Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Bidding on the wall

There's a report on Facebook that Granite Rock Construction, based in Watsonville, CA, is bidding on the anti-immigration wall that has been proposed. Please don't. We hope Santa Cruz will have sanctuary cities and a sanctuary county, in deed even if not in law. Immigrant labor is essential to agriculture which a bedrock of this community's economy, as it is to the construction industry, your industry. Granite has a good reputation; ethics are featured on your home page. Just say no; don't bid.   

Street feeding

Public spaces are public places. Displacing those who are less entitled and restricting access for some to public places enables the haves while the have-nots stay lonely and go hungry

About enshrining values in law

Utilitarian cost-benefit analyses bend and stretch ethics until they obscure the values of our community, elide our relationships with each other, and dissolve the social bonds on which concepts of state and governance are built.

Yes, you are responsible for fiscal stability. And you also must set an ethical, honorable dignified example that reflects the deeply held social values of we who have elected you ...honesty, caring, family, service, fairness, ...

Because this is not really about illegality and crime and lack of documents. It is about equity and goodness and doing what in all our hearts we know is right.

I resist fiscal threats used to bully obedience.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Equity

Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheidel-great-leveler-inequality-violence/517164/

I note that of these four, if warfare becomes nuclear warfare, the rest doesn't matter, and if not, it won't create a global shock; revolutions have been and will be quickly suppressed -- tech monitoring, armored tanks, ... ; medicine is stopping epidemics before they are catastrophic, and maybe we are now experiencing US state collapse. 

My bet is on a plague or a global climate event.