Tag: public service

QUIS CUSTODES?

March 28, 2024 / John Jay

Who Guards the Guardians?

One lens through which New York City government in the 20^th Century has been viewed is the decades long clash between elected officials who were products of political machines and self-styled “reformers” The classic discussion of this history is Sayre and Kaufman’s “Governing New York City: Politics in the Metropolis.” Today, there seem to be no reformers – no public voices who advocate for what they regard to be in the best interest of all New Yorkers. They have been replaced by advocates for particular communities and personal interests. How did that happen and is it important?

The machines were political operations built up from neighborhood organizations that whipped votes for their candidates in exchange for patronage and contracts. Jimmy Walker, William O’Dwyer, Robert Wagner and finally Abraham Beame were products of the city’s organization political clubs. The machines generally dealt in ethnic politics and rallied around Irish, Italian and Jewish candidates. The machines were regarded by reformers as corrupt, inefficient and exclusive – particularly excluding Black and Hispanics from power. The most famous reformer was, perhaps, Fiorello LaGuardia. Both John Lindsey and Ed Koch came up each through reform ranks. Reformers saw themselves as advocates of merit hiring, competitive contracting and professional public administration. Before LaGuardia, New York was exclusively a machine politics town.

The reformers had supporting them an array of political and civic organizations. There were “reform” as well as “organization” neighborhood political clubs that gathered nominating petitions and supported their own candidates in elections. But also, importantly, there was a range of “good government” civic organization, the boards of which were dominated by the city’s commercial and social elite, like the City Club, the Women’s City Club, the Municipal Art Society, the Regional Plan Association and the Citizens Budget Commission, among a dozen others, that advocated for merit hiring, competitive bidding of contracts and high-quality service delivery of government programs. [It is interesting to note that among the most high-profile reformers of the first half of the 20^th Century, at least at the beginning of his career, was Yale graduate, Robert Moses]. There was a kind of yin and yang between machine and reform control of city government throughout the second half of the 20^th Century in mayoral elections. The electorate went back and forth between choosing mayoral reformers and organization candidates.

However, this began to break down with the election of the city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, who came up through a parallel Black political organization – and was not part of the conventional white ethnic political clubs. With the advent of media driven mayoral campaigns, the strength of the machine and reform organizations broke down, with advertising replacing organizing in turning out the vote. While many of mayor Michael Bloomberg’s initiatives mirrored the priorities of earlier reformers, he was independent of political organizations (in part because he was able to finance his own campaigns) and didn’t come out of reform political clubs (and ran as a Republican, as did Lindsey). But Rudolph Giuliani and Bill DeBlasio and would be difficult to locate on a machine/reform scale.

Our current mayor, Eric Adams is a product of a multi-racial Brooklyn old style political machine which has continued to function into the 21^st Century. He is also, importantly, a former city employee and union member. But significantly, there is no reform counterbalance to his old school political policies. Like previous machine operatives he places loyalty and ethnic politics ahead of reform type of “professional” government. An interesting argument that Mayor Adams occasionally makes is that there isn’t much evidence that “professionally” managed government was actually more responsive to local communities or delivered better services than did community embedded local political club driven machines. I am unaware of anyone today, either elected officials or visible civic organizations, advocating for traditional good government policies. Criticism of Mayor Adams is either political or personal.

Where are today’s “reformers.” There aren’t any, as far as I can see. I would argue that just about everyone involved in local government today has a vested interest in the way things are. There are no serious voices that advocate in “the public interest” in local politics. While there is an important argument that the past promoters of reform were actually advancing the interests of the white, privileged New York establishment (aka “the ruling class”), and there is nothing besides self-interest governing politics and government, I am not so totally cynical. I do believe that there is a place for merit and professionalism in public administration. This absence of activism for professional local government has created a troubling vacuum in our discussion of how local government best might function.

Public spirited individuals came into high profile during the city’s fiscal meltdown of the 1970’s, when people like Felix Rohatyn (an investment banker) and Richard Ravitch (a real estate developer), wealthy, white, Jewish men from prominent families, pretty clearly selflessly got involved in attempting to rescue city government from bankruptcy – with not much in it materially for them. They were willing to take the risk of the possibility of failure and diminished reputations. They were prepared and able to speak truth to power. At that time there were other high-profile leaders who were in it to advance themselves, and who were, by contrast obsequious to power. But there were also a number of individuals who, in my judgement, were selfless and brave in their efforts. Perhaps that’s a difficult distinction to draw, or even bad form to do so, but after decades of work in and around city government, I think I’m in a position to make such an important judgment fairly – between the good guys and the bad guys. I would venture to say that there isn’t anyone around today who could or would want to play that “good guy” role.

Some of this lack of civic leadership has to do with corporate globalization, which has produced business managers who tend not to feel a connection with any particular place. Just for example, while Chase Bank is headquartered in New York, I suspect its CEO, Jamie Dimon, would likely tell you that he is a citizen of the world, and is concerned with national and international issues affecting the bank. This is in contrast to David Rockefeller, a previous Chase CEO (although it was at the time a much more local and smaller enterprise) who was in the 60’s and 70’s active in New York affairs and founded the civic organization, The New York City Partnership. The leaders of the two great New York City universities also, I would guess, regard themselves as world citizens, and likely couldn’t name the Borough President of Manhattan. There are some people today who style themselves as local civic leaders, but I can’t think of one who isn’t using the public sphere to attract attention to themselves, is concerned about staying on the good side of the powerful and seeks principally to advance their personal or institutional interests through their civic involvement. They all have an agenda. They aren’t Rohatyn or Ravitch.

In the past, the boards of civic organizations were very much a creature of the business and institutional elite. Their leadership were personally and financially independent of city government and in a position to be critical of its operations. I might note that I believe essential to being able to play the role of independent public citizen is/was a certain amount of independent wealth. One needs to be in a position to not care about what powerful people in government and the media think about you.

Today, strikingly, the boards of those organizations, while they include a few corporate leaders, have a disproportionate share of lobbyists who very much have a stake in the status quo, and not running afoul of those in power locally, who are the object of their lobbying on behalf of various commercial interests. For example, the highest profile civic organization in New York today is probably the Citizens Budget Commission – which sets itself out as a private sector monitor of the city’s fiscal probity. My recollection is that in the 1990’s its board was composed of representatives of entities with a stake in the business of municipal finance, investment banks and law firms. They had an interest in the fiscal integrity of local government, particularly as an issuer of tax-exempt debt. Today the chair of the CBC is a corporate lobbyist, and I count 11 other such lobbyists on the organization’s board. Because of the nature of lobbying, staying on the good side of elected officials is essential to the business. The same is true in the real estate industry, which is deeply reliant on local government and has about 26 members on the CBC board. It seems unlikely that CBC can be effectively critical of government operations given its governance.

It is worth noting, though, that recently, when Mayor Adams thought that the city was likely to face a serious shortfall of revenues, his first impulse to cut the budget in order to get it into balance. This was not how Mayors Lindsay and Beame operated (that is, deficit spending was seen as a legitimate policy) – and mayoral fealty to balanced budgets is a significant advance in the institutional culture of local government.

Some of the retreat of civic organizations from controversy also has to do with the twelve years of Mayor Bloomberg’s time in City Hall. Mayor Bloomberg came from the business and social world of the boards of civic and cultural organizations – and, importantly, he shared their values of merit-based, data-driven public administration. As a result, the boards of those groups were made up of many friends and social acquaintances of Mayor Bloomberg and were loath to criticize him. This was most visibly true of the Municipal Art Society, which prior to the Bloomberg administration, had been in the business of suing city government when municipal actions were at odds with its advocacy of good public design, intelligent zoning, and historic preservation. MAS fired its in house attorney and dissolved its law committee early on in Bloomberg’s tenure are mayor.

Now, when we have returned to a form of machine politics, there seem to be no prestigious voices articulating the public interest – no contemporary analog to Rohatyn and Ravitch. The city’s personnel and procurement systems are highly dysfunctional. There is no powerful group with the ability and interest in identifying those problems and offering solutions that would require a major overhaul of local government (structural challenges that Mayor Bloomberg, who was professionally ideally suited to address, may have chosen not to take on because they appeared so intractable to him and his team. Bloomberg seemed to be focused on addressing problems he was confident his team could solve during a mayor’s ordinary tenure). The groups that now exist on the public scene have extremely narrow agendas, like the present incarnation of the City Club, which is anti-development and anti-institutional and is exclusively involved with using litigation as a tool to advance its positions.

The diminishment of local press coverage is also a part of the problem. The New York Times, long a bastion of local good government opinion articles, also sees itself playing on a world stage. Most of its voices on local issues have narrow, “progressive” agendas. Certainly, there is no one at the Times with any knowledge (or interest) of the nitty gritty of how local government operates. The Post isn’t a serious newspaper, as actual facts seem to not be a priority in its reporting. The Daily News is both resource constrained and consumed with mayhem and scandal. NY1 relies on a coterie of New York City lobbyists with vested interests to offer opinions on local politics and is oriented towards personalities and horse races. There are a number of independent websites now covering local government in a sophisticated way, like The City and Gothamist. But they have a limited audiences and even more limited resources.

The worst part of this situation is that I don’t see a solution. Almost everyone who cares about New York City government today is someone who has an interest in it and doesn’t want to antagonize it. One of the things I learned mid-career is when there is government dysfunction it is not because public officials are incompetent, it is because those systems are the way they are because it is in someone’s interest for them to be that way. There is always someone or an interest group to oppose almost any change in the status quo. Those who don’t have a direct interest, aren’t interested.

Translatio Erici Adams

March 14, 2024 / John Jay

Translating Eric Adams

In the circle of white Manhattanites among whom I travel, Mayor Eric Adams is an enigma. He doesn’t seem to advance their interests, as they perceive them, and as a result they don’t understand what motivates him politically. Having had the rewarding experience of spending more than a decade working in the Southeast Queens community in which he grew up, I thought it might be something of a public service for me to attempt to explain the world view of that community and how the Mayor represents it, as best I can. Doing so requires generalizing about a community of which I am not a member, which risks, at best, inaccuracy, and at worst pejorative stereotyping – but I am willing to hazard doing so to attempt to make matters clearer to those who are perplexed.

Jamaica, Queens is said to be one of the largest communities of African American homeowners in the United States. Two of its zip codes have among the highest income levels in Queens. It includes the neighborhoods of St. Albans, Hollis, Springfield Gardens, Laurelton and Rochdale, unfamiliar to most white residents of Manhattan south of 125^thStreet. Not only are these the neighborhoods that shaped Mayor Adams, but they are also represented by City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (the City’s second most powerful public official) and Congressman Gregory W. Meeks. Congressman Meeks is the Queens County Democratic Chair, the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. While Queens member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,’ name may be more familiar to Manhattanites, Congressman Meeks is a far more influential and powerful figure. Arguably, southeastern Queens is New York City and State’s most politically formidable community – one about which most white Manhattanites know next-to-nothing.

Southeast Queens has been home to many notable New Yorkers. Congressman Meek’s predecessor, former Member of Congress, the Reverend Dr. Floyd Flake, was long the pastor of one of the city’s largest churches, Allan A.M.E Cathedral (succeeded by his spouse Dr. Elaine Flake). Former Citicorp CEO Richard D. Parsons also grew up here. In the past, a large group of well known, successful jazz musicians made Jamaica, particularly St. Albans, their home.

Mayor Adams represents and advances the interests of his constituency well. Many neighborhood residents are government workers – postal employees, teachers, transit employees, police and corrections officers. Among the higher income neighborhood residents are school principals and other senior administrators (and, in fact, Mayor Bloomberg’s schools Chancellor, Dennis Walcott, continues to live there and is now President of the Queens Public Library). The largest private sector employer in the community is jetBlue, whose personnel work at airports run by quasi-governmental entity, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. These folks care about the compensation and benefits received by government and union workers – and the Mayor has gone a long way towards bringing to closure a large number of public employee union contracts that had expired. Residents of Jamaica also care about public safety – both in terms of preventing violent crime, but also in terms of averting the random stopping of Black men by police. Most are car owners and are less invested in public transit. Bike lanes are not their issue.

What they also care less about are the public space issues in midtown and downtown that so bother us Manhattanites – like litter, street homelessness and sidewalk vending – which white Manhattan residents view as being “out of control” and where City government is viewed as failing. Not to say that they these issues don’t matter to residents of southeast Queens and Central Brooklyn, but they are certainly less important than other things. The most important issue to southeastern Queens residents, in fact, is the flooding of the basements of their homes by a rising water table in the decades since the closure of the Jamaica Water Company – a multi-billion-dollar problem with which Greenwich Village residents are entirely unfamiliar.

Mayor Adams is serious when he refers to himself as a “working class mayor,” and when he notes that he neither has nor needs a “degree from Harvard” to be a successful leader of New York City. He has appointed to city positions people whom he trusts with whom he has had long relationships, and individuals who are proven vote getters in areas across the city, presumably with the idea that this will be beneficial in his campaign for re-election. This has been standard operating procedure for New York City politicians for generations, particularly those of the first half of the 20^thcentury who came up through political machines. While Mayors have appointed people to senior positions with prestigious academic credentials and/or high-level private sector experience, this has been a more recent and occasional practice. And I would note first, that it hasn’t been obvious that those Ivy Leaguers have proven to be more effective public servants and second, that the Mayor’s Commissioner of the Sanitation Department, on which many of the complaints I hear from my social set are focused, is an Upper East Side resident with three degrees from Harvard.

The Mayor is also focused on directing government contracts to Black-owned businesses previously excluded from the benefits of government largess. Some of these efforts have come under scrutiny and questions have been raised about them in the media. But pushing public dollars to Black-owned businesses, to which government lip service has been extensively paid in recent years, is definitely part of the Mayor’s agenda. Similarly, I think it can be safely said that some of the practices in which the Mayor and his campaign have engaged that have raised journalistic and white eyebrows, are, in the view of Black folks, practices in which whites in power have long conventionally engaged without public comment. It is only when people of color have taken up the levers of government, in their view, that these have become issues.

It should also be acknowledged that Mayor Adam’s prior position in government was as the Borough President of Brooklyn. Borough Presidents preside over small operations. Much of their time is spent cheerleading for their boroughs, attending public events, making announcements, and issuing press releases on matters of public concern. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that Mayor Adams continues to view these to be central components of his mayoralty. In any event, there is less to mayoral control of city government than might be otherwise obvious because of the decades of accreted bureaucratic structures the constitute city government, particularly in matters of contracting and employment, that tremendously constrict the effectiveness of any mayor. Mayors have all announced great sounding programs that never happen.

It can be accurately said that Mayor Adams is fairly representing his constituency, the folks who voted for him. Further, it should be noted that we Manhattan liberals have long taken pride in our advocacy of empowering people of color and working people – giving them a voice in the deployment of government power. There is something hypocritical about complaining about how they are exercising it now that they have it.

OPUS SUGIT

July 7, 2021 / John Jay

Many have told us that working in municipal public service has been their most rewarding professional experience. They have talked about the opportunity to have a positive impact on their city. They have also more candidly talked about the pleasures associated with the wielding of power. Others have spoken of the interesting nature of the challenges they have faced. When we took on our role in City government we looked forward to this kind of work environment.

However, this not been our experience. We have found working for the City of New York frequently boring and frustrating. We haven’t had much impact. We haven’t experienced that assertion of power. The longer we spent in the service of City government, the less challenging it became.

We have written previously about the ways in which the City is a progressive and humane employer. The City is particularly successful in attracting and retaining a diverse group of employees, certainly reflective of the city’s demographics, and much more so than in the private sector. For all its faults, the civil service system does provide a point of entry for skilled workers from demographic groups otherwise overlooked by the private sector. Many highly skilled recent immigrants, particularly with engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical) educations at non-US institutions are able to find employment with the City.

While not as generous as they once may have been (for non-uniform workers), City employment benefits are still what employees in the 21^st Century are entitled to expect. Health insurance options are comprehensive and inexpensive, paid vacation and sick time can accumulate, protections are in place against harassment, discrimination and retaliation of various sorts. Opportunities for training and advancement exist, particularly for front line workers. Our agency has a professional organizational development team that tries to do its best. Various messaging from employing agencies, as well as from the central Department of Citywide Administrative Service attempts to be welcoming and encourages tolerance and respect.

But, unfortunately, and despite the systems in place, our day-to-day work experience has been of a “hostile work environment.” Generally, City work has been depersonalized, made unrewarding and is subject to frequent arbitrary exercises of managerial authority.

Lack of discretion.

In our position we had very little discretion over our work. In previous jobs in the private sector we could actually make decisions about things. We could decide to buy things. We could initiate programs. We could hire people of our choice to do jobs. None of this was possible in City government. We had no budget authority. We couldn’t buy the tools our staff required. We couldn’t reduce or increase the size of our staff depending on the work available. We couldn’t create new ways to solve problems and attempt to implement them. We had to work with the resources already in place to perform the tasks that they were already doing. We could coach people in how to do their jobs better (which was by far the most rewarding part our job).

For most of our tenure we were prohibited from speaking or meeting with people from outside our agency without permission. We had never experienced this before. This cut us off from information from a wide range of sources. It prevented us from collaborating with others. It made it difficult, often impossible, to solve simple problems that came to us either from other agencies or from the public. This was another means of limiting our discretion over our work. It was infantilizing and demoralizing.

Diluting managerial decision making even more, is the institutional preference for group decision making. Most decisions required multiple large meetings. The radical democracy of City government administration meant that each had their say (although those higher up in the bureaucracy were more closely paid attention to). Often, responsibility for a decision was broadly dispersed – making managerial authority even more circumscribed. This had the advantage of making it impossible to blame anyone for a bad decision.

2.The importance of hierarchy.

Hierarchy was more important in decision making than experience or expertise. Decision making was about power relationships. The higher up in the pecking order one was, the more one was deferred to – regardless of one’s knowledge of the subject matter of the decision. Our experience in the private sector was that even if an individual did not have the most senior title, if they had the subject matter expertise, their advice and counsel were respected and taken seriously. In government, powerful officials made essentially random, willful decisions because they could. Policy making and discretion came with power. At the end of the day, decision making was about the excise of power by individuals who formally had it.

This situation made work unrewarding. The further down in the hierarchy you were, the less discretion and power you had over your work and the more powerless you were and felt. Those on the bottom had their work tightly circumscribed by those above them. Given that, it is no wonder that operations level government employees are often viewed as lazy drones, attempting to cut corners, work less and of having no initiative. The system makes their jobs more boring and enervating than they might otherwise be. As result, people don’t feel invested in their work.

We have never had a job before where going out to lunch seemed like a luxury. Those with power above us expected us to be available from about eight A.M. to about eight P.M., five days a week, and generally to be available on the weekends, if needed. If emails and calls were not responded to immediately, supervisors got annoyed. And, of course, the CityTime system, about we have written, provided no incentives to employees to make themselves available beyond nine-to-five because that time was impossible to record.

Yes, professional employees are generally expected to take responsibility for their work, and to be available to the organization on short notice. But that generally comes with professional responsibility and control over work. Because we had so little discretion over our work, it was essentially not professional. When officials called us, they were looking for data about our work, to complain about a mistake, or to order us to do something. They were not calling to take advantage of our professional judgement; or to confer with us about decision making. Almost always, the subject of the calls had an artificial deadline associated with the work, generated by the power of the people involved – not by the requirements of the task.

3. There are too many people.

We were rarely busy. As far as we could tell, our staff were rarely busy. Everyone tried hard to appear to be busy. Folks talked about how busy they were. Folks complained constantly about the demands made on them by their work. And yet, we spent hours, days during our tenure in City government reading. We tried to keep our reading as work related as we could – so we read non-fiction rather than novels at work. Because of CityTime and City rules, no non-City work could be done during City work hours and the City expected City work to be done at one’s desk. So, ideally, in order to comply with the rules, if one had no work to do, one was to sit at one’s desk with their hands folded, staring straight ahead (and not surfing the internet), something like in first grade. Also, seeking additional work was not done – as it was seen as getting out of one’s lane; straying into other peoples’ domains.

We had too many people for most of the work we had to do. However, for one or two of the functions we managed, we had a very small percentage of the staff required to actually do the job that was our brief. We made do. Assigning underemployed people to the work where we were understaffed wasn’t possible; in part because it wasn’t practical (due to the work sites or the expertise required) and in part because the civil service and union rules prohibited people from working outside of their job description.

In our case, our underemployment was as a result of the hierarchy not taking full advantage of our expertise and experience, the hierarchy’s removal of discretion from our work and the impossibility of taking initiative to take on new projects or do things in new ways. That would be regarded by the hierarchy as impermissible coloring outside of the lines. Most of what we were called on to do in interacting with supervision was providing data about the performance of our business unit up the hierarchy. Often that data was found to be unsatisfactory – but we were rarely allowed to improve the way data was collected or the way in which staff work was organized.

The other task that took up our time was compliance work. Our business unit was frequently audited by both the City and State Comptrollers. Much time was spent providing information to auditors and informing them about the manner in which the work was done. As the audit reports were being written, we were required to respond to drafts of audit reports. The hierarchy was deeply involved in the preparation of these responses, requiring many meetings and drafts. The hierarchy did not contribute to the drafting, or defend the work of our business unit to the auditors and their inquiries. They did not have our backs. They sat back and criticized our work and quibbled over our drafting. They wanted to distance themselves from responsibility for the substance of the business unit’s work, which they micro-managed. We also spent a good deal of time preparing data for internal reports (many of those data points measured things that were important decades ago, but no longer had relevance. It was impossible to change them, we were told by the Mayor’s Office of Operations, because that would make the data “not comparable.” The fact that the data measured nothing of value was unimportant to them.). We took a wide range of required trainings on conflicts of interest, sexual harassment (more than once a year), government ethics and preventing various forms of discrimination. We filled out various disclosure forms.

We spent a very small portion of our time in City government engaging in problem solving, helping people or trying to provide improved services to city residents and visitors. We occasionally suggested ways in which we might be more useful to City government, and those inquiries were never responded to. We were to keep in our lane.

Senior people in the hierarchy seemed to always be busy. Rushing from meeting to meeting. Cutting phone conversations short with subordinates because someone more important was calling on the other line. Supervisors often seemed overwhelmed. They failed to read the many memos they demanded, prior to meetings. They seemed not to have time to respond to emails and calls from subordinates. And yet, meetings that were scheduled for an hour always had to take an hour – even if the business at had took only a few minutes. Meetings with supervisors seemed to meander along, especially late in the day. Meetings involved redundant numbers of people. Air time at meetings was frequently taken up with talk of weekend plans and the weather, as well as with endless self-congratulation about minor accomplishments. Our guess is that even many Commissioners often don’t have enough to do.

4. No recognition of performance.

We had never previously worked in a job for more than a year or two without being given more responsibility, being promoted and having our compensation substantially increased. We recognize that the last of these wasn’t what government service was about. What employees were rewarded for in government, though, was obsequiousness to power. It was the sole currency of the realm. The few people we saw advance were people who flattered their bosses and entertained their willfulness. This sounds naïve, maybe even trite. Of course, this happens in all organizations and bureaucracies. But we experienced nothing like this in any of my prior private sector positions. In City government, responsiveness to power was the exclusive talent being rewarded (we suppose that shouldn’t be surprising in an enterprise that is political at its heart). There was little recognition of a high level of skill, the ability to improve efficiency or increase revenue or, particularly, improving the job satisfaction and performance of employees. Being useful to the boss, or having a political network within government, was what mattered in terms of rewards and advancement. And, as we have discussed, advancement through civil service tests seemed to have little relationship to professional ability. The tests seemed not to measure anything of value for managerial positions.

It was another dispiriting part of the work environment that it seemed not to matter how well you did your job. You did not receive recognition or reward for high performance (longevity was often recognized). We tried to praise our excellent employees for their frequent good work, and this was appreciated and had some value in an otherwise unrewarding work environment – but without the ability to provide tangible rewards they were essentially empty gestures.

For example, at one point, upon a manager’s retirement, we promoted a really excellent first line supervisor into a managerial position. This person was a woman and a person of color. However, the bureaucracy never gave this individual the increased salary or the more senior title that came with the added responsibility. After about a year in the managerial position without the raise, the person asked to be returned to her supervisory position. It was maddening. We were unable to do a good thing, even after the expenditure of considerable effort to get the person into the position.

As a result of this culture, and these often obsolete and often overly restrictive systems, City government work was, unfortunately, generally unrewarding. We suspect that this produces widespread dissatisfaction with work and poor morale. We certainly felt unchallenged and unappreciated. But then again, maybe, despite our fancy education and wide experience, we’re simply a lazy, unimaginative, useless, time serving bureaucrat. Like in the novels of Kafka, the system produces the behaviors it claims that it is designed to prevent.

Tag: public service

QUIS CUSTODES?

Translatio Erici Adams

OPUS SUGIT

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta