Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

"Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other." -- Philip Yancey

"I Think in Ten Years Time We Will Look Back and Say, 'We Should Not Have Done That.'"

People Before Profits

"For the first 100 years after the founding of our country, no corporation was allowed to get a charter unless it could prove that it served the public interest, and charters came up for renewall every ten years or so; they didn't get a renewall unless they could prove that they served the public interest. That all changed after the supreme court ruling that made corporations equal to individuals in the late 1880's, and then, John D. Rockefeller stepped in and really made things get out of hand. We need to go back to an understanding that corporations are there to serve us." -- John Perkins (author of Confessions of An Economic Hit Man)

US Has the 20th Most Free Press

First Amendment - "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Why is the United States number 20 on the list of countries with the greatest freedom of the press?

Is it any wonder that the nations (Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Netherlands, Switzerland, Iceland, and Lithuania) with the most freedom of the press tend to have the least corruption and the highest standard of living. Anyone who understands the principles of democracy should not be surprised.

The best medicine for corruption is a little sunlight.

(Read article and see rankings @ http://www.rsf.org/en-classement1003-2009.html)

As Foreclosures Hit All-Time High, Wall Street on Pace to Hand Out Record $140B in Employee Bonuses

Finance is supposed to exist for one purpose: to make the real economy work better. The fact that the DOW Jones has topped 10,000 and banks are doling out record employee compensations, while foreclosures are at record highs and unempoloyment is expected to top 10% is further proof that the real economy and the finance world have come unhinged.

How can the finance world make tons of money off of an economy in crisis?
By removing import legislation over the last decade that allows Wall Street & banks to grow like crazy, deliberately make bad loans with high interest, and to do it with other peoples' money. With that kind of a formula you are guaranteed to report record profits--not by creating anything of value, but by taking billions out of the real economy in trading profits.

Bailout for Bankers

"The average tax payer in this country, that's people making less that $75,000, should take a bow because every dollar in income tax they pay for four years went to this bailout." -- Donald Barlett of Vanity Fair

Big Government Means Big Business

In general, federal regulation benefits big business, and local regulation favors small business. Small businesses offer greater freedom and prosperity. Big business stiffles freedom, competition, and prosperity. You can be assured that big business will get bigger unless regulating power is decentralized to local governments. Here are two examples of the Big Government/Big Business effect:

Banks at Risk of Failure Has Reached 15-Year High
Banking regulators are warning that the number of banks at risk of failure has reached a fifteen-year high. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said the number of “problem banks” had risen from 305 to 416 during the second quarter. The FDIC has already shut down eighty-one banks this year. This comes at a time when the nation’s largest banks are getting even bigger due to a series of federally arranged mergers and taxpayer bailouts. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo now each hold more than ten percent of the nation’s deposits, despite a rule barring such a practice.

Taxpayers to Pay Banks Billions to Fix Loan Mess: A new report by the Center for Public Integrity has found that any of the lenders that helped fuel the housing crisis by issuing risky subprime loans are now lining up to receive more than $21 billion in taxpayer money intended to help bail out borrowers. At least twenty-one out of the top twenty-five participants in the Making Home Affordable program specialized in servicing or originating subprime loans.
(Examples taken from DemocracyNow!)

Maximizing Profits is not the Purpose of Business

Is the purpose of a doctor to maximize profits? Is the purpose of a teacher to maximize profits? Then why do we mistakenly believe that the purpose of business is to maximize profits?

Principle or Expediency

The only difference between a multi-national corporation and an oligarchical government is that one has an army and the other does not. With this perspective, it is easy to see that centralized power of any kind is prejudicial to human liberty. Corporate executives have the same incentives as politicians. If a politician or an executive must choose between principle and keeping her job, she will nearly always choose to keep her job.

For example, the prankster, Andy Bichlbaum, posed as Jude Finisterra, a Dow Chemical spokesperson, to speak about the deadly gas leak at a chemical plant in Bhopal, India that has now killed an estimated 25,000 people and injured another 120,000. He announced that Dow will accept full responsibility for the Bhopal Disaster and will pay $12 Billion for the health coverage of these 120,000 people.

Within a half hour, DOW Chemical's stock dropped $2 Billion until the company announced that, "Jude Finisterra is not an employee nor a spokesperson for DOW Chemical." To this day, the company has not accepted responsibility for its actions in Bhopal, India.

The Federal Reserve: The Undemocratic Branch of Government

Democracy is More Cumbersome than Dictatorship

Semco went through a radical, democratic transformation beginning in 1980. In 1980, Semco employees "each produced an average of $10,800 worth of goods a year." When Ricardo Semler wrote Maverick in 1993, his employees each produced an average of "$92,000 worth of goods a year (adjusted for inflation)--four times the national average; by the value-added standard, productivity rose six and a half times."

If democratic businesses are more profitable and motivating, then why do people insist on creating oligarchical/command-control organizations? Because...
(1) "so often it is power and greed and plain stubbornness that make bigger automatically seem better."
(2) "secrecy is a strong incentive to be conspicuously greedy."
(3) "bureaucracies are built by and for people who busy themselves proving they are necessary, especially when they are not."

"The era of using people as production tools is coming to an end. Participation is infinitely more complex to practice than conventional corporate unilateralsm, just as democracy is much more cumbersome than dictatorship."

(Quotes taken from Maverick by Ricardo Semler)

Democratic Healthcare! Why didn't I Think of That?

"Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the Finance Committee, who is leading an effort to draft a healthcare bill, said Thursday the public plan would take the form of an insurance cooperative that would be owned and operated for the benefit of its members, but not run by the government. The Senate finance panel plans to take up the legislation on June 23rd."

President Obama's "uniquely American" version of public healthcare maintains the motivating pressures of the free market, while eliminating the choking costs of high paid executives and excessive profit margins. If this insurance cooperative is set up as a true cooperative and not as another arm of government, we may witness the greatest victory of the Democratic Business Revolution to date.

Next, we need to democratize Amtrak. What would it be like if the people who work for and ride Amtrak were to own and manage Amtrak?

(Quoted from DemocracyNow! 6/12/09)

The U.S. is Not a True Democracy

"Give me a word, any word, and I show you that the root of that word is Greek." (Gus Portokalos from My Big Fat Greek Wedding)

How about Democracy?

'Democracy, democracy, democracy. Ha! Of course! Democracy is come from the Greek word demos, is mean people and from the Greek word kratos, is mean rule. So, who rules in a democracy? The people. You see: people, democracy. There you go!' (Gus Portokalos)

If democracy is rule by the people, the U.S. is not a democracy: (1) Democracies do not maintain favored citizens. Favored citizens are citizens with greater political sway or power than others. Equal political power is impossible to maintain in large communities. Only small communities can possibly maintain equal political power for its citizens. (2) Democracies de-centralize power. Never in the history of the U.S. has power been more centralized. The Federal government has power over our food, currency, energy, land, civil liberties, businesses, etc.
The solution is to create true democracy. The federal government needs to de-centralize all power not granted to it in The Constitution and give that power to the cities of the U.S. If a community is too large to be ruled as a direct democracy, then it is too large to maintain political equality.

Argentina: Capitol of Worker-Run Businesses

More than 75,000 people work in worker-run businesses in Argentina, and that number increases every year.

What Does God Think of Money?

If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at who he gives it to.

Transparency and Limited Power Stop Corruption

"The Church committee (named for Senator Frank Church) looked at a period starting with Franklin Roosevelt and running through Richard Nixon...In every single administration you had failures of control by all the presidents and misconduct by the intelligence agencies...Under all the administrations—six different administrations, both Republican and Democrat—there were misuses of power...(that were) inconsistent with the law and the Constitution.

"The single most important finding of the Church committee was that, if during a time of crisis we ignore the wise restraints that have been put in our constitution and laws to keep us free and keep us strong, we are not only going to make ourselves less free, we are going to make ourselves less safe.

"We’ve slipped as a country into not being as open as we historically (have been) and instead into more and more secrecy, and I think that is one of the underlying root causes (of corruption) that needs to be examined and dealt with." -- Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. (Chief Counsel to the Church Committee)

"Deepest Global Recession Since the Great Depression"

The International Monetary Fund is forecasting the global economy will decline this year for the first time since the Second World War. On Wednesday, the IMF said the global economy would see a 1.3 percent decline in what it called “by far the deepest global recession since the Great Depression.”

(Quote taken from DemocracyNow!)

A Business that is Run Like a City

"Most of the forces that shape the structure of business, including capital markets, business schools, economic theory, a variety of laws, and even our own upbringing trains us to assume that at work you're either an employee or a boss, but never a citizen. So at Equal Exchange we understand why workplace democracy seems such a novel concept. We simply don't accept it." --Equal Exchange President Rob Everts

Equal Exchange is a 23 year-old, $34 million employee-owned firm that is run like a small city where employees act as citizens and the employee-elected Board acts like a City Council.

Bribery is a $1 Trillion Dollar Industry

Daniel Kaufmann, the institute director of Governance at the World Bank, estimates that $1 Trillion of bribes are paid worldwide in both rich and developing countries; One out of every 30 dollars in the world is spent as a bribe.

The World Bank's research "shows that countries which tackle corruption and improve their rule of law can increase their national incomes by as much as four times in the long term, and child mortality can fall as much as 75 percent."

Interestingly enough, the most effective tool to fight corruption has been identified by the World Bank as transparency; ee.gg., freedom of the press, freedom of information, and asset disclosure.

Democratic businesses have found, like the World Bank, that being proactively transparent with all financial information fights corruption, creates efficiency, unity, & understanding, and causes employees to be paid for what they are worth and not for the amount that companies can acquire them for.

Now, if only we could force the World Bank to be transparent...

If you want to help democratize the world, and increase corporate transparency, visit http://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm, enter your salary, and browse the salaries of others within your company and around the world.

(Quotation taken from http://web.worldbank.org/external/default/main?theSitePK=84266&contentMDK=64069844&menuPK=116730&pagePK=64148989&piPK=64148984)

Voters Champion Free Market But Want More Regulation

The American people intuitively know that there is something wrong with American capitalism, but they can't quite put their finger on it.

Rasmussen Reports released a seemingly contradictory report on December 29, 2008--just after the economic crisis began. It seems that 70% of voters believe that a free market is better than one managed by the government; yet, 52% of voters believe that there is a need for more government regulation of big business. However, 65% agree that government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.

Intuition has brought the American people this far, but what are the facts. Nationalization is not democratic because government control is simply a new layer of management on top of the excessive, burdensome layers that already exist.

The way to maintain free markets and regulate corporations at the same time is to truly democratize corporations. Corporations that practice financial transparency, have few layers of management, and offer stock-ownership to all employees are held accountable by the employees themselves and have very little need for government oversight.

(Statistics taken from http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/general_business/voters_champion_free_market_but_want_more_regulation)