A call for budget reform

This article calls for reform of the U.S. Federal budget from two perspectives, preparation and content. The first aspect of reform proposes to amend the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 by eliminating the requirement for an executive budget. It proposes replacing the executive budget submission with a budget prepared by a joint executive-legislative council. While the decision-making process for approval of the budget would remain the same, the council-proposed budget would eliminate several time consuming issues of disagreement such as whose economic estimates are used. The second aspect of reform proposes an examination of the contents of the budget. The current budget focuses on agency appropriations and the debt/surplus figure. Many more issues such as unfunded pension liabilities, true costs of credit, value of government-owned assets and the number of appropriations are largely neglected. This aspect of the budget should be examined by a non-partisan group of experts to make recommendations for an improvement in the informational content of the budget. Improved information could help support sound decisionmaking. The article contends that we can preserve the constitutional separation of powers dealing with the budget while we simply improve the methods used to prepare the document itself, and once the document is prepared it would be structured so it can be examined in a meaningful manner by interested citizens in order to ascertain the financial conditions of the country.     

Structuring dissident desire: representations of same-sex prison contact in contemporary South African culture

The figure of the prisoner, particularly as associated with the Numbers gangs in South African prison gangs, is both a hyper-masculine and (homo-)eroticized character. Prison allows for a state of being queer that, through its subject having already been criminalised, and escapes the stigma of feminization associated with it in the hierarchically gendered society outside of prison. Through the structure of the gang and in the confines of the prison, same-sex desire is at the centre of criminality and masculinity. At the same time, prison allows a space in which same-sex desire is countenanced; it thus becomes a literary setting fraught with same-sex eroticism. This essay considers the extent to which the masculinities of prison have become conflated with notions of an eroticized homosexual threat and the politics and fates of such threat inside and outside the jail walls. It reads a film (Proteus, 2003), non-fiction text (The Number, 2010, by Jonny Steinberg), short fiction (by Jan van Tonder), and play (Tertius Kapp’s Rooiland, 2013).     

Technology transfer to a major manufacturing industry: Case study of a state's approach

The paper presents the state of Alabama's approach to the transfer of technology to the apparel-manufacturing industry. The technology-transfer program has been under way for three years. This paper summarizes the highlights of the program, the approach to transferring technology, and the lessons learned.