#Tweeting this blog a la #Trump

When writing this blog, I endeavor to be provocative from time to time and usually get an earful from one end of the political spectrum or the other – or sometimes both at the same time.  However, the biggest complaint is that the blog is “too long”.  I now limit it to 800 words but that is still too long for many whose attention span is no longer than it takes to read the screen on their smartphone without scrolling. 

Perhaps I should emulate Donald Trump.  The New York Times reports that Trump thinks of Twitter as his own personal newspaper.  With a 140-character limit, a tweet has no room for any qualifiers.  You can’t say, “Some may disagree with me and I hope this doesn’t offend anyone; however, I believe….”  You just type the words after “believe”. 

Here are a couple of Trump tweets:

“I have never seen a thin person drinking a Diet Coke.”

“So many ‘politically correct’ fools in our country.  We have to all get back to work and stop wasting time and energy on nonsense!”

He gets his point across without all the research and attention to composition that typically takes up about 6 hours of my time.  Here’s his latest (as of this writing):

“For all my FANTASTIC supporters, and for the U.S.A., we are going to WIN AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, maybe even greater than before.”

I notice that he doesn’t use any hashtags.  He doesn’t need to.  He’s his own hashtag. 

So, I thought I should give it a try (notice it took me more than 300 words to get this far).  Here is my best effort to summarize five years of blogging in 140 (or less) character snippets:

#Capitalism = #prosperity = #freedom

For the long version, check out:  ‘Let’s just understand what socialism means to us’ or ‘Progress or Greed… Which Is It?’

Or how about this one?

#Economics: You don’t get it!  No, really, you don’t!

Long version… here you go:  ‘Robert Reich, the corporate income tax and the middle class’ or ‘One Issue and One Issue Only’

Lest you think I am a dogmatic, right wing conservative, I offer the following quite liberal views:

My tweet: Open the #border with #Mexico, no really… I mean it!

My blog:  Open the border… Wait! It’s already open

Or how about this?

My tweet: I don’t care who you #marry

My blog:  It’s not religion… It’s not politics… It’s personal

Are you ‘pro-life’?  This will piss you off:

My tweet:  My body, my #choice

Well, I am not a woman, so I wrote:  Orphan Black, Margaret Atwood and a Woman’s Right to Choose

From time to time, I get philosophical.  I have to work hard to clarify my thoughts and even harder to articulate them.  One of my favorites got virtually no response:  Hope, Love, Forgiveness… Can Society Achieve It?  Yet, another struck the right chord:  Leadership and the Space Between the Notes.  The first title could be a tweet, the second, not so much.

I could go on.  (I usually do.)  I’m just wondering… should I just tweet it a la Trump?  If you’ve read this far, please let me know.

WHO WILL LEAD?

Fracking, New York Taxes and Twitter

Have you ever sat down to write a brief, polite reply to an email and ended up writing a page and a half instead? Oh, c’mon…  you know you have.  It’s very therapeutic, isn’t it? When it happens to me, most often I have the good sense not to press the Send button.  Sometimes, not.

It all started with a Tweet.  I came across this graphic on the Business Insider website.  It shows changes in population by state and county.  Here in New York State, we are losing jobs as indicated by the orange color.  That Navy blue spot at the top of North Dakota indicates that lots of people are moving there.  ND has permitted hydraulic fracturing (fracking), creating energy jobs and an influx of population. 

So, I tweeted, “No fracking in NY, people move out. Fracking in ND, people move in. Whose economy is booming?”

I got a long reply from an employee of the New York State Department of Labor.  (I don’t believe he was replying in an official capacity and I won’t reveal his name.) 

“I took five minutes and pulled up why I don’t want to see NY and Rochester’s economy to go boom,” he started.  Five whole minutes!  Wow!

“Duke Energy has been charged with environmental violations eight times in less than a month
Residents told the Philadelphia Daily News they were awakened shortly before 7 a.m. by the sound of a huge blast from a natural gas well that Chevron was drilling using hydraulic fracturing techniques.”  He goes on to cite several other examples of citizen complaints and accidents and even ventures into a discussion about train accidents that have caused oil spills and death.

After a careful reading, I set out to make a brief, polite reply.

“First, I would like to thank you for your thoughtful reply to what was just a Tweet. I enjoy engaging in conversation with people of diverse backgrounds and points of view,” I began. 

“Before I respond to your comments about fracking, I would like to make an observation more generally about the business environment in NY. In my work, my clients are CEOs and business owners. I can tell you categorically that they feel unwelcome. Universally, they view the Governor's ‘Open for Business’ campaign as a joke.” 

You can see that I was in the wrong mood to be brief and polite.

“Why?” I asked rhetorically. 

“An extraordinarily high tax burden and a regulatory regime that is unresponsive to the needs of business.”

I cited examples of business owners and CEOs who are considering expanding into other states.  Banks, transportation companies and real estate developers would all like to avoid the cost of doing business here.  New York may be ‘Open for Business’ but business owners are walking through the door in the wrong direction.

As for fracking – on which New York has imposed a ban – I suggested that, “The environmental lobby has scared the crap out of everyone on this issue. And fear is a more powerful motivator than anything else. 

“Every source of energy production has had its disasters -- from coal mine collapses to Three Mile Island to the Exxon Valdez. There isn't a month that goes by without one. If you're interested Google ‘oil spills train accidents’. 

“I lived in Philadelphia for six years. It was rare that a year went by without a major oil fire. Google ‘Philadelphia oil refinery fires’.”  I figured if he could spend 5 minutes feeding his confirmation bias, he could spend 5 minutes feeding mine.

Fracking was introduced in the 1940s and there are over 1 Million instances in the US where fracking is used to extract natural gas. “How many accidents?” I asked. 

“President Obama is no slave to the oil lobby. His Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, has pronounced the risk associated with fracking as ‘manageable’. So, let's MANAGE it! 

“As a native New Yorker, I grew up during a time when New York was the ‘Empire State’ for real. The Governor can keep saying we're ‘Open for Business’ all he likes. But, our 35-year track record of job and population losses tells a different story. If you take Wall Street out of the picture, the state economy is pitiful. 

“You can take each regulation and rationalize its reason for existence. But the overall effect of the state government's burden is destroying us.” 

A week later I read that, once again, New York topped the list of states with the heaviest income tax burden.

I signed the email “respectfully” but I am not sure that was true.

WHO WILL LEAD?