Law And More

Bullying the 65+ - One for Congress

Somehow we made it through multiple economic downturns, including the whopper of 2008.

We did what it took to accommodate a workplace gone tech.

Many of us came from under debt.

Yet, some economists and many financial planners have been labeling us "Brand Dumb."

Come 65, announces the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, 40% of us who are middle class will tumble into poverty. Read all about it in MarketWatch. 

That assumes we're relying primarily on Social Security. After we receive our 2.8% boost in the monthly payment, the average benefit will be $1,461.

Annually, that will total $17,532. Well, the supposed experts concede, that puts us way over the official government threshold of $12,060 for poverty.

However, the experts reply with this: Even at $17,532, many of us will be living in poverty.

But, will we? Or, more to the point, are we?

There are plenty of those in America 65 and over whom I coached who are living a fulfilling middle class life on their Social Security. They are doing that because they made it their personal finance business to adjust and keep adjusting to cost of living realities. 

For example, they knew to sell the family home when the real estate market was near the top. No, many of them haven't been caught in what could be another housing bust, especially in the northeast.

They shed a few tears about leaving all they knew but did the deed: They relocated from high priced locales to much lower priced ones such as Sierra Vista, Arizona, and Youngstown, Ohio. Renting isn't cheap but they know how to shop around in Landlord Nation. 

That's reality number-one.

Reality number-two is that not too many of us are winging it on Social Security, alone.

As The New York Times reports, more than half of us plan to or are already working beyond 65. Some have no intention of retiring at all.

In fact, the two age groups - 65 to 74 and 75 and older - have the fastest rate of growth in the U.S. labor market. That's why I have been a busy career coach for those over-50 who are determined to continue to earn income from work. The aging recognize that full retirement was their dad's and mom's game. A career path may end at age 65. Working rarely does in the current time.

No, we're not dumb. 

And, collectively, we should send this collective message to the economists and financial planners: We won't be bullied into assuming we played it all wrong during our peak working years.

Then and now there were problems. Often big ones, such as the collapse of our industry or medical bills.

But, we have emerged as The Scrambling Generation. Here is my guide, free to download, on how to make a buck, no matter what  Download Outwitting ageism.

And here is my e-book, also free to download, on how to keep finding the exit out of our comfort zone. 

Meanwhile, Congress should be investigating the tactics by professionals trying to establish reputations for brilliance or developing new business - at our expense. You bet, I will testify.

Coaching and Thought Leadership Ghostwriting about Issues Associated with Aging.

Complimentary consultation, sliding scale fees. Please contact Jane Genova at janegenova374@gamil.com.

Suicide Up 34% Among Working Age Americans - Not Just a Tragedy in Legal Sector

New York City taxi driver Roy Kim hung himself on November 5th.

That was the 8th recent suicide among the city's cabbies.

And, collectively they are part of the dramatic rise in suicides among American workers of all kinds.

No, suicide is not just the exit ramp for powerful lawyers such as Gabriel MacConaill who are under unthinkable pressure. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during the timeframe 2000 through 2016, suicides among the working age in America increased 34%. Currently it is the 10th leading cause of death. Here are more details from the media.

Yet, why the majority of workers in America manage to keep living, no matter why, and why some kill themselves remains an enigma. No one has come up with a good explanation, for example, for the dozen lawyers in Kentucky who committed suicide from 2010 through 2013.

Not that experts haven't tried to connect the dots.

At Johns Hopkins, psychiatry professor Kay Jamison published "Night Falls Fast." She herself had made a serious suicide attempt. Since that book came up, suicides have kept increasing. So common have they become that each of us probably knows someone who successfully committed suicide. In addition to three in my recovery group, there have been five in my family.

The only insight I might bring to this puzzle is that there is a realistic fear about discussing with anyone else if you are considering suicide. The odds are that supposed trusted listener will alert the authorities. They could then swoop down and house you in a psychiatric facility against your will. 

In my residential complex an elderly man's cat died. He told a neighbor he felt no reason to live. That was more an expression of despondency than a suicide plan. You bet, he was whisked off to the Yale Psychiatric facility. Soon after, when I had to put my cat to sleep, friends in the development warned me against any allusions to wanting to die.

Perhaps those well-intentioned laws about involuntary confinement of those contemplating suicide need to be ditched.

Despite them, suicides are on the rise.

If those laws didn't exist more could share suicidal ideation or even concrete plans without the expectations of being locked up. As we all know, just talking things out helps so much. In itself, the freedom to do that could prevent suicides.

Litigation Communications

Making points of law, policy issues, and politics accessible and engaging for the public, media, investors, and more. Complimentary consultation. Please contact janegenova374@gmail.com.

Planet Lead Paint - Shift from Advocacy to (Big) Money

When I was blogging the iconic Rhode Island lead paint public nuisance class action trial, the formal public relations focused on advocacy. That was November 1, 2005 until February 22, 2006. 

The defendants promoted public policies such that the landlords were responsible for making the residue of lead paint safe. Another was that federal and state initiatives had already addressed most of the hazard.

The plaintiff and the child activists supporting them argued that children were not safe where they should be: their own homes.

When I interviewed jurors after the verdict went against three of the defendants, including Sherwin-Williams, one woman hammered that stance. She felt so strongly that children must be safe where they live. 

Years later, the RI Supreme Court threw the whole case out. 

That was then.

More recently, both the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the conviction of the defendants, including Sherwin-Williams, in the west coast version of a lead paint public nuisance class action lawsuit.

As expected, that has opened the door to other municipalities and plaintiff lawyers working on contingency filing similar lawsuits. Currently two have been filed in counties in eastern Pennsylvania. Here are details. More are anticipated, not only in PA but in other states.

This time the rhetoric, on both sides, seems to have a lot to do with money.

For instance Jones Day, representing Sherwin-Williams, contends that lawyers are motivating county officials to file the lawsuits because of the contingency fees. Those can reach one-third of the verdict or settlement. Here those statements, part of Sherwin-Williams' lawsuit to halt those two PA lawsuits, are quoted in Forbes. 

Meanwhile, municipalities can certainly use the lead-paint abatement funds from litigation to fix that problem in older stock housing. Otherwise, homelessness can increase, which can hurt the economy of those counties. In San Francisco, the homelessness situation has discouraged conferences from choosing that city. 

Money will become even more prominent if there is an international economic recession. Today, a headline in The Wall Street Journal reads: Global economic slowdown deepens. That, the article goes on to assert, can put U.S. robust growth at risk. The current stock market is hurting the portfolios of too many. 

As for money and the lead paint defendants, such as Sherwin-Williams, they will require a great deal of it for legal expenses as well as verdicts against them and any settlements. Currently Sherwin-Williams is among the CA trial losers which has to collectively pony up $400 million. 

Those public relations firms officially handling the positioning and packaging of the lead paint defendants will have to transcend platitudes. Money as money has a crass image. 

This is Phase Three of the lead paint public nuisance class action litigation. Together the lawyers and the public affairs experts have to prevent it from mutating into "Another Tobacco" or "Another Asbestos." Yes, the courts of law and the courts of public opinion intersect. 

Litigation Communications

Making points of law, policy issues, and politics accessible and engaging for the public, media, investors, and more. Complimentary consultation. Please contact janegenova374@gmail.com.

 

21st Century, Campus Gun Violence - 20th Century, Verbal Violence in Colleges/Universities

iGens have been socialized how to manage a threat of or an actual gun attack in college.

Of course, many of them won't be able to shake off the memory of lock-ins as standard and losing classmates who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. In The Atlantic, Ashley Fetters describes that current ethos. 

However, higher education, just like many other institutions in society, was never really a safe setting.

Baby Boomers such as myself vividly recall the verbal violence that faculty, administration, and upper classmen could and gleefully did inflict on us. I don't recall any instance in which we had even tried to push back. 

The time was before students had pounded into them that they had rights.

Unless a parent had been a lawyer - rare, since many of us were first-generation college - we didn't even know the legal language to associate with that kind of abusive behavior.  One is: the deliberate infliction of emotional abuse. 

Of curse, lawsuits against the miscreants and the institution itself for negligence in allowing that were unthinkable. We assumed that kind action would imprint a black mark on our credentials - and soul.

In addition, as yet, there wasn't the assertiveness industry to provide us with set phrases, facial expressions, and body language for responding to the abuse. No one had tutored us to use expressions like "That was unnecessary" when authority figures were inappropriately critical or just going about happily doing random target practice. 

The attacks, so routine, left their marks on our psyches.

It wasn't until I was in cognitive therapy in 2003 that I got it how many bits of trauma had become embedded in my sense of self. Their large number was due, in part, to the blind faith in higher education. We were told: The more education the better. So, we piled up the degrees - and absorbed the verbal violence. 

When an institution, as with education, is so critical to one's success, those needing it will probably always be at high risk. People have to continue going to school, even through it's marked as a setting for copycat mass shootings which transform the troubled into celebrities. Years ago, we got it the first week of college that tongue lashings and put-downs were part of the curriculum. 

Litigation Communications

Making points of law, policy issues, and politics accessible and engaging for the public, media, investors, and more. Complimentary consultation. Please contact janegenova374@gmail.com.

 

"Bad Times at the El Royale" - Gene Grabowski Type Crisis Communications Provides Emotionally/Morally Satisfying Resolution

A PTSD Vietnam veteran dies in peace.

The film tape FBI agent Laramie Sullivan (played by "Mad Men" Jon Hamn) is burned, remaining secret forever.

A cult leader is terminated. 

Suffering human beings take that shot at redemption. 

And, two underdogs get to enjoy funding for a whole new life.

That's the emotionally and morally satisfying ending for film noir "Bad Times at the El Royale."

Set in 1968, when California was full of infinite promise and Nevada was the only BigCasino game around, the movie focuses on seven strangers who arrive at the lodging which has seen better days.

Only two will get out alive.

And those two have been able to snatch redemption from a lifetime of suffering. Salvation includes the money from a 1956 bank robbery to start their lives over, this time on their terms.

Those two blessed humans are make-believe Roman Catholic priest Daniel Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges) and striving African American singer Darlene Sweet (payed by Cynthia Erivo). Since the counterculture was just getting off the ground then Sweet experiences extreme racial abuse and bias.

But it is Sweet who provides the exit strategy. She does this through the kind of wise crisis communications made iconic by kglobal partner Gene Grabowski. As Grabowski hammers, communication represents 80 percent of the manager's job. Sweet proves herself a brilliant manager. Here is one of Grabowski's thought leadership essays on the transformational power of communications Download CommunicationTrainingGeneGrabowski. 

It is Sweet who provides the template when to hold and when to hold with the strongman cult leader.

She overlooks Flynn's shady past, enlisting him as an ally.

She rallies the tormented veteran Miles Miller (played by Lewis Pullman) to kill once again.

Later when he is wounded, she convinces the fake priest Flynn to help Miller's passage by facilitating the final confession.

With his death Miller finds peace for having slaughtered 120 in his past.

She makes legit taking the bank robbery money.

It is her decision to burn the tape which could have undone faith in a deceased former leader. 

And, it's clear that Flynn will have human caring as he continues to slip into that horrific abyss of dementia.

Before arriving at El Royale, he had spent 12 years in prison for the robbery and had lost a brother as the result of it. The odd morality of the noir film makes audiences cheer that he has not only found a friend. He is freed from financial angst.

All the flashpoints in "Bad Times at El Royale" should get those on the front lines of community, business, and personal crisis to reflect on how they communicate. In his new series "FBI," Dick Wolf might incorporate some of kind of communication training Grabowski recommends for those accountable for managing a world which no longer has absolutes. 

Litigation Communications

Making points of law, policy issues, and politics accessible and engaging for the public, media, investors, and more. Complimentary consultation. Please contact janegenova374@gmail.com.

 

Chris Christie Is Back - This Time, With Buttoned-Down Persona

Those watching election return coverage on ABC noticed this: Chris Christie was a panel member.

His persona lacked the rawness and combativeness of his days as a politico. Those attributes were replaced with a buttoned-down image. 

Will his next be in media? His presentation of self on ABC was that of a well-informed commentator. Easily he could slip into the role of a public interest talk show host or be a permanent member of panels on such broadcasts. 

Meanwhile, the kind of image he used to nurture has been usurped by Donald J. Trump. There is the old saying that only one kind of person can inhabit space at one time. 

Litigation Communications

Making points of law, policy issues, and politics accessible and engaging for the public, media, investors, and more. Complimentary consultation. Please contact janegenova374@gmail.com.

 

Courage - Nowhere Near Getting Our Values Around It in 2018

Are those female law firm partners, ranging from Kerrie Campbell to Dawn Knepper, courageous for suing BigLaw for alleged gender discrimination?

Or, are they simply piggybacking on third-wave feminism which, in turn, has become a platform for #MeToo?

Or, horrors, are they reckless? 

In these unusual times it's a struggle to get our heads around what is "courage."

On Twitter, public affairs thought leader Richard Levick praised an instance of courage.

In coaching a 40-year-old woman in her personal essay for law school I am having her dig deep to describe how her unique version of courage listened, looked, walked, and talked.

And, among those in a recovery group in central Connecticut there had been an undertow of criticism that a lawyer shot himself in the head instead of having the "courage" to embrace the consequences of his third DUI.

There, of course, is no shortage of templates of courage.

President John Kennedy published his book "Profiles in Courage."

Mr. Smith went to Washington.

And, in "Stuart: A Life Backwards," there is the real life character alcoholic who chooses to live his life on the streets. 

There are also templates of downright stupidity.

The classic example is the teacher in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" who encourages little girls to become political heroes. 

In between, there are so many questions. Unfortunately, most of the answers have been filled with 20th-century platitudes. 

Where can we find insight to help sort out even some of this?

Litigation Communications

Making points of law, policy issues, and politics accessible and engaging for the public, media, investors, and more. Complimentary consultation. Please contact janegenova374@gmail.com.

 

Impeachment - More Political Tool Than Process

The message makes a nice tidy package.

That is: Get out and vote next Tuesday. The Democrats can re-take the U.S. House. Then, the impeachment of the current president can begin. 

The promise of being able to start the impeachment process against Donald Trump is what counts. Not the process itself. And not if it is effective and the president loses his job.  

Probably from the get-go with the election of the first president of the U.S. - George Washington - the concept of impeachment has been more a political tool than an actual course of action politicos or a private citizens intended to put in play. So radical is that notion that it packs a power punch.

That's what Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their May 2018 book "To End A Presidency: Power of Impeachment." Here it can be ordered from Amazon.

The reality is that impeachment, by constitutional design, is a complex, cumbersome process. Rarely does it proceed from start to finish.

But the threat of it, as happened with Harry Truman, can hobble the credibility of a president to the point that he can become a kind of lame duck. That threat was used against Truman for firing war hero Douglas MacArthur. 

Clearly, that same threat against Trump serves myriad political uses. Getting out the Democratic vote is just one. Another is that the term has become a popular buzzword which calls attention to what Trump's critics contend he is doing wrong. Also, if the target takes the threat seriously, it can be a distraction. Likely, the president will begin to make mistakes.

The leverage of this kind of tool is not, of course, unique to politics. Those in business use it all the time to motivate anyone, be it an executive or rank and file, to resign. The threat of being forced out is clear. Others distance themselves from the one targeted. And, soon enough, what is supposed to happen happens: That alleged misfit in the organization leaves on his or her own.

"To End A Presidency" is a well-written book. It breaks down legalities into what laypeople can understand and makes the ins and outs of the constitution a riveting narrative.

Litigation Communications

Making points of law, policy issues, and politics accessible and engaging for the public, media, investors, and more. Complimentary consultation. Please contact janegenova374@gmail.com.

 

 

Section 230 of Telecommunications Act of 1996 - Push to Repeal

There was really a time - it seems light years ago - when idealism was high about social networks.

The assumption was that those digital platforms for self-expression and connecting could and would regulate themselves. In the worse-case scenarios, if posters proved to be rhetorical miscreants, the network's powers that be would remove the content.

Yes, the bad guys would be banned temporarily or even permanently. If the members of the media covered that banishing from Paradise, there would be public shaming. Not only branding but actual business revenues could be hurt.

That mindset shaped Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Essentially, social networks were not responsible for what was posted. However, if they observed material which threatened violence and so on, they was accountable for taking appropriate legal action.

Post the Synagogue shooting, there is a growing outcry for repealing Section 230. The assumption is that networks are unable to self-regulate and/or if they do it is too little too late. 

In addition, just about everyone in the loop of facilitating those platforms is being put under a public relations and legal microscope.

For example, should payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe had acted sooner in suspending extreme network Gab?

Should GoDaddy had ended its domain registration as soon as the tone and content of Gab were documented as standard fare.

The world knows that alleged synagogue murderer Robert Bowers had been a "regular" on Gab. Here are more details from Phillip Bantz at Law.com.

The ugly underbelly for all this is the fragile right to freedom of speech, both personal and commercial. That is not an abstract matter. Progress in a society - cultural, social, technical, and economic - depends on being able to put out there all kinds of ideas. 

Litigation Communications

Making points of law, policy issues, and politics accessible and engaging for the public, media, investors, and more. Complimentary consultation. Please contact janegenova374@gmail.com.

 

Gab Goes Dark - GoDaddy Tells It to Find New Domain Provider

Smart media and business guidance could have kept social network Gab in the safe-content box.

However, the newbie, launched in 2016, allowed its posters to stray too far out of the box with rhetoric that was assessed to encourage violence.

Now, reports TechCrunch, Gab is over. At least for now. Its domain provider GoDaddy told it to find another registrar. Since then, Gab is offline. 

Part of this GoDaddy action is in response to the worldwide news that alleged mass murderer Robert Bowers posted hate speech on Gab. But even before that, alt-right Gab got on the wrong side of the tech community. For example, Apple and Google banned it from its App stores. 

More recently, though, PayPal and Stripe suspended its payment accounts. And cloud hosting service Joyent parted ways. 

Underlying this push-back against a social network which is perceived to be extremist is the age-old issue: Can there be a direct correlation between words and action? 

In short, how much influence and power does language really have? Is the pen really more mighty than the sword?

In the era when the medium of published books dominated, academics frequently raised the question if language products such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" helped end slavery.

Further back in history, did the satire on religion Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" prompt Roman Catholics to push for reform? 

Although we are in a post-book time, there are still those questions on applications for content assignments or even jobs about what books changed one's thinking or had a great influence on us.

Not long ago, for instance, I applied to research and create equities analysis for Motley Fool again. Years ago, more than 140 of my writeups had been published on Yahoo Finance under the umbrella of Motley Fool.

On the application was that question about books. My answer was that Scott Galloway's "The Four" had reinforced my questioning about the power of branding. The system of brand management had been invented by P&G in the 1930s. In my current purchasing patterns, I am post-branding. 

Will it be up to the lawyers to duke out if social network language can be held accountable for behavior?

Meanwhile, those socializing youth should explain how misleading the nursery tune can be: Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me. On an emotional level, for many of us the damage has been profound. 

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