Gift Hub

Helping our clients live simply

Burt, the surgeon, doubles as a mortician - that is a joke as old as Martial, and still funny. Jill, the firm's top grossing wealth consultant, doubles as a morals tutor.  When your balance hits zero, she gives you a complimentary copy of Thoreau's, Walden, and you can go "live simply" in the woods outside the office park. I guess that's funny. Why would she give a free book to someone who's broke?

Listening others into voice

Two parables, on video, of 2 minutes each.

 

Enigma

Free Art

Thank you to Samantha Cooper, who appears in this video. And thanks to Alicia Mullinex who served as Executive Producer. Produced at The American College for the Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy program.

The Going Rate for Highest Quality Experience Goods

In Wealth Bondage, Tammy  is the most sought after of my fellow serving professionals.  Lovely, educated, pneumatic, she provides to our highest capacity clients what she calls "the ultra high end girlfriend experience." $75,000 a night, or proportionally more by the hour. I too am smitten but unable to afford her rates, or even a cup of coffee, I tried flattery.  "Tammy," I said, "you are far better than that. What you offer as a human being is beyond any market price." "I know," she said, "I am raising my rates to $100,000 a night." 

The Parable of the Talents (updated)

"Why," I asked The Happy Tutor, "does a priest who saves a person's soul live in poverty, while a heart surgeon who saves only the person's life makes millions?" Tutor said nothing, absorbed in a web video by Dan Pallota.  "I will let you know you in minute," he said, "just let me finish this."

 

2 and 20 to save the world (explanation to come later)

When social venture people say that they are sector agostic, or that nonprofits would benefit from a dose of the profit motive, I wonder how they address issues like these in forprofit education. One benefit (excuse me, please) of nonprofit jobs is that profit maximizers do not apply. Nonprofit structures prevent a highly talented person from doing good while making a killing, and that is the point. Once you get used to making a killing, doing good becomes one more shuck and one more jive, in culting the brand. I asked Fr Brennan (former Jesuit Priest, now employed by a Hedge Fund creating a theory of shared value and defense of the 2 and 20) how he felt about it. He said he was Sector Agnostic, and his laugh, half whisky, half lungs corrupted with years of smoking, concerned me. He found it funny, but I still think that we should cult brands of the divine that are divine. I said that, and I was afraid he would laugh and wheeze so hard that he'd expectorate his rotten lungs. Wiser are the children of darkness. "Fuckin A right," wheezed Brennan. "Take the 2 and 20 now and come up with the bullshit later." "Or," I said, "hire it done for a lot cheaper." But it was getting uncomfortable with an old friend. As if selling "Morals Consulting" to all comers made me some kind of a saint. 

Venus in Spurs

The professor, it says here,  lives happily in his Dumpster, as do I, only his is better. Retrofitting Dumpsters for the poor could be an entrepreneurial social venture, for Bottom of the Pyramid Consumers - not making money off the poor but reducing the cost of being poor. Anyway, I did attend SOCAP14, saw Jed Emerson wearing a Big Black Fist (Power to the People) T shirt, and met many young people who are brimming with idealism and a belief that markets are the best way to express their identity, express ideals, and make a practical difference and a good buck too. Also present were major financial firms, who may at some point be able to package branded investments in such social-good firms to fit not just some economic, rational actor, view of the world, but also to mirror our myriad of cultural identities and visions of the good. That it all comes together in The Brand is something we at Wealth Bondage have long believed. The Market Domination of Wealth Bondage and its Mind Share, ubiquitous, unseen and unchallenged, as transparent and life-giving as the water to the fish, bear witness to our iconic success. Among the other readings on offer at SOCAP's book stand was one on the "Culting of Brands." I believe there was a blurb on it from Seth Godin. Economics is at bottom a metaphysic, a religion, a faith, The Dream of Reason. But properly managed, a rationally run business is identified in the mind of the consumer as were Greek and Roman gods - the embodiment of our sense of self, our sense of social hierarchy, and our own warring impulses. That the emperor was a god makes me think of Steve Jobs.  Wasn't his yatch, the one launched after his death, Athena? No, of course not, Venus. And my boss, too, and mentor, and generous patron, Mistress Candidia, she who rules us all. Goddess of the Free Market, surrogate mother to our brightest children. Smart like Athena, rich like Jobs, and stacked like Venus. "Venus in spurs, Sweetie," she says.