The 1% are not necessarily the villains. If solutions are to be found, the best elements of the 1% are likeliest to fund it, if only because so few other than the 1% have any significant discretionary funds. This 2012 study, US Trust Insights into Wealth and Worth(tm), has many promising indications that the wealthy often do have a social conscience and are willing to fund positive social change initiatives, including those that create and preserve jobs. I am talking with firms that specialize in business exit planning (liqudity events) with an eye to promoting workshops for business owners in transition from success to significance. The seminars would be put on by those I have trained in philanthropic advising and others trained in business exit planning. A possible venue for these seminars would be community foundations.
Many of business owners, it turns out, (per data from Business Enterprise Institute), whose business are in the range of $10-20 million, actually sell their business not to outsiders, nor to family, but to an ESOP (employee stock option plan). They do so for the personal tax benefits, to create a market for their stock, and to protect jobs by keeping the company under employee ownership. I find this very promising for this country. I dearly hope that whatever your politics, you can see that it is up to us, not the politicians or the Ford Foundation, to fix things as best they can be fixed. The most capable "can do" people are often those who have created a locally owned business. And they, the local entrepreneurs, are also among the most philanthropic people in the community, and the most willing to reinvest in their home town. I found this out, not from books and academic studies, but by experience in working with advisors and their clients in towns big and small. The studies simply confirm what I have seen so often, down many a dusty road, as the country client kicks dirt on my polished shoes.Where you from, boy? Still, we get to be civic friends.
In getting things done, forget labels and politics and the stereotypical ways people talk (this one sounding like Fox News and that one sounding like PBS). Forget the noises they make. Ignore the vitriol of this one and the snobbery of that one. Watch their hands and feet. Praise all those who make a personal lived commitment to making life better for others, or giving another an even chance in life. Among the most likely to act responsibly in my experience are, indeed, the job creators in our local communities. Bain Capital? I only know them from what I hear on TV, before the cable went out, for my not paying the bill. But I can vouch for Rotary.
A lot of these folks unfortunately often get lumped in with the Enterprise class assholes who live inside corporations so vast they never imagine there could be a world beyond them. $30 million these days is small to middle size business, still capable of being involved in and significantly linked to localities, communities. Scale up and you're in Gigantor land. Nothing there but Allosauruses tearing up the peapatch. We have yet to grasp the differences introduced into our models of reality by scale.
Posted by: tm | July 20, 2012 at 05:33 PM
When the owner is the president and CEO, and the business is local, the employees local, and the firm's reputation is the owner's own personal reputation we have a system that worked perfectly well for generations, from Ben Franklin forward. When the managers are not the owners, and the owners are mediated by fund managers, and the firm is global, and the managers hide behind a legal department and a PR department, and consider is all "just business," that we get these predatory behemoth's. Think of the difference, in your field, between a locally owned paper, or radio station, whose owning family is socially prominent, with a reputation to protect, versus a national chain.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | July 23, 2012 at 11:16 AM
Yes, the corporatosphere is actually a largely abstract entity composed of legal documents, absentee viceroys and black-box accounting systems. Large economic imperial structures of old -- Spain, England (Mitt's Anglosaxonland), etc. -- had church and royal obligations to hold them in check.
The analogy with local media has one aspect to be wary of: when media is too local, too dependent upon the merchants in its community, it becomes seriously warped. When newspapers gleefully point to a minor uptick in housing starts, that's merchant mentality. When they softpedal negative news in their own community, but trumpet discovered hijinks in the town down the road, that's local merchandising.
The need is to put the public good at the top of the directives corporations and companies large and small must be legally required to obey.
Posted by: tm | July 25, 2012 at 01:42 PM
Good points. And who will determine the degree to which any forprofit or nonprofit augments the public good? And who determines the definition of public good?
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | July 25, 2012 at 04:49 PM
I quite see your concern. The solution to the who is, almost certainly, to be found in a sort of transparency the likes of which we have yet to envision. If son-of-Enron pilfers or harms the environs, the public knows because it's public information (this is also the putative answer to worthless media). You could have apps that notify folks chosen by random lots in case of violations. These folk would be rotated much in the manner of the Cleisthenian constitution at its most relentlessly mistrustful. It's hard to imagine democracy without random authority and radical transparency. I.e., it's hard to imagine democracy.
Posted by: tm | July 25, 2012 at 06:17 PM
Wikileaks ended badly. We have no need to know what our supervisors are supervising.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | July 26, 2012 at 10:06 AM
Our supervisors would agree. But they're not yet chosen thru aleatoric means.
Posted by: tm | July 26, 2012 at 10:14 AM
"Leadership: What Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi Can Teach Philanthrocapitalists."
Posted by: phil | July 27, 2012 at 02:33 PM