MAKING BIG CHANGE
I recently posted a piece I did for CCPA’s The Monitor recommending five readings on big change. Here I will try to distill some of what I gleaned about what it might take. Know the barriers: Big change is hard so it makes good sense to know the obstacles and have strategies for overcoming them. … Continue reading
Austerity and the Decline of the Collective
bold is the new pragmatic
We Need an Antidote to Complacency and Resentment
When life becomes a zero sum game, when competition is seen as the sole basis for organizing society, when targeting social benefits that should be universal shows folk that some gain and some don’t but everybody pays, when austerity tells us that there’s less in the pot so what one gets the other loses, when … Continue reading
EXPANDING THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION
The other day, CNN ran a focus group on what some American voters were now thinking about their president. The comments were almost universally critical including among Trump voters. But even some of the most critical, it seems, may still be Trump supporters. It was, for me, a valuable reminder that pointing out Trump’s flaws, … Continue reading
What Bernie Sanders Has Accomplished
Here is an op ed in the Star on what we might learn from the Bernie Sanders campaign
On the Weakening of the Collective
Summary of interviewed, June 23, by Adam Kahane as part of his Possible Canadas project and first appeared here on Possible Canadas website Kahane: What keeps you up at night? Himelfarb: The number one issue for me is inequality. Let’s think of the bottom, middle, and top of society. On the bottom, the situation with … Continue reading
Bargain Basement Citizenship and the Decline of Democracy
We ought to be outraged. Just about every day our media provides a new account of the decline of our democracy: the inadequacies of our electoral system and allegations of electoral fraud; the high-handed treatment of our Parliament through inappropriate prorogations and overuse of omnibus legislation; a government ever more authoritarian and opaque, resistant to evidence and reason, and … Continue reading
Double Movement: the resurgence of neoliberalism and inequality
This is the month for taking stock of the year that passed and imagining what the year before us may hold. For me, two broad and contradictory trends have emerged which just might shape politics and policy in 2011: the extraordinary resilience of neoliberal ideology and the reemergence of inequality as a defining public issue. Recall … Continue reading
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