainable burden.
Read MoreBy Lynn Hallarman
While I slept in my home, my mother lay dying on the bathroom floor in her home in another state. She was not alone. Her longtime professional home health aide was by her side, propping her up with a hastily grabbed pillow and holding her hand.
Because I am a palliative care physician, I had been preparing myself and my family for the moment of her death for a long time. My mother, after all, was 92 and frail, and had dementia. At this point in her life, it would come down to the place where she would die and who was there in her last moments.
My experience as a physician — a professional life spent mainly tending to the dying — and as a daughter who navigated my mother’s last years with chronic illness, has kept me alert to the national conversations now taking place about the role of professional caregiving as essential health care.
Read MoreBy Peter Hoffman
Few business sectors have experienced such violent swings between feast and famine in the last year as restaurants. Early in the pandemic, there was a demand problem: Few to no customers were willing to take the risk of eating in a dining room. Today, people are going out to eat again, and amid overwhelming demand, there’s a supply issue: A serious labor shortage confronts restaurants across the country.
As a chef and former restaurant owner, I know that the root causes of this predicament date to well before the pandemic. To address it, restaurants must fundamentally change. Diners must, too.
Read MoreBy Michelle Cottle
Growing old is an increasingly expensive privilege often requiring supports and services that, whether provided at home or in a facility, can overwhelm all but the wealthiest seniors. With Americans living longer and aging baby boomers flooding the system, the financial strain is becoming unsustainable.
Consider the demographics. In 2018, there were 52.4 million Americans age 65 or older and 6.5 million 85 or older. By 2040, those numbers will hit 80.8 million and 14.4 million, respectively. From now until 2030, an average of 10,000 baby boomers will turn 65 every day. Already, demand for care dwarfs supply. The Medicaid waiting list for home-based assistance has an average wait time of more than three years.
Read MoreIndividual liberty is valuable. Self-determination enables co-equal partnerships, nurtures cooperation, and helps build strong communities, which benefit individuals in a virtuous circle. Limits to individual freedom are essential, however. The classic example is a child running into traffic. How to define and enforce justified domination is not easy. Doing so can provide massive loopholes that undermine efforts to dissolve exploitative domination.
One example is “vulnerable adults” legislation that highlights the tension between elderly individuals who want the freedom to make their own decisions and others who consider them no longer competent to do so. There are known cases where children of the elderly get the government to make this designation to seize the assets of their parents. Striking a fair balance is a challenge.
Another example is the legal requirement for drivers to have car insurance, which protects the public from having to pay medical bills for injuries due to accidents. One impact of this policy is that some poor people who can’t afford insurance can’t legally drive though they may need to drive to hold down a job. Is this fair?
Who has the right and the wisdom to exercise justified domination? Who is competent to intervene interpersonally, write legislation, or administer well-intentioned legislation…
Read More…AT A BASIC LEVEL, the goal of A.I. and Faith and like-minded groups I came across in Toronto, San Francisco, London and elsewhere is to inject a kind of humility and historicity into an industry that has often rejected them both. Their mission is admittedly also one of self-preservation, to make sure that the global religions remain culturally relevant, that the texts and teachings of the last several centuries are not discarded wholesale as the world is remade. It is also a deeply humanistic project, an effort to bring different kinds of knowledge — not only faith-based, but also the literary, classical and oral traditions — to bear upon what might very well be the most important technological transformation of our time.
Read MoreSmall mutual support teams that embrace shared values and principles can nurture self-development. In Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, Tina Rosenberg reports that “from the affluent suburbs of Chicago to the impoverished shanties of rural India” mutual support teams have helped smokers stop smoking, teens fight AIDS, worshippers deepen their faith, activists overthrow dictators, addicts overcome addictions, and students learn calculus.[1]
Such teams could also help compassion-minded individuals set aside counter-productive tendencies and become more effective — and inspire politically inactive people to become more active.
Read MoreSmall mutual support teams that embrace shared values and principles can nurture self-development. In Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, Tina Rosenberg reports that “from the affluent suburbs of Chicago to the impoverished shanties of rural India” mutual support teams have helped smokers stop smoking, teens fight AIDS, worshippers deepen their faith, activists overthrow dictators, addicts overcome addictions, and students learn calculus.[1]
Such teams could also help compassion-minded individuals set aside counter-productive tendencies and become more effective — and inspire politically inactive people to become more active. Those teams could serve as social greenhouses where we could develop our ability to relate as equals, create models, and strengthen our ability to help transform the world.
Read MoreBy Ezra Klein
…Decades of climate activism have gotten millions of people into the streets but they haven’t turned the tide on emissions, or even investments. Citing a 2019 study in the journal Nature, Malm observes that, measuring by capacity, 49 percent of the fossil-fuel-burning energy infrastructure now in operation was installed after 2004. Add in the expected emissions from projects in some stage of the planning process and we are most of the way toward warming the world by 2 degrees Celsius — a prospect scientists consider terrifying and most world governments have repeatedly pledged to avoid. Some hoped that the pandemic would alter the world’s course, but it hasn’t. Oil consumption is hurtling back to precrisis levels, and demand for coal, the dirtiest of the fuels, is rising…
Read MoreBy Michael Powell
…Yet the phrase is deeply contentious. Influential writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor, have embraced it, seeing in white supremacy an explanatory power that cuts through layers of euphemism to the core of American history and culture. It speaks to the reality, they say, of a nation built on slavery. To examine many aspects of American life once broadly seen as race neutral — such as mortgage lending or college faculty hiring — is to find a bedrock of white supremacy.
“It is not hyperbole to say that white supremacy is resting at the heart of American politics,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton, a socialist activist and professor of African-American studies, said in a speech in 2017.
But some Black scholars, businessmen and activists — on the right and the left — balk at the phrase. They hear in those words a sledgehammer that shocks and accuses, rather than explains. When so much is described as white supremacy, when the Ku Klux Klan and a museum art collection take the same descriptor, they say, the power of the phrase is lost…
Read MoreBy Khalil Gibran Muhammad
As I thought about writing this review, I imagined an opening paragraph summarizing the events of this summer’s nationwide protests against police violence. How observers and participants parsed the civil unrest along the familiar lines of peaceful protesters, rioters and looters, drawing competing moral distinctions between nonviolence and violence. How the police deployed official violence to punish and intimidate activists. How heavily armed, self-deputized white men threatened and used vigilante violence against demonstrators. How President Trump called for state violence against human beings to protect property. And how the residents of many cities committed acts of violence against their intimate partners, neighbors and fellow citizens, including small children.
And then, after finishing Elliott Currie’s “A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America,” a smart, timely, deeply disturbing and essential book by a veteran scholar and leading expert on the criminal legal system, I realized that the details of every precious life harmed or lost this summer reveal a bigger truth about the nation….
Read MoreOn a humid, windless night several years ago, I was driving my parents’ S.U.V. through the oak-covered back streets of my hometown with four teenage friends. At an empty intersection, I reflexively began turning left before spotting the no-left-turn sign on the traffic light above. I jerked the wheel right, crossed the intersection and headed for the U-turn lane.
Before my friend riding shotgun could even finish joking about my driving, we were surrounded by two blaring cop cars that had been waiting in the shadows nearby.
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