Blog posts by Jeffrey Hollender,
featuring posts about sustainability,
social responsibility, entrepreneurship,
and more.
Recent Posts
Lack of Capital for Small Business Prevents Economic Recovery
A dangerous trend is hindering the financial growth of small businesses and our economic recovery on a national scale: young firms feel that banks have increasingly denied loans or credit to them, with 2009 standing out as a banner year for the sentiment that tougher...
Recreating Our Economy: The Untapped Power of Community Wealth Building
We have before us an incredible opportunity to transform our economy. The disastrous turn our fiscal health took in 2008 has forced us to really think about the way our country creates and distributes wealth. One positive outcome of the recession is a zeal and...
How to Create Jobs for the Next Generation
Unemployment is bad, and our progress in creating new jobs has been unacceptably slow. Youth unemployment is often where the problem is worst, and it’s becoming a global phenomenon with 20 percent of British youth and 40 percent of Spanish youth unable to find jobs....
“Move Your Money” and Help Your Local Community
It’s been 64 years since George Bailey and his friends and neighbors saved his community bank in the classic "It's a Wonderful Life." Today, the desire and need to save local communities is just as important and urgent as it was in that wonderful film. In fact, one...
Time to Try Something New? Job Creation in the United States Hits 29-Year Low
America’s largest companies are, more often than not, contributing to a disastrous trend: a decline in job creation. When compared to 2006, in 2009, there was a 25 percent decrease in overall job creation and a 34 percent decrease in job creation among startups. These...
An Energy Revolution, Italian Style
As we sit mesmerized by the global movement demanding democracy and watch with amazement things we never believed possible, we are reminded that hope is something we can never give up. From events happening on the world stage to progress that often takes place in...
Oscar-Winning Documentary Unveils Who Destroyed Our Economy, and How
Inside Job is the story of a crime without punishment, an outrage that has mostly escaped legal sanction and social stigma. While Inside Job can feel at times like the best sort of university lecture, it finds filmmaker Charles Ferguson summoning the moral force...
Why Do People Who Work in Finance Earn So Much Money?
Why do people in the financial sector earn 100 times more than the average neurosurgeon? How is it possible that in 2009 the top 10 bankers earned an average of $900,000 an hour and the top 25 bankers earned as much as 658,000 entry-level teachers -- put together?...
TED 2011: From the Occasionally Brilliant to the Frequently Banal
OK, it was my first time. I was sucked in by the ecstatic repeat attendees, the flow of exceptional online videos, and the opportunity to reach out to the rich and famous. What struck me right upon arrival at this year’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)...
Hungry and Homeless in Central Florida
This weekend, I watched a '60 Minutes' show that took me inside the lives of homeless kids in Central Florida. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the child-poverty rate will soon hit 25 percent. By the end of the segment, I felt sad and embarrassed to be an...
Egypt in America
The courage of the Egyptian people has not only inspired others in the Middle East to demand a transition to democracy, it has also inspired Americans to insist on democracy – here in America. In an electoral system controlled by business, trade associations and...
Death of the Liberal Class, Part 1: Chris Hedges, A Compelling Voice Among the Deafening Silence
Chris Hedges is a unique commentator on the challenges we face. His honesty is exceptional, his writing outstanding, and his perspective insistent. His two most recent books, Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion painfully brought into focus the...
TED Talk: Why We all Need to be More Vulnerable
Brene Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. She spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and...
The Significance of Scale
Out this week is the newest edition of Whole Terrain, which is published by the Environmental Studies Department of Antioch University, New England. The entire issue focuses on the question of “scale.” While the phrase "think globally, act locally" may have become a...
Where is the Bang for Our Buck?
Repercussions of the New Tax Law Would Leave 51 Million Americans Worse Off Most liberals and progressive Democrats were angered by the recent extension of the Bush tax cuts for America’s most wealthy. The excuse, offered by the White House and a good number of...
The Bright Side of Government
For close to one-and-a-half hours this week, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis sat patiently, and deeply engaged, as she listened to the challenges and opportunities that small business faces in a country dominated by the influence of large multinational...
GOP Wages War on Safeguards That Protect Us All
Yesterday, Matt Madia, a policy analyst at OMB Watch, Robert Weissman, president at Public Citizen, Peter Iwanowicz of the American Lung Association, and I participated in a media briefing to call attention to Representative Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) plans to hold...
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
Fighting Democracy and Destroying America’s Economic Future This has been quite a year for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a year of blunders as well as successes. On balance, it appears the chamber is winning more often than it’s losing. My concern is who’s benefiting...
Stranger in a Strange Land
I landed last week in a somewhat unusual place for someone like me: the annual meeting of the American Economics Association (AEA) in Denver. While en route to the event, I realized it was the first time that I can remember that I was attending a conference as a...
Five Predictions for 2011
This is the time of year when all the pundits, journalists, forecasters and owners of crystal globes issues their predictions. Mine are not very rosy! We’ll spend most of our time playing defense. The Republican majority in the House together with Obama and the...
Of the people, by the people, for the people
I believe in an America committed to the democratic ideal of government of the people, by the people and for the people. That’s why, on Friday, January 21, 2011, I was proud to be among the business leaders who announced the launch of Business for Democracy, a...