Obama defines the problem extremely well.
He actually answers the question about how and why we are in this fix.
This one looks at implementing a political agenda to reverse the trend where self-interest economics has lost its ability to reinvest. This is thirty minutes on the growing demand from the ordinary person for progressive solutions. The business community had better get involved.
The Charter Revision of 1977 created community planning boards in NYC when the decentralization of authority was a popular idea. It aligned with social change forces seeking civil rights and social justice, equality, and human rights in the United States.
Concurrently, the mainly white upper-income population since the late 1950s found a small government easy to talk to in their newly built suburban enclaves. The population in New York City, on the other hand remained diverse and residents sought to build the resource of self-determination into the city’s community districts. This neighborhood government idea has become a gesture for expanding participation, it added transparency, but not to the power sought. Now is the time for improved strategies. Click the arrow, watch the slides.
RLC – OCCUPY
Community Boards see themselves as part of the problem, and they like it.
“If all they will let is do is protest, then we will protest.’
Why is the CB a shed for hammers? Many other skills are on offer.
Unhelpful, unhealthy “blame-the-victim” methods prevail.
When reforms and laws are passed to ensure that armed agents of the state cannot kill people of color without the consequence of a transparent indictment and trial, reform will occur. Do not add “all” people to that thought; it only means you do not understand.
The numbers do not lie. Spend some time with the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (here). The problem presented is clear. Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Define this issue completely, and America could be on the path to inalienable, universal rights for all people, but we have a lot of work to do.
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrant’s scheme That any man be crushed by one above. "Let America Be America" Langston Hughes
Police killings are the most exposed cause of untimely death. The risk of being killed by police use of force by age, race-ethnicity, and sex is described (here). There are hundreds of other causes and America has tried to ignore the roots of it for far too long. Inalienable, universal rights reform will not happen efficiently unless every American recognizes the impact of slavery in our history. The problem is not whether all of the events since 1619 are racist or not. The question is this: “How much racism was at work?
The lack of any positive measure of equity formation defines African-American life for four centuries. With the end of enslavement, an entire people with barely a penny found freedom without restitution. When equity was established, it was ripped away by acts of terrorism. The battle for the cultural and economic assurance of fundamental human rights is long, and the bend toward justice only began as an act of government in President Lynden Johnson’s War on Poverty. He recognized the strategic problems when he said,
“Negro poverty is not white poverty. … These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white, they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced, and they must be dealt with, and they must be overcome; if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.”
1965 Commencement: Howard University supporting Voting Rights Act
A project began in August 2019, marking the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. In 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for The 1619 Project. It traces black American enslavement as the central enabler of America’s vast material success and, through their efforts for freedom, assured our democracy. The United States may have a long history. Still, it was not a democracy until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act ensured all people’s voices could be heard in a fully representative government. In a June 2020 article. “What is Owed?” Hannah-Jones expects America to know in its heart how false definitions of race as “the other” and be turned easily into hatred. Her struggle leads to equality for us all. Most Americans really want to feel different about race and all the impacts of enslavement. They want to expel it from themselves and the lives of their children. That leaves one step left for all people, by skin color, positions of privilege, and wealth. The action required is to be different, every day, openly and freely.
The quality of speech and journalism continues to improve white America’s understanding of racism as a cultural disease and bigotry as a heinous character failure. When combined, these flaws lead to insidious political behavior far too easily disguised. The use of public policies from Jim Crow to Sundown Town or from Police Militarization to Mass Incarceration persists as a live-wire fear in America. The path to inalienable, universal rights for all people can be cleared of this rubble.
It will be in this decade, in a century of enormous challenges that all public actions allowing these character flaws to sustain a systemic racism culture will no longer occur without consequence. Perhaps the most important of them will be a continuous, broadly read, watched, and taught American story about freedom. It will reveal an unrelenting effort to achieve social and economic justice for enslaved people. It is a story that would change all of history for all people all over the world. Another take on this issue is (here).
It will be difficult to become different.
I have been writing this as Congressional Representatives debated the second impeachment of POTUS45 when one of them referred to a Supreme Court case that was compelled to allow hate speech (here) as a justification for the President’s misguided attempt to retain power with lies. I recommend listening to the oral argument below of the case the Representative used to defend the President. It will take you back to 1969. The case involved a conviction of Clarence Brandenburg, an organizer of the Ku Klux Klan in Ohio. If you are in a hurry pick it up at around the 29th minute. When one of the people’s representatives can stand before us and use this case, of all cases on the First Amendment it exposes the true horror of our time.
Summary
The Court’s Per Curiam opinion held that the Ohio law violated Brandenburg’s right to free speech. The Court used a two-pronged test to evaluate speech acts: (1) speech can be prohibited if it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and (2) it is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
The court ruled that Ohio’s Criminal Syndicalism Act made illegal the advocacy and teaching of doctrines while ignoring whether or not that advocacy and teaching would actually incite imminent lawless action. The failure to make this distinction rendered the law overly broad and in violation of the Constitution.
The two tiers of the Brandenburg Test have become the standard for determining criminal advocacy. As a nation that respects the law, the courts and the legislature could also seek to judge speech as producing the test of a clear and present danger or as a test of direct incitement.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) gets into the impact of “dark money” on the Supreme Court. His introduction on 13 October is here or below, and important to see before you watch his 14 October follow-up here or below. Attention to the facts is why I am a Democrat.
13 October 2020
14 October 2020
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham scheduled a committee vote for 9 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 15, the morning of the last day of hearings.
Barrett’s nomination is expected to be brought up for a vote at that meeting and then delayed for a week, per committee rules to 22 October 2020.
“The attention given to the social construct of race and racism is four-hundred-year-complicated, the subject of multiple doctoral thesis, many excellent books, and legislation. On the other hand, there is an uncomplicated pre-systemic solution to racism for ordinary people available right now. Become a playful toddler again, and stay that way, We would just have new friends to play the game of growing up in the world. We could sustain the social context of newness without bias. The lesson here is we do not have a self-identity in these first years of our lives and that the bias now held is learned and can be unlearned.”
Rex L. Curry
Yes, white people do something. Everything we think we know about the world is wrong, and that is an excellent way to look at it if we expect to learn anything new. I found Corinne Shutack (also white), who found Kara’s work (above) to be a helpful image for distributing 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice. Her list helped me get into racism as one of several American malfunctions I am working on and drafted for you to scroll through (here).
Shutack’s work helped me view recent events as having system change potential, a process described in five other posts (here).
Even though the world has been brought down by one innocent pangolin, the private lesson of the dystopian pandemic is the exposed super-power of a national strike for health and social justice in a wet market. Coupled with ongoing racial injustice events, I must now plead with you to gird your loins, gear up, and steel yourself for the return to normal.
Do Not Let That Happen.
One of her brilliant teachers said the problem is not whether the events are racist or not. Instead, the question is this: “How much racism was at work?” A regular person sensitive to this condition can tell you what that is personally (here).
It is necessary to recognize possible impediments to challenge inequality. Number one on the list should become the disparities of culture, race, and ethnicity that pose grievous imbalances caused by each of those obstacles. Those that are products of city, state, and national policy offer many opportunities for change. They aim at every human being from New York City to Los Angeles and from Minneapolis to Houston. Yet, each of them produces vastly different consequences for everyone on the diverse spectrum of America.
The blue note is coming for all to hear and understand (listen) (read). Common interest groups will form, and coalitions for change will be built by those groups. System changes occur all the time (here).
Love the One Your In?
A significant part of American history and perhaps of the whole world include patterns of race insecurity. The system we are in fosters that anxiety. The combination of insecurity and fear attracts opportunists of all kinds. Those with political power often seek out and exploit emotions to sustain or advance their position. Recognize the overarching pathway of this behavior as follows: Pick a group, ostracize them, identify a weakness to exploit or strength to fear, support false but agreeable “like-with-like” ghetto policies, and next, isolate and then criminalize the poverty of the marginalized people. Finally, find or select behavior to define as a crime, confiscate their possessions through forfeiture, and then seize and imprison them. As a process, this is a historical lineage nourished by hate and fear. Reform is a failure with this kind of unremoved, unexamined sickness in the world.
The history of this pattern is that of political practice. It reveals a design to fund and eradicate equality as a self-sustaining Apartheid. In America, the persecution of Chinese immigrants, the internment of Japanese citizens, the eugenic sterilization of the “unfit,” the criminalization of drugs vs. health treatment for the addicted are well-known political power moves. Justice speaks when these practices are exposed, the crimes are admitted, and payment for reparations is agreed upon. On a rare occasion, paid up.
Vox developed a story on the four times reparations were paid in America by Americans, six times. Think about that ratio. Vox also encourages close reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ case for reparations. Since the early 1970s, the genocidal aspects of American racial policy remain in the slow-motion systems associated with the so-called War on Drugs. Like all wars, the one on drug use has failed the people while enriching the businesses of war itself. Reform is a failure; a revolutionary perspective for change is on the horizon. The debate for me hovers over the idea called a “new era of public safety” vs. “the end of policing as we know it,” and that’s all right.
The two contemporary responses of enlightened leadership on race and cops can be considered pivotal. First, the wisdom and vision of Barack Obama to even tackle the subject and the far less known insight of Alex S. Vitale, a “critical criminologist.” Second, of the thousands of research efforts available for discovery, I recommend two of them as follows:
“…here’s a report and toolkit developed by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and based on the work of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing that I formed when I was in the White House. And if you’re interested in taking concrete action, we’ve also created a dedicated site at the Obama Foundation to aggregate and direct you to useful resources and organizations who’ve been fighting the good fight at the local and national levels for years.” The whole 416-page full policing pdf report is (here).
Barack Obama 2020
The second response includes the excellent criticism of the Task Force’s thorough but modest volley toward a fundamental change in policy by Brooklyn College Professor Alex S. Vitale. His book, The End of Policing, reviews the multifaceted work in this field that recognizes the path on which law enforcement now stands has made it a significant contributor to America’s spiral into deeply racist and racialized practices. There is no double or triple bottom line; cops do more damage than good, and “protect and serve” is the exception to the rule. The bottom line is Fidelis ad mortem does not have to be the NYPD’s motto. It can translate as “faithful (unto or until) death, and there you have the poetic vs. narrative art of the blue wall.
The call from the President of the United States to serve is a compelling and personal honor. A review of the task force report and toolkit reveals a set of thoughtful, experienced change agents. The movement for racial justice in America must call upon the task force’s people to confirm progress, if any, and consider the next steps.
To fully understand the task force report’s failings, excellent insight is offered in Vitale’s book and through his media interviews (here). In addition, the Policing and Social Justice Project has an implementation arm for the movement. Finally, life-long learners on the subject should subscribe to The Criminal Criminologist (here), where he interviews scholars and activists. It is a great way to meet people you have yet to work with or encounter.
The Malfunction
The relationship of policing to racism requires using the inverse proportion rule. It occurs when one value increases (more people working to solve non-police problems), decreasing another (i.e., the incidence of unproductive police tasks). Adding more workers to a scheme to reduce the time to complete the task is inversely proportional. Reducing the time to get law enforcement less harmful is now critical (meaning short term) or back to the same old and seriously wrong-normal.
The best relationship between Americans and neighbors should be about a child’s structural, materially unequal experience when entering the world. Instead, the systemic inequality of life chances for newborn children of color is exposed decade after decade. The facts are exhibited as shameful but continue unchanged, even though it would be good for every kid.
The use of law enforcement tends to be the hammer that helps to silence criticism. The rightfully enraged also hold a hammer. The better question is, who and what put that hammer in both their hands? Why is the hammer the only tool available? Much of the problem is already well understood, and solutions can be implemented using financial levers and a social fulcrum, but not with a hammer. Wilson (below) can tell you in a few seconds with perfect intensity.
Since the early 1970s (Nixon), the severe problems (the ones requiring a sophisticated toolbox) got fully embedded in racism. Ever since Nixon, every President has presented to the American people ideas with an air of cultural sensitivity. They are truisms such as the need to improve ties, strengthen lines of communication, and make right past wrongs. But unfortunately, all of them are politically calculated half-measures and part of the problem. A social reflex in America is to hide from its history while acknowledging our nation as immigrants. However, ignoring the record of formal attacks on the “value” of every new group requires exposure and condemnation from every leadership position available on slavery.
Marginalizing the oldest mass immigration group explicitly enslaved since 1619, to build the nation requires uncovering the cover-up of all cover-ups. The failure of remedies for yet another century of repression angers the mind and fills the heart with hopelessness. Neither form the basis for a system change.
Perhaps the violence of human history and centuries of brutal intolerance that the American Constitution sought to purge from people’s governance. Instead, it aims to enable and encourage people to sustain the hope for change outside of the system by establishing a false representative government using majority vote rules to kill compromise. The idea is that excesses of either could be no longer be rendered invalid by the other.
Nevertheless, America’s social and economic power continues fueled by slavery and imprisonment. Moreover, a governance system appears unwilling to entirely deactivate rules that encourage and support racism even though the incidence of injustice persists. Change must, therefore, come from changing the system.
The system changes, and for an hour and a half, I ask you to please watch white folks talk about the bifurcation of America by Robert Putnam and friends regarding the subject of “our kids.” Beware, the time spent here is informative, but it can make you a little crazy. They know, they really do know, and have the numbers and the argument for change, so why are we supposed to think they will? They do not create change. Is it because they are just “talking points?” Have we failed to empower them to turn their power into change? Do not let it go back to normal.
Join Your Movement – Pick a System – Change It
Put a grand in a black bank, find one (here) Five-year CD, whatever – your choice. Not for you? Then go to – 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice and have another look.
Live-Long Learning Choices
Did this already? Then go back to 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice. She said it is a work in progress and will continue to develop.
One last thing. If you believe in the power of working-class greatness, remember the super-power revealed the 2020 pandemic – a national strike for health and justice could get health and justice. If a bug can bring capital to its knees and put some in your pocket, that bug is telling you something. So encourage everyone to have three to six months of savings to cover the basic, essential living costs. This is challenging, but it is doable and intelligent for many reasons.
Software, digital hardware, and the life-science industries can add jobs indirectly to a local economy as multipliers, in much the same way as the manufacture of autos and appliances contributed decades earlier with one significant difference. The education of the workers.
RLC
Research and development firms in physical, engineering, and life sciences were the first to take full advantage of information management’s technological revolution. As a result, these industries deposited economic growth into regions with innovations in software and hardware. Perhaps the best-known example of this marriage of technology and science is our understanding of DNA would have been impossible otherwise, leading to exponential growth in these industries into exclusive new fields.
Economists have several explanations, but two words get to the multiplier effect for business and jobs – supply chain. The 2020 pandemic revealed specific concerns regarding breaks in this chain, reflecting national security concerns. The logistics of technology for refining material acquisitions into “just in time” cash-saving packets fail miserably during periods when critical conditions demand everything “all at once” to avert a crisis. Global terrorism, climate change, and pandemic conditions more than hint at this issue. Each occurs like an hour hand, but it is the second hand that sweeps the planet with a new reality regarding readiness. Frightening concerns as these are recommitting Amerian policy to jobs and education may be the only way for the economy to stop shaking. It is time to stop looking at the promise of a chrome future and think of it as something a lot more fleshly.
UC Berkeley Economics professor Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs examines places in the United States that illustrate the critical difference between economic growth and decline in the context of winner/loser locations in a rapidly globalizing economy. Using U.S. Census Bureau data, Moretti’s book exhibits maps of the United States to reveal the system change’s location impact. The growth areas were those with a high percentage of college-educated people. He shows a decline in the regions that still have many “smart people” to this day but failed to produce, keep, or attract educated people in the newly growing system change businesses.
Scholarly observers labeled “the losers” as shrinking cities, pointing to Detroit, MI, and others of the Northeast “rust belt” following their 2000 and 2010 Census analysis. Studies of similar “shrinking” conditions throughout Europe focused on this as a phenomenon of industrial globalization, regional deindustrialization, and suburbanization. In all cases, the winners were those who had in residence or could attract well-educated people. The analytical resources are available for the ordinary observer to dig into these changes as a dynamic force and one affected by public policy. In 2020, the importance of easy access to vital information and re-establishing confidence in the small business and banking community was more important than ever. As the history of the Bureau of the Census shows in its “understand America” mission, it has grown to become a major business subsidy for nationalizing businesses. Moving forward is how to make the Bureaus’ “jobs and education data” more widely available and easily accessible by the small business. Here is a quick look.
Geographic Support System Initiative (GSS-I)
For the 2020 Census, the Census Bureau’s reengineered address canvassing reduces costs. In December 2015, BOC published a 100-page report entitled, 2020 Census Detailed Operational Plan for the Address Canvassing Operation to describe this new Address Canvassing methodology. The practice has been routinely updated through 2018 (here) and eventually rolled into the GSS Program.
The maps (left) should be of interest to all Americans. Authorization constraints still hamper the advancement of this resource toward the routine use of a small business. The API from BOC has tutorials on how the data can help businesses. A tutorial of an analysis that links small businesses with congressional elections (here) is an excellent example.
The policy impact on regional economic growth or decline ranges from why Microsoft owners decided to move to Seattle to attract business policies two decades later. Microsoft took their small but rapidly growing 1970s company to Seattle because they were from and felt comfortable. However, the decision by the fledgling Microsoft is also like, but the reverse of public initiatives in regions hoping to find growth. Both are equivalent, as they are a roll of the dice, plus confidence. Federal officials would not learn of the software and hardware technology industry’s explosive growth until the early 1990s when various attraction-bets came logically into policy.
I doubt that Bill Gates went to the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system to select Seattle as the optimal location. The SIC was developed in the late 1930s as a New Deal-era initiative by the Interdepartmental Committee on Industrial Classification. His business was barely on the list and would not be there solidly until the reinvention of the SIC in 1997 turned it into the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). By that time, Microsoft had already put sad little Seattle on the wow-map, but it was not all by itself. It happened because of the enormous attractive power of the industry. Seattle was not a place with a high percentage of educated residents in the 1970s. Over the next twenty years, Microsoft attracted whole businesses, and they all attracted people with educations that met their needs.
The nerd factor here is essential in another way. The mayors of cities called up their planning, and economic development commissioners said, “get me some of that!” So they put the staff that loved digging into the nooks and crannies of the NAICS to define their regions for comparison to all others economically. As a result, more mayoral questions on the decline and what to do tended to get answers such as publicly investing in “cultural transformation” that led to the arts and a bet on people’s instinct not only to be creative but also productive artisans.
A search engine for NAICS (here) now takes researchers into a six-digit code that parses twenty industry sectors: five goods-producing industries and fifteen services sectors, all geographically searchable at the Bureau of the Census (here). Thus, in looking at the economic structure of employment, the basics are:
Strategic Gates
When the meaning of the word strategy is to get the advantage, examining sector-based development is a good idea. When it comes to isolating specific industries by region, this is especially true. Shared needs mean common supplies and mutually beneficial investments in human capital. Public “attraction” strategies that attempt to connect a worker to an employer are an abstraction. It functions well in the short-term, but in the long, it is a malfunction sustaining the myth that low-end employment leads to a ladder that has rungs. They are there, but very far apart if the business model is the provider, without public partners.
What works more effectively are efforts that alter the worker/employer relationship with massive investment in skills that add choices to the worker and their flexibility within a region. Flexibility has cards to be dealt into the public policy hand as well. The options range widely from help with a car, or specific procurement practice, to a fully paid training program or support for a master’s degree. An added benefit of worker-centered investment is that participants can contribute to the advancement of policy decisions in the future of meaningful work.
Whether that work is by a forensic accountant or a cashier, the purpose of a system change is to build on challenges, opportunities, and futures of them both into eloquent experiences in personal development. The idea of winners and losers will probably always be a macroeconomic point, but it should never exist as a community-based experience. Instead, what should happen in the heart of the cashier or the business owner is the opportunity for growth and knowing there is a higher education resource that is unquestionably and unequivocally available.
The Malfunction
The national partnership between employment and education is a failure. In 2014 the Economic Opportunities Program of the Aspen Institute and the American Assembly (Columbia University) published Connecting People to Work: Workforce Intermediaries and Sector Strategies. It is a 500-page set of whitepapers. The paper to read in this book (pdf here) examined the February 2012 announcement of the Community College to Career Fund. An eight-billion-dollar investment was seeking to bring skills that lead directly to good jobs with the goal of two million workers. The program aimed at high-growth industries by funding regional or national industry groups tasked with identifying workforce needs in their fields and developing solutions like standardized worker certification, new training technologies, or collaborations with industry employers to define career pathways for workers.
When a 500-page document becomes available for the ordinary reader, parsing it for keywords is a powerful tool for skimming the material, searching for specific content using one or two words. I discovered the essay on public investment in a community-college program this way. This one brought out the economic “malfunctions” that affect connecting jobs and education to community development. The words below are ranked from most to least.
The word “sector” occurs 1,319 times and “national” 817 and “region 468 times. The word “federal” occurred 197 times but “federal government” just 14 times. Community College was 151, “university” 115 with cities at 86 and “suburb” only 5. I found “local government four times, and “regional government” just once. The use of the word “schools” – 20 with high schools getting only three mentions. The choices are many, “union” was interesting as was “interprofessional” and training.
Central to improving connections between job seekers and producers is the idea of fairness or balance. In a global economy where the imbalances are overpowering, local efforts can seem heroic. This is what is wrong with them. With this view, the use of the word “race” was a mere 36 times, that broke down to “African-American” 24 times and to Hispanics just 7 with the rest mixed in with the word “gender” 18 times. These are not hot-button words for the footnotes. The issues the people face with these labels must drive the conversation forward, not help it disappear.
Again, the brilliant, heroic work at the local level is not the issue. The megaregions of the nation hold over 85% of the nation’s GDP. Still, the usefulness of regional institutions beyond a structure of few mutual benefit corporations is nil. Malfunctions in jobs and education remain piled into a quagmire of State policy competition neatly encouraged by national policy scant.
In every developed nation in the world, children are considered the top national resource. In the United States, the policy appears to be the children of America are among the highest percentage of low-income whites amid towering imbalances involving people of color. Programs that look at popular fixes such as H1B visas and other short-term job filling policies fail to fully consider a thirty to fifty-year generational failure aimed at children from low- and moderate-income in America.
“The vitality of architecture does not stand on the strength of its foundations or the vision of its builders. It stands on the dignity of life formed in the heart of all of its creators.”
Rex L. Curry (Review of video by Mike Yellen for Ironworker Union 2017) Watch below.
The video above will also be found in a “system change” post on planning, architecture, and engineering (here). It opens like this: “Your bones tell you, you smell it, there is the challenge of unclear change on the tongues of the public speakers. The sticky multiple versions of the truth offered in our modern lives’ political-speech will be swept away by the clear mind of science. This is a call for help in that simple pursuit.”
Below: a sample of data available from U.S. Census Interactive Maps as described above.
Part Five – Every Change is a Second Chance:
Change does occur by chance. Having a readiness for it, on the other hand, requires an eagerness to be fit for the job. Hitting a search engine with the phrase “Theory of Change,” you get something like the mosaic below. My favorite is the Theory of Change website from ActKnowledge and their offer of certification and use of their TOCO software.
Feedback is a response, reaction, or comment when you ask people for one. It is best when it is immediate, given freely, and on occasion fearlessly. The emphasis on this first creates an understanding of behavior changes in people’s education as it deepens knowledge in organizations. My experience has taught me that mission statements (i.e., uprooting poverty, ending the conflict, improving health) should be avoided until the power of evaluation is firm and established. These pools use feedback systems as basic as students working individually, pooling ideas in small groups. Structure from various institutional evaluation sources is available for use and essential to discovering and implementing standards.
In the three mission statement examples above, we can see the importance of these attainment measures. Uprooting poverty became a central component of the Civil Rights Movement. Along with the idea of ending sexual/racial conflict, the rise of Me Too and Black Lives Matter are building institutional coalitions for transformative change. Finally, the idea of improving the health of Americans due to a pandemic put a spotlight on the reluctance (perhaps denial) to examine structural inequality, social and economic conflict, and the health of people as the same.
One and the Same
Successful change agents work with people where they are found. The idea of “where” is locational as in a physical place with a view of something. A more complicated element is how the view includes the desire for outcomes defined by measures of outlook. Without the skills to work the language of outcomes, outputs, inputs, feedback, and some solid interpersonal communication instincts, it is challenging to develop “the same” into something vital.
Therefore, it is best to have some language to describe yourself, your community, and what you want to do to it or have it do to you because if you do not have these insights, this is when change becomes regressive. There are a lot of neat ways to keep from going backward. I like digging into change models, but it is equally important to look internally in the know thyself to know others’ kind of way. There is a “thyself” one you can use for just $50.00 or less in bulk if you are already in a never doubt group. Buying your own Myers-Briggs report allows you to acquire a four-letter MBIT type as listed below. You can explore that idea further (here).
Agreeing to the proposition that you can be one of the personalities listed includes possible combinations because people do change, and we do have differences. Knowing an MBIT type in establishing goal-oriented relationships in the organizational setting is a useful “be open” experience. Being in an environment that sees change as an act that recognizes growth, personal advancement, new skills, and so on is useful, especially among the never doubters. As the mosaic below illustrates, the web and tons of print publications are replete with the fun of using personality types as communication and organizing tools.
If an activity is plausible or even feasible, it can lead to an impact. Knowing the content of that impact comes from your ability to test and confirm actions in short-term, micro-focused cycles. Once in motion, these facts create the long-term result known as a system change. The two search engine mosaics above illustrate a grand range of templates available for guidance. The only missing element is called the first step.
The selection of interventions that take you from the beginning to the middle and the end are changes that should be joyful and hopeful. Understanding people’s knowledge and then in their organizations establish the plausibility of a framework for creating change. Like a good film, there are many connections between the early efforts to begin a story and to start on a path toward something, to get near the end, to sense a climax and a possible denouement, but just like the movies, there is no big “The End” anymore.
Revelatory, that is what it was revelatory. Not the amusing face of God kind, more exact. It started when Thunderbirds and Blue Angles in their F-16C/D Fighting Falcons and their F18C/D Hornet Fighters trimmed out to conduct aeronautic acrobatics. They covered the entire city in a thirty-minute fly over the Boroughs. Fine, I said to myself, a good show, celebrating all the first responders of New York City in a salute to their courage in the fight against a pandemic. There are moments when a system change explodes into existance.
RLC
Read five explorations of system change. One is about discoveries, which lead me to malfunctions as the heart of the issue. Skills are needed, so the next three are about critical thinking, gambits, and pathways. I conclude with the idea that every change is a second chance.
Imagine a day in 3500 B.C.when a sculptor was chipping away at smoothing a stone and created the shape of a wheel. As a social creature, the sculptor shared this object with others who rolled it and laughed when one day, one of them asked for one with a hole in the center. That is the moment when a system change exploded into existence with the production of round objects made of clay on a wheel. Centuries passed before the wheel becomes a vehicle, but it did.
The battles of writers, sculptors, fine artists, and all other coders continue to this day for nothing more than joy and your attention, if not curiosity. Modern humans chip away at their vast capacity for system change by sharing information, exchanging ideas, and dispensing them to others who may also roll them and laugh. The second revelation is about the act of discovery upon which all the others rest. Have a look.
Recall my experience with the jet fighter flyover. The display of power like this can raise every hair on your body with awe, terror, and the fear of death. I know the fear well because it happened to me a long time ago in a roar that ripped something from my being. For me, the fly-over of gratitude recalled that lesson. In just those few minutes, I thought how easy it is in this world to turn every bridge and tunnel to rubble along with whatever else a dozen warships could do to destroy NYC. Trust is the fact implied. This is absurd and unlikely intellectually, but I felt it emotionally as if in a film I’ve already seen. The back of my neck sent me straight into logic models and the theory of change for answers, so I didn’t question the emotion. I just started.
Using code to cope with the unthinkable offers a range of content management systems (CMS) in our minds and places like this to share thoughts. You may recognize the CMS terms. Some of the most common are Java, Perl, PHP, Python, among many others. As code systems, they represent an accepted, partial existence drifting unseen in the Ctrl+Shift+I background of more familiar titles such as Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox. If the browser Netscape sounds familiar, think of the others as tribes sharing a new hunting ground. Through these surviving vehicles, the world is laid at your feet. You stand on platforms like WordPress, Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and hundreds of others you use to manage your content, get others’ attention, and perhaps make people curious.
In taking on a major malfunction, breaking it into smaller pieces is helpful, but it is hopeless when it comes to constitutional jargon, whether in big parts or the little ones. Observers of the jurist legislators watch tie knots in their tongues. The conclusion of these observers believes they need to be replaced with scientists. There are reasons to do homework on how this may be possible. Step one is to find the source of idiocy.
The Critical Legal Studies movement (Wiki) in the 80s examined liberal legalism of the late 1950s through the 1970s. Since then, observers of the conservative and progressive discourse are rebuilding the debate about our future under the law with discord and bad faith arguments. Science will find common ground needed in this noisy place, and that is my problem. It is yours too.
In the conservative constitutionalist’s view, normative or private social authority centers on localized jurisdiction, designed to guide the republic’s actions and protect against legislative or judicial encroachment. On the other hand, the progressive constitutionalists often critique these private sources of power (normative social organizations) as an unacceptable hierarchy to be challenged.
The pathway to social innovations among conservative and progressive views has a constitutional basis. The only common ground here is that both claim the right to system change. It is the pathway upon which they walk that requires clearing. I offer the following example.
Before proceeding with a system change effort, I recommend investing time to understand better two compartments in the same robe’s sleeves known as the Fourteenth Amendment. There are others, but you can see them from TIME magazine’s top ten list (below). The Fourteenth plays a significant role, directly and indirectly.
On June 21, 1788, the Constitution became the official framework of the United States of America’s government. Still, it was not until eighty years and nineteen days later when The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868. as one of the Reconstruction Amendments ending slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution “abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime, and on this point, I highly recommend Ava DuVernay’s 13th (here). The focus here is the subtle malfunctions of the Fourteenth that require equal attention.
The law tucked into the conservative sleeve holds the fire of civil war and the struggle against rulers, something the progressive sleeve shares and knows well. The fabric is the same, but as ideas move from one sleeve to another, the meaning changes. The only insight I have other than the overabundance of male intellectual hubris of legislators is as follows.
The law demands obedience with rules that either mediate or deactivate. The writers and readers of the U.S. Constitution then speak to normative claims differently. The table below illustrates how oppression was mediated between an owner and the people owned from 1619 to 1865. The conservative mediation of authority accepts and activates a wide range of institutions as separate from the citizen as a subject of law because the State defines a person’s legal status, relation to the state, and other persons.
The progressive view of authority reframes the rule of law in search of new conditions. A claim to power sources can become realizable and capable of deactivating specific evidence of oppression. That would be the list you see after 1865 as statements of that evidence.
Critical thinking about big problems builds on billions of local event moments, now accelerated with digital communications. Framed in the 402-year sweep of history, the list of post-1865 malfunctions that demand deactivation is a demand for equality with equity. The digital divide is a fact exposing and expanding the educational challenges of resolving these two issues. Still, the Civil War’s polarizing elements may be a strong contributor to today’s binary politics. It is now a digital freedom-ride world.
These actions of the last century and a half are mixtures of wins and losses. In a four-century framework, these events are brief, even seem temporary, impermanent, cursory, in passing, and can strike one down lift like the 1965 Voting Rights Bill and Fair Housing in 1968, as one of thousand other ways the arc of history bends toward justice.
The conservative’s and the progressives’ understanding of the Constitution supports empirical reasons but different ends. Down to a couple of basics, the constitutional outlook is as follows:
| Experience | Interpreted | For Liberty | For Equality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | Imperative judicial restraint. | Defined by community traditions | Precludes race conscious decisions |
| Progressive | Open to the necessity of choice | Defined by community ideals | Affirm eradication of hierarchy |
The critical thinking outline I use (here) comes down to two items No. 6 – prediction and No. 7 – transformation. I can fully imagine these two components of thought as actual steps onto a pathway that seeks to create change. Not the imagination of change, the slap in the face, tearing of the skin variety.
We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.
Judy Garland
The movie is well-known, as the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (published in 1900) differed. However, these two works neatly reflect half of the 20th century and the trends to its conclusion. By 1939 the original highly violent animal slaughtering tale in the Oz became a dreamy musical. As a result, the film and, more importantly, the re-write became more widely known than the book could ever accomplish.
No longer a satirical look at the gold standard, the focus became a hop and skip down a yellow brick road where you and the charming Dorthy (Judy Garland) go on an optimistic quest to get a strawman a brain, a lion some courage, and a tinman a heart. It is necessary to have relationships with people in a community with a common goal to serve these purposes well because there is no place like home.
The book’s transitional sentiment to the film follows the Gilded Age through 1900 (solidifying segregation), the First World War to 1918 (initializing the war/industrial complex), and The Great Depression to 1939. In this last phase of the century, the film seemed to propel the Federal Government’s power. It accepts a securitization role by taking responsibility for contractual debts such as residential mortgages and other investment obligations like a national highway system in the post-war era of the 1950s. The federal government’s “interstate commerce” power is built on a proven ability to establish the people’s trust to secure and support wealth as dignity. From the Great Depression to the Civil Rights Movement, the national response to these two forces for change should have propelled the American people forward for another century had it not built racism into the Constitution.
Despite the enormous capacity for social resilience and economic growth established in the 20th century, 21st-century America is losing itself in Constitutional jargon to straight talk on social justice. The cost will be the lost confidence and trust of ordinary people and investors throughout the world. Do not get trapped in this dialogue of the jurists. It is now time to turn to the scientists for the truth. The world recognizes us better than we do ourselves. To close, I offer one example:
“World Bank’s 2019 Migration and Development Brief, $529 billion in remittances were sent to low- and middle-income countries in 2018—an increase of 9.6% over the previous record high of $483 billion in 2017. This figure is significantly larger than the $344 billion of foreign direct investment in these countries, excluding China, in 2018. If we include high-income countries as well, the total amount of remittances jumps to $689 billion, up from $633 billion in 2017.” (Source)
Part Three – The Box Gambit:
The “rule” of this gambit is to connect all the dots with four straight lines by not allowing your pen/pencil to leave the surface of the page. Solving this graphic riddle will require some thinking and trial and error. Try it four times. Good luck.
When developing a plan, remember this exercise. We are all in one kind of rock, paper, scissors box, metaphorical or not. Use your experience to identify examples of thinking that explain moving some examples. Next, describe your thinking with other people (dots) as a creative or imaginative game. What examples of thinking or acting to get the dots of your box to work for you? This is a classic “connect” gambit. Use and share this little exercise with friends. Follow the rules four times and four lines. The pen stays on the page. The lines connect all the dots. The answer is at the bottom of this page.
Congratulations on a solution, or before you go for it below, take a moment to think of a problem or issue you/we would like to define. Use the sample questions below to guide a journalist’s six basic questions with some sampling answers. There are boatloads of these things available now. This meets Occam’s Razor test.
Problem Observation
“There are at least three parks in the community in terrible physical condition. They are misused and abused. Then, in the evening, teenagers hang out, sometimes all night, making a horrible noise and a big mess, why I don’t understand how or why, and so on.”
A. Issue/Problem Defining Questions
B. Asset/Opportunity Defining Questions
The Box Gambit Animated GIF.
A graphic illustration of system change produced by Melanie Rayment is discussed in detail in System Change Part Four: Critical Thinking Pathways (here). When we noticed how Rayment put “system change” outside the description, this example was from our training courses on creative thinking pathways.
Gratitude for all the recommendations and accounts, The Report
The Economics of a Pandemic in NYC
The impact COVID-19 presents one of the most serious recovery challenges New York City has ever experienced. It will require a system change as it will, without doubt, reveal a previously unknown range of malfunctions.
A practical example of how never doubt groups of strategic economists, civil rights activists, and social service leaders decide to tackle the following set of problems linked to the pandemic. The pandemic changed New York City’s world. Its impact is diving into the city faster than a Peregrine Falcon ripping into the entrails of a Central Park squirrel.
COVID-19’s blow to the economy led to abrupt job losses and business closures. The New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) prepared a preliminary report on economic impact projections defined by job loss and tax revenue declines compared to previous estimates. Every urban person knows how serious this is going to become. But, on the oddly positive side of the issue, a super-power is revealed in the Pandemic – a national strike for health and justice could get health care and social justice because if a little bug can bring capital to its knees and get the government to put some in your pocket, that bug is telling you something about a national strike. Get prepared.
As the pandemic remains a moving target, the provision of this IBO readiness report could give the deep network of nonprofit community-based organizations time to prepare strategies responding to needs in their community. Read the details here: PDF HTML. See the summary and tables below.
New Yorkers will need a system change. Most major cities do, and it will not happen anywhere else before it is too late.
The information in the IBO report (summarized above) can stimulate a long list of questions following the critical thinking path outlined in Part Three will be highly useful.
For example:
Here are just a few of the facts that stimulated restorative action questions above.
Part One – Discoveries:
In 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott launched the beginning of the most unparalleled system change in America since the authors of the U.S. Constitution finished their work. Martin Luther King was twenty-six years old when the boycott began. He would have just twelve years and four months more to live. Identifying when a system change will occur reveals an unpredictable set of choices in our history. That means the only thing to do is begin. The only way to discover what you need to know is to act.
Two more examples, on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment ratified the women’s suffrage movement. It occurred as a product of 54 ballot measures in 30 states. It took decades of work and hundreds of small group efforts to produce national law prohibiting governments from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of sex. After another half-century, the Voting Rights Act (1965) expanded to include the destruction of segregation with the vote’s power. Proof came in 2016, roughly another half-century later. A recent documentary tells another story of system change that involved just six months that changed the world forever (here).
Tossed up for all to see are the grand assumptions and harmful practices in our world that appear to be malfunctions. We say, “Do something about ending this tyranny or meeting that unmet need.” Democracy is supposed to be one of the best ways to solve a stubborn problem, especially when events threaten many people‘s well-being. But, unfortunately, the argument to “do something” also includes authoritarian structures such as raising an army, running a business, oppressing a people, or ending a pandemic.
At the center of both methods circles the question of efficacy. Is delay due to squabbling and bounded rationality, or is it due to the utter fear of error and power? The discoveries can be positive or negative in our efforts to define problems. Most of our findings concern the value of predicting and mitigating an adverse event’s most probable cause, time, and place. Individual circumstances cannot be assigned effectively in this way and lead to the acceptance of the unknowable as something more easily attached to an actuarial table of risk in anticipation of a long list of malfunctions assigned to social practices few natural events. The losses are, therefore, attributed value and paid to victims post-trauma.
It is occurring to us all that more engagement on questions of global impact events demands an entirely new regime. These events are grounded in climate change and the probable recurrence of global pandemic infections in which there may be other connections beyond comprehension. The risk to “all” in a post-trauma evaluation is an insufficient duality. Losses are measured in blood and cash, by good or bad locations, as lucky or unlucky, in life or death, for cultural survival or existence as subsistence. The trauma is further parsed into black and white, rich and poor, knowing and unknowing, educated or not. It divides young or old, able or disabled, using percentages drawn with an unknown, shifting denominator of dissuasions to proportionality. Tossed it up for all to see is the confusion of our times. (See: Crisis Management)
Still, much of our practical solutions come as a post-trauma payment to reduce future risks. Individual households and governments also pay individually with resources drawn by regional needs. For example, a volunteer fire brigade works in one place, while another site requires a professionalized firefighting force. Predictable malfunctions reveal investments in first responders and a standard set of institutional providers. In these cases, the assessment of risks and costs and the selection of management protocols establish readiness levels defined by the tools required.
Finding Steppingstones to New Pathways
How can the world move steadily and permanently away from post-trauma payouts toward levels of resilience and enduring sustainability? How can the extensive democratic debate be grounded with more power in the equally slow and painstaking science rules? Will it be possible to make science lawfully capable of overriding the procedures used solely to sustain political power? Given these practices, I can accept authoritarian rules to protect us all on the promise of a system change as structured in the Pathways to Malfunction Identification chart below. This is a failing system.
The chart below describes a bubble-up process established as components of local governance composed of “never doubt” groups. As small organizations, they will select a needed change based on self-interests. Examples are quality of life issues by residents or scientific groups to analyze specific problems. The chart also recognizes the formation of interdisciplinary groups skilled at acquiring and injecting capital resources. It anticipates coalition groups charged with aligning policy and program implementation schemes built on trial and error evaluations.
The final system change events in this model (upper right) are as unknown as their seminal beginnings (lower left). They will become known as the initial efforts bubble up, and shared ideas spread like Whitman’s leaves of grass across the landscape of personal change. The bet is a simple one. People in small groups can pick their experience with a problem, become a never doubt organization, and build toward a system change of great value to themselves with recognized results. Should the malfunction be shared widely and require a more productive agency for an action, the process acquires funds. It encourages never doubt coalition groups to seek higher levels of investment that implies a regional area of operation. Finally, if the malfunction has national effects, the proposed system change will have widespread consensus agreement as it is already in place and well-practiced locally.
The chart above suggests that social system changes utilize the energy in the “never doubt” idea. The widespread knowledge of “never doubt” comes from the work and words of anthropologist Margaret Mead regarding cultural transformations or transitions.
Whether the change sought is significant, dangerous, beautiful, or hideous, the cause of a difference (major or minor) can be the work of a relatively small group of people with an idea. The factor often left out is that the change sought could be twelve apostles or twenty violent supremacists. Claims that this is the only way a system change occurs are logical and historically accurate, but it may not be a lasting one in the digital world. Given the flow of ideas, it is possible to conceive of a thousand groups that might identify and act on a common view of change that will alter everything all at once, whereby the source becomes irrelevant. Rosa Parks knew she was not the first person to be insulted on a public bus in Montgomery. She is known for saying, “I was just tired.” But, it became “one and all” who wanted her to be the last person insulted and arrested on a Montgomery bus. Historians can only speculate why the sit-in at the Woolworths in Greensboro, NC, in early 1960 by four untrained college students set the tone for the decade. Sit-ins at segregated lunch counters are well documented throughout the South, but this one began in February and ended in July.
Therefore, the purpose of the chart (above) is to trust in our better selves. It lays out a belief in discovering malfunctions for two extremely well-known reasons. First, power concedes nothing without a demand. Second, the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. That was Douglass (1849). He was writing about getting more comfortable with change, even if every turn seems to be for the worse. Sensing the end of misery in the world is a powerful feeling and opens the mind to wonderment and recognizing beauty.
The failures of power occur in its acquisition and thereafter in the keeping of it. Thus, in seeking change, it is logical to examine how public appropriations become private holdings. Here are three widely known global examples:
GOS-3P RE
The chart has seven letters (GOS-3P RE) in the upper right corner. I developed it to describe a process for defining big problems like the three listed above. I use them to support the never-doubt group idea with steps that mean something in the immediate sense that can be put to practical use today and shared or joined with others on a similar path. Before this process can begin operationally, the issue must be continuously well defined and researched. In writing a GOS-3P RE, the “future perfect tense” as a verb form of communication is best.
A “never doubt” group can process and implement these steps with the cautions offered by Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish philosopher whose book After Virtue (1981) brings insight to our modern problems. One observation remains especially useful now, “Questions of ends are questions of values, and when it comes to values, reason is silent; conflict between rival values cannot be settled.“
In this sense of change, it seems far more reasonable to focus the world on its malfunctions. They can be found among the powerful, among rivals, and even in our regular day-to-day lives. People worldwide joyfully engage a problem when confronted with a self-interest grounded in something as complicated as community survival or as simple as improving physical comfort. Before us, the task is to broaden this personalization of our place globally and broaden it with digital communication tools at our disposal.
Communication action is occurring now, every minute and hour of the day. But, will these face-to-face experiences spin our lives into the shadows of our home-based comforts? Will they be used to share stories of survival more aggressively? Will they help build the knowledge with the action needed to define and solve common problems?
From the mathematical genius of interpreting regression to the mean data to the inspirational voices of political activists, we can likewise fall to the floor in laughter at our ridiculous selves in a barrage of satirical media presentations that seem (and often are) far more accurate than a news broadcast. We are awash with the language for change, but finding a pathway to a real change, please think about the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the sit-in at Woolworths in Greensboro and don’t look back.
Malfunctions are examined in detail (here)
Part Four – Critical Thinking Pathways:
Research into the idea of malfunctions requires the insight of the arts well ahead of the imaginable political strategies around which there is so much negative sensitivity. Expanding “our reality” through others’ eyes and experience is often too esoteric and not goal-driven. Not to worry, there are lots of ways to work on community-building issues.
The visual literacy of our society, on the other hand, is expansive and growing. Because of this, a useful phrase in critical thinking is to say, ‘no one is as smart as all of us.’ Words are used to describe and share what we think we know with others, adding pictures to terms in structured settings will always enrich conversations about change.
We are experienced watchers, but everyone can be a better listener. Another useful phrase to use is “listen to be heard.” The habits of mind that manage ‘your thoughts,’ the sound of your voice, and the voice of others in conversation, represent three distinct wavelengths. Each one of them can block or overwhelm the other, building the skills for a disciplined separation of these frequencies produces a useful conversation.
In discussions of health, the word “critical” describes a “short term” condition. In economics, the phrase “short term” is a shareholder supremacy issue briefly discussed in discoveries (here). That led to lead to some ideas about malfunctions (here) in the second part. The third part had some fun on creative thinking. This one opens to a brief examination of critical thinking that speaks to the origins of the first three build trust and confidence in taking direct actions in the fourth part. These are exhibits of “crisis” under the heading of what I like to call, pick your own malfunction.
I take a brief “readiness” look at ‘thinking’ clearly when selecting a process. There are hundreds of them for sharpening up, so pick one, adapt as needed. Here is a quick exercise to run on yourself, with friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators in getting woke on a problem.
There is little need to discuss this exercise as the point is to cause a moment of reflection. If you had a rapid similar word definition response to each one of them know three things 1) you have some or all the skills listed below and 2) if it took even a bit longer than ten seconds, you need more work on them when “critical” thinking is essential and 3) they are just words you can pick your own. Breeze through the following:
A brief, am I thinking critically outline like the one above is a fine thing between you and your own head. However, you will need a very different use of your thinking ability if you are contemplating a step directly into the change suggested by No. 6 – predict and No. 7 – transform.
Pathways to Justice
Not being curious enough is a problem. Inquisitiveness will take on the full exercise of your intuition on how to run some inference, demand integrity, and put contextual change in the imagination of ordinary people. Perhaps, the language used becomes more demanding or more visually inspiring to help people hear better to be heard well. Perhaps, direct actions and experiences help define and solve problems more directly because they can be given by the people who share them. In these cases, the process forces sharing experiences with reflection to lead to knowledge and getting better at new questions.
Observers of this concept are encouraged to share the use of the Pathways Design. The one above is by Melanie Rayment. The design was published (here) and inspired the “never doubt” design on the idea of identifying malfunctions in parts two and three in this series. Be encouraged to share its use as part of the Creative Commons approach to social change globally, as has the Social Design Pathways network. Who knows, perhaps this too is a system change.
The chart captures the process perfectly. It is one of the easiest to read graphic illustrations of system change I have seen. It is the inspiration describing system change using malfunction identification in part two (here). Social Design Pathways offers its use, with attribution and the hope that changes and adaptation in initiatives are shared with them.
Closing Thoughts on Critical Thinking
Just after the election of POTUS45, the message about the need to produce change at the local law level was a loud one. The term system change is not often used, but ideas like “ranked-choice voting” could become law in the cities and expand to county state legislatures. The proponents can then argue for it to become part of a national election system as federal law. On the other hand, in localities throughout the nation, the conservative idea of “resentment” or that something’s being taken away leads strongly to a “ends justifies means” set of policies concerning regulations governing voting and voting districts.
The system change example given most often was the demand to make law governing marriage far more inclusive. The changes began locally but rapidly across the United States, concluding with a Supreme Court ruling. Marriage, women’s rights, voting, health, banking, consumer rights, and so on have important actionable components that go from local to national or global.
The progressive changes tend to get the most attention, less well known, and impact are changes law (or new law) that alters or removes environmental, financial, and business accountability and liability regulations. Not one effort toward a more civil society vs. a free one goes unchallenged in law or legislation. All of them require the leadership needed to demand improvements in civil discourse and faith in laws that protect people, not just values.
System Change Part Five: Pick Your Malfunction is next. As an added source of motivation, I offer the following twenty-six minutes as a parting thought for reflection.
The writer’s exhaustion as an agent of change is described in a post submitted in January 2019 (here). This post attempted to write about and seek writers on the future of democracy. The post reviews Ta Nehisi Coates, David Runciman, Stein Ringen, Philip Coggan, David Post in a search. It looks at one-hundred billionaires who may live in the altered state of blind anticipation of goodness and starts to list hot buttons and fades into exhaustion.
Part Two – Introducing Malfunctions:
No Income No Job Applicants NINJA
Investopedia
The 2020 crisis analysis will take more time to conclude, as we are in the midst of it. However, the CBO 2021 report of the 2008 bailout should be fascinating. Early signs from early 2020 economic impacts suggest a reversal of shareholder supremacy might occur because 2008 was highly predictable and poorly resolved.
Profit-taking on a crisis is the thematic first serve culprit in the 2020 crisis based on similar failures to respond before it was too late. Uncomplicated Health Care 101 resources could not succeed for the lack of a clock and trigger and a national testing regime. An Ounce of Evidence (is worth thousands of pounds of opinions) by Ashish K. Jha will be an excellent place to return for useful facts and recommendations.
The Atlantic and ProPublica are outfits that like to walk us through the weeds careful; journalistic documentation errors can be helpful as well. Nevertheless, the dizzying structure of facts will more than likely, spin into history and fall throughout the American landscape into little piles of hopelessness. For this terrifying reason alone, I think the facts’ importance is secondary because we expect them to become as invisible as a greenhouse gas or a virus.
Like 2008, observers of 2020 will offer a valid list of avoidable errors available for review that will only encourage the MEGO effect (“my eyes glaze over”) that regularly clouds accountability with details far too complex for ordinary voters. The reviews will say we knew the answers for an effective response and didn’t let go with anything remotely resembling a system change capacity. That is the problem to dig into because we are dancing around the facts with the wrong music. The following is an argument for pulling out the dissonance, malfunctions, and blockages of system change.
The lack of critical thinking in the private and public realm regarding these two global instances (2008, 2020) is evident. I believe a sharp focus on malfunction and not the details of every rolling crisis should be at the core of this kind of thinking. The corners and edges of the American economy have become troubled assets, subject to a relief program, again. How do you set a piece of paper on fire? Edges and corners, shocking, I know, the because feds threw TARP on the 2008 fire, but it still keeps burning, albeit quietly outside of the nation’s corporate boardrooms. The Great Recession critics warned us to develop much higher sensitivity to the malfunctions of capitalism, often referring to it as the American-style.
If this the “sensitivity” at the edge is acquired, how can it be more useful? Perhaps this is the time for a band of writers to create improvements as a never doubt group. I would ask individual writers to leap among the language art professions to build a reservoir of ideas so beautifully stated that it will uplift the American-spirit.
I started my own list of writers (here – excerpt below) to search for that language and not wait for it to arrive. I am adding more names, finding those who are building the conversation, publishing “the papers,” and producing the literature for the never doubt groups throughout America that are help bent on good changes. Read them deeply, and watch them find ways to make the data yield results and where truth can mean something again.
“All journalists need to be understood in the context of action demanded in the vitally important vision of the world held by Ta Nehisi Coates. I spent some time with Vann R. Newkirk II, Adrienne Green, Adam Harris, Reihan Salam Gillian B White, and Matt Thompson. I cannot speak to Ta-Nehisis Coates’s experience. I can read his books or any essay and fully understand the power of his voice and my hope for his influence. Meet him here 2018 and here 2017.“
From Writer’s Wanted
Since We are Waiting:
The facts show financial service companies, insurance corporations, and a million families went underwater on bad loans and poor judgment. The facts show, millions of people became sick with a virus that killed a high percentage of the most vulnerable due to lung infections and other underlying conditions, and they died alone.
The national to local response 2008 and 2020 to fix the “money” problem focuses on the wrong problem. Americans are confronted by comprehensive “health” concerns affecting the cells of their bodies; there are shortcomings in the entire cognitive outlook. Exploring the reasoning skills of Americans is what should dominate the argument and the conversation. That is where the malfunctions will be found. The money is important, but it crowds out critical thinking on a long list of concerns. Here is a 2008 example.
In 2008, Wall Street won the case – use federal funds and reestablish aggregate demand, sustain liquidity for global trade, keep employment up, but income marginal (paycheck to paycheck) in a high percentage of households. Attack tax rates, government interference, and expose public incompetence. Hide wrongdoing and continue to reduce mechanisms for public oversight into private financial practices and kill debate. These globalists arguments are persuasive and claimed by the strategic financial practices of the Federal Reserve System on down to your 401(k) fully exhibit a malfunction.
Recently (April 2020), several hundred other private businesses and publicly traded companies dipped into that malfunction. However, Shake Shack and that steak franchise didn’t return a combined $30 million in 0% interest loans to reduce public outrage. Assuring all workers’ employment on the government dime is distasteful to investors as it does nothing for a balance sheet or the tax code and lacks flexibility. As billion-dollar companies, they know the only way to recapitalize during a full-blown depression of unknown duration is to wait and reduce payroll far more quietly down the road. The bonus is to align the business with American values of freedom and independence that still takes blood to establish and use them to get good public relations.
Despite the depth of the 2008 and 2020 global economic tragedies, other questions that attempt to define and identify the malfunctions of sound reasoning in America go unaddressed. The financial crisis of 2008 and the health and economic crisis of 2020 has one word that tends to deaden discussion of system change, and that headliner is “money.” Failing to understand alternatives to money is a malfunction of American cultural thinking.
For example, why is it so uninteresting to wonder out loud if the world could operate as if wealth is not the only means of meaningful communication? Is becoming an outlier, a monastic monk, or an entire monastery the only pathway to sustainability? What are the alternatives, where are the well-celebrated successes? Some many places and events have proven capital to be meaningless in the achievement of human dignity. Those four college students had just a few dollars between them at the Woolworths’ lunch counter when somehow they galvanized an established, ongoing “sit-in” movement across the South.
These questions and events exhibit an ingredient of enormous importance to life. A clear dividing line separates a private marketplace solution for serving a human need from those in the public realm that want to create change. The line that says on this side of it, the use of debt as a cost of money, is irrelevant, where the purposes of care keep us all well and sustaining the simplicities of life are priorities that reign supreme above all others?
For Fairness and Equity
The last two hundred years of American-style capitalism is about growth. The next century will need to observe fairness and equity more accurately. This fight requires a search for leadership that Democracy should be best in finding. Only one modern American hero has a national day of remembrance for the courage it took to lead a fairness and equity challenge. His pain became ours, and his name was Martin Luther King.
King’s interest in justice with equity held the U.S. Constitution to account first, but this did not extinguish his view on capitalism’s economics. His demand for change is based on two facts. An economic system built on slavery and imprisonment will not change the rules. Change must, therefore, come from changing the system.
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed matter: the guaranteed income…”
Martin Luther King –Where do We Go from Here? 1967
Resisting the pressure to create change weakens your outlook and idles your voice, yet the sadness built into this silence is a powerful force in creating a new and powerful narrative. For those whose interests lie in connecting the dots with visible lines between the confluence of the 2008 and 2020 crisis will gather their strength by recalling the heart of King’s outlook – that the arc of human history may be long, but it bends toward justice.
The concept of equity in the minds of most people is a good place to begin. Any accountant will explain “equity” as a combination of assets and liabilities. One of the first sources of wealth in the world and pre-eminent in the United States has been to support individual families’ acquisition of assets. Homeownership, with the help of mortgage guarantees, is the prime example. It also formed the perfect storm for converting government-insured mortgages into derivatives in bundles of mortgage-backed securities. Confidence and trust in each household and the economy in which they function is the one fantastic thing that makes the liability expressed by a mortgage possible.
In the post-2008 recovery, millions of families realized they were sold a dream, but not a house. The narrative used said they just tripped into the caveat emptor bucket where all of American-style capitalism’s inequities are poured. That is not the malfunction. The third malfunction is far more disturbing. It was how easily and rapidly a vast amount of capital shifted into serving rental housing demand. It was as if the purpose of the crisis was to slice yet another sizeable chunk of households out of the ownership market, but who will put equity into the pockets of the housing investor-class.
Trust
The fourth malfunction’s signal worthy of exploration is a failure of the senses to hear the beep. All of us have the ability to know when someone “feels” trustworthy, a person in whose recommendations you would feel confident following based solely on initial impressions.
Confirmation bias is a proven human behavior. It is as if there was only one emoji for every expression. It is illustrated repeatedly in the communication between people – it is documented with race, religion, age, a whole set of facial expressions, and all kinds of body language. American’s are a highly sophisticated, visually literate group of people far too easily siloed and willing to stay there.
I say it over, and over, the meaning of everything is found in people, not books, newspapers, or TV reporting. Meaning is putting trust in the instincts we have about the people we give power over our thinking-lives, and therefore we are entitled to a judgment. Where is the narrative, the journalism, and reporting that openly explores the hair-raising ease with which the writer and reader are privately manipulated into being managed per story?
There is “same room,” empathy, but never one that could be hand-to-hand in visual reporting. Judgments are, therefore, personal. The following are mine, no one else. In the discussion of economic recovery policies, I find one group of leaders exhibit a distinct arrogance with a hint of condescension (Mnuchin of Treasury and Ross of Commerce, for example) and other groups who are recommending preventative treatments and therapies for me and the nation exhibit authenticity and sincerity. Dr. Fauci, the face of COVID-19, and Adams, our Surgeon General, come to mind.
I think all can see a sharp difference between these leaders and their styles. Those with extensive experience in managing unimaginably massive amounts of capital in their personal lives and those with extensive experience in managing services and policies that protect human health represent our society’s bifurcation. I can take these impressions as personal and symbolic as a guide to strengthen my critical thinking skills.
For example, I have a positive sense regarding Warren Buffet, even Bill Gates, that yields the humanitarianism that I give to Dr. Fauci. Mr. Buffet also freely acknowledges selling 100% of his substantial holdings in airline stock, and in the same March 2020 breath, he is widely quoted for saying, “Never bet against America.” Mr. Gates’ charitable experience with spending millions fighting infectious diseases in the world led him to practically yell out unequivocal warnings regarding lack of readiness to respond to pandemics. I argue that their humanitarianism is not enough as it fails at system change by changing nothing. What are we missing?
Confidence in Change
Recently, the idea of retaining the world’s confidence in the United States was expressed by none other than the American Enterprise Institute in a map they tweeted to the world. The map is used to illustrate one message for all to see — your wealth belongs here. Illustrating the GDP of individual American States in relationship to fifty other countries in the world is designed to make people confident – to trust the systems that are in place now. Before you read the next paragraph, I call your attention to Wisconsin on the map below.
This BEA/IMF map is blatant public relations. It was published in the April 2020 phase of the pandemic as an unabashed claim of massive economic power, nothing else. Frankly, I know not where this thinking lands on the index of malfunctions. The following is how I am trying to work it out.
In response to the pandemic, a “system change” relationship between public and private equity is something Europe understands and Denmark in particular. I have one example of why Wisconsin should have no difficulty in system change if they were more like Denmark. Hartland, WI, for example, is known as the nuclei of one of the most important regions of Danish immigration in the United States, but there is a stronger point to be made.
The Denmark government stepped forward to continue paying wages for their people even when they are not working. People kept their jobs with their employers and stayed home. Denmark retained some businesses and most family income and stopped the virus from spreading with efficiency. The policy maintained the nation’s cultural status quo with steady, confident anticipation of ending the crisis. The employee’s program is the arrow program’s tip from a full quiver of medical and economic tactics. The system change is rapid. It allows business activity and production to restart with as little cost and disruption as possible. Instead of a half-baked business paycheck protection program, this was a well prepared Protect Denmark strategy.
Please spend a few minutes with Mette Frederiksen, Prime Minister of Denmark, introducing her nation’s work opening the Climate Summit in Copenhagen (here) and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardin on COVID-19 (here) then (here) then Trump on Climate (here) via NBC. There was a surprise until the NBC video told me that he could read a prompter well – so stay with it long enough for proof. I leave it to your cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias instincts. Mette’s every word rings with truth to me that Trump ends with the testimony of a bait and tackle shop owner from Port St. Lucy on ending toxic tide is the only part that rang truthfully.
Remember Port Huron
Consider the four malfunctions summarized below and remember Port Huron if you are of a mind to develop more detail. All of the above brought to me a recollection of the Port Huron Conference because the answers were there and beautifully identified a half-century ago. (here). I am stunned, by their revelations.
First, fully recognize and prepare a narrative that describes how America has a comprehensive health problem that includes the inability to use our wealth far more effectively in self-study. Second, figuring out the importance of equity for all Americans requires a system change that clearly shows equity flow. The “one percent” copy line has failed to capture the imagination or the curiosity of people. Third, capital is more fungible today than in the entire history of civilization. Ordinary people like me barely understand how quickly markets change. A specimen, such as a variable stock holding, can be mutually interchangeable (replace or be replaced) at the speed of light solely for the holder’s benefit in charge of the change. The pensioner will not notice what was taken until it is gone forever. The fourth and most perplexing malfunction examines how trust and confidence are broken as agents for change. Is it for the lack of a hard “in what?” do I trust, and in whom am I confident? Could it be a failure to face the clear signals of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance? Is there no one helping the American people figure it out?
Aside from my deep belief that the purpose of time is learning how to get the next moment right, the serious malfunctions in communication and, therefore, persuasion will not self-solve. Courage will be required. Examine our country’s health as a cognition issue, that the perception of all people, from the homeless veteran to the owner of a hundred Manhattan towers, should agree to one central point? The creation of equity for both comes at the cost of the other that the vet’s pain is removed when the powerful owner becomes a partner in a change to the system. What could make that happen?
Recognize the malfunctions sketched out here are not the “have vs. have not” situations that shaped the lives of these two people. It was for the lack of a system change that eliminated inequities between the “knowing” and the “unknowing” of them both as they look out over the landscape of their country.
Thank you for reading System Change, Part Two: Malfunctions. Comments are appreciated on these ideas, references to other readings, and the practical steps needed to bring them into sharper view. Conference recommendations and notifications are appreciated giving that it has been far too long since the insight of Port Huron and the work of Writers Wanted.
I have offered a brief gambit in Part Three. It is a bit of instruction from the teacher in me, but if you still want to know what that is, click (here).
Wait to discover what the new Democratic members in the House have in common. There are three unelected leaders working 24/7/365 to get more Democrats and Independents in the House and Senate. They are Nina Turner, the new president of Our Revolution, Maurice Mitchell, the new national director of the Working Families Party and Yvette Simpson, the new chief officer of Democracy for America. They share concerns for the dignity of the American worker and family, and they represent a unique political triumvirate. If they can protect one another, build an agenda for 2020 and start winning the future for the people left behind or pushed away it will be about more than politics. Whether conservative or progressive, that is all that should matter.
The depth of their shared experience as dynamic African-American leaders will be measured by how well they inject the people’s intellect into movements for change, but one other thing they have in common is a little scary. They seem woefully inadequate to the task and appear slightly ineffectual in the scraps of video available. Perhaps, it is the lack the money essential for digging into the demography and mysteries of votes and power. This kind of analysis can be replaced by the analytical skills of a grassroots organizational structure but, do they have it? Some of the poor impression is theirs to own, but the main problem is with us. What do they need to prove? They can lift their organizations into positions of great power, but when will we know? Winning elections is no longer sufficient. What will be? What must we do?
Most of the poor and struggling families around the world are in the outlying urban areas both near and far from the dense core of economic forces that push and pull people from the land. Homelessness is a production function cities. The vast ability of dense urban areas cities to create demand also cause a maze of economic disruptions that displace and break families. In much of the world, the human byproduct of this displacement is evident in large informal settlements. The housing market is failing to provide housing to one-third of the world’s urban population. Why do they get pushed? Do they know? No, and no one is telling them, even in America.
“There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”
J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”
One person knows a lot about the economics of this is Bruce Katz, Director of the Center on Urban Metropolitan Policy at Brookings, a century old, centrist purveyor of fact. There are five short presentations and one long video by Katz (HERE). It will take about 30 minutes to watch this selection. He may sound libertarian, but he is just the messenger. I recommend listening to him before reading further. If you’d rather not, here is the super short version and why a triumvirate, such as the three imagined here is essential.
Our metropolitan centers are by far, the vital economic engines of America, and as such will continue to produce unrelenting displacement pressure on low-and-moderate-income households. They are the engines of learning, full of universities, colleges, advocacy organizations and training centers fully capable of creating a next-generation citizen fully capable of breaking down and eliminating gender, racial and ethnic barriers. Details are here.
Skilled civic engagement in regional growth is a cultural phenomenon with specific strategies. First, retain the residence of threatened populations in the core. Second, draw down every opportunity to inject the reality of displacement pressure into the political heart of leaders. Third, this is a “no news is good” issue. Capable leadership will flee, equity holders will cash out, take their young and move far too soon into lower-cost environments (south and southwest). You need them. Encourage them to stay and fight.
Lastly, the 535 people at the federal level of representative leadership are ignorant of this fact, or at least behave that way by deferring to state powers. The triumvirate(s) suggested here is a stateless organization, they are capable of creating policies, projects, and priorities that strengthen multi-state regions and agencies. The U.S. more than its 50 states; it’s a network of 363 economically integrated metropolitan areas (click map above). Regional development policies are thousands of times more relevant to the future economic and social health of working-class America than the set of lines drawn by cartographers to establish the Republic a couple of centuries ago.
The boundaries of the states were formed using an imaginary grid that stretches across the earth. The intent of this coordinate scheme is to locate or identify precise geographic positions. The idea dates to 190–120 BC, it was used to draw uniform boundaries of the American states, and today your phone knows where you are to within a meter. The states are arbitrary constructs of uniformity and similar size, the metro-regions are synonymous with the health of the nation and in a metaphorical sense they are “circles.” The circle looks inward. It is an object that shows its boundary to the world, the grid does not. This is the organizing principle upon which triumvirates will develop their power. The voters of these regions are majority blue, Democrats and Independents. The organizational realignment toward multi-state economic regions will take a while, in the meantime, several strategic components require special attention.
Is a “rainbow coalition” possible? The presumption that it exists is wrong; it does not exist. All the appetizers, entrees and fixings are laid out in the kitchen, but supper has yet to find the dining table, even the one that is in the kitchen. The foundation for celebrating this high quality of change within the American diversity spectrum is barely recognized or touched let alone stirred with any fondness. We have no language, no string of words for it and it dates to 1984.
Building a foundation for American diversity is developing in two places, universities with civic engagement policies for incorporation across their curriculum from STEM programs to the more traditional centers. The leaders are in law and political science who carry the strongest interest in a sustained discourse on democracy and its institutions. The second place occurs in the city where the language of diversity is improving followed by state and federal elections that exhibit serious divisions and therein lies the dark side of the social justice coin.
Counting over several years and multiple election cycles, the U.S ranks 27th out of 35 economically developed countries in voter turnout. Volunteerism in community service ranks low at 20 to 25% of households, and it is top heavy in the higher income ranges. More recently, threats to the well-being of working families have increased civic engagement activities, especially in urban areas. These facts were so widely apparent that it led to the creation of the American Democracy Project (ADP). It started with colleges and universities in 2003 and remains a nonpartisan initiative of AASCU in partnership with The New York Times. The knowledge resources on this subject are online and free for digital distribution (HERE). An author’s presentation on the 2017 edition is (HERE). As these efforts are failing, a viewpoint on why is outlined (HERE) for comment. American civic engagement practices for dealing with problems is the problem. The plug has yet to slip into the outlet, the power is there but the switch is missing and there appears to be no endurance limit on our knowledge of this fact of self-oppression.
We have the radar for the existence of other ships in the Democracy, thousands of them but that is about all. Here is one example. To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960) is one of the most read books in America and widely assigned in schools. White people think the attorney Atticus Finch was a hero but to the African-American, he is a stone looser, yet Aaron Sorkin is willing to use his exquisite use of language and force that point into the debate of how we must “all rise,” the last two words in the play. The demand is to get to a better American place (read a PBS interview (here). Where is the language that makes it possible to call out or openly condemn people that tacitly support a culture of hate and malice? The American psyche is far too easily driven into little camps and throwing a “big tent” over it remains as unpalatable as always.
When thousands of people like the Mayor of Jackson Mississippi (first 5 min. only – on video here – 170K pop. 80%Black and a third Asian) enter your world the tent can get more interesting. Getting past platitudes and on to education and housing in Jackson will be his issue. New leadership like this will be watched and if possible assisted to see through the clouds that new leaders attract. After the 2016 election, many groups pulled big national lists together for study but they not useful. As the digital revolution began in the 1970s, the ability to study, think, act, and respond together became the more useful MOOC. The isolation remains and groups still struggle to form beyond encouraging references to Margaret Mead and her opinion on the subject.
Americans need an intervention regarding addictions to racial ignorance. Where is the tough-love slap in the face that makes everything right and gives us back our senses? This intervention is possible. It will be done with superb care on the ground yet to be found for a foundation unlaid and a building we can barely envision. It will be done as if all the oppressed, unlucky or struggling rainbow of people in this nation could stand all at once and scream NO to pandering leaders, and yell in one sweet sound, “we are the change we seek, we are the change we seek!”
Nina Turner (Our Revolution) puts it this way. When “the hunter,” writes the story, there is no story of the lion. Political movements are similar. It can use filters that leave people out who think they are in. Like the term “hunter,” labels such as “neoliberal” or “self-reliant” simultaneously attracts people to power they cannot acquire. In tracking the lion, the hunter knows what the lion is willing to submit to and uses it to the exact amount needed to achieve the injustice of its death. The hunter’s brand is visible, control the narrative of bravery and therefore secure its benefits and power. The lion’s story is direct; death is food. Death is the gift of her pride’s survival.
If we are the lion, our revolution is underway but barely notice unless there are videos of a shooting. Being African-American and politically progressive should be a natural fit, “if” there is a family history of engagement in fights against social and economic systems that insist on a second-class citizenry defined by gender, income, color in the rainbow, one at a time or all at once. We do not forget the people who died in resistance to this condition. They are the builders; they own the long history of this change in the nation. We hold them as gifts and if we can, we will add chapters.
We do not speak of the blood horror, hopelessness and fear it took to get those moments that made the change. A great joy rests with its victories, each of them rings triumphantly in our nation’s history. Today we watch scrapings from historic speeches, we read books, listen to songs and examine pictures about the cost of resisting oppression. Today, over a half-century later it appears to many that there are those who take a black life are becoming unpunishable and at worst made legal actors in a much broader attack on all people facing the pain of a soft oppression, a sense that something was taken, an addiction and the threats of despair that each cause. of us have had “the talk” with the young about protests, lawful police orders, and standing ground. The hunter would have you fear the lion and drain you of compassion for her pride, yet all the while to the lion; death is a gift.
America’s history of death and pain rings painfully for each loss and because each bell we ring for them, tolls for us all and it is here and now. The bell rings if we resist the “lawful orders” of a cop, it rings loudest in friendly fire, and it rings until we cannot hear at all. Following difficult times, it is in our nature to bring out the good in ourselves and find reasons to celebrate our sacrifice but the movement today is very different. There are more ways to assure the story of the lion than I can count, and there are now thousands who can damn the old hunter’s lies. Is this not enough, what needs to be new, what needs to be different? Skip the ad and listen here for it from a collection called “Outskirts of the Deep City.”
The average, everyday person will talk about issues and events but often lack the will to act. Modern political analysts understand the events leading to changes that improve lives. Actions do not come easily without the experience of working for the prospects that succeed. Change politics can fool you. it will ask you to stare at the beak of the Eagle on America’s Seal and love your country. The new politics of change will put you in the grasp of her talons; make you the builder of her nest of arrows and hold you in her branches of peace and victory. What needs to be in the new politics?
A voice of unification for the working family that restates American values of fairness with justice. Better education for your kid? A wage scale that keeps up with costs? How about better protection from ill health, big pharma, and corporate greed? When we face threats to our well-being, who will be there? Look left, look right and say I will be there for you, I will be there. What needs to be different? We are the change we seek.
At this time in history, most Democrats and Republicans (save a few) can only equivocate and obstruct. If 2020 is going to be an opportunity, the “be there” time is now. Maurice Mitchel is now the National Director of the Working Families Party. (WFP). He is one of those “go” leaders with extensive experience in movements beyond, in front of and behind elections. He will continue to expand our understanding of what a democracy can do. He can see the irony when both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump say, “the system is rigged,” and it says one thing to him and me. We need very new politics.
What is exposed here? If we are to remain a democracy, we are challenged to do big things. First, increase the number of voters by 1,000%, crush all forms of voter suppression and stop playing short can-kicking games. There needs to be an ass where there is a can. Watch his mildly nervous presentation at NetRootsNation.org is here. All the right words are all in a row, but he needs the kind of heart that beats in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to get the sound we need. He has the words, now give him the sound. Words are important, but how they sound is even more so.
There is a better sound in Maurice here as he defends the Working Family Party (WFP) from an attack by the three-term Governor of New York State because of WFP support for Cynthia Nixon in a primary. Challenging the governor happened for one important reason, it is time to say “No” to the oligarchs and those who say yes to them. At the heart of it, Maurice defines what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party in the nation as it is in NYS. Maurice would not be taking anything away from Alexandria if he repeated her reminder that New York leaders of the past had led the progressive movement with great courage. The entire WFP requires voices that do not speak of defenses against attacks to define injustice. The math is easy, the foolishness of the peacemakers exposes their failure as change makers. If you hear, “Five-hundred or so American billionaires are not the cause of America’s problems.” It is time to share everything, every strategy, and tactic. It is time to offend with relish and know all the actors who are firm in their purpose and who might face death in the anarchy we all detest.
After Yvette Simpson lost her bid for Mayor of Cincinnati, she acquired a new position as Chief Executive of Democracy Now (January 2019) as described in a news story interview (Here). Yvette Simpson’s membership of the Democratic establishment represents the party’s better self because individuals from diverse backgrounds who seek public service expect to be Democrats. The record is improving slowly, but the proof is the problem. The majority of every Congressmember’s senior staff is not diverse. This was not widely circulated news until the membership became more diverse.
Can a Democracy care for all people and meet unique needs without sowing division and discord? What I learned from Yvette was the calculus of a representative government requires a variety of navigation skills throughout a campaign without end. She knows no one on the progressive side of the equation is better at grassroots engagement. She notes that if you run you cannot knock on doors, you must walk the race. Winning is face to face, not face to the screen. She believes in the power of “we.” Her experience proved to her that the road made by walking is formed best with a bold and unapologetic agenda aimed at making changes that people want in their lives. It was once summed up as rights, first to the pursuit of life, second to liberty and third happiness. Winning a primary but losing a run for Mayor gave her insight into the challenges of 2020 hopefully aimed at the Senate as a priority. Will the triumvirate be up to speed and ready to respond?
The growing economic success of central Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan is also the story of large, diverse cities in multi-state regions that hold with a significant share of the state population. For decades disinvestment in the infrastructure of dense urban regions presents hidden dangers. Not spending where spending is needed exposes failures of transit services to and from these centers. Auto congestion where and when it is hated the most. A rising cost of housing, including deteriorating conditions in the suburbs, the displacement of low- and moderate income people into suburban neighborhoods, and sporadic increases in urban homelessness. The more significant sources of stress are evident in the protests of working poor teachers in decaying schools alongside troubled police and fire services and other first responders racing into a long list of preventable social and environmental problems of life-threatening severity. Pick-up a copy International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection and all of this is documented.
Putting added reduced tax cash flow into the hands of wealthy people and corporations are not coming to the resolution of any of these problems. They are without accountability; the board members of the super large foundations are out of touch with the broad national dialogue needed to keep our democracy responsive, instead of their wallets. Yes, new partnerships are there, but the old lines of privilege remain unchallenged and taxing them is failing because loop-hole land will never go away without reinventing America. If the horrible truth is super high tax revenues collected by the government don’t work, what needs to change?
We live in a society where the most important things go unsaid. For example, the question on the table in a substantial foundation’s boardroom is “Are we failing in our quest for social stability?”. What is known but never said aloud is, “Well, if large groups of the society get upset and start causing trouble with disruptions of the economy and endangering their own lives and the lives of others, we have fully equipped our police forces with enough riot gear and other tools that could conquer a country.” Can you hear that lungful exhalation flow across that confident conference table? Look again out of the conference room’s vast windows overlooking a landscape of terror that could be unleashed, then turn to the doorway as it opens. Meet your new master, the authoritarian who can only keep this crowd at bay with your foundation’s loyalty. Impossible you say? Not according to world history.
If you hear, “Several hundred multi-billionaires are not America’s problem.” An economist in a rabbit hole is baiting you. Don’t go there. Of course, high taxes don’t work, government (city, state, federal) have never been able to get much above 20% of America’s GDP from the very beginning of this measure. Using the 20% rubric, the GDP in 2018 will top $21 trillion to yield on average $6 trillion in annual revenue. The interest paid on the national debt is $364 billion. (10/1/18, through 9/30/19). The total public debt is around $17 trillion. Individuals, businesses, and foreign central banks are its owners with 90 percent of it in Treasury bills, notes, and bonds. (Details here.)
America’s “good faith and credit” is highly respected, 30-year “treasuries” sell with ease. Credit is another word for trust so, the bottom line, the money is there to do what we want. Therefore. We must ask, what does work instead of taxes? The answer, spending on the right stuff, followed by the right questions that get asked but never answered. What is the right stuff? Where you put your political brain requires you to find out.
In 2012, Jim Sorenson put $13 million into a business school in Utah and created the Sorenson Impact Foundation where they quietly work on a long list of projects that would make every candidate for sainthood happy. Other things like program-related investments (PRIs) vetted by the business school, “select and develop business models for high-impact, early-stage social enterprises capable of reaching underserved populations.” I love mouthfuls like that, but what is wrong with it, what is missing in philanthropy? According to Forbes, not a thing (Here).
If you read that Forbes article, then you know the objective of all foundations is to “go to scale,” and that means two things, the more obvious is to spread money all over the globe with a goodwill website to prove it. The other is to make wise social impact business investments and get universities to establish a methodology for measurements and publish the results. Highly respected multi-billionaires like Jim Sorenson and all the other billionaires in his moral class think they know what the right stuff is or needs to be, so he like many others create these hopeful puppy dog foundations. I can look up all the billionaires and foundation staff; I can know where they live, play and work nationally and internationally. They are the wealthy residents of a tiny planet.
Bottom line, what is wrong, what is missing? The hundreds of multi-billionaires are missing in the vapor of their wealth. A wrong-headed street-intellect assumption is they have formed an oligarchy and now vie to rule the world, distracting us with their wonderfulness. The truth is far dire; they have tucked themselves away in their boardrooms happily overlooking their private empires of goodness, adapting and maneuvering to sustain themselves among one another, while all the while the world is burning, slowly almost imperceptibly into ash and dust. So, bottom line, yes, it is their fault, and this is important, except for a few they didn’t mean it.
What is missing, I want you to join in this practice. Below is what I have so far. You can give advice or list wrongs, make rights, just click here.
I have no interest in tracking them down, although there is a project aimed at doing so. (here). Our charity must believe they will find the “right stuff,” otherwise they face incurable insanity. Our job is to be persuasive regarding the need to make course corrections essential to the survival of next generations. I know about the hideaways in the mountains and the means to get there. I do not know who is worse off, those without sanctuary or those forced to say, “Mine is full, you are not selected?” Want to add to the list? Click here.
The USA is not the America Tonight Show. The adjective (above) describes giving your name to something. It is also called identity politics, so you get people who are Trump Republicans. Identity is much bigger than a person, a color, religion, political philosophy or favorite late-nite TV show host. A claim of leadership in the name of dignity for all life produces a replaceable leader. Arguments are won (or should be) on the facts of the day, week, year and decade, not charismatic leadership, bullies or the learned helplessness of their constituents. For example, we win the war of words when we describe the death of young minds and the heart lost in persons beaten low by hate. We win when we force all to hear the frightened whispers from the mouth of hunger. We win when we describe the violence embedded in climate change or assault rifles and how randomly either can take anyone’s home or life at any time or place, one of them used to be in God’s hands, today, both in are ours. We win if all these voices are unified not by fear but in a single call to defend the dignity of the human person. Stand on this path and you will know methods that move all of us forward and away from the confusion that divides us.
The three organizations and leaders briefly mentioned here know these methods. In listening to them I know this is Our Revolution, we are the Working Families of this nation, and the demand for Democracy for America is now. We win when our unity is theirs and theirs ours. Calling for an accord does not create unity. The phrase, “the people united will never be defeated” begs the question. What is causing our downfall, our defeat? To keep our democracy, we must be the change we seek and to begin, form triads. Triangles form the strongest structures, tripartite coalitions are a step forward. So if our revolution is to be composed of working families working to assure our democracy remains useful nationally, these three among many others need to find and build local triads.
The voting record from any combination of election districts for offices in cities, states, and Congress by voter and candidate reveal a set of cultural signifiers useful to the practice of removing identity politics toward a healthier method of governance. If the triumvirate’s network is true, if the depth is there, it can conduct this analysis across state lines and recognize the issues of working people step across all the other lines used to divide Americans.
The traditional roots of the old identity way are made sustainable by the quiet assurance of a 98% retention rate among incumbent candidates all the way up and down the political spectrum. So, I am not talking about politics. This is about change. Being conservative or progressive comes naturally to people from low to high income for two reasons. Households are “conservative” because every change tends to be loudest when it is for the worse, and progressive because it is a way to seek out useful and if not, virtuous change that will protect the family. One of the more complex examples of change follows:
The retention of wealth by the wealthy began in 2016, it was legislated in 2017 and became law on January 1, 2018. The expectation of tax reductions for corporations an increase in wages, they have not. The bet is that a few extra dollars in the working families tax return suffice. That it is billions among the super wealthy remains an abstraction. The national revenue is increasing, but the federal budget is still ripping holes in the safety net that helps a growing number of households protect family health, old age, and their financial security. Why? Uncontrolled congressional spending.
The subtle implementations of the attack on so-called entitlements is unclear, but the lion’s strategy, in this case, is easy to spot, go for the slow and weak ones in the herd. The human problem with this kind of attack is the lack of fairness in compliance and the complicity of the herd. In these transactions, this failure should not be lost. Nevertheless, do not allow the debate to move away from the cap held by the hunter regarding issues. Taxes are not paid for social security from incomes over $138,000. Where is the security in that equation? If the answer remains, the revenue is still insufficient. What is missing?
In my small part of the world, I have organized a tool to implement one of our best methods. I have one or more persons in every election district able to build or join a canvas team and be on the ground for a candidate. You can see an early version here. Security is a growing issue. Sign up here if you are in the district. Instructions follow.
This canvas method is easy to implement, more so in a blue majority city and state and it grows exponentially through a natural network of friends and family. It reveals the enormous power of democracy with personal decisions to work for a specific candidate (city, state or federal) on a routine basis for a limited period every two, four and six years. If tools like these are deployed in the metro-regions, with a clear understanding of the unique economies of each, the ability to produce change people need and want. If not, the answer is clear, try again, and again, and again because we are the change we seek.
The deep concerns of people are not articulated well by most current leaders, especially those who are dependent on identity politics and tenure in office. We should ask why but do not. Leaders acknowledge our concerns but we still allow them to remain fuzzy about accountability to benchmarks or criteria from year to year. There are no triggers or penalties in exclusive political alliances based on religion, race or social background. This tendency allows leaders who see a lack of basic employment with a living wage only pushing a few into desperation. The lack of health insurance protection bankrupts “only a few” families. Our safety in the community, the affordability of our housing, and the failure to educate our young, only hurts “a few families.”
The promise to sustain the two largest safety nets American’s ever fought to acquire serves everyone even but even the vast “we” of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid is under attack. The subtlety of the attack, even the logic of it will read to divide not unite. I want to be able to say it all began in 2018. This is when just enough people realized the rise of opposition politics and the resistance found ways to diagnose all the reasons for a lack of movement on working family concerns and the honest needs of ordinary people. The first pronouncement is to put a number on “only a few.” We are now that few, there of millions of us and we vote. The second is to learn how not turn against “the other” in this movement, fight for scraps or fail to fight for the few. Those of us who can create moments and events, year after year will rip the mantle off the shoulders of the tenured leaders if needed. It all began in 2018. As it goes for the few, so it goes for us all.
At a political rally, I overheard a leader say, “We need more facts to make that decision.” It was the response that got my attention. “You’re a damn fool, we don’t need any more damn facts, just walk out that door and look around. There are your damn facts. We have got to get to work and it starts now. Do you hear me? If you walk out that door you can smell it. Tsunami’s don’t come with a warning until it’s too late.” The third benchmark for the growth of a progressive movement is swift decision making. Do not wait another day, rush to the defense of neighbors and all those struck down, stand in the light of MLK and seek his justice.
Some professionals study organizational development in such depth they have become almost impossible to understand. But I did come across one article in the reasonably accessible Harvard Business Review that gives me hope. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman use massive amounts of business data. On the question of diversity, they compared leaders’ self-ratings with their ratings by bosses, peers, and subordinates. These ratings reveal leaders assume they are better at valuing diversity than they are. Take that to heart, the social change movement is never doing as good a job as its leaders want, and there are good reasons to be aware. Defending the get woke movement demands exposure of our failures.
To understand the cause of poor decision making, Zinger and Folkman used data on leaders and compared the behavior of those who were perceived as making poor decisions with those perceived as making very good decisions. Whether leading a major international corporation or a scrappy nonprofit organizing committee, pressing for these traits tend to hold true. Here is a description of the common paths that led to poor decision making from the most to least significant. Laziness tops the list, some of the signs are not checking facts or confirming assumptions. Next, not anticipating negative events reduces the ability to defend. When a leader is indecisive it tends to be costly to an organization due to missed opportunities. Leaders that remain locked in the past will make decisions with assumptions that are no longer true. Lesson: Always look forward.
Among the lesser causes of poor decisions are in failures to align “dots” in an organization’s membership. The overall strategy of the organization often referred to as a lack of strategic alignment deals with the leader’s isolation breaking down important interpersonal relationships and dependencies. Similarly, over-dependence on one person who is waiting for another, who in turn is waiting for someone else leads to poor decisions. A leader’s lack of technical depth will reduce the use of high-level expertise within an organization, and if it is there, people need to know. It’s always the coverup. Statistically, the least named cause of poor decisions was found to be a failure to communicate the what, where, when, and how associated with their decisions. I wish Nina, Maurice, and Yvette all the success in the world as they head into 2020 with the capacity to produce swift and effective decisions for their organizations.
Next, I think it will be fun to have a good look at those that have shattered glass ceilings in their hometowns. They are inside the beltway for the next two years. Ordinary observers can find out what they have in common other than the obvious and if they can lay the ground and build the foundation for a significant change in the culture by the means necessary.
The following three paragraphs are lecture-like. Nevertheless, they represent the standard by which I believe our glass breaking, culture changing, the newest members of Congress should be evaluated. I’m open to other ways, but I will fight for the following as I share in the spirit by which you now hold office.
You have entered Congress with a personal theory of change. We all use it to adapt to our environment according to need and want, as well as, evaluation of performance. Results are measures to indicate the quality of adaptation in one of three ways, positive, neutral or negative. Change through experiments reinforce the positive and reduce the negative. We are cognizant of the trial and error world in which we and our family, friends and coworkers’ function. From child play to professional practice we learn that we control what we can make recur. I can get Sally to laugh and Bill to chase me every time, and that’s as a grown up. I also know the reverse of that is impossible. The information gathered through experience is routine and enough. You can work through personal skill sets on this question by recalling past actions in getting (or not) a date with a person of interest back in your school days or a “contract” more recently. Knowing how to lead yourself is the prerequisite for leadership of others.
The number of people and dollars involved in business and government require confidence to take action. There are consequences at every step. Seeking to alter a in negative society or to improve a positive one requires careful thought and experimentation. In this setting, dialogue gets to the capacity of individuals in business or government to collect reliable information, review methods of data acquisition, analyze and predict results. Confirmation of concrete benefits from people with these skill sets leads to investment decisions as mere possibilities. At this point, choice and timeliness come into play involving the number of options made available.
The changes sought are thereby proven to the satisfaction of the decision makers and it becomes their legacy all the way through implementation. Comparison with alternative trials within or in opposition will minimize risk or advance the position of competitors. Given the period of work, in weeks or decades, the institutional response is to claim an impact and advocate for its continuation with confidence.
To reduce the abstractions of these three components, two recent events will illustrate the human problem inherent to the science of this practice. Science obscures additional motives by building silos. As 2018 ended, the incarceration practices of the federal government were reformed. In practical street intellect, this meant the 30+ year enforcement of harsh drug laws that achieved the re-enslavement (imprisonment) of African-Americans (mostly men) for nonviolent crimes would end (Watch 13th again).
The public investment in a huge federal prison system has consequences, however, accountability for this practice as a racial strategy is practically nil. Creating a big door through which cops and prosecutors could quietly push young men into federal prison (and still do in city/states) was easy to ignore due to a tacit agreement on both sides of the issue. Here it is in one sentence over the procession of two ounces of Marijuana. “We have 15 to 25 mandatory years on you that can go to seven maybe five with the name/location of your boss.” A generation of lives lost and for what, “El Chapo?”
The second event involves the language code that embeds a similar level of bigotry and racism. As the close of 2018, the word was “wall.” Create a wall to protect our borders from the demons to the south. Street-intellect reads that as keep out the Spanish speakers, the Mexicans, Hondurans and everyone else. The super short-term political trend exhibited here reveals consequences without the accountability to reason and practical solutions. An orderly process for dealing with immigration is consumed by the rhetoric of violence and a symbol upon which the 45th president can lean.
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrant’s scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
“Let America Be America” Langston Hughes
Persuasion is the responsibility of communication. The writer’s list project asks what writers can do with a list of billionaires coupled with some “hot button examples” and interest in shifting the narrative in ways that improve the focus of new media on questions of democracy and great wealth. Scroll or read down to see a list of billionaires.
Hundreds of writers focus on American democracy, yet the ability to conference meaningfully toward a collective capacity for persuasion has yet to be successful due to journalism’s “reporting” rule. It will be shattered soon. Examples of how and when the rule-breaking might begin are sought. Here are a few that interested me. I am sure there are many more to be found.
The Economist’s chief editor (Zanny Beddoes) maintains the anonymity of many writers, so they may “speak with a collective voice.” Kathrine Viner’s leadership of The Guardian seeks many readers’ participation using “be digital-first” and “free to the edge” strategies. Small groups snatch up specific issues organized by the Open Markets Institute. Mission: to “expose and reverse the stranglehold that corporate monopolies have on our country.” The Volokh Conspiracy (out of the Washington Post into Reason) is forming a conference of writers exposing the absurdities of journalism and the irrationality of law in a Democracy. The first family son at the New York Times (A.G. Sulzberger) will find new ways to speak truth to power about lies.
After 160 years of publication, The Atlantic reflected on its 1857 mission statement and summed it up with a set of core principles. Knowledge is partial and provisional and subject to analysis, scrutiny, and revision. Reasoning guides opinion with facts; ideas will have consequences, sometimes with world-historical consequences. The long version is here.
When The Atlantic hired Ta Nehisi Coates, he managed to convince the editors that their enormous megaphone has been held by plundering thieves for all of its 160 years. It would be necessary to act on this knowledge long-buried, ridiculously rationalized, and intentionally forgotten. I would love to have been in the room for that one, but I can hope and wait for the movie, I suppose.
All journalists need to be understood in the context of action demanded in the vitally important vision of the world held by Ta Nehisi Coates. I spent some time with Vann R. Newkirk II, Adrienne Green, Adam Harris, Reihan Salam, Gillian B White, and Matt Thompson. Unfortunately, I cannot speak to Ta-Nehisis Coates’s experience. However, I can read his books or any essay and fully understand the power of his voice and my hope for his influence.
The talent is not missing; there are many others. The big institutions in a democracy understand how governance’s quality weakens without writers’ fearlessness, but they also know they are often helpless in the din of voices. Where is the table for them to share a vision? They explore uncertainty with the creativity needed to fund that work. Where is the table?
Reinventing journalism in news organizations offers an opportunity to build a list of cooperative persuasion leaders. Starting with online publications is the short, natural step. However, the leaps needed to create an exchange between investigative journalism and longitudinal analysis of scholars remain. Before I get to some examples, let me add a personal story.
Big-brush/sweep machines clean the streets of New York on alternate days, and if a car is in the way, a “ticket” for $45 (pre-pandemic now $65 post-pandemic) is distributed. So people make way for the machines. I was late on one of those alternate-side days by exactly six minutes to see the fine laid on my windshield in its bright orange envelope. I said, “You guys are perfect!” The officer smiled and shot back, “Oh, no, honey, it’s just because there are so many of us!” Writers are like New York’s clean street officers with one exception, they are not as persuasive, and they don’t get results.
Here are those examples:
One: The Confidence Trap: David Runciman says Democracy favors complacency, especially if accompanied by trust. A crisis tests trust by producing an opportunity to muddle through just enough to make measurable improvements.
Two: In Nation of Devils, Stein Ringen describes “democratic government” as a contradiction defined by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). At best, the law displays a cloudy vision of an opportunity to develop policies for a healthier nation. The ACA’s details did not stop other capitalist democracies: Germany, Japan, UK, and Switzerland. All built national health care systems worthy of imitating. The U.S. “repeal and replace” quagmire spanned a decade only to reveal the mediocrity of American democratic governance.
Three: In The Last Vote, Philip Coggan describes how the social contract commitments made after WWII became bankrupt at conception. Nevertheless, the prospect of continued global chaos coupled neatly with interest in building a stable central bank system to sustain a permanent global borrowing cycle.
Four: David Post, like many writers on “the law,” has a different concern. His In Search of Jefferson’s Moose ties the importance of Democracy to that of the Internet, with the effect on the practices of democracy becoming a grinding combination of legal constructions built on precedent. Without national boundaries, cyberspace domains change the world every day.
Being a witness to a homeless family being more economically creative with a $10,000 stake in a food truck than all of Goldman Sachs is heartbreaking. But, it should also be instructive and that it has meaning. Super wealth is an institution established through slavery and investment in it. It drives the first steps, makes the rules, and imagines why “bad” gets first dibs, and in the history of governance, it tends to get authoritarian.
Facebook’s network platform is free in trade for your customer data. Unfortunately, that use led to a violation of privacy norms. It was in the fine print. The classic elements of a crisis: shock, denial, depression, anger, and a final stage, acceptance, swept across our minds and changed our experience in its use.
The financial crisis after 2008 exhibited the last two and most worrisome stages that spill into the violence of despair. That is why Steve Brill’s or Eric Posner’s observation of economies cannot change the world or get agreements on steps over their lifetime. Ideas like “quantitative easing” are effective, yet in a word – academic. They are the managers of the climax in the hazy relevance of the denouement. Books prove good facts are no longer enough.
The anger/acceptance stages of the 2008 crisis continue to rip the sparkle off the per capita income metric, and the product moving forward appears in a long list of appalling disasters. Yet, this is where it gets interesting. The world map shows where wealth creation and democracy as linked. The map of the states indicates the concentrations of that wealth.
The Democracy Index (world map above) is worthy of a detailed look at motives using the filter provided by three issues, 1) energy by type of use, 2) concentrations of wealth by micro-location, and 3) careful attention to the discourse of nations in which events are arranged in the plot, also known as “wagging the dog.” Self-governing societies will find applications to internet communications that extend a democratic republics’ capacity once protections from intrusions posed by authoritarian regimes are established.
| Teton, Wyoming | $28,163,786 |
| New York, New York | $8,143,415 |
| Fairfield, Connecticut | $6,061,357 |
| La Salle, Texas | $6,021,153 |
| Pitkin, Colorado | $5,289,153 |
| McKenzie, North Dakota | $4,709,883 |
| Shackelford, Texas | $4,585,725 |
| Westchester, New York | $4,326,490 |
| Collier, Florida | $4,191,550 |
| Union, South Dakota | $4,106,670 |
The Brookings Institution (here) compiled a map of the United States to look at geographic areas of prosperity, using a combination of data sets to reveal an index of “vitality” as part of The Hamilton Project. The map combines a county’s median household income, poverty rate, unemployment rate, prime-age employment rate, life expectancy, and housing vacancy rate. It presents a Vitality Index as a measure of a place’s economic and social well-being. I found it fascinating for comparison regarding the general location of the 1%.
The “red vs. blue” model of democrat and republican political party behavior by county or state tends to ignore sophisticated communication fraud levels at a global scale. Conflicting economic remedies from the political left and the right are abstractions aimed at preventing social conflict. Tension is natural to diversity and a good thing in many ways. Still, it can worsen when associated with the corruption of thought inherent to high concentrations of wealth and poverty.
The gap is more than economic (have and have not); it includes the “knowing” from the “unknowing.” The 1994 book Making Democracy Work by Robert D. Putnam (w/Leonardi and Nanetti) is a twenty-year look into Italy’s civic traditions. They found Democracy works by reinforcing regional identities and trust. The reach of ordinary ideas about how democracy works well draws out shared experiences.
The reach of reasonable self-governance they found no longer competes in a global economy. It is under attack. The evidence is in the range of experiences not shared. The range for this knowledge moves from mysterious offshore accounts to the helplessness of refugees that grow in total numbers and places. When a different way of life is upon a people, it occurs in one of two ways, creatively by the attentive or forcefully by the thoughtless. Both are embedded in the human heart and the sheer force of Nature’s DNA, the purpose of which is can only be understood in ten-thousand-year chunks of time. We witness distracting matches between authoritarian bullies and capital supremacists, the tolerance for which is unforgivable.
The worldviews formed by individual writers, small academic teams, and think tanks serving billion-dollar clients lack persuasive power. Demands to “lop off their heads” lack merit for most, and only a few rise above their own purposeful din. The result is a failure to communicate and implement remedies to a range of well-defined problems. So to soothe my own heart, I collected about a hundred individual Twitter feeds of the large social change institutions under subject headings (policy, voting, taxes, human rights) to prepare brief monthly summaries and evaluate their helplessness. Maybe a summary of 140 character statements over a period of time will reveal a pulse. So I put them together in what I like to call the Tweet-o-Rama.
What are the questions that lead to improved decision-making that results in effective action? We know writers such as Tom Friedman get his questions by extracting detailed accounts of global conditions. Wealthy Lexus drivers in aging cultures live alongside regions and nation-states that cherish olive trees because they are poor and young. Writers can take the market abstractions of global warming and climate change and make them concrete for the average person, not with facts but with hope. They can convince 80,000 people in Houston that floods will be routine in their neighborhoods. They can lead them to organize and join millions of other households in hundreds of other regions subject to firestorms, drought, pestilence, and addiction. Who are the writers that will lead people away from actions contrary to their well-being in the caveat emptor world of American Democracy?
I want you to pursue one idea as a member of a writers’ group (here when it is ready). The people on the writer’s list will focus on one group of people in America who function in an overlapping set of groups loosely defined by the phrase “political elite.” Why is this important? We know the terms; one percent of American households control more wealth than the ninety-plus percent of all other households and 38% of the nation’s total wealth. Statistically, the one percent represents 1.3 million households, but homing in on 12% (160,000 households) gets to the top of the elite pyramid. These are households with $25 million or more in annual wealth accumulation (2010), as nearly half of all billionaires are Americans. Researchers will find the others visiting just a few of its cities. The “roost principle” will connect people to the place with a bit of due diligence. The ten counties in the table above yield a significant number of opportunities. Wyoming has no income tax, so know that the celebrities listed are among the lower-income and are, for the most part, second-home ranch owners.
To find the top one percent, go to where the average household income is high and wait. Questions that cause the askance look, a hitch in the step, pupils widening of people in service to wealth work well. Chosen “birds of a feather” communities completely understood. Getting close requires hooks, levers, and some demographic imagination. The elite households in the $25 million and way above Paradise Papers group are definable (with exceptions) as people capable of creating a high office candidate (president, governor, senator). The “elites” shoulder tap is heavy – a military deployment to corporate interest areas, the management of armament/gun control emotions, even the disruption (or development) of the public interest in a sustainable and affordable system of healthcare could be a subject of interest.
Digging into the lives of people who own wealth feels personal. It isn’t. If the 1% is to be more than an economic abstraction, the work, purpose, and privileges of these super-rich members of our society require analysis beyond the “who and wow lists” available now. (See source: How Much.) For example, the wealthiest zip code is Fisher Island, located just off Miami. The island is accessible only by ferry or water taxi for its 500 households, and many of the units are investment properties with guest rents averaging $800 to $1,200/day. The island is just 193 acres, its tidy apartment buildings house at peak occupancy of about 1,400 people putting the population density at 46,000 per square mile. Nearby Miami Beach is only 5,000 people.
Who understands these contradictions well? More importantly, who are the best persuaders? Who or what injects actors onto the playing fields of social change. I want names that force a local debate. A successful dialogue often concludes with goals, objectives, and strategies. Local self-interest problems stimulate debate, and solutions will produce dialogue.
Two columns below the “Bumper Year Chart” provide examples. Of the wealthiest 100 people globally, there are 32 Americans ($12B to $100B) in the column on the left (1-32). On the right column (31 Americans), there is a list of the poorest of the rich ($4B and $5B)—the names on the list that follows a link to a Bloomberg.com profile. The task of writing thoughtful insights concerning the behavior of the elite holders of wealth is an impossible one. So, where is the starting point that discovers message controls? The third name on the list below is Buffet. He offers one idea on how to make some progress in understanding that facts are essential in how Senator Patrick Moynihan (NY-D) talked about them. The Senator often observed that we are entitled to our opinion, but we are not entitled to our own facts.
Warren Buffet’s factual logic makes him confident about the future. Despite challenges that link the concentration of wealth to the lack of engagement in reversing intolerable poverty, he and Berkshire Hathaway companies remain billion-dollar beneficiaries that prefer GDP growth over all other indicators. His argument for a positive future connects the rising tide of the annual GDP per capita. The optimism of “averages” draws from population growth of 0.5% (births minus deaths) and 0.3% through immigration for a total of 0.8%. A modest increase of 2% in real GDP without nominal gains produced by inflation would allow for a 1.2% growth in GDP per capita. Amortized over 25 years $59,000 GDP per capita in 2017 becomes $79,000. Buffet says, adding $20,000 is good news. His four words at the start of the 2020 pandemic were, “Never bet against America.”
The forces that continue to force wealth to the top to prioritize global wealth outside of a regulatory framework tend to discount the leading producer, a healthy and productive population. One can hear Buffet saying, ‘being blind to that is how you shoot yourself in the foot,’ but the following quote from his article in Time Magazine(1.15.18) are the facts he presents on why the nation could end up with a severe limp.
“…the Forbes 400 paints a far different picture. Between the first computation in 1982 and today, the wealth of the 400 increased 29-fold–from $93 billion to $2.7 trillion–while many millions of hardworking citizens remained stuck on an economic treadmill. During this period, the tsunami of wealth didn’t trickle down. It surged upward.”
Mike Bloomberg: Time Magazine(1.15.18)
The writer’s compensation is absolute freedom with no master other than the fellowship of those who seek a fragment of truth worth exploring. Thus, for example, Bloomberg reported in December that 500 of the wealthiest people on earth became $1 trillion richer in 2017. The louder point was that it was “more than four times” the 2016 increase. The chart below shows an average of $2.7 billion per day was added to the wallets of the wealthy from known sources.
Critics pointed to it as “shrugging off” growing economic, social and political divisions. The U.S. has a significant presence on the index, with 159 billionaires who added $315 billion, an 18 percent gain that gives them a collective net worth of $2 trillion. The total amounts to a 23 percent increase on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the world’s 500 wealthiest people and compare neatly with a 20 percent increase in the MSCI World Index and Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. One in every 20 Americans is a millionaire.
Note
The highest density of people who would consider a million a small amount live in a city-state known as Monaco, where almost 20 percent of households have assets totaling at least $30 million. The wealth tracking firm, Wealth-X, is a business that focuses on where the super-wealthy enjoy the privileges and benefits of tax havens along with the risk-taking of casino gambling.
The world’s residents are becoming the product of computational methodologies built to manage metadata on all forms of consumption. Example: Bloomberg has the power to keep himself off the list. The reason being “he’s giving it all away.” The simple truth is no one person could be as productive as his wealth expresses, and no one person, plus a charitable board, can be very productive in giving it away. That is what a democracy is designed to figure not, not fifteen well-intentioned people in a Manhattan boardroom.
The global aggregators of surveillance capitalism provide data loops requiring something in trade, with mouthful sentences like you need a box. The concealment of those on the list above is nearly total, but the wealth these individuals acquired in 2017 was enabled by invading your privacy. I have a box – it sits between me, my family, business, community, and network, and the rest of the world as I determine. In this box, I place my total data stream as I decide. Nothing leaves or enters that box without my permission. It was expensive but worth every penny.
A refined example of positive responsiveness is Browder’s DoNotPay. It offers “deep learning” artificial intelligence capabilities to help people in the U.S. and Great Britain prepare and file legal documents such as small claims suit against a credit report agency like Equifax. The AI will also write formal complaints to an insurance company and other related proceedings managed by law. Providing communal service platforms meeting a specific self-interest helps to put consumers in charge. The development of the GoodGuide and many other applications for that handheld computer called “phone” have similar interests in connecting the content of products to environmental impact and consumer preference.
These two forces – the data aggregators and consumption guides will continue to mature. However, as a nation of laws, American social and economic history illustrates the tension between these forces’ two regulatory structures. The first regulatory response focuses on the concentration of wealth with antitrust laws that expanded from the New Deal through WWII and concluded with public agencies such as the Environmental Protection Administration. Managing the growth and excesses of large corporate monopolies led to a need for a significant government response to assure public welfare. As a result, the environment and the economy improved.
The second regulatory structure sustains productivity with systems for economic fairness. Public resources such as Patent Law enforce monopolies on a product-by-product basis to support a wealth concentration process. Since the mid-20th century, the global integration of trade and communications is fast, and the regulatory framework is slow.
The exposure of absurdities in protected wealth as an indicator of productivity is sharply evident for the lack of results. For example, is it possible to believe an individual can be as productive as an annual increase of $2 billion in earnings suggests? Is it absurd to think a small board of directors managing $20 billion in annual charitable giving can do so with a few studies? They might usefully address a human need with effectiveness. Still, other than gaining a somewhat narcissistic sense of satisfaction, the processes are designed by tax law to support hundreds of small boardrooms incapable of concerted and coordinated implementation. Thus, they may feel “democratic” yet debate regarding the future of millions of people from these little hideaways of probable caring remain slaves to a sophisticated national system for establishing equilibrium.
National policies support local efforts to prevent dirt-poor households from getting above 15% in the nation but not by region. Those who find themselves on the short and foul end of the inequality stick are part of a continuous computational analysis under the Poverty Rate heading. The public policy concern focuses on containing and, in some cases, ‘hiding’ concentrations of poverty. The reasons were given, such as global competitiveness at the start of the 21st century, assure those on the long, pointed end of that stick will behave in the common interest. However, they no longer feel trustworthy, as wealth and self-interest are without inhibitors. Here is a chilling example. If the earth had 100 people – One person has 50% of all the money, 56 people have no internet access, 14 people cannot read, 13 people have no clean water (via Vala Afshar). Many of these “100 people” percentages to review (here), such as 86 can read and write, 14 cannot, or of 100 people, 5 speak English as a first language.
Overwhelming inequality is the breaking point of every society, whether a few thousand or a billion people. A half-century has passed since the University of Chicago’s thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s argued for economies of scale (Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and Richard Posner). As highly persuasive economists, they proved this practice would yield cheaper goods and services to consumers. The winning methodology altered the antitrust policy by placing measures of economic efficiency above all else. The counter-argument warned that top levels would produce large corporations and inhibit the decentralized development of a democratized society and impetus of reform movements in the overall economy.
The U.S./China rapprochement of 1972 and its aftermath neatly symbolize the result of this pathway. The Yale Law Journal examines the issue in a detailed analysis of Amazon’s business model as an antitrust paradox. The resulting excessive concentration of private power in nearly every category has continued since then. (See American Antitrust Institute).
Examples are:
The extraordinary possibilities of capitalism exhibited in a democracy are evident in the list above. Strong contradictions form how one-person/one-vote struggles with dollars per vote, pay-to-play, and so on. The former is a central principle of democracy, the others of capitalism. The contradictions are deemed acceptable with one proviso, a free and unfettered press. Frightening.
Writers have a media consumption preference that bundles into silos. Some like finding dark Toffler-laden tea laced with culture-war confrontations, misleading data; others like the opposite. Media trends build on event coverage. From top-tier media to social media posts, data platforms “reason” by an algorithm with print, sound, and voice information. Its meaning eventually emerges in people, but plucking concrete data from the digital realm reveals a person’s name, named places, dates, times, and all other numbers hidden in a meta-group. Ideas are inherently abstract, but when directly associated with one or more people, they become authentic. With it, I can pick your favorite car, including the one you can afford, and the GPS coordinates of both.
Industry’s use of media is specific to the needs of its users in the digital revolution. Journalists prepare news with feeds; businesses prepare annual reports with technology, and both pull concrete data from a wide range of outlets to measure changes in the world. Each provides strategic opportunities to maintain accuracy, cross-referenced by time, date, place, and sources. In all fields, but especially in advertising, public relations, and corporate Wall Street, the actions are proof of persuasive communications down to the microsecond.
Time is everyone’s money. My analysis of media companies and their compilers focuses on the tiers of persuasion that want the public to trust government leadership. For example, the economics of political media services track and drive press-mentions and then analyze them for impact. Message repeat processes produce trust, even if the message is a lie. Confidence, on the other hand, requires a relationship with journalists in specific industry areas. The resulting “lists,” cross-referenced with legislation, not only provide opportunities for exposure but also produces alternatives in a vastly expanded media environment.
Building insight into competitor’s and partners’ strategies is the essential component of understanding the distinctions in messaging style. Building collaborative media relations occurs best by connecting experts in various industries to establish themes, niche components, and trending topics. Ways to stay on top of the television, radio, newspaper, or blog news cycles on politics occur by increasing interactions with journalists that purvey issues specific or parallel to their areas of interest. Vehicles such as e-alarms will demand responses as part of an item coverage process quantifiable for impact successes. The abstractions described above are the shrill whispers of many (list), so here are some concrete examples.
Multimillion-dollar fund-raising and candidate-support operations with political party affiliations such as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are looking more closely at selecting local candidates based on benefits predicted by regression of the mean formulas. The average family does not exist, but from a data-only perspective, that non-existing family is doing far better in 2018 than in 2009. In the maturation of the Media Era & Digital Information Age (MEDIA)©, the ability to design formulas that provide a picture of events that move toward an exact middle point in the future verify the consistency of regular human experience.
On the other hand, the confidence provided by this capacity for prediction includes a form of arrogance that fails to recognize the enormous power of the outlier within the overall data framework. Viewing a young man shot down in the street sustains substantial influence because it was repeated repeatedly by news producers. Documented improvements between law enforcement officials’ behavior and people’s conduct in confrontation with society’s norms have occurred. Our generation’s dynamics require trust derived from the balanced exposure of wins and losses, but always toward better ways to confirm human dignity during its failures. Trust remains a reasonable objective, and people such as Eric Liu are fighting to provide it as a product.
Thanks to media platforms such as TED, we can encounter Eric Liu and get to know him without ever meeting him. His mission (see him here) as the founder of Citizen’s University is to train people in the art of urban living as “pro-social, problem-solving contributors of a self-governing community.”
He says we must ‘find ways to “show up” as vital citizens of a community for one reason – the constant examination of our democracy creates the change essential to sustaining our freedoms to do so. Continuing this vitality in the city from suburb to dense core provides opportunities to explore change and power. Liu defines power as it relates to change and describes it unapologetically as the capacity to make others do what you would have them do.
Dr. Margaret Mead’s observation of how small groups change the world offers no guarantees on how well, thus the need to pay attention. The evidence is in one aspect of the need to build new kinds of political awareness. The congressional elite represents one of those small groups. Some of the evidence is the use of rules and legislation that contradict a constitutional promise of public well-being in trade for private security. The congressional median income is well over $1 million, but the annual salaries are under $200,000 for all 534 members apart from the Speaker of the House.
Moving toward a perfect union is confronted hostage and quid pro quo tactics as the source of power. That they appear directed by those who cannot cope with the realities of our democracy is of great concern. Such dispensation will not bring peace to their society or ours. The ordinary citizen senses this as a kind of in their bones evidence. The raw competition for capital supplants the more useful search for agreements and compromises at the core of peace and security politics. The loss of democracy is at stake in The rise of authoritarian practices hints strongly at a loss of democracy and its principles of fairness.
The ordinary citizen can get updates when legislation is introduced and scheduled for debate or votes, even when it gets new cosponsors or hearings because outfits such as GovTrack will send them to you by email. Thus, with your “sign up” to a proposed law, notification of the entire process as it starts toward the POTUS desk is provided in your inbox. A good example is the quality of questions available when this is done by a small group of writers interested in a topic. For example, a few seconds will produce a map such as the one below.
Questions: Where are nuclear reactors in the Northeast? Why do you ask?
On Jan 29, 2018, Rep. Eliot Engel [D-NY16] introduced H.R. 4891: Dry Cask Storage Act of 2018 with co-sponsors from New York. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which will consider it before sending it to the House for consideration. With this, information a citizen can be ready to ask about Dry Cask Storage, what they are, how are they produced, where will they be placed over the next century, and most importantly, why this legislation is now? Casks are for spent nuclear fuel that has been “burned” in a nuclear reactor. They remain “hot” for centuries. Since Yucca Mt., NV closed in 2009. All those red dots still produce “burned” fuel rods. Local storage appears to be the necessary result. Citizens can seek out those who have determined that the development of nuclear electric power is a public dollar priority and decide what it means to include local storage.
Jamaal Bowman shocked the Democratic establishment by defeating Representative Eliot L. Engel, overcoming the old-guard party’s attempts to save a 16-term incumbent.
NEW YORK TIMES
Disjointed energy policies create expensive highway repairs and inefficient mass transit. The fossilized power grids, roads, and rail in the United States symbolize growing income inequality and support hostile polarization. The time for a strong pull from the heart of people as Americans is now. It may stop them from pushing themselves into the falsehoods of “taking a side” on every aspect of energy policy. But, first, it will be necessary to examine this “taking sides” problem.
For example, litigators for wealthy clients use “due process” to stall reform, and they are winning. The guarantee of due process grinds down reform efforts through a maze of courts. Arguments for improving worker safety or regulating the discharge of chemical waste can last decades. Clever due process litigiousness in energy policy turns to high stakes trading and away from long-term community prosperity. Legislative and financial engineering results in two societies, a small, well-protected class and the hopeful. As the list of threats to human health and well-being grows, the nation’s trust in a better future is a factor held well past its due date—wealth streams to the top echelons at an astounding rate. The rate itself may encourage bankers and brokers to put the welfare of homebuyers and small businesses at risk simply to sustain trade. The darkest example is the exposure of the NINJA home mortgage scheme to bundle loan securities despite a “no income no job application.” Is there a “side” regarding this behavior, other than right and wrong?
The global overshoot problem is due to human consumption. Kate Raworth offers methods and arguments for a more beneficial economy. She sees it built on regenerative and distributive systems designed to meet individual and community essentials. The step toward essential from food and water to the production and shedding of complex materials, human use patterns extend beyond the earth’s ability to provide. The solutions to these problems have two expectations. The first is the apocalyptic solution. Individuals, communities, and nations build on fear of destruction and deploy a disturbing “fitness” for survival policy. The second is a hopeful focus on scientific and technological interventions occurring throughout history. Various direct actions and mitigations can leverage the overshoot problem into an opportunity for human advancements in global asset management.
A few minutes of her talk (here) leaves you with agreement on nine ecological crises facing human settlements. Climate change is an “easy one” with known solutions. Getting to effective implementation is the challenge. Even if it is incremental, it must recur and thereby exhibit control over a process.
Leadership organizations represented by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Partnership for Public Service dedicate resources for performance-measured actions. Their politics deal with big issues such as ozone depletion (global) and deadly air pollution (local), while climate change, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, nitrogen, and phosphorous loading continue. They evaluate global threats such as freshwater withdrawal, land conversions, and the loss of biodiversity. All of this without a measure for a political change capable of demanding prevention as the alternative to repairs after the fact. Known ecological ceilings prove prevention works, but it also links to taxation, and the cost of living that leads to local bets on quality housing, health, education, public safety, as well as important protections from fraud, violence, and lies.
Comprehensive well-being remains a local power through specific actions. The lack of compromise, consensus, and political resolve for others’ well-being who are in trouble stands as a central problem nationally, but not in your neighborhood. However, other actors are taking a global gamble on the low odds of an active resistance capable of lopping off heads yet retain a capacity to sustain the commons’ morality.
A thought experiment. List all the things as regenerative components from the following priorities: water, food, health, energy, education, income and work, peace and justice, political voice, social equity, gender equality, and networks. Each has a social foundation defined by its participants to design requirements that meet their unique local locations’ demands. Then, apply a set of decision tree questions (Yes/No) directly linking a local or regional regenerative need and global concern. I like the idea of starting with the decisions produced by large corporations’ public powers and the private behavior of the super-wealthy.
“The wealth of the “one percent” is a problem because their instructions to money managers are boring. Examples might be hey, “don’t lose my money,” or “assure my estate’s growth rate is ahead of inflation with minimized levels of risk.” There are exceptions, of course, but not enough of them to resolve the risk, gender, and racial wealth gap. The problems in ordinary working people’s experience are reminders that access to reasonably level playing fields are requirements. It used to be your favorite “Anchorman” could be trusted, leading to everyone wanting to be an anchor.”
RLC
The inequality of wealth and opportunity among different regions of the United States are like those across neighborhoods of the nation’s large cities or the earth. The city solves big problems in thousands of small ways. Aggressive efforts in the production and preservation of affordable housing, effective deployment of resources for immigrant families, an extensive re-investment in public education, and a diversity of people capable of standing shoulder to shoulder against forces that would divide are urban tools against intolerance and hatred. Subsequently, the security of future generations is possible unless they are asleep or put there.
I request the names of independent writers on American democracy and the names of the elite among the one percent of interest to them. Each writer will be interested in a specific set of these elite actors (via political position, corporate employment, or investment behavior). One or a combination of no more than two of the following subject areas will drive content: Human Health, Social Welfare, Banking, Finance, Insurance, Real Estate, Foreign Policy, International Relationships, Global Climate, Energy, and Defense.
Businesses understand goal attainment for ideas like sustainability. The elite are those who set out to acquire the enormous wealth held by Post WWII American people. The idea of compelling the formation of that wealth to benefit the rest of the world follows an established model – destroy, build, repeat. William Simon’s A Time for Action (1980) presents the financial details tested against long-term political experience and his core belief that governments that give businesses everything they want can also take it away. Regulatory relief and the aftermath of the 2008 recession proved that the government had to put back a ton of cash. Its many actors slipped into the financial fog of litigant confrontation. Insert expressions of freedom into this give-to-take governance problem, and you have a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, and Independent dialogue. The Simon-vein of political give and take compromise is reason enough to implement a sustained “what’s next” analysis of the current situation, but this alone is not persuasive.
An elite household recently produced a candidacy and a presidency on an apparent disrespect for the politically elite and therein lays the new opportunity. The relationship that the elite has to the issues of the day will give writers a clear opening for a strategic narrative capable of turning the suppositions of the conservatives regarding political power into a set of unique American propositions based on an appreciation for reason and argument.
The political confusion summarized in Tom Sowell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies adds a lot of fuel to the idea that nothing matters more than winning the argument now. Creating this condition is the sole criterion for success. The ability to persuade in the moment or a few weeks or days before an election, a board meeting, or a declaration of war aims to release resources immediately. Such activities are the enemy of creative imagination; they feed thirst and hunger with no thought of drought. They satisfy in increments with a poor view of the fragmented structures that lay in the wake of every act of selfishness.
If American Democracy is no more than a flash in the history of human freedom, it will be a bright one. Alternatives to “he said, she said,” culture-war banter will reduce disdain and distortion and contentiousness. One source of this problem is the grouping of “people like us” in communities. Cultural segregation has been ongoing since WWII and encouraged through national urbanization policies, the practice of “steering” in real estate, and widespread support for belief systems that sustain the isolation of people. These highly selective forms of seclusion reduce the desire for tolerance and interest in moderation.
Writers should not avoid using a tabloid-like approach regarding news of the elite and their link to the pocketbook experience of the 99%. Therefore, the use of dates, times, and numbers in ways that make sense. One example: the billionaire’s list shows wealth as a multiple of the national household median income to elites. Multiply 1.7 million times $60,000, and you have a wealth of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos around 2015. This forces one question. How is it possible for one person to be that productive? It won’t be easy to unite writers as highly trained paparazzi aimed at billionaires, but it will happen for two reasons.
In my Literary Criticism (Class 457), Prof. James demanded a thoughtful and thorough examination of written work. From the first sentence to the last, he asked his students to tease out themes. If we saw symbolism or meaning, our expressions had to come through each character’s experience as reflected in our time and place in Room 342 every Tuesday in 1972. In non-fiction work, the same principle is applied. I learned to reduce a three-thousand-word policy paper to 200 words or less with dates, numbers, named places, and people. An idea is concrete if linked to a person(s) by name; otherwise, it remains abstract. In concrete terms, you know that I took a class in 1972, where Prof. James taught lessons on using concrete data in literary criticism.
Writers know how to be concrete. The enemy of this effort in persuasive writing will be too many words. I know, I know.
The second reason is more complex and subject to the contest of assumptions. Over the last three decades, we have become accustomed to the world described best in Deborah Tannen’s 1999 book, The Argument Culture. Since then, hostility combined with the discipline of 140 characters and the power to broadcast them globally leaves one remaining issue – getting as many people as possible to pay attention for a few minutes. In a cross-disciplinary sense, the theme of her bestseller, You Just Don’t Understand, catches sight of the debate on the future of American democracy. Add Patricia Turner’s worldview (I Heard It Through the Grapevine) and Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, and the reasoned and well-channeled description of sex and race in America provides the footing for moving writers forward like a force of history fully capable of persuading their readers to resist authoritarian “divide and rule” governance solutions.
The challenge to truth is not “the lie,” but algorithms that can target the people to act on a specific issue for the best effect quickly. A revolution in the revenue stream is how the bulk (99%) of new paid advertising in media is alongside user-selected content. No one is non-targetable or immune from a story, whether true or false. Producing stories from “news farms” based in like Macedonia will look the same as value-driven news agencies such as The Guardian, The Economist, The Washington Post, or the New York Times. Paywall or not, these and some 120 newspapers in the nation have begun a ready, fire, aim, and re-aim process to secure their financial and editorial independence and safeguard the journalistic freedom and the liberal or conservative values that free them of commercial interference or political control.
Access to an expanding list of recommended writers is (HERE). To suggest names, use this address: click here. As the file acquires thematic consensus (12-18 mo.) and an internal sense of balance, a process that looks to the quality of change described below might begin with persuasive skills.
“For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun, the winds, and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And, we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.”
President Barack Obama – Inaugural Address (1.20.2009)
The purple, red, and blue of election districts, counties, regions, and states of the Republic reflect the people who vote. The election district image reveals a purple country. It reflects the diverse views and opinions at the neighborhood level. The overall appearance is of a non-decisive experience. Not until Congressional representatives become state icons are people encouraged to take a “with us or against us” experience into the red or blue silos. The left and right model is, therefore, bankrupt.
Political leadership will always be a force capable of producing extreme attitudes. It can also generate moderate views, rightful independence, and outright nonconformance. A new up, down, from the top-down or bottom-up image, is needed. It also needs to be as sideways and wiggle-waggle as possible to help us think and perhaps laugh at the absurdity in much of our discourse. An active localism result and its new and innovative approach will not eliminate the violent polarization represented by the depressed who find themselves lost, perhaps criminally insane in the malaise of disagreement. Animosity does not acquire political conformity or year-to-year compromise. Negotiation, tolerance, and kindness, on the other hand, work. Where do you find it? I know that because of one truth and one goal, the big cities yield a solid shoulder-to-shoulder acceptance of the work before us, and when cities get their power back, all the people of this nation will be healed.
“Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.”
FDR
Participate or stay in touch and decide later….
Most of us are lifelong learning type of people, and every so often we find opportunities online that help one to think things through. Recently, I have been exploring the expansion of political engagement in the United States and discovered an easily audited MOOC (a massive online open course). For $50 you could draw down proof of purchase with an academic compliance certificate after taking an odd little quiz. The Dr. Nicholas Carnes, the author of The Cash Ceiling and White-Collar Government, offers Civic Engagement in American Democracy along with Dr. Bruce Jentleson, a seasoned historian and author of The Peace Makers. With several others on the Duke University faculty serving the Stanford School of Political Science, the course via the Coursera platform examines political structures and leadership.
If you don’t give these mostly white male academic actors their $50 you are not allowed to finish the audit and get answers to a crafty “think independently” style quiz. These disappointments are instructive of the racket that is American higher education, but that said, there are worthwhile things to share in this Duke-MOOC.
The course starts with civic engagement as a top-down prerogative found in the U.S. Constitution, a document designed by our privileged founders in such a way that it became inclusive of all people. For that, we give them a lot of credit. The course briefly breaks down government structures while implying one central question.
Do we have political representatives that become powerful due to their response to the demands of leadership in their time, and therefore yield lessons of success and failure for serious study?
When forced to ask if there is such a thing as profiles in courage or is it more likely the practice of covering up mistakes creatively, the assumption is you can do both. Applaud and boo and hiss. This avoids one other possibility. Has America become a nation where the most important things cannot be discussed or debated. The important things go unsaid.
The Duke-MOOC’s questions about leadership reveal distinctions between the style of presidential leadership vs. the presidency as an institution. The course design implies the need for the renewed focus of political scientists on system dysfunctions, but that is not relevant, lest the core message of this MOOC goes unrecognized as follows:
Political leadership in a democracy does not have a beating heart worthy of a stethoscope unless it helps ordinary citizens discover the conditions conducive to opportunities for successful change. It must have enough force to demystify and redesign failing institutions. The institution of the presidency in this context as recognized in the laws of Congress is limited but shapeable, even flexible when it remains outside of individual leadership styles, especially those that are suggestive but not dispositive of any question such as the concepts for change made by the President of the United States, people began to experience in 2017.
Following the debate initiated in the Federalist Papers (Jefferson, Hamilton, and Jay) the Articles of Confederation matured. One question was whether the national leadership should be “a President” or an “Executive Council”. The newspaper format not only established a set of values for a high quality of governance, but it also did so with transparency. The result became the separation of powers, checks, and balances. A President (Article II), a Congress (Article I) and a Judicial Branch (Article III) will rule “a Republic if we can keep it” as Ben Franklyn is described as saying. The Federalist Papers are revered because they brought to its participants a clear, well-thought-out settlement of the issues.
In this design, power and influence could shift between the Presidency and Congress (examples) however, the central governing authority gave Congress the capacity to remove a President, but not the reverse. Another is the President is the Commander-in-Chief, but only Congress can declare war. Treaties with other countries are signed and negotiated by the President, but the Senate must approve (2/3 vote). Top officials are appointed, but the Senate must confirm by a majority. Finally, the Constitution gives more power to Congress on trade with other nations and among the states. All these capacities for leadership were developed as powers vested in the Constitution and specifically designed to prevent the emergence of an autocratic and monocratic presidency.
Perhaps the most beautiful concept of the design is how it provided for a network of federal courts that could be easily replicated by the States. The Republic continued to build, first in the ratification of the Constitution and to each new State the rights to supreme power lawfully held by the people and their elected representatives. The prospect of a renewable union through elections and local, state, and presidential nominations expressed balance in its concern for the people. It holds an essential concept for change as reasonably manageable and a promise of a process for justice through law.
In 2018, the ordinary citizen’s understanding of presidential powers is very different on issues such as war, treaties, top officials, commerce, and global trade. It appears the President is in charge of it all and when it goes bad, the question turns away from the institution of the Presidency and toward individual Presidents as powerful actors. The issues surrounding the 116th Congress Congress 1/2019 to 1/2021 are whether investigations replace legislation. Will there be an insight into the creation of law as this is their mandate? Will both houses of Congress slide into an oversight malaise? Will it provide evidence of honor or obstruct the evidence of dishonor? Will it be wrong if nothing is resolved?
Connecting the lessons of 2018 with the future (2020 and beyond) is how well the forces of civic engagement in a democracy can restate America’s vision, dreams, and tragedies. Just as these events were experienced by our Founders, they extend from every first-year student to graduating class and from elementary schools to colleges, and how this easily translates into leadership by representatives, staff, or volunteers in helping to identify, define and solve problems.
The American political system works through a set of crucial actors with varying power during specific periods of the election cycle. These components are not well known, yet they continue to build toward an “election day” and engage organized “club” voters who make decisions that will influence the electorate based on participants and issues. For good or ill this is where the heart of a democracy beats, so why is it considered boring, monotonous, dull, even deadly? One answer is the people they inject into politics don’t do what “I’m Just a Bill” says they do or what School House Rock missed. (Here). The House website has all the details for bill making (Here). Spend a few minutes with these processes and the disconnect with local concerns is apparent, along with the tendency to make bad laws that trigger poor use of our Article III powers.
The ordinary citizen’s engagement with political leadership is rarely exposed as viable unless your subscription to Netflix is considered equivalent to your representatives’ Twitter feed. The addition of participants with the capacity to organize large sums of money and talent notwithstanding, the “up-from-the-grassroots” process is what makes the top-down behavior of congress members, senators, and judges come alive as constitutional actors. Local political clubs of ordinary people determine who runs and how. An analysis continues by district and office from local to federal that allows participants to compare incumbents who are 98% successful in defeating challengers. These clubs decide what issues candidates can speak to with credibility. They will examine records of accomplishment and coach them on the hot buttons of the day (i.e., health care costs, immigration, DACA). It is condensed to one of my favorite street phrases about modern-day political representatives – “They can talk the walk, but they can’t walk the talk.”
Once the choice of candidates is complete and aimed at the next election cycle, the value of local issues in the form of cash and vote capture is exposed. A candidate does not have to be rich to lead but improving the grassroots knowledge of the problems of wealth and government is a starting point of high value on every question related to the quality of public life and the capacity of civic engagement to get results. Comparing the percentage of contribution from ordinary citizens and public matching with the cash from PACs and other significant funding sources also compare neatly with decisions to suppress or build-up voting. In the nexus of these forces determining vote capture is where the fulcrum for change in the quality of civic engagement requires placement.
There are rules. I cannot give my Congressional Representative that extra half-million in mattress cash, but I can run ads on TV against her opponent, which is more fun and more effective than talking up her accomplishments and general wonderfulness. Because this is a power that can only be accomplished because I am rich makes it seem unfair. The idea of constitutional power extends from “natural persons” to corporations and similar entities and that they make everyone else listen to them using TV time and campaigning more than any single person also tilts the field.
Within this broad spectrum of power and latitude lies the creative point of law, from which corporate personhood as we know it has emerged. Despite beautiful legal minds, why does the creation of this new force in society feel so haphazardly developed, contentious, antagonistic, and from which it will no doubt proceed indiscriminately? Two sources are offered for review. The first is a leader in opposing the principles presented in the Citizen’s United case by the Center for Economic Policy and Research (Here), However, going straight to the Supreme Courts Blog will offer a more direct route into the business of Constitutional Law as it is practiced today before the people (Here).
The information age provides a variety of translators regarding the meaning of events due to the actions of a specific interest group, a political party, a community, or a private business activity. All these actors, including those who are violent, exhibit in an environment of multiple perceptions, persuasions that communicate with documented actions. The coexistence of these views as pluralism has become corrupt due to our new world, the one that contains a proliferation of media platforms. The MOOC upon which this essay builds describes this condition with dog metaphors. It goes something like this: A media outlet can have a “watchdog” approach, always looking for an intruder or investigating one. The stories are appreciated, but their watchfulness can also be described as “lapdog” in a social or economic climate of good times and news. To attract more readers Seeing Eye Dog media envisions pathways of change to the future. Reader boredom will lead a hungry media outlet into an “attack dog” frame of mind. It will search for “man bites dog” stories. Finally, you will find Puppy dog journalism presenting cuteness as its source of attention.
A dog is an enjoyable companion, as a metaphor for media, it puts a news outlet into the retail entertainment environment. As such it will struggle to survive in a digital market that humanly speaking is a ruthless sovereign more easily than any other autonomous form. Multiplatform media is a problem if the value of political thought is to remain sustainable, in the sense that it does not cause harm in the search for our better selves in the way William Wordsworth spoke of it:
When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.
The value of metaphors such as doglike digital media is transparent. It provides for an analysis of categories of news activities such as politics, sports, entertainment, food, real estate, even pets. There is exchange value in the trade for knowledge in each of them. Instead of looking for attention or getting a trick or two with some treats, this digital dog media wants a complete recording of your online existence as an expression of your life. From a civic engagement point of view, the question for debate is whether it is a fair trade. The history of political accountability builds on the separation of government from the press to assure free expression, but it also leads to tough choices concerning responsibility, and rightly so.
The Federalist Papers encouraged its readers to recognize a variety of viewpoints. Still, in the framing of our Constitution, the public demand for a system of solutions had a priority, the best decision is the one that holds and controls the high ground of consensus. The proof that a process can maintain and manage events toward goal accomplishment is because they will recur. Here are two examples:
In Federalist No. 70 (1788), “The Executive Department Further Considered,” The idea of a council was proposed as an alternative to a President. Hamilton argued for a single executive. He believed it would be less dangerous to democracy because one corrupt person would be more straightforward to remove from power than bad actors in an Executive Council. Hamilton’s position prevailed on this point of recurrence, and it built on other conditions such as the speed needed for many decisions coupled with the capacity for secrecy when required. Here, the full admission of the positive and negative aspects allows a process where decisions were made final and ratified. The legacy of the papers remains well known, as challenging debate articles reprinted in news and magazine formats for distribution. That world is now a vast digital network where essential priorities can be lost. Here is an illustration of this complexity.
As the CEO of Public Radio International, Alisa Miller’s insight regarding changes in the human knowledge condition has focused on the exponential change in reporting the news in broadcast media’s super-connected world. She points to the revenue issue by comparing the number of seconds used to report events in February 2017 (Nuclear North Korea, United Nation’s dark report on global warming, flooding in Indonesia) and then points out why the death of Anna Nicole Smith received ten times the coverage of the UN report. First, it was cheaper to recycle AP and Reuters. Second, the 50% reduction of foreign news bureaus by American media outlets, and third, most people get their news from local TV stations that who spend only 12% of their time on world events, while according to a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found over 50% of Americans have a severe interest in global issues. A clip of chart (below) from her TED talk illustrates this contradiction.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)
To help illustrate the rate of change since the observations made by Alisa Miller in 2008, all the above and more are available for viewing and reading across “all of your devices.” In partial recognition of this new exponent in media, the TCPA charges the FCC with making it unlawful to use automatic dialing equipment and prerecorded messages to contact consumers on their mobile devices without prior consent. Parallel businesses such as Neustar have formed to help telemarketers assure (or evade) compliance.
Other companies such as Granicus are digital communication services designed to provide sources of public data (e.g., legislation, policy changes, meetings, minutes, voting, lawsuits) for political representatives and government agency clients. The business model of both use digital platforms that integrate information and communicate content conveniently to their client’s constituents. Restrictions on telemarketing messages distributed on rapidly changing platforms inject ambiguity into the making of public policy. For example, federal government officials and agencies are not subject to the TCPA rule, but the FCC has yet to address whether the TCPA federal exemption applies to state and local governments. Since the passage of this law (2005), it remains unclear what the FCC will do.
States and local governments’ interest in citizen and community engagement is an investment in content management. Granicus is designed to serve individual households with a citizenship experience. Public agencies seek the use of digital services for meetings, data delivery, general access, and record keeping. People can sign up and get alerts straight to their inbox when minutes are digitally published or laws drafted. Digital services can help neighborhoods and communities to define and solve problems with government agencies and staff.
Location-aware, internet-connected devices in the pocket of nearly every adult and child have an enormous capacity for the provision of information from changes in transit schedules to Amber Alerts. Often touted as an integral part of the smart city or government, the public charge is to assure accountability in the provision of accurate and reliable information. While the jury is out on “smartness,” laws such as the TPCA, suggest principles that encourage transparent management of public documents. In the screaming birth stages of digital devices, growing pains are inevitable. Like an eye-to-eye handshake, paying close attention to the public’s digital face and grip has been added to the watchfulness requirement. Public website portals provide a foundation of necessary access to information, including routine evaluations of the agency’s outcomes in regular reports. Performance-based management of every public act will be known whether it is the never-ending work of street repairs to managing the legislative process, each is an act of leadership in the public interest that can be recorded.
On the question of human nature, Milla Jovovich, playing the role of Leeloo in The Fifth Element says, “Everything you create, you use to destroy.” Her message is one that produces a millennium of drum beats. More than the existence of earth, air, fire, and water is the reality of love in resistance to hate.
Reading the Constitution via the National Archives may be an excellent pastime on how legislative bodies can make laws but offers little insight into the processes changing a life today. In contrast, reading the debate framework of The Federalist Papers reveals reverence drawn from historical relevance, experience, and reflection. We see how the ratification of the Constitution became possible, June 21, 1788. That it took twelve years to accomplish also captures attention. The details of the entire process are available from the National Constitution Center (here).
Over a two and a half-century period, the formation of a two-party system became central to the process of American self-governance. During that period, we have watched large-scale corporations and institutions grow too complicated to comprehend fully. Imagine yourself in the expansive boardrooms of a global corporation; its glass curtain wall exposes a vast urban landscape. The ocean glistens toward sunset. The agenda in this boardroom is to review the methods underway to sustain the expansion of global market contracts for the members around the table according to earnings reports confirming another quarter of extraordinarily continuous growth. All following conversations address mitigations by staff to meet that end. These two parts – sustaining market power and mitigating threats are one in both business and politics and represent a “third party” with a global scale.
| Replacing concern for two-party politics, with interest in global organizations will improve the governance of democracies. |
The power and mitigations process of the two-party system is unlikely to weaken, even though 43% of the electorate prefer a focus on issues as independent thinkers, thereby expressing significant disdain for the “them vs. us” condition we live with today. In a segment of the Duke MOOC, Phillip Bennett presents a kind of hopelessness on this point. He suggests the review of many sources confirming gloom and doom and starts by calling out David Broder’s book The Party’s Over. He also recommends The Pew Research Center and Gallup tracking of this condition in reports such as “Americans Less Interested in Two Major Political Parties,” at Gallup (2015).
In contrast, Tana Johnson seems hopeful, in her book, Organizational Progeny. She presents “bureaucracy” as a tainted entity, but more importantly, she sees progress in the growth of global governance structures as bureaus. Her book draws up an index of non-state actors around the world for analysis and points to a new depth of social networks, multinational businesses, and the thousands of independent agencies working on global markets and environmental concerns. These agents are achieving steps toward parity with state actors. The consensus is on one point. National political and business self-interest practices are harmful to the well-being of the earth. The proof is forthcoming slowly on specific dangers, involving death from large groups of people to coral reefs. The framework for building this knowledge does not come from state actors, but by paying attention and understanding the expanding role of International Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO). The central idea is the so-called “international community” does not exist today, but once (or if) a common set of values are found, it could. The European Union’s efforts to improve the market conditions for trade are based on a shared interest. The EU is summarized here.
Successful organizational development design includes structures that support decisions made by those closest to the source of information on an issue, in how they address problems on the ground, evaluate causes, and recommend the next steps. A good example is represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Instead of concern for the fate of national politics and their parties, the interest of the IPCC in the global, intergovernmental system offers insight into ways to improve governance in a Democracy as a civic engagement issue.
The earliest lessons in the creation of democracy begin with the struggle for independence found in the growing respect for law as an alternative to obstruction or war. Rules that prevent the design of an IGO as a creature of a nation-state assures decision-making methods are built on majority opinion or voting among groups within their bureaus. Internal respect for mission grows by not allowing low-level hindrances such as control of individual project funding or vetoes aimed at preventing the implementation of research, or demonstration programs. Designs with co-equal parts also provide a laterally broad (vs. vertical), organizational structure with interconnected and autonomous. The injection of financial resources from related IGOs further insulates their activities from the control of an individual country, state, or powerful actor.
The experience of the IPCC in developing policies and support for initiatives to increase independence and implementation capacity is in the design of the IPCC by the Reagan Administration. It was their decision not to install mechanisms that could obstruct and this led to a variety of “unorthodox methods to intervene in the IPCC’s work” by the George W. Bush Administration many years later. It was too late to inject state control mechanisms. Why? Tana Johnson selects one word — progeny. The formation of new global interest organizations as of 2000 represents 80% of all IGO formations, and they are the progeny of existing IGO agents, not nation-states. The increase is up from 40% of new post-war IGO starts 1940-1949. The crucial element is how the organizational design is developed in contrast to a nation state’s typical imputation of controls that could be used to put a local interest ahead of global concern. IGOs with a worldwide mission framework thereby include the support of many small states. In effect, Republics are forming based on common ground issues and self-interests in global networks designed to obtain a majority vote capacity.
Funding diplomacy as a problem solver is far less costly than weapons.
Human relationships are repairable and renewable, armament is nothing more than lethal waste.
In 1971, Bretton Woods (IMF & World Bank) renewed its charge on global currency objectives amidst extensive criticism. A half-century later the subject is how the IMF and World Bank function with greater independence than imagined yet fail. War, famine, under-employment, and other deteriorating global conditions exhibit the inability to resolve past wrongs more effectively. Correcting bad decisions and weak behaviors are not functions of the fiscal discipline demanded in loan agreements. Infrastructure projects financed by the World Bank Group also draw criticisms on the ethical issues associated with funding projects that cause the displacement of indigenous people only to reflect the dominance and priority of the industrialized nations. National economic policies are predetermined under IMF G7 styled packages (20 in 2018) leads to the loss of authority to govern the economy, especially among the small states. The G7 was formed to sustain a steady flow of fossil fuels and function today without the consultation of developing countries or those that are changing rapidly due to climate change. The lack of a useful organizational design built on controls over capital alone exposes the central principle of global stewardship that one nation can never be as smart as all of them and an organizational mechanism for one has become apparent.
Given the subject, Organizational Progeny has sustained readability. In the first 20 pages, the lessons for improving the U.S. democracy tell me not to look at political representatives by a party in any nation-state, but by how many political representatives understand their bureaucracy. The proof is in the following eight chapters. Improvements in global well-being through an expansion of IGO capacity to produce a self-improving progeny is possible, but one look at the index of U.S. Bureaucracy (HERE) gives one no such hope. Nevertheless, establishing greater international relationships through these agencies is a route well worth exploring.
The most prevalent form of presentation of over 430 American government agencies is a list organized alphabetically. (but) Perhaps, organizational design is possible in the sense that defining “a system” can only be accomplished by using an even larger and more complex one. There is no authoritative list of the vast American bureaucracy; perhaps the Federal Register index/add year is a better source. The Register allegedly updates it at the end of each month. The legislation that created the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA.gov) is maintained by the Department of Justice]. Here, about 80 independent executive agencies with 175 executive departments are on their list. The criteria for the selection of this number is they comply with FOIA requirements, although they are imposed on every federal agency.
Perhaps more than all the other agencies representing government largess, instrumentality, mission, or management, the people in the FOIA offices represent the rise of a specific status group. Standing in public service remains central to officeholder credibility. If the mechanisms for access to public information begin to fail, think “house of cards,” think of yourself as impressionable and incapable of independent thought because you cannot prove your sources as reliable.
Michael Lewis reports on the Trump administration’s approach to staffing the federal government in his 2018 book, The Fifth Risk. There are examples such as 1) WMDs at home going off, an attack from 2) North Korea, or 3) Iran or fundamental infrastructure failure, especially 4) our fragile electric grid. Lewis sees the fifth risk 5) as “the thing you’re not thinking about when you’re worried about whatever you’re worried about.”
He sums up that fifth thing under the heading of “project management,” and despite the public hostility toward the services of government, the battle to reduce and destroy them from the top down has accelerated under conservative leaders in Congress since Obama’s mid-second term. Conservatives project individual strength (wealth, deal-making, and skepticism with press critics who among others are openly demonized. The management practice is to weaken or eliminate service institutions, especially if not statutorily protected. These are the ingredients of authoritarian business.
One quick story that Lewis tells that sums up his main concerns with the government. Catherine Woteki is a world-class authority on agricultural science. Her responsibility at the Department of Agriculture was to manage and review research grants approaching $3 billion, much of it on examining the impact on food production in the U.S. due to extended periods of drought, heavy rain, high winds, and substantial flooding. In January 2017, Trump replaced her with Sam Clovis, a right-wing talk show radio host from Iowa. He is without a science background, but he supported Trump in 2016. I hear Trump’s voice as he says, “Call my friend Sam if you need research money.” He’s a great guy.” Clovis withdrew his nomination in November 2018 following his connection to Russian interference in the election and substantial opposition in Iowa. Lewis points out that resistance to “old boy” politics is one reason for the structure and success of the Civil Service. Have you ever heard of the Sammie Award? Have a look (Here). It is about loyalty to the United States and its people.
Given the broad historical sweep of Congressional power, the rise of public cynicism, and policy, the strongest tend to occur during periods of prosperity. The power of the president strengthens if there is economic trouble or threats. The strength of this power is diminished as Congress responds to discontent over the Vietnam War. When the Watergate scandal erupted, it was Congress that forced people to tell the truth and that led to President Nixon’s resignation. Nevertheless, Congress’s role requires the regular citing of relevant provisions of the Constitution to sustain its power, and there stand nominations to the Supreme Court. There should be a copy in the pocket of every member of Congress. Here are some reasons.
The work of the executive branch staff works hard to put Congress, as a coequal branch, in a subordinate position. Congress will often fail to take the power the Constitution gives it when difficult questions are posed. It avoided a vote on the war in Iraq, and when that happened it became known as Congresses, “use-it-or-lose-it” power, therefore yielding to the emergence of an “imperial presidency” since it was the first attempt in the Gulf of Tonquin, Vietnam.
The 1994 midterm elections reduced Bill Clinton’s power when Republicans captured control of the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. In that year, Speaker Newt Gingrich’s (R-GA) “Contract with America” sought to make Congress the center of the federal government and implement significant tax cuts. Then Congress was eclipsed by President Bush due to the 9/11/2001 that allowed him to draw on the President’s role as commander-in-chief.
Since 2001, the Supreme Court has found federal laws unconstitutional 14 times. The justifications for doing so generally fall into three distinct categories described (Here) Putting Congress on the curb allows the executive branch to stonewall its party representatives on all issues from energy to the replacement of the Senate Majority Leader (First R-TN replaces Lott (R-MS).
The power The Executive might wane with the rise of congressional “oversight” power, but the word tends to mean lack of sight and routine mistakes. It is a congressional oxymoron. When Congress finds itself boxed in by Presidential powers, it is time to sit in the Senate and listen. If there are great debates taking place with respect for facts, the country’s leadership can strengthen, if not it is every citizen’s responsibility to find out why they are not talking openly.
Finally, in the spirit of MOOCs around the world, look for the work of our youngest professionals n screaming out of the academy in search of something that stands firmly in the world, does not equivocate or sidestep the reasons we love our country and earth. All people are different yet inspired by a straightforward opportunity – to live a good life, to be unharmed yet fearless in the search for a more perfect union. Here is just one more idea of precedent among millions of other insights worthy of the few thousand others that seek the simple truth of human existence. It will come down to what humans must have to grow and change, and that is a threat to their survival. We see something on the horizon that appears to be the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of vast swaths of the Natural world.
In the five year run of the TV series Third Rock from the Sun, John Lithgow was an Alien named Dick Solomon. He gave us the opportunity to laugh at the challenge of big problems with this observation.
“Where would we be without the agitators of the world attaching the electrodes of knowledge to the nipple of ignorance?”
John Lithgow
The Union of Concerned Scientists is an international group aimed at the planet’s most pressing problems and backed by sound scientific analysis. This organization has responded well to growing resistance to decisions based on political calculation and corporate hype. Evidence came soundly in when results of the 2018 mid-term election added ten new scientists to Congress and all seven scientists endorsed by 314 Action who were up for reelection won their races as did seven other, other incumbent scientists. (More on the Union and 314 is in Media & Measurement)
The concrete structures of a problem become known through a set of expressions. For example, climate change expressed as extreme weather events can have a metric such as the moisture in the air, which in turn can be sourced to warming ocean temperatures and that to the increasing presence of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere. In this case, the big heading is global warming. It has just one number, the “too late year” or the tipping point after which the science suggests the changes predicted cannot be reversed. As big problems are groups of small ones, it is especially tricky when they represent a change framework involving centuries. Global warming is not fast enough to be experienced by people, and an extreme weather event or fire cannot be linked to it as a cause. Big problems also live in the middle ground between fear of the unknown and confusion about science. They combine to produce apathy in an ordinary person and a career for a climate scientist.
Technological systems are available to “draw down” gases that heat the atmosphere. However, the global production of these gases is increasing at a rate higher than Nature’s service, or that technology offers to lead to a zero-sum conclusion. Furthermore, political solutions to reduce emissions require an enormous reduction of apathy regarding the issue, and greater trust in science, its disciplines, and practices. Reshaping the world or just the United States requires technology. However, the major contributor to atmospheric gases is without a technical solution. The waste in energy use created by modern land-use patterns is the primary cause followed by the way food is produced and delivered. There is no drawdown technology for these practices; it is a consumer choice problem for policymakers that is almost impossible to explain. Here too, the set of expressions are many. Isolated housing, auto dependency, high per capita infrastructure costs, fragmented uses, and environmental damage are all traced to a failure of urban planning, architecture, and engineering, not because what they did was wrong, it is just no longer right.
The chart below illustrates all the major sources of energy used by all the major sectors of the economy. Transportation, residential, commercial life, and industrial production are the major sectors that require electricity to function. All but the producers of electrical power (who have an efficiency of distribution problem) have a major impact on land use and food production. The current uses of land and the food energy people need are expressions of problems. Each is a clue to the concrete structure of the larger one. Energy in the use and management of land and food will require a much better vehicle for its use and best described today in one word “city,” the function and purpose of which is the most significant problem humanity has yet to face.
Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/
Getting more scientists into Congress has become a necessity of our time. Too many of our lawmakers are not making any sense. We need people who make evidence-based decisions that are outcome-driven and measured by performance measures from day-to-day and century-to-century.
Rex L. Curry
There are many origins of human progress; election cycles may not be one of them because of how willing we are persuaded to act in our interests. Sharpened stones and sticks, fire, and the wheel are on the early list of ways to simulate community interests. More recently, the primary source of human advancement today comes from the ability of scientists to explain phenomena in ways challenging, if not impossible, to vary. The political structures of our survival will change for that reason. I will tell you why.
With both excellent and poor results, improvement in the world is due to a verb, science. When Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976), criticized Lovelock’s Gaia principle as a failure because it suggests the earth has a cause or a purpose, he got support from the non-theist community. Scientists will accept ideas of God or Gaia as metaphors for profound mysteries the same way they would admit to thirst or hunger. On the other hand, the aggressive acquisition of knowledge for survival requires a far higher footing than metaphors for the unknown.
As a measure, the law has done what it can to expose its deficiencies from a local magistrate to a Supreme Court Justice majority. The necessity of science to become political managers, act in defense of science, and work on behalf of society is apparent but slow to persuade. Speedy persuasions are not like this profession. It is crucial to have a more comprehensive view of things to be done, whether in urgency, over the next century, or more from today. Here is why.
Modern legislation requires science to solve problems. It now needs to be politically persuasive. Organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) examine many contemporary social concerns, from nuclear weapons to food and energy. However, exposing inappropriate political interference is needed to get science out of the crisis news cycle. UCS’s Michale Halpren is the director of the Center for Science and Democracy. This center’s analysis fuels the new kind of talent Shaughnessy Naughton of 314.Org hopes to find. Naughton and her team have excellent methods for putting scientific principles to work in politics. With the help of people from STEM backgrounds, its mission is to find and elect scientists to political offices in preference to lawyers. 314 Action’s national networks of pro-science advocates are organizing to combat notorious attacks on fundamental scientific understanding. The need for leaders who advocate for evidence-based reasoning is a priority for one reason.
Extended problems such as pollution are subject to clinical analysis, and those associated with climate change require continuous outcome-driven policies designed to meet performance measures. As a result, the political dialogue will shift to the debate over resources needed to protect the public. The resource argument is that corporate-survival hype can be a forgivable strategy Evidence from industries in big tobacco, pharma, and fossil fuels is overwhelming.
Leaders in the U.S. Senate, House, State Executive, and Legislative offices who express unwillingness to recognize science as a concluding arbiter require exposure. The name “314.org” elicits a well-known scientific formula for determining the area of a circle – Pi. The “Under the Scope” project of 314.org aims at the anti-science members of Congress. They analyze votes against the facts, data, and behavior that promotes anti-science policies. The open-ended discovery of knowledge is a counterinsurgency effort aimed at the non-scientific community in all political bodies. The rise in questioning authority and distrust of empirical evidence has never been more critical.
New evidence proves political leaders are highly unreliable sources of knowledge. The explosion of new instruments for measuring phenomena in every field makes the availability of an ever-lengthening chain of cold digital reasoning a matter of record. The capacity of science to test and disprove conjectures continues. What remains is a world filled to the meniscus with adjustable explanations and versions of fact in which misinformation is used as an obstruction strategy. A fact-sloppy world is not a place to solve problems, especially when the tools are in hand. Firm, high-impact daily-actionability is now available in multi-integration forms of data involving cycles from one hundred years to microseconds.
In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams (writer/artist) and Mark Carwardine (zoologist) describe the journey to see wildlife before extinction. What if it was what we now call a chicken? In an introduction to their book, Richard Dawkins noted that all living things are genetic cousins; some are just more distant than others, so if one unique part of the global biomass slips into nothingness, so does a part of all of us. In this view, Doug and Mark’s journeys are not about species extinction; they are about the problem of not knowing that the species ever existed.
We acquire knowledge of life on earth and the physical universe by testing to disprove hypotheses. Demanding improved flows of information establishes a balance between valid data and theories. Here we come to the central problem of science.
What do we do when what we think we know needs to be disproved continuously?
The exponential nature of knowledge in the world is concerning. One of those expansions draws from Darwin’s initial findings to complete the first Genome Project. Communicating this knowledge widely adds complications as it spreads the demand for evidence. Defining the genetic structure of evolution has been ongoing for a half-century, and the findings continue to be astounding throughout the Dawkins debate.
One Chance
A change in one cell can also produce grave disadvantages, such as HIV and Covid-19. Nevertheless, every variation of the DNA code in cells adds depth to the design of instruments for storing data for knowledge of life. The diversity of beingness builds in these genetic pathways’ toward infinity, and the storehouse is human curiosity plus machine storage with which a more profound relationship is desired.
The best “last chance” example is the evolution of sight. The transformative advantages of responding to light energy are evident in many species, from unicellular eyespots to vertebrates with image-forming eyes. Seeing the relationship between HspB5 (a heat shock protein) in the genetic code for alpha-crystallin reveals how the full spectrum of sunlight became a force in species diversity. The evolution of sight is complicated, so Joshua Harvey details the 500 million-year story of the human eye here for the curious.
Another Chance
Normal atmospheric pressure at sea level translates to about 14.7 pounds [? Men’s shot] per square inch. In the big January 2018 storm hitting the northeast, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) explained bombogenesis’s new metric. With the growing interest in connecting climate change with evidence from big storms, a key element will be the atmospheric pressure change rate. Typically, significant winter storms are nor’easters or winter hurricanes. The “bomb” metric puts the rate of change in the spotlight when the barometric pressure drops 24 millibars or more in 24 hours. On January 3, 2018, at 9:51 AM, the pressure was 1027.0; on January 4, the pressure was 996.2, a 30.8 drop. A January morning can begin as cold and fair, and 20 inches of freezing snow and fog by the following day. (Table)
A Billion Other Chances
Viable routes to millions of discoveries share a common theme. In explaining phenomena, they tease out the elements that are easy to vary. A mathematical and observational components’ variability provides proof of insufficient data, ineffective thinking, and the lack of a testable hypothesis. In The Fabric of Reality, the quantum physicist David Deutsch promotes the “above all” practice of using two principles: problems can be solved because problems are inevitable. He offers one reason beneficial for every inquiry. Precautionary principles or methods cannot avoid the unseen. These challenges are hypothetical and rare, if not unimaginable, but it is not impossible to implement vigilance.
The questions and procedures that might lead to solutions remain unknown until too late. For example, could the fires that destroyed the towns have been prevented? Yes, but only if the cities were never there. After decades, information proves human emissions of GHGs caused a slowly rising global sea and melting ice sheets at the poles. The location of significant impact areas is everywhere, making the final delay action question: how many people are life-threatened?
The data on conveyed gases into the atmosphere remains an annoying controversy in the scientific community due to a long list of non-scientific reasons built on the attrition model of human survival used in war slowly being applied to the world, but what is to be done as everyone is threatened everywhere?
The losses of both Antarctic and northern ice sheets across Canada, Greenland, and the Russian tundra to the North Pole are facts. They connect to anthropogenic warming. Science links these facts to temperature, a question answered by well-funded analytical rigor. As sea-level rise continues, science suggests it is unlikely to become critical before 2100 (defined as 6.6 to 16.4 feet). Rather than determine the fixed probability set in the unstoppable motion of ice into liquid in the coming decades, there is the irrational belief that it may be alterable. Unknowns are just that, unknowns. Best question contest:
What do you do when the stakes involve displacing over a billion people?
The argument for increasing urban density and resilience is a reaction to the problem of temperature and less so the issue of global warming gases. Rising temperature is the “ugly fact.” So it is the asteroid, in the otherwise beautiful climate change theories. While science may argue methods for managing “atmospheric gases” for decades, it could also peer review the fabric of our reality into neatly defined tipping points of chaos.
Applying Deutsch’s and his colleagues’ extraordinary scientific discipline requires redirecting. Theories of parallel worlds may be fascinating but unhelpful. Instead, it would be far more supportive for the community of scientists to develop full knowledge of the cities we share now in ways that will persuade the whole world to change.
The button string of agency logos above represents multiple agencies attempting to connect “the dots.” The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, often referred to as the Supreme Court of Science, described Climate Change and its dangers as a “settled fact” in 2010. In the 2014 report, specific impacts on a region, such as a significant increase in precipitation, help them share and connect critical buttons. The Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) is anticipated in late 2018 and will not combine all of them. Climate impacts quantified by region and season will drive direct hands-on action. Therefore the subtlety in the added detail will not (or should not) be lost on city and state climate analysis organizations or first response agencies. Directly or indirectly, the additional data will enhance localized reactions to and preemptions of specific events. The range of detail now available marks ranges from the upward trend of “heavy downpours” by counties in Iowa to the dots connecting the impact of drought, followed by big fires, heavy participation, and mudslides in the canyons of California.
The discovery of sustainable human settlement ecosystem relationships in the Anthropocene era is well underway. Encouraging climate scientists to engage in testable theory engineering will be more complicated than the advances made by the more practical stepchildren of Climate Change, the proponents of resilience. A diverse and adaptive set of urban settlements worldwide already demonstrate the practice of urban resilience and their trial-and-error relationship with a rapidly changing global ecosystem. Farsighted investments in urban places are underway to make them “climate-proof.” Like temperature, they are available as measures of effectiveness accompanied by several instructive cautions in using variables.
The exact location of these places and the population protected have begun to exhibit the political structure of a “them and us” crisis. The central non-scientific problem is distinguishing between the unseen hazards of survival by location. As physical entities, these places can be socially and economically diverse. They can be resilient and unique laboratories of the sustainable ideal, vast BTU storehouses, exemplary learning centers, and without a massive change in political outlook, little more than a few caves sheltered from the misery of the humans left behind.
When problems are questions, we want or need answers. When the answers are known, and a pathway forward is clear yet impossible to implement, the questions tend to get labeled evil. Examples of the “not enough” type of problem are “money.” These are public education concerns, safety, food, and water security. When measured against fairness or equity, the decisions turn to political power or priority measures. The best use of standards is the general assurance of well-being through governance, accountability, and transparency. The “too much” problem includes corruption, poverty, religious conflict, and large/small-scale warfare. Complex phrases such as Global Climate Change describe combinations of “too much, not enough” questions. The destruction of natural resources, viral pandemics and extreme weather, and thermonuclear war are anxieties without containment; they are sloppy expressions wrapped in cloaks that encourage nervous intolerance, claims of injustice, and many proofs of inequality. The solution is simple but impossible to implement without intensified global awareness. Put every combination of the human condition into one boat or one well-contained set of urban places, and the choice is evident – fix it or sink.
From the pale echo of evening light, from the big bang to the stuff of stars that we are now, the capacity for measurement has only managed to imagine a tiny part of what creates the space that allows “matter” to exist. But, the enormity of cosmological physics aside, the ordinary observer can walk away from dark matter and energy theories with one helpful fact. If only 10 percent of the physical universe is available for measurement, why is human existence in such a tiny part of that completely unexplored? Could it be that the button for that is in our backyards?
Science begins with the unseen and grows with the unknown. Still, given the promise that the revelations of science can continue indefinitely, we face one flaw, an unlikely continuation of intellect in the absence of less than habitable earth and only where the necessities of survival redefine the luxury of inquiry.
America has not seen an argument for affordable housing, and infrastructure since the post-WWII 1950s. At that time the incentive was in the service of veterans and a national defense strategy to spread out the population. The approach today would be to build on American capacity for diversity and building America’s energy future. The civil rights movement provides the Constitutional bedrock for a fair and successful investment in housing. However, the fossil fuel industries political purchase of the “fracking states,” has federal government’s lawmakers legislatively groveling before the demands of this giant industry.
More than a half-century later, the House of Representatives has an opportunity to assist (if not force) a Senate debate on these issues (housing, energy, and infrastructure) as they continue to gain national significance as local priorities. An opportunity to create a New America awaits. Each state delegation understands their constituent’s desire to keep or acquire affordable homes, clean water, and reliable sources of renewable energy. House and Senate members also gain public support when they seek common ground and reach out to strengthen the body of America as a whole. No matter where people are or how well they live in their districts, they are sensitive to bad news. They also know their character, and that of their community echoes in the least among them. It is time to close in on new policies that support investment in the future of energy, housing, and infrastructure.
When violent change hits a community, the question turns to first responder’s capacity, then speed, followed by when (or if) the full weight of federal support occurs. If the change is massive but slow, as if following the logic of a cancer cell, a long-term sense of resilience is essential. Leverage for needed change will be found in these fast and slow forms of damage. The “small fires” response to sudden catastrophes in the national context continues to produce quality emergency management skills. Service providers and communication systems reach deeply from federal to local levels. The service of a national post-trauma framework is building strength because it is vital, but first-response systems are quickly overwhelmed without front-end steps in mitigation that can pull its people out of trouble at a steady and reliable pace along with outright prevention.
There are a few people in the House and Senate that have a growing sense of urgency because they see more “small-fires” and the evidence of cancer in housing and infrastructure. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has found a shortage of 7.4 million affordable rental units for America’s 11.4 million extremely low-income families. (report here). The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a series of reports on America’s infrastructure needs. One of them is on the current “bait and switch” mirage plan.
False choices emerge during stress. One option is to go against your neighbor as a solution, and the other is to find ways that build a stronger, more perfect union among neighbors and nations. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s American Housing and Economic Mobility Act is a stronger union idea with two parts worth study; we will build 3.2 million affordable homes and provide $10 billion for a competitive infrastructure program. Senator Kamala Harris Rent Relief Act, (tax credit) identifies millions of households in need of help, and Senator Cory Booker wants more state and local governments to adopt inclusive zoning policies. Warren sees the big picture, Harris aims at families facing displacement because rents are moving well past wages (see Pew Research Study) and Booker wants 20% of the housing in market-rate development made affordable to moderate-income families. All work to avert a crisis with supply and demand side incentives and subsidies.
The increase in proposed House legislation on housing since 2016 is built on facts demanding a fair and equal investment in people, health, transportation, and education. (See Lincoln Institute analysis on inclusion (here) and dozens of other publications (here). Behind these initiatives prowls the lessons of the 2008 Recession. Fannie, Freddie, and the Federal Housing Administration guaranteed 90% of new home loans in the United States at a time when banking regulation and trading in mortgage securities blended to produce fraud and put at risk the loss of billions in taxpayer’s money. For a decade, 2008 to 2018, the Treasury has yet to figure out how to sustain Dodd-Frank (see weakened status here) in order to get more private capital into the market so taxpayer money is not as much on the line despite the caveat emptor hook.
One number above all other metrics suggests a housing affordability and infrastructure emergency is pending. It is around 40,000 people living in NYC shelters with a growing percentage of emotionally distressed and mentally ill people in the population. The number alone is less telling than realizing how and why it is staying and lasting at this number for decades. Homelessness has become a production function of cities. In NYC, an additional 35,000 people by official estimates are homeless as transient or invisible. There are no rules to stop these numbers from exponential growth. Homelessness in the United States goes up slightly for a few years and declines. Rising rents and natural disasters contribute to the increase.
The lack of “job access through reverse commutes” to regional opportunities known as JARC was discontinued in 2016. Some funding programs remain, but the focus on balance is lost. Losing the battle for affordable access to jobs through pre-emption services also produces an unknown number of homeless entering suburban and rural areas. These communities have affordability concerns too and the presence of invisible homelessness is repealing laws that prohibit the co-habitation of unrelated individuals. The lack of a federal role in recognizing urban economic stress also involves sole dependence on cars for mobility and the affordability of suburban and rural housing.
The Housing and Transportation Affordability Index (H+T) looks closely at neighborhoods by combining the cost of housing with the cost of transportation. H+T analysis reveals an urgent need for innovative investments in transit-based housing and infrastructure. The Center for Neighborhood Technology’s index finds the annual cost for the use of one car ranges from $7,500 to over $10,000 based on vehicle type and miles traveled. The cost of public transit is also included. The cost to households per mile per capita will increase in sensitivity and alter development patterns. More than any other structural component of a region, the quality of transportation is central to the management and maintenance of all other structural services such as water, power, and energy. The nation needs better policy basis on the cost of providing infrastructure services by using per person and per mile metrics.
Improving the Government of the People
We are the change we seek. When the 31-year-old Adem Bunkeddeko, son of refugees from Uganda decided to mount a primary challenge to Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, (NY D-9th CD), he discovered affordable housing had major traction as both a right and a federal responsibility. He got the attention of Brooklyn voters but fell just 1,852 votes (pdf) short of a primary win and a seat in Congress. His run for office highlighted the national demand for balance instead of power. You see, there is no federal housing responsibility.
The political voice on “rights” 2018 mid-terms expanded when 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, toppled Joseph Crowley’s (NY D 14th CD) ten terms in office (2004). The world paid attention to that win. Not only did she seize the issue of housing as a right, but she also took firm hold of a broader mission — build a path to all human rights as a national representative with a seat in Congress. She proved Joe was not building that path and in 2020 it may not be Yvette Clarke or several others, Democrat or Republican if candidates such as Adem and Alexandria keep showing up with the simple desire to rebuild a government of the people. The “blue wave” was different this time. The sense of impending crisis stirs in the blood of ordinary people base on two events. First, the traditional political powers steadily abandoned labor’s demand for something more than a living wage. The second is the grave error of believing in and trusting an authoritarian leader’s promises.
In either blue or red districts, incumbents have a 98% retention rate. When challenged in a primary both Democrat, and Republican candidates speak to “rights,” one suggests you have inalienable “rights” and government will take them away, the other believes that government will help to get “rights” taken or never gained. Why is such a tragic choice given to the American people by its political leaders? It is a false choice, and it will remain so until the key indicators such the plight of catastrophic illness, starving wages and the threat of homelessness stops pushing a growing number of people into the “one event” threshold. That one event is when the cost of a car accident, a fire, or illness and hospitalization is a trauma that puts people sleeping rough in streets, cars, and tents. The question is easy. How big does a national catastrophe need to be? How many families facing this condition or the threat of it does the federal government need to act in service to localities in need? Is an emergency band-aid enough when the cause is cancer?
The Kindness of Strangers
From New York City to Seattle, the median price of a home is going up and over $1 million. They are not outliers, urban homelessness in America’s cities is recognized, if not well understood, but it is not spoken of in the heartland of America. The big cities have the skills to manage homelessness, but without a national focus, the ongoing production of unaffordable housing will continue to displace people from the city as rapidly as the market will bear. Today, 50% of American households are paying more than half their income for housing. The 2017 homeless number went up for the first time since 2010 to 554,000 people as an official accounting, but critics of the crisis put the number of homeless at 1.5 million, to include the invisible people. The increase comes from cities. However, the seven to ten percent of the homeless that have come to live in rural/suburban areas are less understood. Janet Fitchen describes the increase in families who are on the edge of homelessness and housing insecurity in rural America (See research study (here). Like the invisible 40,000 homeless in NYC, the nation is full of people who are “doubled up” with family or friends, live in vans and other transient accommodations. Homelessness is a quiet, sneaky cancer, but unlike a disease that presents too late to cure, Americans have access to a huge immune system of wealth, the solution will not come from the kindness of strangers or emergency responders. The call to the people is clear, “we are the change we seek” and if gets called progressive social democracy, so be it.
The House is a group of strangers blended by the U.S. Constitution into an institution designed to build the means for consensus on the rights of Americans. Concerns such as health, housing, and a living wage continue to grow. The financial mechanisms are important to determine, but less so than meeting goals that assure healthy, well housed, and economically resilient communities. The House’s reflection on constituent concerns also involves the business community as a key local and national player. Here is one example of how a view toward balanced interests outperforms narrow special interests. A company called Apartment List, is actively engaged in the nationalization of the rental housing market. Having acquired $50 million (2018) in Series C funding, this company is well on its way to a successful IPO. The affordability of rental housing and home acquisition affects the economy of every State. When it also threatens a national listings business model seeking 50% of the national market, they become strong advocates for a federal role across the aisle.
It is also in the business interest to see public efforts on the employment uptake side such as support systems that encourage business responsibility in this area. A model worthy of study in the UK called Business in the Community is designed to connect disadvantaged groups and businesses to help both entities gain and sustain employment. A summary of American initiatives largely at the state level with some federal funding is available for research and review at End Homelessness.org.
The incidence of housing distress using the homelessness as a single indicator in a national “base test” show how reductions in the cost of 1) affordable housing, 2) transportation, 3) child care, and 4) education, are causal factors that reduce the incidence of incarceration, mental health and substance abuse problems that contribute to homelessness (Burt & Anderson, 2005; Burt, Aron, & Lee, 1999; Taylor, 2001). Homelessness is reduced substantially if the first four are readily available for individuals or families in response to a distress event, but face it, those four things are good for everyone. If these elements are not available the next three become part of the problem. Incarceration, mental health, and substance abuse are far costlier and more difficult to resolve. From a policy point of view, the winning argument is clear. Assuring affordable housing and mobility through access to education, training, and transportation is financially sound, and good for every household all the time in every community. What is missing? Health, if doctors could prescribe a safe, healthy home for people, wow. Hey, it’s not impossible (see this Article).
Economic rationalizations such as “cost/benefit analysis” ignore variables if they lack metrics and infringe on the two indispensable experiences of democracy; the use of individual rights and with the use of these rights, the potential to develop equity and the capacity to manage change. The people of Flint, MI were not engaged in a public process regarding changes in the source of their water supply. The decision was made to save money. When high concentrations of lead, known to cause brain damage, was discovered it revealed a lack of metrics for a variable that could have put a number on the rights violated and a value on lost potential. In this process, a value is not be assigned until after damage occurred and sadly this too is part of the cost/benefit fallacy. When the social framework for change is overrun by economic reasons the opportunity for continuous damage to people and whole communities increases. Lead in water, toxins in the air, land and sea and homelessness are economically rationalized as an individual or corporate failure when the actual cause is the erosion of basic moral understandings and a commitment to specific values and principles.
One of the specious economic arguments on housing in America is that we have plenty of affordable housing, but it is in the wrong place. The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the National Alliance to End Homelessness and many others have set their moral compass on placed-based housing rights and opposes such hollow statistical abstractions. Nevertheless, a missing component appears to be a pre-emptive demand from the business community for federal solutions that can continuously produce affordable housing where needed and include support for affordable transportation to places of work. If that can be made to recur, the Senate might get its top-down act together on housing and infrastructure. The creative opportunity for renewable energy, affordability, and economic mobility is staring the American public in the face. The missing element appears to be a legion of people ready step into the future of democracy and the promise of the pursuits outlined in the laws framed and disseminated in the U.S. Constitution.
Follow-up Interview Sources
Maria Foscarinis, Executive Director National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty
Diane Yentel, President, National Low Income Housing Coalition
Nan Roman, President, National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Chris M.F. Figueredo, Executive Director, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center
John Kobs, CEO Apartment List
Open Letter to MAA
Re: Mathematics Competition
Some 330 million people in the United States (see pop clock), of which 75 million are younger than 18, to yield 255 million adults that could own a firearm. Among this group estimate, 55 million of these adults wouldn’t touch a gun or be too infirm to handle one or physically unable to do so because of imprisonment or other factors restricting civilian gun ownership. The 200 million left would be among 393 million civilian weapons in the United States. The control ratio of adult-to-weapon is 1.965. This number is significant enough to evaluate the U.S. as a probability space (the deep end is here).
A word of caution and challenge. The call to mathematize death by a weapon as a personal experience within the odds framework can be the wrong approach. Death by civilian gun ownership is not be compared with lightning strikes, a fall down the stairs, or a trip in front of a bus. Perhaps the comparison would be instructive enough for Congress. (January 6. 2021 comes to mind,) Regardless of the weapon, control measures from national to local, applying the law of probability to the data sources available for analysis is tempting but sends the wrong message because we live in a world of dull messages.
The almost daily occurrence of a mass shooting by firearms provides the hot button that gets our attention. Death by a weapon is now a national experience of human tragedy and represents an unparalleled threat to our culture as a society of caring people. The existence of this condition allows us to envision a world of armed guards standing before every place of assembly like pawns in a lifelong chess game of potential violence.
There are alternatives to cognitive dissonance, and throughout the remaining days of this decade, the possibility of a far better vision for life in America is possible. I fear for all those who would enclose a weapon into their hearts and hands to achieve an end. A far better vision is possible. Please call upon mathematicians to identify the United States as a sample space and use a set of events in which each involves zero or more outcomes of gun violence. Here is the hard part, the assignment of probabilities to events will ignore the individual experience from events to probabilities.
A sharp math person could produce a new expression re-focused by the massive volume of weapons and the likelihood of general use in the form of interpersonal violence as a message. Create a number from the national experience and call it the cultural endangerment factor or the national pain index. Above all other goals, your membership’s analysis contributes to a language of hope for us all.
More detail and discussion (HERE) in the Washington Post and from the BBC on American gun culture (HERE) and why the NYS Attorney General is charging the NRA with fraud (HERE). One other thing. The math people didn’t respond beyond “Americans are more likely to kill each other.”
Wealth above all other social factors can push the door closed on people, especially when they are men without means or women, but only if they don’t push back. The righteousness of wealth will spin the story, wag the dog, and fake the news without fact or journalistic integrity. The “maleness” premise regarding errors of judgment, leading to lies, cover-ups, the war for profit, cannot be questioned for facts or become dispositive. Yet, throughout human history, it has been, without doubt, the male force that sustains these errors of power with the equanimity of profound blindness. The challenges to power in the new age of data alter the demand for balance, but if technology is stealing government, there must be a way to get it back.
The Truth in a Hurricane and Other Takings
Based on centuries of case law, the last two SCOTUS appointments (2017 and 2018) challenge America’s ability to provide health care to all. It supports an imperial presidency and returns the claim on women’s bodies (See Rebecca Solnit). Given that legal precedent is now available in terabytes, good change can come from an unseen hand to remove a regulation unfamiliar to many for an unknown entity. Other typical disturbances involve the role of state legislators and jurists in the service of wealthy individuals. The majority of these actions can be considered “for good,” however, the question now posed is why the actions of some private actors that might be dangerous remain unknown until lethality is exposed.
The law is post-mortem in its attempts to mitigate or prevent the actions of an individual with a deadly assault rifle.
The regulatory breakdown of a corporation handling toxic chemicals is therefore complete. However, no one is safe in the biochemical era of guns and randomly poisonous compounds.
Congress members need at least $300,000 every two years (and more every six years for Senators) to communicate to their district or state if challenged in a primary and general election. A member’s salary is under $200K per year, yet the average income is over $1 million. Sadly, alternatives include saving money by suppressing the vote to twenty percent of their registered electorate. The nature of this numerical playground has the pay-to-play problem, and it occurs unscathed due to one presumption. Those who do not make profits (or win) are unfit. While the prerequisites of profit have merit over reasonable periods, instant profits on demand do not. The practice turns natural functions into risky behaviors such as breathing air into your lungs or altering the performance of the earth’s atmosphere. These become recognized as a “long train of abuses.” the right, duty, and the consent of the governed include “throwing off” that government.
The following examples are worthy of the careful and devoted attention of writers. Understanding poverty for its cause on a broader footing focuses on the number of households of all kinds who are physically displaced over multiple generations. For example, recent climate change events intensify land ownership/control identification with poverty indices. Like equity, the use and power over land skew toward the top. The income-only definition neglects land, not only for its value but the dangers associated with its location. Hurricanes and their floods contain truth in their wake. Land regulation, even in public ownership, serves unevenly. Historically, the land is the equity of all people, yet access to it is patchy, unfair, and environmentally racist. Three words of the Marxist define the problem – property is theft. To which the historic response is in six words “To f’n bad. I’ve got mine.” Hopefully, this leads to knowing the mean of all climate change events by household location. With that, the question of poverty will include land. Where is it owned (or rented), and how so? (Penn State Paper and World Bank)
The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently deferred to the right of states to make their determinations of “public use.” In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, federal agencies acquired land for offices lost in the World Trade Towers. Today, projects managed by the Land Acquisition Section of the U.S. Department of Justice include obtaining land along hundreds of miles of the United States-Mexico border, ostensibly for the public purpose of curtailing illegal drug trafficking and smuggling. The general purpose of these acquisitions is to mitigate terrorism customs facilities. A similar practice on the displacement impacts of climate change is possible. However, this is where politicizing the law reveals a subtle, if not adverse, effect.
In 2012, while serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge Kavanaugh struck down the Clean Air Act’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. In combination with the Acid Rain Program created in 1995, the Cross-State rule has brought steep reductions in the air pollution that causes acid rain and smog. The people of the Adirondacks will tell you these efforts are why Bear Pond and the entire Saint Regis Canoe Area in New York State are healthy again. Unfortunately, in 2014, six Supreme Court Justices overruled Kavanaugh’s opinion, and the Cross-State rule was reinstated. Justice Kennedy’s clarity of thinking sustains EPA’s authority to safeguard the nation’s air quality. In Kavanaugh’s opinion, it appears victims must show they are harmed or dead. Ruling against pre-emptive efforts reduces lawsuits against power companies and other sources of pollution and reveals how the law may not be what leads the court.
View from Long Pond Mountain of the Saint Regis Canoe Area, NY 8/2006. Photo by: Mwanner
Models representing extreme heat days, freezing days, days with extreme precipitation, and extreme weather events (e.g., tornado watches) can predict migration and displacement patterns. The hedonic categories used to challenge these extremes become lease about the rights of wealth and refocus on the basic comforts of food, housing, renewable energy, and “other pleasures” as expenditures of a higher priority.
Aggregated data on these four elements define a set of “marginal willingness to pay” factors from region to region. Each can be refined further by changes in median income per decade. Populations remaining in high extreme incident areas expose a percentage of households with the capacity to leave yet stay and those without a migration choice. Empirical examples confirm these predictive models, such as the household displacement from nine hurricanes that hit category five before landfall from 2005 to 2018 — Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dean, Felix, Matthew, Irma, Maria, and Florence. Also, migration preferences are well known, such as the number of older households that migrate to warmer climates to avoid extreme cold days.
Two categories for national regions and their communities emerge in these models—those who can develop the strength to do bold things and build strength and those who will face eventual displacement. The planning required to identify and act on this second category will not occur using predictive weather models or empirical analysis. Instead, it will mandate new central governance powers coupled with a market response to be effective.
Planning has begun to assess the national capacity to absorb household migration due to fear of extreme events and the number of households displaced directly. However, it is equally important to recognize that the investments in establishing safety criteria by region are not occurring in the name of national security or “health, safety and welfare” concerns but left to market forces and the private sector on a post-trauma basis.
Few events more terrifying than a California wildfire can give you the feeling that we have become the consumers of an illusion. The social, environmental, and financial practices that separate the “haves” from the “have-nots” are well known. But, with the advent of extreme events, the separation of the “knowing” from the “unknowing” is the fuel injection offered by the information age.
We the People Series: The following paragraph summarizes history’s “maleness” through the lens represented by Brett Kavanaugh’s recent appointment to SCOTUS. So here goes.
Safety in social relations is on top of the list, but it has matured into a desire to live free from fear. The need for physically strong protecting leaders facilitated male dominance. However, the connective tissue composed of dominant men throughout this history fails to reveal alternatives. It must. John Elkington’s introduction of TBL brings this point home in the last sentence of the first chapter.
“Developing this comprehensive approach to sustainable development and environmental protection will be a central governance challenge – and, even more critically, a market challenge – in the 21st century.”
Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business,” Capstone, 1997
The expression and fulfillment of need, once represented by trade as a social and economic activity, has become the abstraction of “stock” as an economic activity. Elkington asks,
“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?”
The “central governance challenge” has yet to be accepted in the following decade. The Senators are talking without listening, members of Congress scurry and hurry better than ever. There are warnings by Elizabeth Warren (D-CT) on the weakening of Dodd-Frank’s demand for accountability.
Tribes form, and trade or war between matures into national security through conquest, or becoming interdependent through trade. Little has changed in this give-and-take process for 5,000 years. One problem, though, physical supremacy is still considered the final prize. It is not.
The annual value of trading derives from bets on labor, innovation, and cheating. Today, the dividend value of this bet is thousands of times higher than the total paid in wage income in the same period. From the viewpoint of observers, this path leads to catastrophic social events, the most recent being the Great Recession of 2008. A few years later, in January 2020, Elkingon’s prognosis of the challenge exposed once more the fragility of assumptions built on capital and nothing but wealth, so help them, God.
A few years later, in January 2020, Elkingon’s prognosis of the challenge exposed once more the fragility of assumptions built on capital and nothing but wealth, so help them, God. Tribes form, and trade or war between matures into national security policy through entirely new forms of conquest, such as becoming interdependent through trade. Little has changed in this give and take between men and “their” families, tribe, and nation for 5,000 years. One problem, though, physical supremacy is still considered the final prize. It is not.
How Did We Get Here?
One of the sources of this failure comes from establishing a basis for congressional independence and power. Bruce Babbitt, Bill Bradley, James Fallows, Mike Kinsley, and Chuck Peters were encouraged by Nicholas Lemann, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, and other privileged white males to develop workable across-aisle relationships with the minority party and the Executive Branch. Upon implementation, that became Bill Clinton in 1992, when the Congress of the United States lost its ability to govern.
A new, wealthy group of equity owners arrived to forecast the shift from manufacturing to the information age. Supporting working families and unions decreased in favor of technical professionals. Laborers live in other countries. Economists called it the “death of distance.” The influence smelled like big packs of crisp hundred-dollar bills in every urban electoral district. The government’s national leadership fell into vats of cash because they needed it. The tragedy of the George Bush wars and the policy obstruction aimed at the Barach Obama presidency like a shotgun exposed every raw nerve of America, leading to POTUS45.
If this sounds a little off to you, please read about the Atari Democrats. The Atari video game is gone, but not the rise of the neo-liberal compromise. Make your case for when and how we got into this mess (Comment) (NY Times Story).
The logic of how technology stole government, from the lessons stretching back to the Atari Dems to today, leads this “we the people series” to the root of being good people to the third in this series. If you subscribe a return to it in a couple of years will occur. Got now, please read Truth in a Hurricane.
You can get something from new representatives about the truth, even a Republican from Nebraska. On the first day of the Judge Kavanaugh hearing, Sen. Ben Sasse made a strong, almost non-partisan point. He says Congress must stop pushing its power to the executive branch to avoid taking responsibility and promote reelection. He stopped short of calling it cowardice, just saying that was no way to live your life. He warned that a politicized Supreme Court is a failure of congressional representatives’ duty and begged his colleagues to keep politics in Congress and leave the Supreme Court alone.
Watch the clip below or the longer PBS clip here. And here is I”m Just a Bill and The Constitution from School House Rock as Ben suggests.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
George Orwell
Authoritarian control is a pattern that repeats, from Rome’s bread and circus to today’s popcorn and Netflix. Subtlety is the only difference. The interest in lowering education, limiting cultural exchange, and individual expression is the historic pattern across the modern spectrum.
Love the “Black Panther” typography.
George Monbiot is a writer that is paying attention. The news from The Guardian is as hopeful as it is accurate. I urge you to read and subscribe.
Posted: 17 Jul 2018 06:09 AM PDT published in the Guardian 11th July 2018
“The little-known history of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in a New York primary hints at a coming transformation in US politics. Even at first sight, it is exhilarating. The overthrow of one of the most mainstream and senior Democrats in Congress by a 28-year-old Democratic Socialist with a radical programme and one-tenth of his funding is, you might think, interesting enough.
But since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocked out Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary election in New York’s District 14 (which means that she will almost certainly enter Congress in November), I’ve been interviewing some of the people who lit the fuse that caused this detonation. What has emerged is just how marginal and improbable their movement was when it began, and how quickly it is now gaining momentum. A revolution has begun in America, and it is time we understood what it means.
While the effort to find and run insurgent candidates arose from the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, the handful of young people who launched this movement struck out entirely on their own. They had no resources and no political standing. Neither Bernie Sanders nor any others in the old guard were prepared to support them or endorse the candidates they found.
In a way, this tiny group, that at first called itself Brand New Congress, that evolved into the Justice Democrats, marginalised itself. It wanted nothing to do with a traditional left it saw as being obsessed with positioning. It wanted to escape the shadow of people who seemed stuck in the 1980s, who didn’t take environmental issues seriously or understand the need to challenge structural racism and gender inequality or to reach millennials trapped in terrible housing and miserable non-jobs. They were mocked, ignored and dismissed as well-intentioned but hopeless idealists. One of them told me how he was literally patted on the head by an older Democrat.
At first, it was chaotic. Most of the volunteers they recruited had little or no experience. Some turned out to be wonderful, others less so. Their original aim was to find 400 candidates to challenge both Democratic and Republican incumbents. They sought bartenders, factory workers, small business people, community organisers, teachers, nurses: ideally people who had never held public office before. While Democratic candidates are usually chosen on the grounds of how much money they can raise, the Justice Democrats looked for people who could not be seduced by big funders. They reasoned that if the people they met had served their communities instead of themselves, they were unlikely to sell out once they were elected.
They found plenty of brilliant potential recruits, but they struggled to persuade them to stand. Without mainstream support, they didn’t have the credibility required to convince hundreds of people to give up their lives for an improbable cause. They managed to persuade a few dozen, however, and among them was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They phoned her, invited her to dinner, and asked her to attend a meeting in Kentucky with other potential candidates, in the hope that they would inspire each other to run. She took her time and toured District 14 before she agreed.
She was, as we have seen, a fantastic candidate: determined, indefatigable, brilliant at explaining complex issues simply and directly. Alexandra Rojas, the campaigns director of Justice Democrats, tells me: “She has a way of making issues that others see as radical seem simple, straightforward and pragmatic.” Everyone I spoke to remarked on her grace and stability, and how she calmly absorbed the dramas that surrounded her bid. The original organisers were joined by extraordinary local campaigners, combining traditional fieldwork with the Big Organising tactics developed during the Sanders campaign: using proliferating networks of volunteers to fill the jobs usually reserved for staffers.
Remarkable as she is, there are others like her. Cori Bush in Missouri, Jess King in Pennsylvania, Kaniela Ing in Hawaii, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Sarah Smith in Washington, Linsey Fagan in Texas and Kerri Evelyn Harris in Delaware are just a few those now fighting for Democratic nominations or seats while renouncing big money, relying instead on the enthusiasm of the communities they hope to serve.
The Justice Democrats are not expecting all these candidates to win, but hope for a few spectacular victories at the congressional elections in 2018 and 2020, not only replacing corporate, money-tainted Democrats, but flipping a couple of Republican districts as well (look out, for example, for the campaigns by Brent Welder and James Thompson in Kansas). As soon as such people take their seats in Congress, one of the core organisers, Saikat Chakrabarti, tells me, the aim is to “legislate the hell out of everything, like the Republicans do … proposing the boldest, biggest ideas on Day One”. By 2022, using the momentum gained from a few strategic victories, they hope to run a full slate of new or re-energised candidates. The aim is to create a genuinely populist Democratic party, that speaks to people across the political spectrum who have been alienated by the corruption and drift of mainstream politics.
Thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United ruling, which removed the caps on political spending by lobbyists, US politics is dominated by billionaires and corporations, buying the candidates and policies they want. They can’t be outspent, but they can be outmaneuvered, by recruiting incorruptible people who can speak past the money. Eventually, the Justice Democrats hope, there will be enough strong and inspiring people in Congress to overthrow Citizens United, purge the institutional corruption from US politics and turn democracy in America into a meaningful concept.
So far, the Democratic party has reacted in two distinct ways. Some senior figures, like Nancy Pelosi and Tammy Duckworth, dismiss the significance of what Ocasio-Cortez has achieved. Others, like Kirsten Gillibrand, have suddenly switched positions in response to her victory, echoing her call, for example, for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, that has been separating children from their parents on the Mexican border. Both are forms of self-preservation, but if more revolutionary candidates win their races, the second variety is likely to prevail.
By understanding how the great reversal in New York happened, we can begin to understand what this movement of outsiders might achieve. It could yet change the world.”
Many factors are at work, but the heart of the zero progress problem in education and the direct relationship with inequality. For African-Americans, the data shows a gap in college achievement that remains wide. Those with undergraduate degrees are less wealthy than white counterparts, and the chance that both spouses will have undergraduate degrees is lower.
The concentration of poverty is unfair. One of the steps taken was population dispersion under many names – national highways, urban renewal, demonstration cities renamed to model cities, etc. By the mid-seventies, a fragment of local power began to form in defense of those left behind. A nod from the power brokers produced community-based nonprofit development corporations. They would become advocates for people willing to grab at rungs on the ladder and straps on their boots.
Only a little of this is accomplished. Urban blight and deterioration were reduced, and new mechanisms to alter America’s manifest destiny as a “white-thing” acquired a civil rights and “strength through diversity” foothold. A beautifully accurate book that fails to be persuasive (like lots of academic work) says somewhat antiseptically:
“While taking steps to enhance families’ ability to live wherever they choose is essential, attempting to engineer the movement of large numbers of families from specified high-poverty neighborhoods to specified destination neighborhoods should not be a primary policy approach to ending the cycle of multi-generational disadvantage.”
The resilience of investment in the urban redevelopment will require non-displacement policies coupled with durable human capital investments that flatten the barriers to the correction of past wrongs. The physical list is long and easy to draw from lead paint to cheap housing in flood plains under the big heading of environmental racism to the lack of equal protection under the law, the list is short on changes needed in the psychology of human relationships built on ignorant concepts of race. Patrick Sharkey describes much of this in Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality. Urban policy discussion is excellent following the standard academic style of argument.
Differences in isolation and subtle forms of prejudice make the question of racial discrimination an unsettled scientific matter. Even though subject to indirect methods of measure, American society’s discrimination levels may have decreased over time in dense urban areas, largely because of proximity and shared experiences, workplaces reflecting the city’s diversity, professional sports teams, and packed subway cars, to name a few. In dense areas, opportunities for cultural integration grow and change quickly. The study of change in workplace discrimination against African Americans has been ongoing since 1989, and this work suggests that it has not changed much nationally. The persistence of discrimination in US labor markets is more striking in less dense areas masking progress in a city such as NYC.
Families are institutions with exalted political values. Except in cases of neglect or extreme abuse, parents across the full spectrum of the population and family type have the liberty to set their own bar on parenting quality. This means some families do not know they are not creating a supportive and stimulating home for their kid and more than likely resent it as an accusation. The measure of a child’s chances of cycle-ending success begins with the family through six major resource investments.
The link between parenting quality, income, race, education, and action regarding the issues raised tends to be “unclicked” by legislators in preference to the family stereotype. Policymakers, on the other hand, demand specific attention to the full spectrum of family needs. Their studies examine patterns of parenting quality. They also know how to design programs that get to those who might benefit. The projected result is kids on pathways that break the cycle of poverty, overcome the sensitivities of race and become cross-cultural without losing the gratification of their origins. This kind of liberation comes from exceptional educators and fantastic health care experts with unique training and talents. Parents who have a low income, are poorly educated, are African-American, Hispanic, or unmarried and all of the above need the well-paid time of these professionals, and they are not getting it. They are the ones who can disentangle the influence of race from socioeconomic status.
Parenting influences child outcomes, and good programs improve parenting. The proof is in the depth of scholarly articles surrounding the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) using data following participants from 1979 to 2014. Disadvantaged children face complex internal and external threats, so it is a given that policies and investment in professional intervention can eliminate them all on both fronts. Mobility on the social change scale will remain beyond public policy reach without an agreement to this as fact. The graphic illustration above comes from one of those scholarly articles entitled, The Parenting Gap by Richard V. Reeves and Kimberly Howard (here). It examines parenting issues with sampling data and provides an extensive bibliography. The trial of a program (Memphis, TN) integrated health professionals with low-income mothers who rank below the sample median on an index of intelligence, mental health, sense of mastery, and self-efficacy. These are amazing, thoughtful findings, accurate and true, supported with an extraordinary depth of peer-review findings. They are persuasive, but the barriers that create unfairness remain, so the question is why and what is missing in their arguments to produce implementation?
How do you fully understand the return on investment in people and places? The answer is in the free availability of public policy data that shows how private resources combine to meet goals. Public abstractions such as “a more perfect union” or “freedom and justice for all” must prove progress in the public investment realm. Private abstractions such as accelerating the advent of transport with electric cars must also prove to sustain investors.
Data on social mobility continues to disappear from the public record when it becomes private. Without unrestricted data, public goals cannot be accurately developed, stated, or confirmed if accomplished. This leaves only one measure—the success or failure of capital invested in goods that produce returns. The proof of how this endeavor creates a better country in terms of diversity in social mobility remains unknown. When groups of people start decrying the lack of fairness and are unprovable, the measures and tools for proof are hidden or gone. Who has them, and where are they?
Perhaps the best example is how difficult it has been to prove the need for vitality in a reform movement dealing with incarceration, the rates of incarceration, and who is incarcerated. The data calls it out as a pure aberration of justice with a zero chance of a remedy attached. There is a range of problems that ring discrimination when prison populations who cannot vote are used to sustain a rural congressional seat. The continuation of policies that help to assure one-third of the 620,000 people released from prison return. In this example alone, the great American Apartheid is revealed, and the reform movement has begun. Another crime in the name of the money society is the failure to collect mortgage data (HMDA plus) and protect consumers from unfair practices that lead to the denial of credit access. Here again, the federal responsibility to conduct its business in ways that reduce inequality can be ignored by cutting back on the information needed to show progress.
Brookings is one of those “think tanks” considered to be left of center as its focus tends to be the proof of progress in eliminating the failure of American Democracy to assure human dignity and make right its mistakes, especially in how public policy has wrongly damaged the lives of its minority citizens.
Groups conduct these issues described above, like Brookings at the deep end of the pool. If any reader here wants to make sense of your block, in your neighborhood, and with your neighbors, please do so. In your blog, link your work or give work to people focused on their Congressional Districts and the city and state representation shared by that district.
Deep end: Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective (PDF) and see the result of poor outcomes for black men. See longer Technical Paper (PDF) and the full Results here.
