The Most Democratic Workplaces of 2010

WorldBlu is a non-profit organization with the goal to inspire the formation of 20,000 democratic organizations by the year 2020. Each year WorldBlu recognizes, on it's website, the most democratic organizations in the world. Check out this year's achievers!

Union Cab of Madison Is a Democratic Business

I believe that one day, the majority of businesses will be run democratically because the standard business model will struggle to compete.

I'm a Podcaster Now!

I just signed up for Odiogo's (http://www.odiogo.com/) free service that converts your blog posts into podcasts, automatically. Now DemocraticBusiness.blogspot.com is a podcast! Click the "listen now" button in the top left hand corner of this post to listen.

Beyond Borders' Emergeny Efforts in Haiti

Beyond Borders is a democratic organization who's sole purpose has been to assist the people of Haiti--since the late '70s. Beyond Borders has the trust & support of the Haitian people. I can think of no better organization to donate to in order to help the people of Haiti, at this time.

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Fascism= The Marriage of Big Business and Big Government

On January 22, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that any corporation or union from any country in the world can spend as much money as it wants to win in any political campaign. Corporations can now recruit and finance, openly, its own candidates with however much money it is willing to spend. If, for example, Exxon Mobil decides that it will spend one percent of its earnings on it's own candidate, it will have spent more money on a Presidential Campaign than any candidate in history.

If left unchecked, this will be the straw that breaks the back of democracy in the United States. The sadest part is that, once again, the Republicans & Democrats are too busy fighting with one another to see that our country has just been hijacked.

Vote With Your Money

Move your money from Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs to a local bank. Vote with your money. Your choice of bank is much more powerful than you electoral vote.Enter your zip code at this website below to find high-rated, local banks. http://moveyourmoney.info/

How Can We Have a Healthy Economy and Healthy Ecosystem?

Euphoric Purpose Inspires Democracy

Joel Salatin is the owner of Polyface Farm in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia

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)