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From Moral Hazard to Virtuous Cycle

If events of the last three years have taught us anything, it’s that America needs a new business plan. Main Street has suffered outsourcing, foreclosures and pink slips, while Wall Street has secured a taxpayer-financed lifeline and awarded its executives mega-bonuses. This doesn’t pass civic decency muster or the economic patriotism smell test. Fortunately, more enlightened national leaders are showing us another way.

At an event in Pittsburgh in October 2009, United Steelworkers International President, Leo Gerard, announced that his union was taking a historic first step to partner with Spain’s famed Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, the world’s largest worker-owned industrial cooperative, to transform manufacturing practices in North America.  (more…)

MUPPETEERED

Whether acting in or out as Miss Piggy, Big Bird, Oscar, the Cookie Monster, Kermit the Frog, Animal, Gonzo the Great or Fozzie Bear, according to Goldman Sachs, we, the 99%, are all Muppets in waiting. Those pulling our strings in the name of their own unalienable rights to unearthly wealth creation at our working class expense should be sued by Jim Henson from his grave for breach of contract with the cultural heartbeat and soul of a country that is still a great deal more than the sum of its markets. (more…)

Reasons to Believe

There is a new heartland heartbeat of hope and inspiration making its way across America providing freedom, sustenance, fulfillment, sustainable progress and community-recycled profits. Following English 101 guidance where our teachers taught it was far better to “show, not tell;” actual place-based economic models are starting to transform foreclosed, outsourced and “creatively destroyed” industrial and residential wastelands. Showing through working mainstream bipartisan parables instead of broadcasting via predictable and disheartening partisan political discourse, a new American reality is emerging just below the surface of decay, abandonment and despair where the eye that sees comes up short against the entrepreneurial mind that perceives and acts while the working class soul prospers.

We need to see, touch, and feel what’s possible, to immunize ourselves against the campaign “Super Pac” induced message viruses coming our way. Trapped by “the worst politics money can buy,” anonymously-funded campaign sloganeering turns the pros and cons of vulture versus virtuous versus crony capitalism practices and excuses into a futile and infertile debate. We only know what’s real in our lives, what we aspire to and how we have no choice but to calibrate and try to heal the suffering at home, next door and down the street. Surrounded by decades of premeditated economic devastation that grows stagnant ugliness as an annual metropolitan and rural mutant harvest, we need reasons to believe, reasons to transform moral hazard (over the top risks without bearing any consequences) into stakeholder “friends with benefits.”

While still micro-sited and not yet everywhere, and without falling into the delusional narcissistic trap of wishful thinking, there is a whole new economy struggling under America’s crusty, polarized skin, trying to break free and go to scale. (more…)

Homesteading for the One Percent

(AFP/Getty Images)

Inherited merit is perceived as un-American and justifiably so in the land of supposed equal opportunities. Historically, the “Far West” belongs to the enterprising and courageous pioneer, the indentured servant who paves his or her own way after voluntary conscription, the “failure is not an option” entrepreneur, the hard working immigrant, the colonial self reliant.

Tragically, America’s current housing crisis makes a complete mockery of this vision. More than a policy day late and a refinancing dollar short, now we have turned our underwater homeowners into Katrina-like refugees, disenfranchised in their own land.

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The Bane of our Existence

“Sometimes people need to be fired, and sometimes they shouldn’t be hired at all. That’s reality.” So states Washington Post columnist, Kathleen Parker (“Romney’s rivals serve up a heaping helping of pious baloney”, published January 11, 2012). If only it were that simple…the gospel according to job creators.

Surviving the Great Recession with undisputable income inequality now the American norm, unfortunately not the un-American exception; too many unemployed, under-employed, foreclosed, and socially abandoned voters on all sides of the political spectrum are ready for something more useful from our political leaders this election year than a predictable and useless zero-sum debate placing all of the blame either on Wall Street or Washington D.C. In fact, the one percent versus the ninety-nine percent “occupy our public squares” protest-context frames this stand-off as the elites against the rest of us, fingering the collusion between big money and big government as the principal barrier to a more democratic prosperity. Extending this perception means that the powered and monied-up in both principal political parties are in the “peoples’ docket” with the “get out of jail free” verdict going to the most credible, the healers, the ones who lead by example, who turn their backs on trickle down and trickle up, who roll up their sleeves and get down in the ditch dregs with the rest of us as we dig our way out in ways we can believe. (more…)

Heaven Prefers the Job Creators

Seen on the Street: the top one percent now sport a “members only” gold-plated lapel pin with the initials “JC” inscribed using blood-red conflict diamonds.

“JC” stands either for “Jesus Christ” or “Job Creators” depending on the eye of the beholder and the smirk of the wearer. The pin is produced as a charity tax write-off by worshipping “Oligarchy Prosperity Gospel” disciples who pray so that only victors get to gorge upon the spoils, the meek are consigned to rate-payer and renter castes, and inherited merit gets taxed at the capital gains 15 percent level with the goal of sparing hallowed wealth accumulators from the excessive burden of having to give back some of what they legally misappropriated. (more…)

Moby Dicked America

In the discarded dog-towns of the Great Recession, the “Moby Dicking” of America – harpooning our whale of a country to dance with the stars for starry-eyed profits – no longer qualifies as a victimless spectator market sport where big game hunters can pay to play for uneven advantages. Outside of paradise, twenty-seven million unemployed average citizens have come up empty, receiving nothing but return to sender job applications this holiday season (Los Angeles Times), with no improvement anytime soon. Our jobless testify to a national disenfranchisement fix, a coast-to-coast underclass that is alive but not well and which has morphed into a signed, sealed, and delivered divorce standoff between global shareholders and local stakeholders, between those who have way too much and those who have much less than enough, between those who decide to buy-back their corporate shares because they’ve confused investing in themselves with investing in their country, and between generations struggling to equate broken, non-recyclable promises with anything positive they were brought up to believe in. (more…)

The American Spring: What Could Go Right vs. What Already Went Wrong

Chris Matthews’ soberly accurate proscription for the current presidency (“Five things JFK Could Teach Obama”) strikes a double chord not only with its content but also because it is juxtaposed in Time magazine’s “Rise of Smart Power” edition (November 7/11)  with a description of foreign policy successes that are less obvious on the domestic front. This dichotomy between getting it fairly right overseas and missing it fairly broadly at home is much more than just a simple failure to communicate and signals an indictment of misplaced priorities and lost opportunities. (more…)

Let Them Eat Poverty

The elemental sleight of hand trick in modern American politics is to divert and channel populist anger into the two traditional party platforms and electorates as imperceptibly as possible so that voters don’t realize they’re going against their declared self-interest. But by 2030 according to current demographic trends when the U.S. will be a minority-majority country deploying ever more sophisticated social media platforms to convene at will – this may no longer be possible. These two developments, identity-based technology and advancing multicultural composition, spell out most clearly why the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is not and will not become the left wing version of the Tea Party. (more…)

Ecclesiastes in Washington: A Time To Grow Up

Intervals between cycles are getting shorter, like summer turning into autumn in a matter of hours instead of days. We’re on internet time and the earth churns faster, connecting the highs and lows with shorter and smaller sine curves between deadly financial system implosions and heady bull runs. A time to reflect on why last night’s policy afterglow following a well delivered Presidential jobs address before an applauding Congress sinks so quickly into predictable partisan political and media talking points even before the President leaves the chamber. (more…)