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.

~ On the Future of Democracy ~

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.

Important but,

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. 

Am I Too Impatient?

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.

Inclined to Take Action?

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.

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.

None of this is Persuasive

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?

What Can You Do? Name Writers & Develop Themes

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.

List of Billionaires

Altered State or Shift in Strategies

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-20^th 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:

1. Walmart gets 25% of all dollars spent on groceries in the U.S. In 2015 they began their online version of Amazon, knowing the problems of Sears.
2. Jeff Bezos (richest on the planet) started Amazon with investors in 1998. Low-profit margins ruled until 2017 when $60 billion in sales revenue yielded $1 billion in profit.
3. CVS, Walgreens, and Rite-Aid have 99 percent of the pharmacy market, and two of them want to merge; one is attempting to purchase Aetna, a large insurance corporation.
4. Each year Amazon’s online business model captures a growing percentage of online spending (40% – 2015). It is leading the revolution of spending from “brick to click.” More are on the way.
5. Google and Facebook claim 64 percent of online ad revenue.
6. Google claims 64 percent of all search engine traffic.
7. Bloomberg reported the top 500 billionaires added over a trillion dollars in 2017.

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.

Media Density

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.

More Hot Button Examples

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.

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?  

Get a Start Button

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.

Motivation and Instruction?

“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.

Determine Persuasive Capacity

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)

250 on Electoral College

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

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