In 1973, a lovely man wrote a lovely book and touched a lot of people the world over.

His name was E. F. Schumacher and his book was Small is Beautiful. The book helped revolutionize how a whole generation of people thought about the connections between work, scale, technology, ecology and economics.

The main thrust of Small is Beautiful is that in our rush to capitalize on the efficiencies of technology, we wind up creating businesses that operate on too large a scale. The same economic systems that are incredibly efficient and cost-effective from a business standpoint turn out to be wildly inappropriate for the human beings who work in them. Schumacher subtitled his book: “Economics as if People Mattered.” Continue reading →

If he watches American TV from his prison cell in France, Carlos the Jackal must think he had the right idea but the wrong place.

You may recall that Carlos was the most feared terrorist and assassin in the world – a man so famous that he was recognized everywhere by just his first name. After two decades of political assassinations, Carlos was convicted by a French court in 1997 and sentenced to life in prison.

In the meantime, here in America, there’s a whole cadre of political assassins who are every bit as lethal as Carlos was. Instead of killing people, these folks are hired to kill off political campaigns and political careers, which in politics usually amounts to the same thing. Their weapons are smarmy political ads that are often as deadly as anything Carlos ever dished out. But unlike the Jackal, these stalwarts get fame, fortune, and a place of honor in the current political firmament. Continue reading →

My grandmother was born in the 1880s, died in the late 1940s, and lived what I have come to think of as a nineteenth-century life.

As the daughter of Irish immigrants, she was born into a family and culture of working class poverty. She was literate but otherwise poorly educated. She married young, lost one child and raised five others, including my mother, who was her youngest. Grandma helped support her family first by working as a laundress for a wealthy Park Avenue family, and later by running a boardinghouse on the West Side of Manhattan.

My grandmother’s life was very tightly circumscribed – her family, relatives, neighbors, the Catholic Church, and the endless struggle of the poor to stay alive, stay employed, stave off illness, and educate their children in the hope that they would have a safer and better life. Continue reading →

When I was young and living in New York, I wandered one day into a political storefront at the other end of my neighborhood and began one of the great adventures of my life.

For the next ten years, I immersed myself in the nuts and bolts of the New York City political system, first as a street-level campaign volunteer and then as an elected member of the Democratic Party hierarchy and leader of the Party’s operations in my community. Continue reading →