The Poverty Creation Industry
Recently Joe Brewer, Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk had the audacity to describe what they call the “Poverty Creation Industry.” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/15726-its-time-to-shine-a-light-on-the-poverty-creation-industry They write that, “Poverty is human-made. It is created – knowingly and with scientific efficiency – by a vastly sophisticated industry that includes private companies, think tanks, media outlets, government policies, and more. This ‘Poverty Creation Industry’ is about the least talked about feature...
read moreMaking Way for Worker Co-ops
Guest post by Taliesin Nyala, a co-owner of the Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA), a worker-owned cooperative based in Massachusetts created to democratize education and the economy while furthering the cooperative movement. TESA designs curriculum and resources for learning, such as Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives. Wall Street is booming while nearly 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed. Corporations and the wealthy are thriving while almost 50 million of their fellow Americans are living in poverty—that is...
read moreBusiness profits are an illusion, based on a slight of hand.
If business stopped externalizing its costs it would stop making money! I’m somewhat obsessed with the concept of “externalities” and its companion concept developed to capture them, “full cost accounting.” “Externalities” are the costs and negative impacts imposed by businesses onto society and the environment that are not paid for by those businesses. Manufacturing puts pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize...
read moreIn Defense of Millennials
This is a guest blog post written by Nassy Avramidis, Junior Partner at Jeffrey Hollender Partners The other day, I threw a paper cup in the trash. There was no recycling bin in the vicinity and I was in a rush. Normally I am pretty conscious of the environment, but there are times when I slip up, and the guilt can be somewhat overwhelming. A lot of us, especially in my generation (the “Millennials”) carry around a specific feeling of guilt when it comes to shirking our environmental responsibilities. Responsibilities. That word carries a...
read moreHSBC Funds Suspected Terrorists and Gets a Slap on the Wrist
Have you heard about HSBC’s terrorist funding scandals? How about the many banks involved in LIBOR rigging, essentially playing games our money? If you’re an ordinary person, hearing these things was shocking. But let me be clear: it’s not shocking that banks have shady deals, what is shocking is the extent to which they were able to commit these crimes without any legal recourse whatsoever. Is the legal system in our country so fundamentally flawed that we are afraid to prosecute these banks for fear of a total economic collapse?...
read moreCorporate America: Killing us slowly
Recently the Michael Moss in a New York Times Magazine cover story on “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food” examined how food companies have known for decades that salt, sugar and fat are not good for us in the quantities American’s consume them, and yet every year they convince most of us to ingest about twice the recommended amount of salt and 70 pounds of sugar – up to 22 teaspoons a day. As a critique of corporate behavior for 25 years, Michael Moss’s story convinced me to add US consumer food companies...
read moreSo, how are the Millennials doing?
Not terribly well. According to a Fall 2013 survey conducted at Rutgers University, the recovery still isn’t so great for the bottom 99% and particularly those under 35. Nearly one-quarter (23%) of all respondents to the survey were laid off from either a full-time or part-time job during and after the recession (over the past four years). According to the survey, older workers fared slightly better during the recession than younger workers. Nineteen percent of workers age 55 and older were laid off from a job compared to 23% of workers ages...
read moreAmerica, now a less equal society than Egypt & Yemen
We’ve almost all seen the video that went viral this week, the one that illustrates the gaping wealth inequality that we have in the United States (If you haven’t yet, watch it here). Now that we can grasp the true depth of the problem, what do we do about it? If you’re feeling hopeless, you’re not alone. It’s a complicated struggle with tough solutions. As an article in the Atlantic recently pointed out, some solutions include unlikely ones like capping salaries, (which I wrote about in a previous post called 580) probably...
read moreSOCAP: Soul is Headed to Boston on March 9th!
What if your job, your finances, and your community were all aligned with what you value? SOCAP has created a special one-day event, SOCAP: Soul, to help answer that question and explore how change starts within us. SOCAP: Soul Boston – Social Capital Market’s first east coast event – will be held on Saturday, March 9th at MIT’s sustainably innovative Stata. What if your job, your finances, and your community were all aligned with what you value? SOCAP has created a special one-day event, SOCAP: Soul, to help answer that question...
read moreRating America: 16 things we’re not good at.
This month the World Economic Forum released “The Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013,” that ranks 144 countries, on everything from “Organized Crime,” to the “Quality of Overall Infrastructure,” and the “Protection of Minority Shareholders. #1 represents the best nation, and #144 represents the worst nation. America did very poorly almost everywhere other than Gross Domestic Product where we ranked #1. This is yet another message about a system that no longer works, or at least a system that works well only for the top...
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