Gift Hub

Discerning the Proper Uses of Riches in the wake of Pope Francis

Given the Pope's emphasis recently on the wealthy giving back, and capitalism as bondage to wealth, I wonder if we will see a second edition of Schervish and Whitaker's Wealth and the Will of God: Discerning the Proper Uses of Riches in the Service of Ultimate Purpose? At least an Appendix on Pope Francis, or a brief rebuttal of his Bull would be in order. 

Pope Francis Rips off Wealth Bondage

I am sorry to have to say this, but Pope Francis is infringing the Intellectual Property of Wealth Bondage. For years, I have been making the point that the Free Market (Wealth Bondage) is Tryrannical, making us slaves of metrics, systems of ownership, and wordly desires.  Now, the Pope, without even a nod towards Gifthub or my generous sponsor, Wealth Bondage, makes points that look to me to be suspiciously similar. Wealth is bondage, the rich should give, WTF? As if I had never said this! As the head of an organization as wealthy and hierarchical as the Catholic Church, I had expected better of Pope Francis. Given the corruption of the church, and its many pressing financial problems, (fines and settlements worse even than JP Morgan), I have no problem with its spokesperson aligning his Personna with Virtue, and building the Brand, but spiritual goods no less than intectual are owned in a Free Market.  My connecting the Gospels to a Saintly Critique of Capitalism is Prior Art, and should be acknowledged as such with not only a kind word (which was lacking), but a few dollars in compensation.  I am also a bit miffed about his riffing on the Poverty theme. Soon he will trade in his Popemobile for a Dumpster on Wheels.  Right, we get the symbolism; he is broke, kissing lepers, washing the feet of the poor. He is a good man, etc. Virtuous and Christlike, yes, but humorous? All sermons, no sermones. The long tradition of carnival, and the riotous inversion of the social order, in which nuns and priests were once hunted through the streets, as were the Kings and Queens, and rich business owners (all in fun) is under-represented in the Church, except, maybe behind closed doors, down in the wine cellar, where who knows what goes on, subject to the secrecy of the confessional, and attorney client privilege. If he laughed more, I could take this Pope more seriously. The world will not turn upside down, or right side up again, because a Pontiff writes a Bull.

Morals Consulting Code of Ethical Conduct (DRAFT for Peer Review)

Fr. Brennan and I have been tasked by The Big Boss, Mistress Candidia herself, with coming up with a Morals Pledge for us as Moral Consultants in Wealth Bondage: America's Iconic Brand of Wisdom, Wealth and the Will of God.  Originally, I suggested a vow of chastity, poverty, and silence, patterned on what real monks and monkesses had in olden times. I thought these might prevent some of the greatest abuses of morals consulting to the world's wealthiest families, and would insure the integrity of our noble trade.  In the work we do we cannot afford even the appearace of impropriety. As a practical matter, though, after a preliminary survey of our peers, we decided on a vow against fornicating, and giving moral advice, while simulateneously charging or paying a fee in excess of prevailing rates, tips excluded. (Unbundling fornication and morals advice is permissible, under these rules, if prevailing rates are charged and allocated fairly across the services provided.)  That passed after a heated discussion about prevailing fees, and whether fornication while giving other than moral advice, while charging or paying the going rate would be considered a violation. "Other than moral advice" ran into the question of whether giving other than moral advice while fornicating and charging a standard morals consulting fee would be considered a breach of professional ethics, which might tend to bring our profession into disrepute, or whether it might simply be treated as a welcome relief to provider and client both. "Can rampant hypocrisy be ethical?" one doxy asked. "Wouldn't it be more ethical if we fornicated openly, charged whatever the market would bear, and give whatever advice moral or not the client wanted to hear, within the law?" While we saw some truth to that, truth is not the issue here. We decided, subject to final review by our peers, that the exception proves the rule. "Other than moral" is morally acceptable while fornicating (or before or after fornicating within the scope of a single engagement) and charging a standard morals fee, if fully disclosed as "other than moral" to the client. Please feel free as a morals consultant to the world's wealthiest families to leave your comments in the box below, during the 10 day draft period, starting today. After that, These Nonbinding Principles of Ethical Conduct will go up on the wall in Wealth Bondge, by the rack where you pick up your towel. We do not want to blindside you or your clients! Do you see anything here we may have missed?

Contesting Wealth Inequality as Cause for The Wealthiest

“While there’s a lot we know about inequality, there’s a lot we don’t,” Ms. Boushey said, as quoted in a NYT article on wealth inequality and a new think tank to study it.  Funding comes from The Sandler Foundation. Video of Herb Sandler at Give Smart.

An Interruption from a Board Member as to The Meaning of Money

Yesterday I did a 60 minute breakout for a Fortune 500 financial services company at their annual conference.  By agreement with the convener, I planned 30 minutes on "the big questions" that donors and clients ask as they contemplate their lives, mortality, and posterity. In the other 30 minutes, I agreed to talk tax, tools, and techniques.  In the back of the room, were 6 highly intelligent looking, quite well dressed, people who paid very close attention to the life questions. ("What kind of person do you want to be in what kind of world? Where do you want to have an impact now, later, at death or beyond death? How wealthy do you want your children to be? Are there things in life you have not yet done that you would like to get back to while you still have time?") Then, as I pivoted into the technical stuff about charitable tools and techniques, in the context of estate planning, one raised his hand, and launched into a plain spoken directive: "You are going way too fast! Stick with the life questions. Do not push product and tools. Stay with the vision issues." His perspective is my perspective, and I welcomed it, so I asked him his role there. He said, "I am on the Board of this company" as were the five imposing figures to his right. That evening at the cocktail hour, another member of the Board sought me out. "What is your background?, he wanted to know. I summarized 27 years in financial services. He waved that off as nothing. (Which, I agree with; from a Board perspective, I had been another mid-level drudge managed to metrics.) "No, no," he said, "What is your real background?" Finding that I have studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at some depth, he launched into his professional history, his estate planning, and his own dilemmas in passing wealth to heirs.

Here is more:

• The talk was originally submitted as 100% about the life questions.
• The conveners wanted technical because the firm does technical and gets reps paid through technical
• Those authorities responsible for Continuing Ed were apparently mystified by my applying for CE credit for a talk on life questions, so the technical had to be prominently included. 

Here is what I conclude:

• Steve Job's said that the iPhone is "the intersection of technology and the liberal arts." So estate planning and charitable planning are the intersection of the humanities and the technical. (The why of life with the how of money.)
• The humane side of gift planning is woefully under-represented in this hard-driven age of metrics and results.
• As gift planners get pushed and pushed to get results by the numbers, and as financial firms push their reps the same way, and as the liberal arts fall into the "nice to have" category at even the best colleges, and as the liberal arts continue to attract, not the future leaders, but the feckless and the disaffected (speaking as one), the gap between what wealthy people need (a space to reflect on what matters most) and what they get (a space in which to be planned and badgered by the numbers) will only continue to grow.
• What Board members want for themselves and how their orgs are run (whether law firms, accounting firms, financial firms or nonprofits) are at right angles - "Manage others to metrics, but treat me, precious me, as a person!"

On a positive note..... the big life questions are easy to ask.  As long as you don't fear what happens next. What happens after you ask them may be what happened in the streets of Athens or Jerusalem, with results that were unpredictable, but could include poison or crucifixion, head up or head down, depending on the situation. The wealthy bear it away. This is their Republic, their world. We get to live here, but to pose questions about love, life, justice, as if wealth reported on up from the Board to the Most High, or to some inner light more reliable than personal preference, is more than your life is worth or mine. I do not ask the big questions - What kind of world class Fool do you think I am? - I just quote many people, mostly dead people, who asked those questions. And at least 50% of every talk I give is The Answers, which amount to products, assets under management, tools and techniques and gift opportunities. So, I know how my bread is buttered, and I keep the buttery side up, as I was taught, in 27 years under the yoke of metrics, under a Board, who would prefer something else altogether for themselves, and can't find it, won't find it.  Poetic justice. Death in life. Running to metrics, objectively valid, and right on time.

The Umbrella Project

Eloquent piece by Bruce Deboskey on the ethics of instinctive versus strategic philanthropy. Challenged by a homeless man in a downpour to give the man his umbrella Bruce does not and his colleague does.  Bruce concludes that both instinctive and strategic giving are good. In tonight's deluge, I tried tonight to accost many people asking for their umbrella and my results for the evening are: 0 umbrellas, three reprimands, 23 walk-pasts, and one strategic plan for ridding the world of homeless people like me. All these responses have merit. Helping clients understand that their values are their values and all values are equal is my role as Spiritual Leader to America's Wealthiest Families. I may not have gotten an umbrella but to the extent I have reasurred by my betters I have made at least some small contribution to the good of all.

The Dance of the Dead or Spiritual Entrepreneurship for the Good of All

If we as Wealth Advisors are to serve as secular priests, in the wealthiest families, whose family enterprise includes famous brands, foundations, social welfare organizations, PACs, think tanks, and other family entities whose puppets and beneficiaries govern the polity, we had better find a way to be sanctified without upsetting anyone in the families we serve. This the Catholic Church and others have pioneered, as Fr Brennan, our defrocked priest in Wealth Bondage, reminds me. Pacts with the devil are a necessary strategy when the Devil runs the Fallen World and we have responsibilities to keep things on an even keel now and far into the future, despite whatever roiling of may occur from below. Still, the Gospels, or any other religious text, are an inconvenience, since on a certain popular misreading they might seem to say the first last shall be first and the meek shall inherit, or that charity is justice, or that strangers deserve hospitality, contrary to every principal of Prudent Estate Planning, particularly in states that have repealed the Rule Against Perpetuities. Buddhism seems a better bet as a spiritual support for a Wealth Planning practice since it is without doctrine. "Compassion for all we see." That sounds pretty harmless, really.  We feel compassion for all, for all we see and not for those we don't since they are  not our neighbors per se, are not present, or if present are invisible.

I was meditating, Buddhist style, with my boss and generous patron, Mistress Candidia Cruikshanks, she who rules us all, as founder and president of Wealth Bondage: An American Icon, when the Spanish speaking maid interrupted us, her hand shaking and rattling the cup as she served us herbal tea. "You stupid slut! How the F can I hold a charitable thought with bimbos in aprons rattling the effing cups? What am I? Am I some piece of furniture here? Do you know who I am? And you rattle a cup in my presence? When I am communing with most effing high? God was telling me how optimize all my effing bottomlines! And now I have lost my train of thought! Do you think God will forgive you for interrupting his most important message since Moses? Don't just stand there simplering. Be gone from my world!"  So the maid is headed back to Mexico, not on the private jet, but in the trunk of my car. No! Don't misunderstand. She is alive and well, though weeping and a little dehydrated. I check whenever I pull over for gas to make a pit stop. My instructions were to dump her across the border, "with her own people. Her little pissant family or some distant relative can pick her up; they all stick together; I wish her no harm; I have compassion on all, that she might live! I have mellowed since my spritual awakening into the larger purpose God has for me as his Steward of all Creation! Oooooommmmmm." Once I dump the maid over the border, while I am here, I will see if I can find any memorabilia from The Day of the Dead.  Skeletons Dancing. Maybe there is a spiritual angle I can use in that too.