Sunday, October 20, 2013

Restore print media by restoring core issue discussion -- only two ways


To renew print media to full life two commonsense things can provide it with a high volume of news that only print (even the internet version) can deal with fully – and that only print opinion writers can deal with comprehensively.

One: if income taxes were adjusted monthly in direct step with increased or decreased expenditures, newspapers would have to add a new section for avid taxpayers to follow the latest additions and cuts.

We would not build a courthouse for 100 years.

Second: a randomly picked grand-type-jury could become our informal third branch of government. Such a directly-powerless citizens' branch could informally set the public agenda in accordance with the needs and interests of everyday people – without worrying about the tangles of expending political capital (automatically building it; see below) and avoiding controversy and all the usual stagnation inducers.

Mad Mayor Bloomberg's crazy idea of building a new $400 million Bronx courthouse in 2004 to TAKE OVER from the almost brand-new $120 million supplementary court building opened in just 1977 to pick up the criminal case overflow during the crime wage AND ALSO take over from the 1939, landmark status, main court building up on the hill (the latter still standing because it is the architectural anchor of the area -- both still standing actually -- empty) – would have been laughed to derision by a real people jury. Ditto for the new $600 million Brooklyn courthouse opened by Crazy Mikey in 2004 – also after criminal cases had declined 4X.

Obamians and Clintonians and friends want to help everybody, just nobody in particular. They pick a limited number of objectives each year and fight them to a standstill with Republicans -- perpetually leaving untouched key bread-and-butter issues like doubling the minimum wage and rewriting the entire American social landscape with legally mandated, sector wide labor agreements – issues that promise no immediate results (at least not in the eyes out of touch elitists).

Let's face it; Obamians and Clintonites are academic liberals who do not relate on any visceral level to what immediately interests everyday Joan -- so what interests Joan can always wait until next year, or decade, of forever. They never catch on that if they were pushing hard on doubling the minimum wage reform and sector-wide re-unionization (the only market setup that works historically, and world-wide) they might build more political capital then they would knew how to spend -- even if they did not immediately succeed on the specific issues.   

Harry Truman said: "The power of the presidency is the power to tell people what they damn well should have known in the first place." 

The automatic solution to progressives' political capital building inability could be a monthly adjusted income tax and an informal political grand-type-jury that would put society’s truly deepest concerns on the very front of the political burners and keep them hot until resolved. Interested, high volume content-newspapers; interested long analysis pieces-magazines?

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