Cooperation


Book Description

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, they harness the longstanding practices and values of cooperatives: self-determination, democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and respect for the environment. Bernard E. Harcourt develops a transformative theory and practice that builds on worldwide models of successful cooperation. He identifies the most promising forms of cooperative initiatives and then distills their lessons into an integrated framework: Coöperism. This is a political theory grounded on recognition of our interdependence. It is an economic theory that can ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, it is a social theory that replaces the punishment paradigm with a cooperation paradigm. A creative work of normative critical theory, Cooperation provides a positive vision for addressing our most urgent challenges today. Harcourt shows that by drawing on the core values of cooperation and the power of people working together, a new world of cooperation democracy is within our grasp.




Crisis Leadership And Public Governance During The Covid-19 Pandemic: International Comparisons


Book Description

This book explores various issues and challenges emanating from the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines how governments worldwide have dealt with the pandemic. Post-COVID-19 and its disruptive impact on social and economic life as well as public and political attitudes, the world is not the same. A new normal has dawned in public management and public services, with immense implications. This volume collects the lessons drawn from the pandemic, notably how crisis leadership and public governance were used to combat the crisis, as well as which aspects were helpful in that regard. This book covers a total of 17 countries and regions, namely: Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China (Mainland), Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, The Netherlands, the Nordic Countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland), the UK and US. Special attention is drawn to China (Mainland) in particular, where the pandemic first broke out. Its subsequent efforts in suppressing the epidemic have been quite stunning. The range enables good international comparisons to be made in crisis leadership, response strategies and effectiveness across continents, systems, and cultures (East Asia, Oceania, Europe and North America). While the pandemic is still ongoing by the time the book is finalized, the experience gained over more than two years has provided good ground for lesson drawing.




Medicare Primer


Book Description

This report provides a general overview of the Medicare program including descriptions of the program's history, eligibility criteria, covered services, provider payment systems, and program administration and financing.




The COVID-19 Response


Book Description

The COVID-19 Response: The Vital Role of the Public Health Professional explores population health during a pandemic and how is it different than clinical medicine. Other sections cover federal, state and local responses to COVID-19, testing for COVID-19, the implementation of public health control measures, the use of public health emergency powers, health equity, the resignation and firing of public health leaders, vaccination planning, and the future of public health post COVID-19. Leaders and practitioners working in public health practice and academia, as well as students in public health undergraduate and graduate level programs will find this book extremely useful. - Clarifies the role of public health in a pandemic emergency - Assesses the indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which include excess deaths from dementia, diabetes and heart disease, and will soon include the potential for global epidemics of preventable diseases like measles, diphtheria and polio - Explores the impact of lack of trust in science and public health leadership - Describes a way forward for the public health system to be prepared to respond to future threats




Racial Equity, COVID-19, and Public Policy


Book Description

Racial Equity, COVID-19, and Public Policy: The Triple Pandemic focuses on the health, economic, and justice impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on racial equity. The book does not simply document the problems made worse by the pandemic, but it provides historical context for issues that rose to the surface in new ways, the existing inequities revealed during COVID-19, as well as policy responses to those issues. The volume is distinguished in its focus on the implications for racial equity through an examination of both existing public policy and new ideas for change. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the ways in which this period of American history and politics is unique, most notably in the convergence of major threats to public health, economic livelihood, and access to justice. This “triple pandemic” will be felt in the coming years and will continue to unfold, depending upon the adequacy of the contemporary response. This edited volume is designed to provide the reader with a thorough understanding of issues including policing, housing, business, disaster response, education, immigration, vaccine distribution, reentry of justice-involved individuals, and the responses to public protests—all with a unifying focus on racial inequities and social justice concerns that elevated these issues to broader public attention and political response. This coalescing emphasis on public policy as both a cause and effect to address these issues makes the book a unique contribution to the public policy literature. This book responds to audiences seeking a better understanding of the events that occurred, the conditions that set the stage for their eruption into wider public view, and what might be done to prevent social and racial inequities in the future.




Municipal Fiscal Stress, Bankruptcies, and Other Financial Emergencies


Book Description

It is difficult to find someone who has not heard about the Puerto Rico, Detroit, Michigan, or Orange County, California, bankruptcies. While guides for responsibly managing government finances exist, problems often originate not because of poor financial reporting or financial deficiencies but because issues external to financial wellbeing arise, such as economic, demographic, political, legal, or even environmental factors. Exacerbating the problem, there is not much advice in the existing literature on how to act when municipalities face financial struggles. Filling this important gap, this book explores fiscal health and fiscal hardships, municipal defaults and bankruptcies, and many other aspects to help guide local governments during fiscal distress. Fiscal hardships negatively affect the quality and availability of public goods and services and, consequently, the wellbeing of residents and businesses living and working in distressed municipalities. Turned off streetlights, unmaintained public parks, potholes, inconsistent garbage pickup, longer response time from emergency services, and multiple other issues that residents of the struggling municipalities deal with, lead to higher crime rates, lower quality of K-12 education, dangerous road conditions, lower housing values, outmigration of wealthier population, and numerous other problems. The COVID-19 pandemic put additional unprecedented pressure on municipal finances nationwide. In this book authors Tatyana Guzman and Natalia Ermasova evaluate distressed cities and municipalities and provide practical recommendations on improving their financial conditions. What are conditions and signs to look for to not to find yourself in similar situations? What can be done if your municipality is already experiencing fiscal hardships? What are the consequences of fiscal misfortunes? How does one exit a fiscal emergency? This book answers these and other questions and serves as a guide to fiscal health and prosperity for U.S. municipal governments, students and researchers in public finance, and general public management fields.




Artificial Intelligence and COVID Effect on Accounting


Book Description

This book considers the effects of COVID-19 on accounting, particularly with regard to the role of artificial intelligence in accounting in the post-pandemic business environment. The contributions in the book consider a variety of sectors that have been affected by the pandemic, such as the stock market, forensic accounting, Bitcoin, as well as the economic and educational responses to the pandemic and the aftermath felt by both developing and developed countries. This book will be a valuable read for academics, students and practitioners of accounting who are keen to explore the future of the field in light of the pandemic.




The Centers of Power, Corona and I&I


Book Description

My books are about one thing and that is the mind. 1. Where did our mind come from in a natural point of facts. 2. What did our mind do during its historical, cultural existence for the past 100.000 years. 3. Who owns and who controls our mind. We don’t actually control our mind and makes Free Will an ambition and not a fact. The Centers of Power control our mind for the last 5.000 years, we have made simulations about believing in a god and call it religion. We have made simulations about society in believing in governments, laws and politician and call it statism. 4. In my books I explore solutions to live as a free individual and that is only possible if we all live in a free world, without the political, financial and religious oppressors I call the Centers of Power. How can this work out for me, if I am in love with mental slavery, how do I unslave? Am I a monkey with an Ego or am I a cosmic, archaic mind? Being involved in natural philosophy to answer questions on where I come from, who I am, where I am going and to stand up for it, challenge authority, lead me into prison for over 10 years. How I became the enemy of the German state, a danger to its citizens and to my five children, will be covered in my two books. People that are dangerous to the system are tending to be removed. I look at the Centers of Power, its origin and the way it divides the people in order to enslave them and it makes me think is it monkeys running society? So how do we unite and make love win - to change the system and push for peace? We are now living in historical times and, like it or not, the choices that we will make over the next few years will have profound implications to the future of the entire human race. Corona-Plandemic: Whether or not to wear the mask. Whether or not to take the vaccine. Whether or not to get the health app. Whether or not to fill out the digital visitor card. Whether or not to take the digital money chip. In any case the attempt by the Centers of Power to reset global society leads eventually to a global awakening of the truth. My journey is to go back to the foundations to get things right. To discover truth, the cosmos has to be first debugged and to make a model of the cosmos. Typically large groups of intellect don’t get it right, because they are consensus orientated, like in politics. It is not truth orientated, in the past we have only found this by the outsiders; there we find intellectual progress. The other reason why it is so hard to find objective truth is that our brain is operating just like a computer on bio-chemical algorithms by electricity and hormones running the hardware to simulate software. When we experience pleasure or pain, when we see, hear, smell the outside world it is always an interpretation, a simulation, but never the actual objective truth or the reality of the outside world. The cosmos can be computed by us in a simulation (Matrix) and so can our society be computed, but so far no human has understood the underlying structures of that Matrix. A society like ours to discuss truth can be a very dangerous place, if you question authority. I found it hard to fit in the academic system as a scientific philosopher, so I started the path of knowledge without the academic prison and in order to finance this I started my own companies in the USA, Germany and the Netherlands; where I eventually ended up in a German prison. That happened primarily because I used psychedelic (magic) mushrooms to detach me from the general agendas of a slave in society. I present the theory that we are not living in a mechanical cosmos and a material world, but a computational cosmos – a simulation made by our mind, just as it makes a dream work, or a believer of a god that lives in the clouds called heaven. We are a dream state in the body of a monkey, becoming awake that we are neither monkey, nor a sentient being. To wake up from those dream simulations is probably the hardest accomplishment and usually happens late in our life. I doubt that reading a book, following a guru, god or scientist will help in this endeavor. In my case the search for objective truth, reality and the knowledge of relevant information, in combination with the magic mushrooms did the switch of perspective … probably also a bit of luck, called non-linear dynamics and chaos. What I really was surprised by from the awakening aspect was altruistic, unconditional love. This concept is not naturally accepted by our Ego-self driven software – however it turns out that this energy is a force that can only be activated once we achieve a Free Will of Thought. That is what makes some of us unlike any other living organism on this planet; to forgive your enemy, to love your enemy are concepts of meme that contradict the animal mind of most humans. Well once we understand that we are like a computer thinking with bio-chemical algorithms it is not a surprise that we start life with an Unfree Will of Thought …a simulation of the brain looking for food, sex and all the other things that feed our Ego-Self telling us how great and wonderful we, our simulation of the Me actually is. I have never experienced that a person is really evil or that he and she wants something evil. What people do can be horrible, and the mess they make can have an incredibly destructive potential. But if you look closely at what's going on, it may not stop, but if you condemn it, it will stop even less. When one works through it, accepts it, perceives it - then a light of love shines out. There are no bad and evil people at all, there are only people who are on the way, whom one must invite and pick up...  Evolution on how cosmic space-time creates meme and life, how it drives to ever more complexity we might call consciousness.  Evolution from a living organism called ape with a brain that does interpretation (simulations) of colors and sounds from the outside world, communication between us; but unlike any other brain on this planet, it can simulate also altruistic love, mathematics, arts, morals and ethics.  Evolution from a hunter & gatherer tribe to a complex, modern civilization; still being an animal with universal power ambitions of the Ego-Self.  To understand consciousness and enlightenment and our part we take in the cosmic, archaic mind we call nature.  Using computer science artificial intelligence (AGI) to understand how our consciousness works in living organisms and especially in the human brain. To perceive the simulations that make up our worlds we make up in politics, religion and business.  The internet becomes mightier than the sword of the oppressors. Now we have access to meme, to information directly, without the editing or censoring of an official cultural gate keeper. What it does to freedom and change during 2020 is the main topic of the book, to predict what 2030 will look like when governments start a direct war against their citizens.  The deep state within governments, as the global Center of Power and their agenda of a Great Reset.  The rise of slavery, capitalism and democracy.  Central banks, IMF and World create FIAT Money (out of thin air) and therefore have control over third world countries, with their imposed conditions of these loans.  Representative Democracy is a plutocracy of the very few ruling over their (sovereign citizens). We need a direct democracy right now.  Outline cases where the media-propaganda has served political agendas, like false flag attacks on Libya, Iran, Syria, Iraq, 9/11 and Corona.  Who runs global politics and societies since the 18th century? The Wall Street financed wars; Rockefeller, Rhodes & Co financed Adolf Hitler to prevent a United Europe with Russia. We have a 147 corporations that control the economy and the media, but do we have another power-center-cult?  The New World Order (Great Reset) is coming and we can be sure that the global elite will be successful in that.  The most powerful spell on humanity is electoral democracy. The answer to that problem is not a new political party, but rather local community building, spread true information on the internet and the Resistance.




Accelerating Diagnostics in a Time of Crisis


Book Description

By presenting chapter-specific roadmaps, this book offers a behind-the-scenes chronology of the response to COVID-19 and provides a rubric for future pandemic response. Targeted at lay and scientific audiences, reflections and lessons learned grant the reader an opportunity to leverage this knowledge and improve the outcomes of future pandemics.




Homelessness in America


Book Description

This title provides a one-stop resource for understanding the crisis of homelessness in the United States. It covers risk factors for homelessness, societal attitudes about the homeless, and public and private resources designed to prevent homelessness and help those in need. There are a number of questions to be answered when addressing the subject of homelessness in the United States. What are the primary causes of homelessness? What are the economic and socioeconomic factors that have an impact on homeless people? What demographic trends can be identified in homeless populations? Is the U.S. addressing the needs and concerns of homeless people adequately? Where are the areas with the highest homeless populations? What can be done to help homeless people who live with mental illness and/or addiction problems? Homelessness in America: A Reference Handbook answers all of these questions and more. It thoroughly examines the history of homelessness in the U.S., shining a light on the key issues, events, policies, and attitudes that contribute to homelessness and shape the experience of being homeless. It places special emphasis on exploring the myriad problems that force people into homelessness, such as inadequate levels of affordable housing, struggles with substance abuse, and gaps in the U.S.' social welfare system. In addition, it explains why some demographic groups are at heightened risk of homelessness.