Something remarkable happened in the world of the richest men on earth. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who dedicated most of their lives to accumulating as much wealth as possible, decided to give nearly all of it away - in their lifetimes. Why? To help those who cannot help themselves. And even more than that, they have asked their peers to do the same (the Giving Pledge) – give it all away.  If you don’t see this as unusual, think again. This act represents one of the most extraordinary moments in global economic history.

Rich men (I am leaving women out purposely) do not give their money away easily. After all, it represents their life’s work. Their wealth supports their egos, power and position in the top levels of gazillionaire moguls. We imagine a secret society of power players divvying up the world’s wealth for themselves with no regard for those without. When you give your money away, you give your power away too. It’s emasculating. Male virility shrinks with one’s portfolio. Big swinging….well, you know the rest.

So why would the world’s two richest men give it away?

It boils down to an evolving sense of social conscience – the deep belief in individual responsibility to help relieve human suffering.

Perhaps we all have this mandate to some degree. We call it charity, tithing, philanthropy. Yet social conscience goes beyond those traditional labels to the depths of our being. We are not simply writing a check for a “good cause” or attending a gala with our social set. We are investing ourselves in creating a better world.

The innovative David Miller, who heads up Princeton University’s Faith and Work Initiative, writes, “We all have greater capacity than we realize to live lives of radical generosity. We can do it with our time, treasures, and talent.”

The new giving pledge is a part of our consciousness. We give, because we must. However humble, all of us can affect someone else’s life in a positive way through kindness, compassion and generosity—not for the kudos, but for the personal satisfaction of knowing we are part of a giving (not taking) world.

Beyond Noblesse Oblige

Commitment to philanthropy is nothing new. Noblesse Oblige has dictated that wealth and privilege requires the responsibility to serve society. No one embodies this more than the UK’s Queen Elizabeth II. In modern monarchal systems supported by the taxpaying public, royals know the part they play in balancing the scales of privilege—lest they lose their heads. Modern royals have given moguls a model for social responsibility.

We have come to a moment in the evolution of humankind where we recognize that each of us has co-created the world we live in—the good, the bad and the ugly. Each of us is responsible for the state of our fellow inhabitants. Each of us has the power to change our world to a more caring place.

Apathy is a direct act. If we do nothing; we are part of the problem. It is a clear statement of “I accept all that is and will make no effort to change it.”

For those of us like myself, who do not, cannot, will not, accept all that is—we are called to fight. Like spiritual warriors, we charge into the Battle for Goodness. It is our mission to usher in the change that we know, as consciously evolved human beings, is our purpose here on earth.  In the fight against the ugliness of gluttony and the violence of greed, compassion is our sword. Arm yourselves and get ready for battle.

Contrary to outdated beliefs, compassion is not weak. It represents love and love is the strongest force in the universe. It is the very essence of what we live and die for. It takes great courage to love in an unloving world, great courage to show compassion in a culture that reveres aggression, great courage to stand up to destructive forces of power and say: Enough! You have had your time at the top. We are taking our world back.

Only the strongest among us can do this. It requires us to push through the status quo of who has more, and those that want only more for themselves. It forces us to not play both sides by catering to the self-serving while claiming concern for humanity, or placing self-interest above social conscience. Love inspires us to recognize that we are indeed at war—with corruption, greed, injustice and the brutal inhumanity of top down economics.

If we say yes to social responsibility, we are saying yes to the fight for Goodness and the hope of transforming humanity from a culture of hate and selfishness to one of compassion and community. All of this brings me back to the Giving Pledge and the example of two business titans, Gates and Buffet, who are galvanizing the troops to create a better world for us all.

It is a giant leap forward in the evolution of human civilization for power and privilege to finally join the Fight on the side of Good.

©2010 – All Rights Reserved

Monika Mitchell - Executive Director  

www.good-b.com/blog

This week has been a boon for the American economy. Or so the “experts” say. The Wall Street Journal declared that the U.S. economy will rebound in September. In a WSJ survey, 52 economists asserted that the recession will end in August. Alan Greenspan declared at the National Association of Realtors conference in Washington, D.C.  “So while I look at the housing market as something that gives me grave concern, we are finally beginning to see the seeds of a bottoming.”

While job losses continue to mount to the tune of 600-700,000 each month, foreclosures this year alone will climb to 2-3million, the Big Boys continue to pump out cheerful economic news. Weren’t they the same ones who heralded an endless housing boom?  Greenspan said famously in 2006 that the worst of housing downturn “was behind us.” Not Greenspan, Wall Street financial wizards or the “experts” at the Wall Street Journal called the financial crisis before it happened. They were caught completely off-guard, “bewildered” as Greenspan would term it. So why in the world would we believe anything they claim now?

“This is no normal recession and there will be no V-shaped recovery,” says Mark Patterson, chairman of Matlin Patterson Advisers. Addressing the Qatar Global Investment Forum this week, Patterson continued to send shockwaves through the investment fund crowd. As to the “glimmers of hope” Obama, Bernanke and Warren Buffett proclaim?  “It’s a sham. The banks are insolvent,” says Patterson.”The US government is trying to sedate the public because they are down to the last $100bn (£66bn) of the $700bn TARP funds.”

The reason these words shocked the well-healed financial market audience is not because they didn’t know the bank bailout had failed, but because they did. Only no one inside the money trail is supposed to admit this publicly. The fact that the nation’s 19 largest banks are in more financial stress than ever and small regional banks are set for a major collapse is not news to anyone present at the Forum. It is only news for the general American public.

So why would the Federal Reserve, the Obama Administration and Treasury Department mislead the American public down the yellow brick road of spray-painted gold? “They think they’re doing this for the greater good of society,” continued Patterson.

The common belief held by the powers that be who (allegedly) look out for the common man and woman is that if the American investing and consumer public believe things are getting better, they will. Isn’t that what Dorothy believed about the Wizard of Oz? In the end, even Dorothy found out he was a fraud.

“The taxpayers ought to know that we are in effect receiving a subsidy,” Patterson explained in blunt terms that the government bailout supports Wall Street and throws the ordinary American taxpayer overboard. The Daily Telegraph in the UK reports, “The US Treasury’s effort to stabilize the banking system through the TARP programme is a hopelessly ill-conceived policy that enriches speculators at public expense.” Why do we have to read the news in the United Kingdom to find out the truth of U.S. policy?

But it really is no surprise to most Americans. We all know this in the deepest part of our souls. We have eyes to see and ears to hear! Millions of small business owners know there is no credit available to support their growth. Tens of millions of workers know their days at their jobs are numbered. American homeowners worry every day whether they can keep their families afloat and the roofs over their heads. Dean Baker of the UK’s Guardian reports that a foreseeable recovery in the U.S. economy is “wishing thinking” and the data actually reveals “no end in sight.”

After the fallout of the Savings and Loan crisis and the subsequent October 1987’s Black Monday, the residential and commercial real-estate market took a decade to turn around. The devastating affects on the manufacturing and service industries continued to hit Main Street hard long after the crisis was over for Wall Street. Money men take care of themselves and rebound light years ahead of ordinary citizens.

So where is the economy rebounding?

I was in Seattle this past weekend, one of my favorite places to visit extended family and friends. Everyone was in a fine mood. My girlfriend and I took her mother to the South Center Mall off Highway 5 just outside of Seattle. The Mall was packed to the brim. It took 15 minutes to find a parking spot. The Gene Juarez Spa where we waited for her mom to enjoy a Mother’s Day pampering was ten deep in the check-out queue. You would think they were giving things away! My friend works for My Space and even though the company laid off 150 workers last week, she feels secure.

I was wondering if it was a Mother’s Day mirage or if the Pacific Northwest hadn’t been hit with the same economic tsunami that the east coast had. Living in New York, the city is experiencing the worst downturn since September 11, 2001. Businesses are closing left and right. My office building in the Flatiron district is half deserted from formerly full occupancy. An appointment with my dentist usually requires three months to book. The secretary said, “Come on in, we are wide open.” Even Donald Trump complained to a local New York paper that no one was lending, buying or selling in the Manhattan real-estate market. World-class 5 Star restaurants are advertising $24 prix fixe menus.

Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, California, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Connecticut, Pennsylvania…these are just a few of the states suffering from deep recessions. Apparently, some states have not felt the pain yet in a big way.

What is our economic prosperity based on? Production and Consumption. These have shrunk by about 60% nationally. What is our financial system based on? Banking and Credit.  These have virtually disappeared. 90% of the United States banking system is insolvent resulting in 90% of all private consumer credit disappearing. The only credit currently issued is the small amount from still solvent credit unions and billions of government sponsored home loans.

Patterson said, “The U.S. Treasury is out of its depth and seems to be trying to put off drastic action by pretending that the banking system is still viable…We’re going to see a catastrophic increase” in the number of defaults. He claimed financial firms are knee-deep in debt and can’t refinance. These firms are making money by “gambling with excessive leverage, so the knife that cuts off leverage is going to cut off their heads as well.”

Okay. Been there, done that. Uh-oh…over-leveraging is how we got into this mess, remember?

Arianna Huffington wrote this week in the Huffington Post of a bewildering “financial euphoria” taking hold of market makers. Not only does she see this as premature, she wisely asserted that this false bravura “narrows the window for reform.” Arianna states that the banking class is “terrified of serious financial reform” and therefore is spreading the word to celebrate recovery.

Arianna stated that despite public assertions to the contraryy, there isn’t a genuine appetite for reform and regulation from the new administration. In fact, top Obama guns seem to be recreating the former status quo with new policy. Obama’s money men include, Larry Summers, one of the architects of the reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act and Tim Geither “who actually talks the talk of a reformer, but walks the walk of a Wall Street true believer.” 

 Ms. Huffington continued, “It’s time to stop pretending that the Wall Street economy is the same as the real economy. The Wall Street economy may be showing signs of life — thanks to the hundreds of billions we have poured into it — but the real economy isn’t.”

This seems to jive with the increasingly suffering masses who shoulder the burden for Wall Street’s boon with the painful realities of escalating unemployment and unlimited foreclosures. The credit squeeze is strangling the ordinary American family, homeowner and small business owner. The clock is running out for helping them avoid insolvency.

Yet Arianna thinks the window is closing on reform because the Big Boys are feeling their oats. The true economy is the one they are sitting on with big fat bottoms. When they come crashing down even harder than before, the Big Boys will regret their lapse in action, because the folks they crush with their indifference will call for their heads.

Yet I am not as worried as Arianna. Like her I understand that Wall Street financed with taxpayer dollars can’t last forever.  Sooner or later the top of the food chain will become too heavy for the masses as it did in 2008 and come barreling down again with a bigger boom than before. We are just biding our time.

Yet do I think that America’s Fool, Alan Greenspan, is accurately predicting a housing market upturn? Do I think the dinosaur elitists at the soon to be obsolete Wall Street Journal are calling the end of the recession in 4 months correctly? No, I don’t.

I think August or September will see a tide turning when even Seattle’s booming consumership turns cold. Money is currently being directed where it will do no good -into the pockets of those who ripped it away from ordinary American pockets. It is only a matter of time when the government coffers run dry.

The engine of the economy needs to be fueled with large amounts of cash indeed. But that engine is no longer Wall Street. It is ordinary working America that is the real engine of the real economy- the one that supports the fake economy of Wall Street smoke and mirrors. Working America is where the money (gross national product) comes from. Labor over time equals money- the time it takes for a homeowner to pay back a 30 year mortgage, the 10 years it takes for a student to repay a loan. This is the real economic engine that urgently needs its wheels greased.

But I am not worried, nor should you be. Because when the boom falls upon us again, the window will open wide for the necessary transformation of business that is destined to be.  The American fools will not be ordinary people, but those who forgot the most important lessons of history. The wheels of American Justice inevitably turn towards progress and reform.

This week The Economy of Trust Blog has a guest blogger, Peter Ressler, otherwise known as “the Sage of Wall Street” (is there such a thing?) and author of Ressler on the Street column on GoodB.net.

The words of this Call to Action are so powerful and important, I thought they were worth repeating here.

(From the pages of NEW MEDIA WAG GoodB, our blog sponsor, Good Business International: Building Better Business for a Better World. http://www.good-b.com/ws-ressler-on-the-street.html )

     Calling All Heroes

“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
 - John F. Kennedy

Things are really tough on Wall Street. For most of us, we no longer even know if there is a Wall Street. The world we knew for the last few decades has come painfully and abruptly to a halt. I could mark that day to six months ago, September 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers fell. That day will forever be remembered in infamy. That was the moment Wall Street, as we once knew it, ceased to exist.
We could go back over and over past mistakes, but it wouldn’t do much good to resolve the suffering of the moment. As the country suffers, so goes the world.
There are a lot of bad guys on Wall Street. Most of us in the industry know this. Wall Street has been villianized again – just as it had in the 1930s and many other times in history. Selfish, greedy, gluttonous, money hungry white collar bank robbers prowled the Main Streets of America poised to take whatever was not nailed down. 
It’s enough to make a Wall Street veteran sick. Many of us are. Many of us worked seven days a week, fourteen hours a day for years, only to find the culmination of our life’s work destroyed by the reckless indifference of colleagues. Okay, I feel for you. I am feeling it too.
Yet another thing I know from 28 years interviewing and working with and for some of the top market makers in the industry, is that there are a lot of good guys on Wall Street too. (Excuse me gals if I use guys as a generic term for everyone.) I know a lot of really honorable, smart people who built their careers on integrity, talent and tenacity, yet now suffer from the missteps of others.
In my nearly three decades in finance I have discovered there are two Wall Streets: the one of infamy that feeds off injury to others and another that creates wealth and markets that improves the lives of millions. The latter is the Wall Street I know best, the Street I have chosen to work with for most of my career.

To these Friends I say:
The world is suffering with us. Some are getting hit really hard. Observing the growing lines at the food bank near my office, the tens of thousands of layoffs announced weekly in almost every industry, the unbelievable pace of foreclosures throughout the nation, it looks like things are worsening by the day.
Our country needs us. There is a lot of money sitting on the sidelines in private equity, hedge funds, and private investor capital. Everyone is waiting for the opportunity to turn this crisis into a boom.
I have a new proposal on how to beat the Bear for all those sitting on piles of cash on the sidelines. It is time for the brave and hardy to jump into the ring. Put your Patriot Suits on and lend a hand to our confused and dysfunctional government. If we wait for Congress, the Federal Reserve or even the Treasury to save us, all the progress we and our parents made before us may disappear.

Calling All Wall Street Heroes…

Take a page from our Bravest, those who saved us from near destruction seven and one half years ago, and jump into the towering fire that took thousands of our own down.  Now it’s our turn. We have the tools to put this inferno out. Invest cold hard cash directly into some of the better companies in our nation before they put more unemployed on the streets and create more homeless mouths to feed. Together with our government we can knock this raging fire down to simmering embers.

People don’t want a handout, they want a job. They don’t want to stand in a bread line, they want to buy their own. 

So here is the plan:

Right now the consumer and the small, medium and large businesses that employ them
are taking the hit dead on.  Every hit they take weakens the basic foundation of our economy.
Trusting the ones that brought this on to do the right thing after two strike outs is a fool’s gamble where the risks are greater than we can imagine. Buying bad assets from bad banks is a bridge to nowhere. Bad banks will not support good businesses now anymore than they did since they received $350bn to do so.

 If ordinary Americans don’t have a job, they cannot pay their bills.  If they don’t pay their bills they
 will default, thus creating even more pain and suffering for all concerned.  How many of the 7,000 workers laid off from Macy’s can grab the shovel and start building roads as earmarked in the new “stimulus” package?  How many of them will benefit from a tax credit if they are no longer employed?

The operating theory is that private capital will save the banks by buying the bad securities nobody really wants.  If private capital buys distressed assets from banks with the same guarantees offered to Freddie and Fannie how can we be sure the banks will use the funds they receive to shore up the middle of the structure of our economy?  So far their actions say they can’t or won’t.

It is time to give up the old model and realize we are in uncharted territory. Any attempt to get back to the old model that has been pulverized is a waste of time and certainly a waste of our money which is being printed faster than we can keep track of.  The debts we are incurring now will have to be repaid by our children, their children and their children’s children.

There is another way.

All of those who have become fabulously rich as a result of being in the right place at the right time must put on their patriotic uniforms and help those who did not happen to fall into the same great fortune and luck.  After all, without the middle classes many of those fortunes would never have been made.

To prevent our economic system from declining further, we need to shore up the foundation where the circulation of funds begins and ends. By investing in large, medium, and small businesses that employ the backbone of this great country – the consumer – we can stabilize our economy. Private equity can step into the American creditors’ shoes and issue low cost long term debt to struggling business with the strings the government won’t attach – keep your people employed. Firms will show their love for our country by taking on debt in order to avoid more layoffs.

This action by the financial community would reveal to the world the other Wall Street – the one that cares about safeguarding nation’s economic health and who understands America’s responsibility to the world. We need to save our own country and not wait for others to do what we can do ourselves.

 J.P. Morgan, the man not the firm, did this successfully in the early 20th century during the Panic of 1907. He and a group of powerful financiers jumped in to save our nation and in the process saved themselves. Warren Buffett stepped in to shore up some unstable companies in the fall of 2008. There are many more big investors out there like Buffet and the late Morgan. This country has been good to you; it’s time to show your country how good you can be to it.

If we don’t step into the fire and help put it out, there is much more pain to come. Put on your bunker gear and Scott Packs and let’s put this fire out before it burns the whole house down.

PETER RESSLER is Chief Executive Officer of the Ressler Mitchell Group in New York catering to Wall Street’s Elite. Peter’s legendary reputation as the “best in the business” in financial recruiting combined with international renown as a leader in values-based and socially responsible business makes him one of the most unique voices on the Street. He is also a volunteer firefighter and a member of the Firefighter Assist Search Team in his local community. As a business ethics expert and Wall Street veteran, he has been called, “The Sage of Wall Street.”