This month's theme is the public sector and the common good. The concept of a common good offers the possibility that politics can be about more than building an institutional framework a for the narrow pursuit of individual self-interest - i.e., making America work for business...
Posts published in “Issue: November 2018”
The national discussion about reforming our health care system is all about ending Obamacare (or not), adopting a “single payer”approach, or leaving things to the “marketplace.” No part of that discussion addresses the reality that we hardly have a healthcare “system” at all. Instead, we have big insurance companies, private…
Many of us are still reeling from the UN Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report published early in October. It confirms the dire predictions we read in Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene (Trajectories). The IPCC report reflects the consensus view of top climate scientists in a report that…
No more executions by the state of Washington:
In the February 2018 WIP, Glen Anderson argued that the death penalty makes problems worse, and called for its abolition. On October 11 our Supreme Court ruled the state death penalty statute unconstitutional on the grounds of racial bias...
I. The common good, and what happened to it? In the beginning there was the world, and nobody owned the world, and the world was with humanity, and humans lived in the world under egalitarian social relations based on common interests—common good. Now, a few thousand years later, were we…
The Thurston County Public Defense Office and the Thurston County Jail are collaborating on a project to replace the depleted accumulation of worn and torn books now stored in the jail library. A jail without a library is like a bookshelf without books! From now through December 10, 2018 you…