A Novel Idea

At a little noticed meeting with Senate Democrats, Warren Buffett, the
famous investors' guru, told the lawmakers that rich people are not
paying enough taxes.

A tax increase for the very wealthy? Many of the Senators backed away
from that recommendation, even though it came from the world's second
richest man.
That is just one reason why Mr. Buffett plays a central role in my first work of fiction, Only the Super Rich Can Save Us!
The title is derived from an exchange between Buffett and a woman from
New Orleans. Buffett is leading a convoy of critical supplies right
after Katrina to help the fleeing poor stranded on the highways without
food, water, medicine and shelter. At one stop, Buffett was
distributing supplies when a grandmother clasped his hands, looked
right into his eyes and cried out: "Only the super-rich can save us!"

Her words jolted Buffett to his core. Arriving back at his modest home in Omaha, he knew what he had to do.

The next scene is early January 2006. Buffett and 16 enlightened
super-rich elders gather at a mountaintop hotel in Maui, and devise an
elaborate strategy to take on the corporate goliaths and their
Washington allies, and to redirect the country toward long overdue
changes.

What follows is a top-down, bottom-up mobilization of Americans from
all backgrounds in a head-on power struggle to break the grip of the
corporate titans on our government.

With four out of five Americans believing that the U.S. is in decline,
imagining the super-rich powerful engine revving up an organized
citizenry is a precondition to revitalizing democracy.

Tom Peters, the best selling author of In Search of Excellence summed up my book's objective by calling it a work of fiction that he would love to see become nonfiction.

Step by step, week by week, Buffett's super-rich, who call themselves
"the Meliorists" build their campaigns-first privately and then openly
launching their initiatives during the 4th of July weekend with media,
fanfare and parades.

Turning real, well-known people into fictional roles does not mean that
their past achievements and beliefs are overlooked. To the contrary, I
extend their achievements and beliefs to a much more intense level of
what I believe they wish to see our country become.

Over the years, I have spoken to many super-rich and found many of them
discouraged and saddened about our nation's inability to solve major
problems-a society paralyzed because the few have too much political
and economic power over the many.

Buffett, in my 'political science fiction,' to use my colleague Matt
Zawisky's phrase, selected people like George Soros, Ted Turner, Ross
Perot, Sol Price, Yoko Ono, William Gates Sr., Barry Diller, Bill
Cosby, Joe Jamail, Bernard Rapoport, Leonard Riggio, Phil Donahue, and
others because each brought unique experience, determination, money and
rolodexes to that secluded Maui hotel where they met every month.

The "Meliorists" address the enormous mismatch of resources between
citizen groups and the corporate supremacists. This time the entrenched
CEOs are challenged by the retired or elderly billionaires and
megamillionaires who know the ways and means of business and political
power, and can throw the resources, smarts and grassroot organizing
talent against the corporate behemoths, who are not reluctant to
counterattack.

In 1888, a Bostonian by the name of Edward Bellamy published a
tremendous bestseller about a utopian U.S. in the year 2000 called Looking Backward. The book inspired the then-growing progressive movement.

Obviously, Bellamy's utopian dream was not actualized. In my book, I
show not a utopian society but a primer for how the super-rich, as a
catalyst, could provide the means for millions of Americans to upgrade
their quality of life and their livelihoods while confidently building
civic and political institutions to hold and extend their gains.

I mean this book to interest anyone searching for ways to make
fundamental, sustainable change. With this book you could see how your
favorite big issue could be handled strategically and tactically. If
you just want to escape your despair over our national gridlock and
peer into the possible, into what could happen now if enough people and
progressive super-rich come together, this book is for you, too.

Every week, leading reformers in our country produce documentations,
diagnoses, denunciations of injustice and proposals to address it.
Little happens. Too many mismatches. We need major catalysts. But
first, we need imaginations rooted in fulfilling available
potentials-transformations for us and for posterity.

By the way, my fictional Meliorists have a task force on posterity as
well. For more, see OnlyTheSuperRich.Org. Take it from there.