This particular section is taken from the book Confluences. However, over time it will be further developed, more items will be added.

· A large human-service network works as perpetually running machinery that is able to operate on its own power, separate from both the responsivity of the people served and the productivity of the services provided.

· A deficit basis for human-service work is pure genius – the more work is unproductive, the more deficit is produced; the more deficit is produced, the more the human-service work is needed.

· A deficit basis for human-service work is also economically ridiculous. There is no fiscal or service end to the need to meet needs.

· Excellence in human service work must be both abused and trivialized.

· Good work must be stolen from the time of moments and relationships and, instead, be somehow measured according to the discrete movements of a ticking clock.

· Monies assigned to urgent concerns must be removed from these areas of concern at the first sign that the investment of such monies is being productive.

· The economic argument must be used as a tool to remove particular services, not as a tool to help shed light on the productivity and cost-effectiveness of specific service endeavours.

· Any political movement towards more accountable and productive services must be actually directed toward the minimization or removal of less politically-supported services.

· Programming, and the structures linking programming, must become the driving force behind services. Responsivity to clients may fit in; however, the fit will be, at best, clumsy.

· One must believe that a well-fitted flow-chart is a beautiful thing.

· The goods/values that led individuals to initially desire work in human-services must be trivialized and made into a sign of immaturity.

· The goods/values that led individuals to initially desire work in human-services, if present at all in everyday practice, will -- for the individuals own protection -- be effectively veiled from the scrutinizing eye.

· If one is to accept the “language of gifts” within the institutional realm, it must be viewed as a form of “positive thinking,” thereby creating a distancing from the tragic and disturbing situations in life, and from the goods that can emerge from having to face such domains.

· Paperwork is not the essential part of human-service practice; however, lack of paperwork will jeopardize the security of one's employment. Curiously, lack of compassion will lead to no such effect.

· For those who consider themselves low in the institutional hierarchy, they must clearly identify and become consumed with failures that are to be understood as the responsibility of those higher in the institutional hierarchy. Deficit is to be unmistakably attached to the hierarchies of institutionalized power. Problems are seen to descend down bureaucratic ladders, originating with those in power. Obtain better leadership and the problems would desist.

· On the other hand, those who are in positions of leadership must understand that deficits occur because those lower in the hierarchy are refusing to cooperate with the organizational plans. Deficit support and amplification occurs because many of the players in the institutional game refuse to “get with the program.”

· The clear simplicities of the above relationships between power and deficit -- as viewed respectively by those in leadership and those underneath leadership -- must be embedded into institutional and political structures such as, but not limited to, union and management. These fighting entities and discourses will, within their ongoing dualisms, make up a systemic whole that operates within its own circular field, ensuring its own self-perpetuation.