". . . it strikes me that a little humane graft is a good thing."

Richard Sennett offers an interesting solution to unemployment among the disabled:

. . . As the work of Robert Lane has so incisively shown, the political competence of working-class people, white as well as black, lies in forging personal relationships and affiliations as a means for exercising power. The lower half of the city's population is, in a drive for rational reform, deprived of what it knows and understands about getting things done: the little deal, the contractor who cuts in his friends, the ward politician who calls a friend in city hall to repair a street or find a disabled constituent a nonessential job. Thus the polarization of contact groups and the congruent growth of the intimate home and the defined routines outside it create a power vacuum; the little guys in the city are deprived of a region in which to fight or cajole for what they need for themselves.

I do not intend to argue that we ought to increase graft anew, though it strikes me that a little humane graft is a good thing. But we ought to look at why machine politics came into power in the past, and salvage the good mixed in with the greed and viciousness of those regimes.

From The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (1970).