Working Indiana - Working for Democracy and Justice

Using the DSM-IV (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) as their guide, filmmakers Joel Bakan, Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott persuasively argue that Corporations like human beings fall within a professional psychiatric taxonomy.  In their 2003 documentary,

Wheel about and turn about and do jus' so.  Eb'ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow

--Thomas "Daddy" Rice--

In 1974 Congress passed a comprehensive law aimed at protecting American workers’ pension and fringe benefits.  ERISA [the Employee Retirement Income Security Act] was primarily designed to address shortcomings in the nation’s pension system.  These problems arose shortly after the close of the Second World War as a flood of returning G.I.s replaced America’s aging workforce.  Following the collapse of Indiana’s Studebaker Corporation, i

Writing in the East European Constitutional Review (Fall, 1997) Christian Lucky contrasts the Yazoo case—an early land privatization scandal, with the looting of formerly public asssets in post Communist Russia.  Comparing early America’s experience with corruption and privatization with contemporary events in Russia, Lucky identifies what he believes to be a common thread: “the distribution of former state assets may largely hinge on who is situated at the crossroads of politics and property.  The allocative principal is essentially lawless and follows politi

Reporting in the New York Times December 19, 2007 Mary Walsh relates the findings of a Pew Center study of public pensions.  Ms. Walsh summarized the Pew findings: “Almost half of the states have been underfunding their retirement plans for public workers and may have to choose in the years ahead between their pension obligations and other public programs.” 

 A “moral obligation” assures investors that, although there is no direct promise to fund this unlimited indemnity obligation from appropriations, the State will try to do so and it will be bound to try very hard indeed.  For, failure to honor the indemnity would likely poison Indiana’s credit in the bond market, bringing governance to the same precipice Indiana found itself facing in 1837.  This sort of indirect promise or suretyship has been identified as p

 Like many public/private collaborations which tout their ”businesslike“ approach, the Toll Road lease departs from the real world business model in an important way: lack of accountability.  Pouring concrete to ”jump start“ the state economy at the cost of eight billion dollars (Skurski’s estimated loss figure) is a strategy that will be testable only over time.  The politicians who have delivered this miracle will be long out of office before it

Indiana’s only toll road follows the Michigan state line westbound to Chicago, never straying much more than ten miles away.   Passing through 157 miles of mixed agricultural and recreational land until its terminus in “the Region,” beneath skies stained ochre by industrial haze, “The Mainstreet of the Midwest,” streams through the broken heart of the area’s once mighty industrial body until it bridges the waters of Wolf Lake where Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb stufffed little Bobby Franks corpse into a culvert just for the fun of it.

Back in the 50’s Leon Festinger studied a Midwestern cult of UFO millenarianists; reflecting that most of us strive for the kind of foolish consistency Emerson dismissed as the hobgoblin of little minds, Festinger wondered how people handled “dissonant” situations, those occasions when deeply held beliefs collide with known facts.  He evolved two hypotheses: (1) since the existence of dissonance is psychologically uncomfortable, persons should be motivated to reduce it and achieve consonance, and (2) when it is present dissonance not only prompts efforts to reduce it,