Effective Modern Campaigns Against Inequality and Poverty in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Brooks ◽  
Amanda Gutwirth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Public School ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
The Common ◽  
Public School Educators ◽  
Macro Social Work

If one of the goals of macro social work in the United States is to decrease poverty and inequality, by most measures it has largely failed that mission over the past 40 years. After briefly documenting the four-decade rise in inequality and extreme poverty in the United States, three organizing campaigns are highlighted—living wage, Fight for $15, and strikes by public school educators—that fought hard to reverse such trends. A strategy, “bargaining for the common good,” which was implemented across those campaigns, is analyzed as a key ingredient to their success.

Civic Disengagement in Contemporary America

2001 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Putnam
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Information Technology ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Past ◽  
Life Saving ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
The Common

Over The Past Two Generations The United States Has Undergone a series of remarkable transformations. It has helped to defeat global communism, led a revolution in information technology that is fuelling unprecedented prosperity, invented life-saving treatments for diseases from AIDS to cancer, and made great strides in reversing discriminatory practices and promoting equal rights for all citizens. But during these same decades the United States also has undergone a less sanguine transformation: its citizens have become remarkably less civic, less politically engaged, less socially connected, less trusting, and less committed to the common good. At the dawn of the millennium Americans are fast becoming a loose aggregation of disengaged observers, rather than a community of connected participants.

The Hard-Boiled Anthropocene and the Infrastructure of Extractivism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamin Creed Rowan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Environmental Resources ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
The Common ◽  
Contemporary Situation ◽  
Collective Thinking

Abstract This essay suggests that hard-boiled crime fiction in the United States has developed the kind of “deep infrastructural ethic” that John Durham Peters says is present in much modern thought. The essay attempts to illuminate the genre’s infrastructural ethic and its corresponding affordance for environmental critique by tracing its expressions through a sample of significant texts in the hard-boiled and noir canons, and by concluding with a sustained reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015). These readings demonstrate that hard-boiled narratives enable readers to perceive the ways in which extractivist infrastructures are frequently built upon and facilitate the exploitation of both human and environmental resources. Hard-boiled texts help readers see capitalism’s extractivist infrastructure as a type of material and intellectual entrapment that ultimately undermines the common good and the planetary commons. Further, this essay argues that hard-boiled crime fiction attends to what AbdouMaliq Simone calls “infrastructures of relationality” and thus points a way out of the material and metaphysical entrapments of an extractivist economy’s infrastructure. The infrastructures of relationality that emerge in a world in which climate crises have broken down the infrastructures of capitalism provide a platform from which individuals can practice a mode of collective thinking and being that provides an alternative to the alienation upon which extractivism depends. In short, the hard-boiled genre is not only one of the Anthropocene’s earliest cultural responders but is also a vital genre for making sense of our contemporary situation in a deeper stage of the Anthropocene.

Rethinking Market Regulation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John N. Drobak
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regulatory Regime ◽  
Market Regulation ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
The Past ◽  
United States Today ◽  
The Common ◽  
The U.S

Rethinking Market Regulation: Helping Labor by Overcoming Economic Myths tackles the plight of workers who lose their jobs from mergers and outsourcing by examining two economic “principles,” or narratives that have shaped the perception of the economic system in the United States today: (1) the notion that the U.S. economy is competitive, making government market regulation unnecessary, and (2) the claim that corporations exist for the benefit of their shareholders but not for other stakeholders. Contrary to popular belief, this book demonstrates that many markets are not competitive but rather are oligopolistic. This conclusion undercuts the common refrain that government market regulation is unnecessary because competition already provides sufficient constraints on business. Part of the lack of competition has resulted from the large mergers over the past few years, many of which have resulted in massive layoffs. The second narrative has justified the outsourcing of millions of jobs of U.S. workers this century, made possible by globalization. The book argues that this narrative is not an economic principle but rather a normative position. In effect, both narratives are myths, although they are accepted as truisms by many people. The book ties together a concern for the problems of using economic principles as a justification for the lack of government intervention with the harm that has been caused to workers. The book’s recommendations for a new regulatory regime are a prescription for helping labor by limiting job losses from mergers and outsourcing.

Saeculum–Ecclesia–Caliphate: An Eternal Golden Braid

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-107
Author(s):  
Paul J. Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The United States ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Church ◽  
Catholic Perspective ◽  
Secular State

The secular state, the church, and the caliphate are associations that each hold universal aspirations, at least implicitly. While the universal aspirations of the church and caliphate may be obvious enough, every state seeks dominion over the whole world. (“Secular” describes states that limit their vision to this world, as opposed to the transcendence to which both the church and caliphate appeal.) As an essay in Catholic speculative theology, Griffiths asks two questions: Whether Catholic theology supports or discourages the variety of political orders, and whether these orders could be ranked in terms of goodness from a Catholic perspective? In response to these questions, Griffiths appeals to two aspects of St. Augustine’s political thought: Political rivalries serve the common good; and the principal indicator of the degree to which a state serves the common good is its explicit service to the god of Abraham. The United States (a secular state) is compared with ISIS (an attempted caliphate).

Pluralism in Religion and American Education

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana L. Eck ◽  
Brendan Randall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Established Fact ◽  
The Common

The United States is among the most religiously diverse countries in the world. Although such diversity is not a new phenomenon, its degree and visibility have increased dramatically in the past fifty years, reigniting the debate over a fundamental civic question: What is the common identity that binds us together? How we respond to religious diversity in the context of education has enormous implications for our democratic society. To the extent that previous frameworks such as exclusion or assimilation ever were desirable or effective, they no longer are. Increased religious diversity is an established fact and growing trend. The United States needs a more inclusive and robust civic framework for religious diversity in the twenty-first century—pluralism—and this framework should be an essential component of civic education.

Backtalk

2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Glazer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public School ◽  
The United States ◽  
Job Security ◽  
Teacher Strikes ◽  
Public School Educators ◽  
The Way

The recent wave of teacher strikes and walkouts across the United States is focusing much-needed attention on the concerns of public school educators. But Jeremy Glazer argues that we have been ignoring a huge silent protest right in front of us: the increasing number of teachers leaving the profession. Through conversations with what he calls invested leavers (i.e., teachers who had invested years in their career, sometimes gaining additional degrees and certifications), Glazer learned that some are leaving teaching not because of a lack of experience or competence, but because they lacked job security or were no longer allowed to teach in the way they thought best.

The Spirit and the Subprime: Race, Risk, and Our Common Dispossession

2016 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Amaryah Jones-Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Common Good ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alternative Conceptions ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
The People ◽  
The Common

This essay argues that Sarah Coakley's understanding of contemplation and the Spirit's dispossessive work can provide timely interruption of contemporary economic crises when read beside Willie Jennings's indictment of Christianity's imagination as the production of race. Read together, contemplation and dispossession provide useful frames for analyzing and reimagining the common good. Here, I argue that theologians and church communities can understand Coakley's and Jennings's work as confrontations with racial capitalism. In particular, I take Coakley's attention to the need for dispossession by the Spirit to correspond with black theologians’ assertions that we must turn to the dispossessed in the United States—the black and brown poor—to find where God is at work. The racialized subprime debtors who are perpetually dispossessed, failing, and criminal are the people Christian theology must align with in order to confront its relation to white supremacy. By contemplating alternative conceptions of property and ownership foregrounded by the concept of dispossession, we can begin to imagine, perceive, and practice an otherwise common good.

scholarly journals Sacred Voters and Secular Elections:

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Joseph Twiner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
National Election ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
Catholic Bishops

As another major national election approaches, American Catholics need a better understanding of the political conscience. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ document Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship (FCFC) attempts to provide guidance. However, the document has been roundly criticized by Catholics from various political persuasions. In attempting to understand political conscience today, it is helpful to return to the great thinkers of tradition, and in particular Thomas Aquinas. This paper aims at recovery of Thomas’ understanding of conscience, rooted in the act of synderesis and oriented towards the common good, as a fitting and critical interlocutor for FCFC.

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