A personal note, aka "biographic" for Second Bill of Rights, Greening
Including a link to "Why Trump..."
William R. Neil was born in New Jersey and attended public high school. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Lafayette College with a degree in American Studies in 1972.
He was a social worker and supervisor in the public welfare system in Trenton, New Jersey from 1976-1987. From 1987 until 2001 he was an environmental leader in New Jersey, first with the American Littoral Society and then with New Jersey Audubon Society, where he was the chief policy writer and lobbyist, finishing as Director of Conservation. For NJ Audubon, he wrote, edited and sometimes published the Green Gram (ten years), wrote numerous essays, including quarterly writing for its magazine, and produced conservation brochures and posters. He has testified before Committees of the Senate and the House, in Trenton and Washington, been a guest on NJ Public TV, and conducted numerous press conferences. He also carried out his own “investigative reporting,” especially around issues of land swaps and the cranberry industry. His policy memo (1996) was the genesis of Governor Whitman’s later bond act to save 1,000,000 acres of NJ land – at the time the most ambitious program in the nation.
On September 9, 2001, on Sandy Hook, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for Environmental Advocacy and Leadership by the NY/NJ Baykeeper.
After moving to Maryland in 2005, he served on Governor O’Malley’s Transition Team for Planning and Smart Growth, and wrote a significant portion of the final report in 2006-2007. Recent essays on Land-Use, which have been critical of the “Smart-Growth” trend, have been: Making Sense of Mixed-Use Mania (July, 2007); What Euphoria Can Do to a Decent Concept (May, 2009).
Since February of 2007 he has been writing essays on the political economy and the financial crisis. Some of the more prominent ones have been: Fiscally Responsible or Ingredients for an Economic Katrina? (Feb. 2007, which cited the possibility that financial markets would freeze due to derivatives and high leverage); The Missing Green Rail Vision for the MD/Metro DC Region (2008); The End of An Era, Part I, (June 2008); The End of An Era, Part II (Sept. 2008); Making Sense of Economic Chaos (Nov. 2008); Where Wall Street Drains Into The Bay (about deregulation and the failure to clean up Chesapeake Bay, Feb., 2009); A Fireside Chat on the Cusp of History(Review of Bill Greider’s Come Home America, March, 2009);Stagnation, Stagflation, Stalemate…?(June, 2009); Look Back in Anger: Wall Street Insiderism, Oligopoly & The Threat to Democracy (Sept., 2009);Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Market (Jan., 2010). The Costs of Creative Destruction”: Wendell Berry vs. Gene Sperling.
His essays on the political economy/ecology have also appeared in publications of the World Economics Association, the Second Largest Professional Organization for Economists. He is not a professional economist.
An explanation for Donald Trump’s Election appeared as an essay in the book Trumponomics, entitled “Major Miscalculations: Globalization, Economic Pain, Social Dislocation and the Rise of Trump.’
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue79/Neil79.pdf
Before being banned from the Daily Kos for criticizing President Biden, his essays appeared from 2014 to the fall of 2021, as billofrights: https://www.dailykos.com/history/user/billofrights
Since August of 2021, he has been posting as
http://www.gracchibros.wordpress.com
And then in the summer of 2021, he began posting here at Substack.