Joseph M. Firestone is Joseph M. Firestone, author of 11 books, 7 in politics and economics, and 4 in Knowledge Management, as well as a writer, researcher, blogger, speaker and trainer. They write and talk about enhancing democracy so it will work again. They also write about enhancing equality, and economic and social justice, through responsible fiscal policy. They want to sharpen national and international conversations about fixing aspects of broken democracies, especially in the United States, but also in democracies generally. The failed political, economic and financial institutions of the US and other democracies, and the destructive policies emerging from the way these institutions interact with one another, can no longer be allowed to endanger the well being of the people and their public purposes. They’ve written 6 books in the past seven months, in which they analyze the problems and crises of the United States and to a lesser degree democracies in the Eurozone, and set forth solutions to them; and a 7th, which focuses on knowledge management and risk, while providing a framework that applies to the risk of error in all environments, both public and private, in political systems of all types. To facilitate these solutions, they think we need a bottom-up, self-organizing, consensus building process among the American and other peoples, that will enable them to decide among themselves, and for themselves, about what they want to do to fix our democracies and failed institutions, as well as to solve the variety of serious substantive problems facing most nations, and how they want to proceed to do those things. Their program focuses on both the fixing democracy problem and also on the variety of substantive problems found in the US and many other nations. Here’s a list of books and links which they’ve completed over the past 7 months: Declarations of Dependence: Tyranny, Sovereignty, and Democracy; Austerity, Greeces Debt Crisis, and the Theft of Democracy; Who Needs Balanced Trade? Who Needs Balanced Budgets; Fiscal Myths of the 2016 Campaign; Real Fiscal Responsibility, Vol. I: The Progressive Give-up Formula; Real Fiscal Responsibility, Vol. II: The Peterson Network, Inequality, and the Failure of Neoliberalism; and Riskonomics: Reducing Risk by Killing Your Worst ideas. And here’s an earlier book that started them on the path they’re now on: Fixing the Debt Without Breaking America: Austerity, the Trillion Dollar Coin, and Ending Debt Ceiling, Sequester, and Budgetary Crises They won’t catalog all of the many problems that beset our democracies, here, but they’re carrying out a vigorous program to write about them. From their point of view there are two problems whose solutions are key to enabling us to solve all of the others. The first is the problem they mentioned earlier of providing for continuous bottom-up self-organization of individuals and newly formed groups that can render the influence of big money powerless to overcome the influence of self-organized majorities seeking to accomplish public purposes. This problem can be solved by using a technological environment to enable people to continuously self-organize. Some of their future books will show how this can be made a reality. The second is the problem of getting past the fiscal myths and illusions used by austerity supporters to create economic stagnation in economies and the appearance that there must be a money shortage in the future. The apparent, self-fulfilling shortage of public spending authority, will stop the democracies from solving the variety of problems they face, many of which will take a great deal of money. So, they need to continue the work they started in some of the books they’ve already published, which is to create counter-narratives to the fiscal myths preventing our democracies from solving their problems. In the immediate future, they want very much to continue their writing program. They have many more books to complete, and they don’t have the institutional support available to help them drive their program forward. Until now, they’ve been shoe-stringing things, living on previous savings, and the small royalties coming in from their books thus far. Here are tentative titles for books they plan to write in the coming year. They’d like to slow down their writing pace a little to 6 books over that period, so they can breathe a bit. Here are the tentative titles for them:– The Job Guarantee and the Green New Deal;– The Fiscal Summit Counter-Narrative;– The Austerity Wars and the Crippling of the Democracies;– Re-inventing Democracy: Design for a Meta-layer;
Find Joseph M. Firestone online:
