Humanity is at a pivotal moment of transformation. How we proceed from here will determine the level of suffering we will endure or the level of peace we can achieve in our lifetime.

The more strife and hardship experienced by our world, the more we question the status quo. We have not arrived at this moment by accident. We are part of a growing force of voices that yearn to bring about change.

Humanity has suffered tremendously in the 20^th century.  The traumas of wars, conflict, and injustice over the past 100 years have taught us great lessons. From these painful moments we have made great advances in terms of human rights. The second half of the 20^th century brought forward a consciousness for the urgent need  to protect the innocent and to “right” the many wrongs of society. Before this shift in thinking, human rights was a fringe idea held by a small group of brave and enlightened souls. The creation of the United Nations and the hundreds of advocacy groups that evolved from it represent the dramatic change in our cultural beliefs. We have gone from killing each other to saving each other. At least some of us have.

What this proves is that it is possible for human beings to change in a fundamental way. As change agents, this is important for us to remember as we move through the often frustrating process of transformation. While it can be slow, plodding, and exhausting, when we look back over the last century we see enormous progress in the way human beings relate to one another.  In spite of those who wish to maintain the status quo, change does come.

One of those areas of progress is the treatment of women.

Beginning half a century ago the plight of women as second class citizens was brought to the world stage. We discussed civil rights, education, and economic rights, and made serious political and social advances. Most of all a consciousness grew that refused to relegate women to the simplistic roles of submission and subjugation we suffered as a gender for the previous 2500 years.

If you remember the progress we have made in recent years (after more than two thousand years of repression and suppression), we recognize as a species human beings have advanced further than we think. Yet the fight is still on…

We hear of young girls subjected to vicious attacks as they fight for their right to be educated. We witness the violent abuse of women worldwide as they struggle to take their rightful place along side of men. All of these challenges reawaken us to a simple fact. There is still so much to do.

We have arrived astonishingly in this new century at a crossroads of spiritual and cultural evolution of the world community. The advancement of women is a crucial part of that evolution.  If we wish to advance as a species, the 21^st century is poised to become the Century of Women. This will be the century where women fully participate in the decisions and direction of their own lives.

I worked in the financial industry in the U.S., here in New York, for several years—a traditionally male world. For all the progess America claims in the advancement of women, the world of money in the United States and across the globe is still controlled by a small group of men. The proof of this unilateral control was exemplified by the financial crisis that began in the U.S. in 2008 and spread around the world in a matter of days. It continues to wreak havoc today. Hundreds of millions of innocent people are struggling to survive due to the aggressive and predatory acts of a few thousand men.

I am convinced (and I am part of a growing consciousness) that the only thing that can right this great wrong will be the addition of women to the economic and political systems in a real and integral way.

Greed is not the sole province of men. Women are prone to this human flaw as anyone else. Yet what are traditionally recognized principles of feminine energy – compassion, love, receptivity and conscious humanity – are exactly the elements missing from the current economic structures of the world. These human qualities are precisely the factors that can fix the financial system and prevent another collapse from occurring at the hands of greed.

Compassion and business are not supposed to mix, but a human social system (whether political, religious, or economic) that does not include compassion is forever destined to destroy and not create.

The world needs love. The absence of love is the catalyst behind all human-made suffering. When we forget about love for humanity, we become violent, detached, and destructive. We needlessly create pain for others, because we falsely believe that caring about them will make us vulnerable.  The absence of love inevitably becomes a virulent hate; this is the greatest tragedy of our civilization.

Women are lovers. Women know that love makes us stronger. We understand in our deepest core that love not hate has the greatest power to heal. While hate destroys, love rebuilds.

We are mothers. We nurture our children who create the future of the world and give them strength to face the challenges they will meet. We are the givers of life, not the takers of life. In giving life, we give love with it.

Women are healers. Our job is to offer strength, tolerance, understanding, and wisdom to help repair our world.

In this Century of Women, it is not that women will replace men. It is that men by our example will open themselves to the compassion women embody. Men will find the courage to open their hearts to the love women innately feel for the planet, for our children and communities.

In this Century, women will finally face their fears of annihilation and find the strength to step up and take our rightful place as leaders along side of men.

It is only in true partnership of men and women in government, spiritual traditions, and in our economic structures that we can heal the suffering of our modern world.

Monika Mitchell - Executive Director    editor@goodb.net

©2010 – All Rights Reserved

Remember the Old Boys’ Club…? The boring, cranky, devious one that controls the banks, the economy and most of our wealth creation and money supply from behind the scenes? The one where nearly every key position in government is occupied by an Old Boy? Yes, that one.

Well, there are still a few lifetime members of the OBC firmly entrenched in the Federal Reserve (Grandpa Ben), and the Treasury (Timmy G and Larrykins) who continue to give all our money away to their ever-popular clubby friends.

These are the same old boy club members who along with ex-Goldman partner and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin gave the store away to the big banks in 1999 with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Ordinary banks like Citigroup could now legally play roulette with government guaranteed deposits. OB Robert Rubin thought it was such a great idea he took a job with Citibank only weeks after leaving the Treasury.

These same old boys, Summers, Greenspan, Geithner with OB Senator Phil Gramm (now a lobbyist for Swiss Bank UBS) the very next year pushed through the ill-fated Commodities Futures Modernization Act – otherwise known as Derivatives-Are-Born-Free Act. This little understood law overturned a century old rule that had prevented unregulated market bets since the Panic of 1907. Now all bets were off…

Meanwhile back at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency that was supposed to be supervising the gladiator games, another group of old boys put the final nail in the coffin. In early 2004, Chairman of the SEC William Donaldson (former head of securities giant DLJ) got together with a few good friends, card-carrying OBC members and business colleagues, the heads of the five largest investment banks in the industry including soon-to-be Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Together the six overturned a law that stood on the books for three decades limiting the amount of risky assets the nation’s largest securities firms could hold.  In a 45 minute meeting, the barrier between 12 to 1 capital to debt ratios and all hell breaking loose was removed.

Unlimited leverage became official:  the biggest banks no longer had to follow “the net capital rule” and could use their “own judgment” for how much risk to take with other people’s money. Within four short years, the five firms would triple and quadruple their risk levels to the point where three of the five firms collapsed along with the United States banking system.

Who benefited from merging boring deposit-taking banking and casino trading by dismantling Glass-Steagall? Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo…

Who benefited from under-the-radar derivative anarchy?
AIG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, big banks, the hedge fund and private equity community…

Who benefited from reversing the capital restrictions on  risk for big banks?
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo…

I think you know how the roller-coaster fun ride ended.

It is clear who did NOT benefit from the free-for-all deregulation of banks and the refusal to create a derivatives exchange…The working public, small business, you and me. In fact it was the elimination of these three important legal statutes that pushed the American financial system to the brink of collapse in less than a decade. Are you getting the picture? In the words of Oliver Hardy, Old Boys’ Club of America: Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.

And now for something completely different. The All New Girls’ Club.
Move over boys. The girls are back in town.

Democracy and Law

The recent nominee for Supreme Court Elena Kagan summed up the need for law in the preservation of freedom. “Law matters because it keeps us safe, because it protects our most fundamental rights and freedoms, and because it is the foundation of our democracy,” she said. These words could be easily translated to the current debate on financial reform.  Freedom only functions when the laws protect everyone. Keeping our nation’s financial system safe from rape, plunder, and pillage is the ultimate goal for financial reform.

Out of Washington this past decade, little of our government’s actions made rational sense. Economic anarchy was called “free-enterprise” and “reform” was equated with more war and less public safety. Same old story as the old boys kept their stranglehold on the gov and our economy.

Back in the old days (late 20th century America) one voice of reason rang out-the former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born. In 1998, Born singlehandedly stood up to the firmly entrenched old boy network of Greenspan, Summers, Rubin, Geithner and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt and fought hard to regulate lethal derivatives citing the risk of unmitigated disaster. Unfortunately, the irrational voices of the old boys drowned her out and her warnings of financial crisis came true.

Sitting on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission a few weeks ago, Born had her chance to chastise the champion of free-for-all enterprise and economic recklessness, Alan Greenspan. She told the old boy that he “failed to prevent the housing bubble, failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal, failed to prevent the activities that would bring the financial system to the verge of collapse…You failed to prevent many of our banks from consolidating and growing to a size that are now too big or too interconnected to fail.”

Wow! What a woman. It was almost worth the  painful two years of financial woe to see Greenspan become visibly angry and categorically deny what is already documented fact. Ding dong “the Oracle” is dead.

In a sea of male bankers, another woman’s wise words stand-out. Sheila Bair, Chairwoman of the FDIC and long an advocate of safe banking and distressed homeowner assistance, has the odd distinction of being one of the few banking industry regulators in favor of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Such an agency “would help community banks, not hurt them,” she claimed in direct opposition to her old boy colleagues. In accepting the Profile in Courage Award alongside Brooksley Born, Bair said, “I’m particularly pleased to be joining …other female awardees who stood up when some of their male counterparts failed to act, or worse, actively fought them.”

Next up in the House of Feminine Wisdom is consumer rights champion Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law Professor and Chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel. As head of the panel, Warren is a fierce critic of how the bailout money was allocated by the Fed without condition. She has become the nation’s most vocal and toughest advocate for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Warren summed up her fight for reform with this, “It’s ultimately about protecting the whole economy. When we destabilize American families; when we sell them terrible products that explode in their faces. That in turn destabilizes the entire economy. These products that were gonna offer these huge, huge profits weren’t just lousy deals for consumers. They were lousy deals for investors. They were lousy deals for pension funds. They were lousy deals for the worldwide economy.”

Wall Street: Fix this Mess You Made

Two weeks ago as I stood outside New York’s City Hall listening to angry protestors chant, “Wall Street fix this mess you made.” I realized that only our lawmakers can fix the mess they made.  A financial system without laws protecting the innocent constitutes economic anarchy… And anarchy is a dangerous thing. It has been an expensive and painful lesson for us as a nation and global community. What does the “free market” really mean? What keeps a  society truly free from tyranny after all? Laws can create tyranny or protect us from it – the choice is ours.

The only way to safeguard our economic system for consumers, financial professionals, investors, as well as for bankers is to vigorously regulate the markets. Limiting leverage with capital and debt restrictions, reining in risk of deposit-taking banking institutions (separation of Bank and State), removing conflict of interest from official regulating and rating agencies (eliminate regulator – ratings shopping), and creating a consumer financial protection agency in the same way we oversee every other product on the market from food (FDA) to children’s toys. These changes are basic and reasonable responses to maintain economic freedom, not obscure it.

The Old Boys’ Club has launched a battery of lobbyists who are fighting hard against these reforms and the women in power are pushing back.

Ladies Night

At a recent evening celebrating women leaders, California veteran Senator Diane Feinstein claimed that, “If Congress were all women, we would have financial reform by now.” That may or may not be true. Yet there is something to be said for the healing quality of women. The women in government right now seem intent on fixing the problem, not denying it exists or throwing more wood on the fire.

Feinstein pointed out that 18 years ago when she was first elected to the Senate, there were only two females in that body of Congress. Now there are 17 female U.S. Senators. That is an increase of representation from 4% to 34% in a decade and half. Every election we move closer to shattering the glass ceiling held firmly in place by the OBC that has dominated our nation’s financial system for over two centuries.

Feinstein, Olympia Snowe (R-Me), Susan Collins (R-Me), Barbara Boxer (D-Ca), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Kay Hagen (D-NC), and Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) are all leaders on comprehensive financial reform. Margot Dorfman, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce took the opposite view on financial reform from her male counterparts at the big business lobby thinly disguised as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The USCC is campaigning against the creation of a consumer financial protection agency. Dorfman declared her support for the agency and for “America’s small businesses and communities” by urging Congress to “pass comprehensive financial reform.”

Additionally, Mary Shapiro as head of the new and improved SEC, Bair, Born, and Warren -embody a newly established feminine wisdom that is moving the ineffectual and outdated Old Boys’ Club out of the way.

Women are healers by nature. We are mothers, sisters, daughters, problem solvers, and leaders. The time has come for the feminization of our politics and our economy. Our nation needs to be healed. That’s not a job for the timid or delicate. It’s not for sissies. It is for the strong, powerful, and wise. The way women really are.

The logic of the Old Boys’ Club represented by the ancient Greenspan and the not-so-ancient 50 year old males controlling the nation’s largest financial institutions has rapidly dissipated by its own self-defeating actions.

As for me, I think the patriarchs in the tired dreary old boys’ network had their shot and screwed things up just fine – now it is time for the ladies to take their turn and see if they can clean up the mess the boys made. For my money, I put my trust and faith in the New Girls’ Club.

We have come a long way, haven’t we?

Monika Mitchell - Executive Director    editor@goodb.net

©2010 – All Rights Reserved

It used to be that indifferent wealth building and outsized risk was sexy. For thirty years, the world of high rolling high finance was the object of admiration and envy. The chants of “Wall Street sucks” some ten thousand strong in front of City Hall last week signify that the days of glamour and greed are over. Inarticulate and ineffectual as that phrase might be, it reveals the increasing rage building against Wall Street titans. In the wake of the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, economic hardship has become too real for too many.

Wall Street’s ”burn baby burn” ethos isn’t looking so hot these days. The thrill is gone baby. The thrill is gone away.

Last week, Wall Street’s ruling class, the risk managers of the mortgage securities division at Goldman Sachs were skewered to a well-done temperature by a suddenly alive and outraged Senate Committee.

Question: Where was this “you done wrong” stance when the Street paid themselves millions on the backs of the downtrodden and newly homeless? Where was the outrage and effective action when the industry cannibalized itself and then walked away with the Golden Goose? The rage of our elected officials on display across TV Land America seems too little too late to help those in foreclosure or destitute from loss of income directly due to the excessive greed of a select few.

So what was this humiliating display of Goldman Sachs princes falling from grace all about?

The current anger at Wall Street seems to be channeled almost exclusively at one firm and that nefarious place called “Wall Street.” Goldman Sachs has come to represent for many critics, the Great Satan in modern America.  Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi called Goldman the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”  His attack of the Big Bank established lines of battle between those who believe the investment banking giant can do no wrong (Warren Buffet  & junk bond king Michael Milken) and those who believe they are modern day Dillingers (Taibbi and most of America.)

In case you missed it, the Securities and Exchange Commission suddenly awakened from its decades long “see-no-evil” stupor and brought civil charges against Goldman Sachs for allegedly deceiving clients by selling bad debt called “synthetic CDOs” and then profiting on their client’s investment faux pas. These “exotic” financial instruments were once ironically termed “weapons of financial mass destruction” by Goldman’s most vocal supporter, Warren Buffet. (Buffet invested 5 billion dollars in GS in the fall of 2008.)

Goldman’s defense: Our investors are big boys capable of making their own decisions. Translation: “We are not responsible for your ignorance…suckers!”

Taibbi points out in a recent UK Guardian article that the philosophy behind their defense is the medieval business model of “caveat emptor.” He writes, “The investment bank’s cult of self-interest is on trial against the whole idea of civilization – the collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even if we can.”

Goldman’s greatest critic is indeed correct that the investment giant’s “cult of self-interest is on trial,” but this is not exclusive to Goldman Sachs. They are simply the most visible and seemingly “best” practitioner of unrestrained profit-seeking at the expense of the greater society. Goldman Sachs is not on trial literally (at least not yet). The entire business model of profit-at-any-cost (Atlas Shrinks) is “on trial” in the eyes of the public.

For years, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. As a culture, we have defended a business model of profits-before-people that has come to bite us in the bloomin’ arse. The model has been reduced to an inane battle of “conservatives versus liberals.” Just curious: Since when is it “conservative” to take the food out of a baby’s mouth and the roof over a hard working family’s heads? Since when is it “liberal” to establish a morally restrained code of behavior that embodies the Golden Rule? All these absurd labels prove is that as a society we force people into tiny boxes for our tiny minds to comprehend and then completely miss the point.

The Point: Are we survival-of-the-fittest capitalists in a deadly game of Darwinian magnitude? Or are we morally responsible and socially conscious capitalists who have personal boundaries in the pursuit of profit which we won’t cross? In other words: In the quest for money, is there anything at all that we won’t or can’t do?

Libertarians or Randian greed-mongers would say no. In the purity of the “free market,” there is nothing we should not be able to do. Theirs is a Wild West philosophy of lawlessness, predatory mortgages, and under-the-radar “derivatives.”

The chances of Goldman Sachs breaking a securities law and being convicted of fraud are pretty slim. They are too “clever” and too connected to behave criminally. Goldman does not have to break laws to profit; they simply change laws to their advantage-circa Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The purity of our democracy is the real issue, not Goldman’s alleged “fraud.”

Law of the Land

While in Wyoming traveling from Yellowstone National Park some years ago, the owner of a lodge asked me if I wanted to go grizzly bear hunting. I replied, “I thought it was illegal to shoot grizzly bears.” The cowboy smiled, “We make our own laws here.” Looking around at the rugged and wild expanse of nature surrounding me, it was easy to understand his conviction. He could have killed me too and no one would have ever known.

What struck me most about his question was that he and I were of such contrasting worlds. I, a city girl, was comfortable with society’s rules. He, a wilderness child, had no respect for anyone else’s law. The fact that he thought I would share his love for the indiscriminate killing of innocent animals astonished me. We held a completely different moral view.

It reminds me of a conversation with a former mortgage trader from one of the big banks just after Lehman’s fall. He had been skiing in Aspen in 2007 and overheard two mortgage brokers ranting about a deal they failed to close. “F***ing Bitch,” they swore of the cautious widow who refused their loan. My friend was weary of the business and said, “I made my money; it’s not fun anymore.” His was a rare conscience in the world of finance-one where he gave up “the fun” to become part of Vermont’s middle class. The price of easy money became too high for his morally conscious mind.

What is really on trial with Goldman on the hot seat is our cultural ambivalence to greed. There is no such thing as easy money or “money for nothing” – that is the great American myth. There is always a price to pay when we throw care and responsibility to the wind.

We live in a shared society, not an island apart from the world. We are part of a complex and extensive global community. Everything we do from polluting the environment to polluting the economic system comes back to haunt us. In our adolescent materialism, we forget there are consequences for our actions.

For the record, “Wall Street” is not the few blocks stretching downtown that last week’s protestors symbolically walked. Wall Street is an amorphous destination that exists as much in our minds as it does behind the gold and glass plated doors of 200 West Street. It stretches from one end of the nation to the other – south, north, west, east and everywhere in between. It reaches every continent on earth and directly affects every nation. It operates through every bank, insurance company, corporation, lender, and financial advisor. It includes the stock exchanges and bond markets in New York, London, Hong Kong, Chicago, and around the world. Wall Street is not a “place” at all, but a global economic system. The question is do we want to support a system that creates value for society or destroys it?

The myth of the “free market” is that we should have no laws. We should be able to shoot grizzlies and each other with impunity in our current economic philosophy. No one will really know if we “screw” each other over. As long as we do not leave a trail of emails behind, it’s your word against mine. Who would ever know?

Our market values do not emulate our societal values. We live in a ”free society” within a complicated system of laws designed to protect us from the tyranny of each other. I can no more “kill” you, than you me, without legal consequences. Yet I can sell you bad debt hidden in between thousands of pages and laugh at your stupidity as you writhe in agony from economic disaster. The double standard of our flawed morality makes little sense.

Greed is looking ugly these days. “The great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” is greed itself. Unbridled greed is primitive, crude, crass, dangerous, socially obsolete and not in the least bit sexy. To paraphrase that great philosopher, B.B. King:

The thrill is gone baby.
The thrill is gone away.
You know you done us wrong baby.
You’ll be sorry someday.

Taibbi writes of the task facing the modern world to make a collective decision once and for all, “not to screw each other over” just because we can.

Goldman Sachs is not the source of the problem. The real source is the primitive and socially unconscious business model they embody and we embrace. The acceptable for-profit survival of the fittest model where we “take the money and run” without responsibility for our actions. The model where it is not only “okay” but “good business” to leave dead bodies in our wake. The model where if I survive and you fail… I win!

After all, they shoot grizzly bears don’t they?

Monika Mitchell - Executive Director    editor@goodb.net

©2010 – All Rights Reserved