Is Profit-Maximizing Capital a Social Good Fraud?

If you are comfortably on the social responsibility side of teeter-totter of double- or triple bottom line possibilities, you can pretty well be assured that what is said here is real and getting worse:

But with this wave of capital has come concern about the social impact actually being achieved with profit-maximizing capital in terms of how clients are selected (seen by some as skimming off the least poor clients) and the interest rates at which loans are made (seen by some as predatory lending).

This conclusion comes from the MonitorInstitute.org report on What's Next For Philanthropy, whose heart is in a great place for making sure the caring sector at least sometimes gets its feet down on the ground. But still, I can't help be wonder if this is just a polite way of saying that all hope is lost for Change We Can Count On when it comes to different models of functioning.

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Coupons For Failure ... The Little Guy Gets it Again!

This is exactly the kind of business crap that the President and other supposed supporters of Main Street retail and innovation need to see:

http://mashable.com/2010/11/12/entrees-to-go-groupon/

Mom & Pop and every other configuration of the smallest of small business gets screwed over again and again so the big corporations can latch on to the inner workings of our side of the teeter-totter of Impact Investments. This is not sharing values, it's just letting profits of big corporate interests control everything!

Double and triple bottom line idealists should be frothing at the mouth! And better yet, even the SBA should be figuring out how to stop this from happening. Gosh I'm pissed because I see it occurring over and over again.


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TAX CREATIVITY – An Innovation Assessment For Those Who Can

If a president, gender notwithstanding, wants to be tagged an empowerist, he or she needs to think from the core that empowerment strategies, tactics and presumptions have at least something to offer each and every discussion, and definitely important policy positions and the words that make them happen. 

Accordingly, if our particular president of the United States wants to give the richest of rich more tax savings against his promises, the least he absolutely needs to do is use such a mindset to come up with something more than just give them the money and worry about it later. There are ways to ingrate empowerment thinking into legislative proposals--though we seldom actually see inspired innovation on this front. 

Why not cut and divide the richest out and create a new segment so they get their benefits if they EARN them by investing them into, I don't know, new jobs, underwriting career transitional training free for displaced workers, advocacy initiatives that help address social injustices within their business sector? We do “transportation” taxes that are aligned with an action and purpose. So what’s to stop policy creators from thinking in a similar manner and generating truly innovative financial incentives? If done correctly, who would necessarily cry about the private sector kingpins putting their money where their complaints come from?

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FREE RENT is NOT Blending Values

I'm not naming names--yet!--but the fact is I get pissed when I see major nonprofit leaders hawking productive double or triple bottom line benefits as eminating from such simplistic (but important) actions like a for-profit major corporation giving their favorite nonprofit free rent in a building. That is not real value when it comes to blending profitability with equality and justice. It's primarily just a tax write-off and weak publicity tool. IF those two entities are truly doing something unique that compounds the cash value, then maybe I'll be persuaded differently. Otherwise I say know it off and spend more time doing something useful with the potential.

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Wasted Resources – $250,000,000 down the progressive drain?

Imagine the situation where a progressive funder, wanting to sympathetically address a true social problem, decides to give his money to relatively conservative, pretty ordinary service oriented models of care. No effort is made to change the causes of the problem, and the challenges that continue exist remain substantial.

Under this scenario, is it worth the money, say $250,000,000, to hold the situation stagnant by offering simple remedies for direct care because care is needed? Should the donor dump it down this drain knowingly right now, or hold out and invest in progress that fixes the core problem later?

Now judge the same guy when three years of a stopgap intervention shows that the money in fact didn't do much because of the very fact that his investment didn't get to the heart of the problems, didn't make systemic change. And what if it turns out that he choose the route he did because he didn't seem to know that there was a viable social justice advocacy infrastructure in existence--but that he didn't know it because that very infrastructure was nearly invisible because it steadily received so little funding from traditional philanthropic donors who tend to shy away from advocacy.

Whose fault is the situation? The person with millions to give who didn’t assess what was there or the agencies that didn’t scream enough to get their value noticed?

Or put another way: how does one Blend Values when no one knows one side even has value to offer?

I blame the guy with big dollars—especially in this case when the one who gave the money draws his massive profits from the green energy and participatory environmental movement—a movement that draws its core strength from community empowerment, involvement advocacy.

If there is a place for Blessed Unrest, here is where it should prevail. Under no circumstances should the earth be rebalanced at the expense of balancing the justice of those who inhabit the planet.

No wonder that His Royalty of Wales sees Harmony as the missing resource of real change. And this is very much why progressive funders draw the ire of those who have the ability to make true change happen, even if these angry do-gooders cannot truthfully confront those with the bucks.

This is exactly why President Obama is falling short. He doesn’t understand how to empower his own family of allies let alone does he have faith in the faithful family of change agents! 

We must make him see this, and he, our president, must be the one to capture that attention of people with such large dollars and get them to place their ongoing philanthropic bets on real change.  


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Olbermann Dies - STUPID ETHICS

People of the progressive world should indeed be mad as hell that Keith Olbermann has been fired. Not because he broke the rules but because we put up rules that have no reason to be there.

Keith's job like other news/commentators is to live up to reasonable standards, for sure, but he's also the kind of character we need who can make the noise needed to see where the lines of the villains are at any point in time.

There used to be a sociological show called "If there weren't any blacks, we'd have to invent them." I learned this as a nascent learner of the power of togetherness before I had any idea how to use that force against evil.

Sure progressives need to maintain high standards. But did Keith go ranting and raging about his donations? Did he give so much as to change anyone's world or rock a race? Did he even make note of what he did?

Yet we treat him as we would every other member of our tribe: if we can't eat them when they are young we eat them when they get near the edge where The Deceptors actually live! 

What's worse is that we kill these mission leaders rather instead of those who do more damage. Why doesn't anyone complain about how little money the most successful progressive philanthropists give to keep strong and effective social justice advocacy efforts moving forward so they can push the line of the evil further and further away.

It is amazing how little they give and how difficult it is for funders and advocates to stand together in the same room to talk about how not having money hurts the movement. So many people are so fearful of money that they transfer their hangups into what amounts to very stupid public ethics.

Killing Keith Olbermann serves no purpose and except to feed the idiocy within that is very much the food of the real Deceptors.

Give him his job back.

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Change is Happening

In order to make this project work, I'm switching this blog from another. Be patient for intro posts and smart commentary to follow. 

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