Gift Hub

Giving Matters (Chris McLeod, JD)

I have not met her but certainly have enjoyed reading around on her site and her blog. Chris, an attorney, writes about giving with her whole being. I have never heard this thought before (as listed in her service offerings). 

Transform your grief: People who suffer a loss or trauma often feel powerless or at a loss for what to do. Connecting with a nonprofit partner that is doing outstanding work to educate the community and prevent similar heartbreak can help restore a sense of hope and well-being to the individual and his/her family.

 

Email to a Friend Well-Placed in Dynastic Wealth Counselling

"When the grandmothers speak the world will be healed." Hawaiian proverb. 

Whatever Cordelia saw in her dysfunctional family, emblematic of a deranged kingdom and cosmos, she said only "nothing." When she awakened her father from his madness, it was not with words but with music. By the end of the play she and her father are dead, and a moral order is restored to a world that seems lesser and prosaic. The Fool is Cordelia's friend and talks constantly, always off balance. "My poor fool is hanged," exclaims the king dying with his daughter's corpse in his arms. This is the universal story of which Golgotha is a for instance. Pieta. The Fool cannot teach the Princess what to say or how, but the "given" both address is the same, fidelity to.... (Strains of music offstage.)

Secular Priest, Adoptive Son, and Consigliere in a Great Family

You remember Fr. Francis (Frank) Brennan, the defrocked priest who disappeared from Wealth Bondage (proud sponsor of  Gifthub) along with a case of communion wine, and an altar boy, from the Wealth with Wisdom Scene Room? He called me on a stolen cellphone to catch up. Apparently, he has landed on his feet as Consigliere to a Great Family from South America. I asked Father Frank what his duties entail. He said as "the most trusted advisor," he is responsible for the family mission statement, and maintaining family values, wisdom, and hence wealth across generations. I knew all that; it is just the textbook stuff that all Consiglieres do. In The Godfather, Tom is an attorney but almost an adoptive son. Father Brennan said he is drawing up the adoption papers for signature once he "makes his bones." As with Tom, Fr. Brennan may have to, as he puts it, "execute against plan," by making certain recalcitrant types "an offer they can't refuse." (Remember the movie producer waking up next to the severed head of his prized thoroughbred horse?) I was confused about this, and how it reconciles with Family Values, Family Mission Statement, the Gospel of Wealth, and the Will of God on Earth, to which Great Families are devoted and from which they ultimately derive their legitimacy in the eyes of the Almighty and the General Public. Then I recalled in The Godfather series that not only the family but the Church, as well as the police and the judiciary, and Senators, are corrupt to the core. Family Values, religiosity, family capitals, come down in the end (in the film, not in real life) to patronage. Favors traded, rings kissed, large bodies of cash, rule outside the rule of law by oligarchs and their friends. For this to be credible we need a Secular Priest and in this role Fr. Brennan is second only to the very best in this field. I do not want to name any names because the list of those calling themselves Consigliere to a Great Family runs several pages long, and includes some of the most respected figures in the field, known for sagacity and virtue. I do not want to make invidious distinctions as to their relative merits. The Monk Rasputin was the best historically, and it took many bullets, a hatchet, and an unknown number of bayonets, to bring him down, before the Tsar his client fell, and his family too, into the pit under a hail of bullets, some bouncing off the children's vests sewn with diamonds, but many getting through. Brennan has enough sense to take the last helicopter out of the compound before it falls, if his escape from Wealth Bondage, one step ahead of the law, and several of his wives, is any indication. It was good to hear from Brennan. I am glad all is going well.

The Old Philosopher (Eddie Lawrence)

My thanks to a well known figure in philanthropic planning circles, an honest man, though a secret reader of Gifthub, who provided the link. I promise not to mention, to any of our mutual friends, that he reads this blog, if he promises not to tell anyone that I write it. (If you too are a reader, your secret is safe with me.) Let's keep things positive, with Eddie Lawrence. The rich have their burdens no less than the poor and we all must do our best to maintain their morale in a world of hurt.

The Parable of The Empty Cask

As he has aged, my mentor, The Happy Tutor, Dungeon Master to the Stars in Wealth Bondage, has become more irascible and cryptic. I was asking him how I could better position myself as a Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, or even as their Secular Priest of choice, since that is the fashionable term now among my fellow Serving Professionals who have successfully penetrated this elite and highly competitive market for virtue and wisdom. All Tutor would say, sitting on his pile of garbage in the Dumpster, well insulated with a layer of Great Books, is, "Phil, I have often noticed that the emptier the cask, the better it sounds when beaten." And with that he struck his fist on the wall of the Dumpster, which resounded nicely. I just don't get the point he is making, though. Why tell me this when I am so full of wisdom?

Blogging Philanthropy - "eras" up to now

Blogging around 2002 or maybe earlier about Wealth Bondage & Philanthropy (two topics as intimately connected as ying/yang, or any two bottom lines found in social impact investing, or corporate branding), I have noticed phases. In the earliest days I blogged into blackness with no readers. Then with the advent of Google came those misled into visiting because of a prior burning interest in either Wealth or Bondage or both. I blogged as The Happy Tutor, playing into lust, philanthropy, will to power, gullibility, and greed, and  no one was the wiser, though some were productively confused. Then, came many interested people who also under aliases commented on the satiric posts, sometimes as many as 150 comments per post, in carnivalesque ebullience, freed by a mask to speak truth as fiction, without real world consequences, like shunning or being fired from a job. Then came the walled gardens of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest that a) mandated a trackable identity to be sold to advertisers as the price paid to Wealth Bondage for a free service and b) attracted the masses who had little to say, did not say it well, but said it often. Gifthub cleaned up its act, and I began to post as myself, a morally insane secular priest to America's Wealthiest Families, bro bono publico, and without clients, clothes, or shame. Then came the era when the insider readership seems to have picked up and no one comments online, but several have entered by email into a tormented ongoing conversation about the moral insanity of dynastic wealth planning, the incredible deafness of advisors who claim to be "trusted," much less "secular priests," blaspheming the holy they claim to serve, or the vapidity of so much philanthropic blarney. As Samuel Beckett, or one of his sorry tramps, once opined, "Something is taking its course."

Now, I find that others, on the inside of Wealth Bondage, well respected, with impeccable resumes, in positions of authority, at the pinnacle of the dominance hierarchy, with followings in the field, and sometimes with client bases equal in net worth to California, say, or all of Guatemala,  are struggling as I have with how to bring the sub rosa conversations back into public view. Their best thoughts, as mine, are disowned - homeless and wandering like a mad person who cannot remember his or her own name, and gives as his or her address a childhood home, long since torn down. Many of us know what we fear to say. Many of us fear being what we are - in my case reasonably enough. And thus we string ourselves along in Bondage, as the Pope has noted, to Mammon and Markets whose second bottom line is damnation, which is a metaphor for the hell in which we are the better self we dare not be. For those who have published blasphemous books merging Mammon and The Holy, who have read the Gospels over coffee, and Leo Strauss over lunch, looking for the angle leading to personal preferment, to the propping up of wealth, power, and injustice, or who have spoken at professional conferences, presenting themselves as Wise and Virtuous Counselors to Dynastic Wealth, be on notice: The polite silence of the mortally offended will not last. If we awaken dreaming of black holes into which we stream and from which we stream, and our wealthy clients too, with all their serving professionals, and the heirs, generation by generation until the final trump of doom - let us find some Moses to interpret as with Pharaoh and his dreams.  (I am not that prophetic interpreter. I know one, now silent, who is, whose judgement corrects mine. And in that silent one the voice speaking sub rosa is from love and from love alone. May that healing voice be heard.)

Little lamb who fleeced thee?

Lion beds down with lamb for photo op. Lion later devours lamb. Retains photo for branding purposes. Rated by the other Lions in the pride as highly social. On the way to slaughter what elase could the lamb say, but baaaa.? So lambs have said to whatever shepherd has fed, fleeced, and slaughtered them since ancient times. At least now it can go to scale. 

Noncompos Mentis, Your Honor

Got the test results. Noncompos mentis is now the official diagnosis. I am relieved, actualy, since this may help me settle outstanding legal claims against me.  

Attending SOCAP 2014

I will be attending SOCAP 14 and am touched that several important people in that network have reached out to me, despite my grouchiness. Let me make a short case against "social capital" substitutes for love, then leave a space for others to help me learn.

Wealth Bondage or Freedom or Capitalism Generally is hungry. It is failing its citizens and destroying the planet. It can no longer produce the growth on which the economy, investments, and a rosy future would depend. In its fear of death, it is now devouring, owning, managing, commodifying and selling the social, having exhausted the natural. It has zero interest in co-ops or freely shared ownership arrangements or representative stakeholder management structures, because it is driven by a naive dream of being like Steve Jobs, or Zuckerberg. It wants to both do good and own and profit and brand and manage and be a bigshot.

That is at the low, naive level at which SOCAP works. At the higher level, at the Bank of Wealth Bondage (caveat: Gift Hub is owned and operated as Social Capital Investment of Wealth Bondage and I am its shill, on a contingent contract basis) a new bubble is needed. The current one, inflated by Treasury is a compensatory product of the prior bubble (mortgage backed securities) imploding, and the TARP bailout of Wealth Bondage. Prior to that we had the dot.com bubble, with a tone  much like SOCAP and driven by the same unholy intersection of Silicon Valley, venture investors, media bullshit, suborned stock analysts, and a buying frenzy among the naive. Before that we had the original real estate bubble. To support the next bubble, which is the only growth economy we have, since the real US economy like its infrastructure is hollowed out and failing, we need deal flow, packaged investment funds, brokers, intermediaries, and we need rating services to stamp the bullshit investments as A+ Prime by an agency at least a credible as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. When this blows up we have more TARP. But if we can get in early and get out on time we can do well, and then do whatever good. No one goes to jail!

Where all this tends is to deal flow and to transactional versions of social investment.  It is Genetically Modified Philanthropy. If Monsanto did Social, it would be at SOCAP looking to invest in the next Green Revolution. The tortured language of doing well and good, is the product of minds unable to face simple truths - that tragedy is a more likely outcome than comedy, that the lion of profit and the lamb of love do not lie down together for long.

Against this, and as the remaining hope for the humane and natural communities we have love, and the gift economy where I give because I have received, and pay forward because I have a vain sense that in doing so I participate in something like the holy spirit. Giving is money, love, art, time, a mother's lullaby, a song sung by a girl skipping rope, an economy of gratitude that resents owned platforms and is disgusted with trademarks, patents, and other restrictions on the gift and gifted. Where did NAPSTER go? That was social.

Where do we find freedom and human agency? The answer today is Entrepreneurship and the sale of the Social so that our fellow consumers can create identity by buying and selling. Yes, I see young talented people for whom the Mall and Market are all there is, and it saddens me as an educator, and holdover from an era where it was still possible to read all of John  Milton, Wordsworth, George Elliott or Dickens and not have attention waver, all that much.

Why come to SOCAP, then, since, apparently, I am so smart and know everything already? Well, I teach philanthropy  to financial advisors and fundraisers and have one of thirty assignments devoted to New Frontiers of Philanthropy as Lester Salamon terms it. That assignment has been phenomenally popular with students, both forprofit and nonprofit. So I want to learn more to teach that better. More importantly, when I become reactive, as I am in this post, I know it is because I am off balance, and largely ignorant. I want to learn so I can be a more reliable connector and boundary spanner between the best elements of the new and established (equally vain, equally deluded, equally doomed) ways of doing philanthropy as things fall apart. By investing in the young, I hope when I am even more decrepit, and starving naked, they will share with me their analysis of my defects, as I so freely now share mine with them.

See you at SOCAP.