Gift Hub Phil Cubeta

Reuters from Paris

From Dior, where soft dresses in greens and pinks were spiced up with riding jackets and flirty stockings, to Vivienne Westwood, who matched princess gowns with paupers' rags, fashionistas acknowledged the tough times while allowing themselves to have some fun.

Good to see the beautiful people so socially engaged.

Emergent by Design is her quite extraordinary blog and emergent community.

Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch View more presentations from Jean Russell.

Download in pdf.

Institutional Investor Magazine:

The “politically unspeakable reality” is that the pension systems are underfunded by something more than $2 trillion, says Orin Kramer, chairman of the New Jersey State Investment Council, citing independent research that he recently commissioned.

Maybe there was something to the Death Panel concept as a solution to ill health and penury in old age.

Philanthropcapitalist arrives: "Don't be afraid! I have two bottom lines."

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" from The Country of Marriage, copyright © 1973 by Wendell Berry

Questions

• When we adopt the language of social enterprise, or social investing, or a social capital markets do we embrace metaphors more sterile than those of the fox, loam, carrion, the crop, and the harvest?
• What is lost when our master metaphors are commercial?
• Can we engineer solutions to our ills, or can we only be cured?
• Might the cure be organic, from within, from sources that lie deep in literary and philosophical traditions, rather than those, or along with those, from business? For, of course, farming too is a challenging business.
• Is it the MBA, the prophet, the poet, or the farmer from whom you draw most hope?
• The MBA, the prophet, poet, or farmer - who best feeds your moral imagination?

For reference: Give Through Experts and Seeing like a State. And, what the hell, The Pasture.

There is no indication that the Pope's brother knew anything of what happened at the rigorously disciplined boys' choir before he got there. Nor have he and the Pope discussed it. Someone is out to get the Church. Media are creating a circus. Why is it, though, that the Devil so delights in bedeviling the holy? Dionysus became the fallen, stinking, priapic, goat god of the cleft hoof. Dionysus - he of drunkenness, frenzy, riot and berserk violence - was the great god of satire, where the order of the world is inverted to reveal its true nature. We can no more renounce the devil than we can renounce physicality, the abuse of power, and the pleasures of sanctimony, hierarchy, gorgeous costumes, pageantry and hypocrisy. The more we denounce and externalize the devil, the more we cast him into hell, the more Satanic we become. That was the truth of the great ages of satire, and I am sure a long exploded heresy, for which any number of heretics have been burned at the stake by any number of holy men holding the cross before the sinner's eyes and feasting on his agony.

Philanthropedia announces a white paper on their expert-driven methodology. The profile of a giver who believes in experts? That too is worthy of a white paper.

Jolyon Jenkins via BBC:

Indeed exactly because accountancy looks like a dry, value-free activity, it can be used as a kind of moral laundry.

Can we say the same, though, of social venture double bottom line bookkeeping? Probably goes double.

"Not at this time. Let's get it done. Let's lock and load. It's plagiarized but what the hell."
- Matthew Eric Wrinkles, 49

The ritual of the last words is certainly a well established part of our legal system. For those legal clients who have not committed capital crimes, or have never been convicted of such in states allowing the death penalty, the ritual of the last words is "The Last Will and Testament." How well does that document reflect how you wish to be remembered? (Fine, now let's get on with it.)

The reading of the will by the attorney to the children - now there is another moral tableau. As the Irish say, "Where there is death there is hope." 

A Rabbi said to me recently on these subjects, "The Last Will and Testament is your final teaching." What does your last will and testament teach? And is that teaching on purpose or inadvertent?  By inadvertent, I mean that many a will teaches us a good deal about capitalism, taxes, and the legal system, and the goals of the attorney who drew up the forms, and almost nothing about the moral identity of the person whose last words it is. Our final documents are often as ill fitting as an all purpose, one size fits all, shroud.

Given how grim all this may be, I think we should start with a legacy plan, and work back to life. What would we like to accomplish with our resources while we are yet alive? What teaching for heirs now, by living example? Now that is a far more interesting topic. Yet it is not a topic for which the attorney is trained or paid, or generally needed. A shame, then, that the attorney drives the legacy planning process.

Who is responsible, then, for seeing to it that your intentions are embodied in your financial plan for life and your legacy plan for death? I think it goes like this:

• I am responsible for my plan
• I am responsible for clearly articulating my intentions
• My advisors' responsibility is to hear and heed my intentions
• I am responsible for checking that they have
• I am responsible for getting a second opinion if necessary
• I am responsible for firing the advisor who turns my work over to a paralegal and produces a boilerplate, state specific, highly profitable document that in no way represents me well.
• The attorney is responsible for reforming himself or herself
• I am responsible for providing the incentive. 

And now to find life in death see Keats, "This Living Hand".

 

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

 

                                                 

The Wealth Channel:

Professors Duska and Cubeta discuss the importance of having clients confront "ultimate questions" during the financial planning process.

It is hard to speak up for fools while wearing your only good suit.

Foundation for Global Leadership:

Philanthropist, financial advisor, philanthropy coach, Reg’s desire to contribute was sparked when he first traveled to West Africa in 1968 as an economic development student. While in Nigeria, during the Biafra War and crossing the Sahara, he came face to face with his life long sensitivity to the sad reality that some people are lucky enough to be born into the right circumstances and some people are not – but that the lucky have an opportunity to give a hand to the unlucky.

Adventure travel for those assuming the white man's burden? Better than staying home, no doubt. Why do I tend to identify with the guy pulling the rickshaw rather than with the philanthropist riding in it? Maybe because the subaltern laborer seems so much happier than his dignified patron? Of course, like me, the laborer might just be sucking up in hopes of a tip. Maybe the patron has loaned the coolie the money to purchase the rickshaw, at rates slightly lower than the local usurer? That would be micro-finance, and much to be admired.

NY Times Knowledge Network:

The Women’s Philanthropy Institute is partnering with the New York Times to offer an online course to raise the profile of women’s philanthropy worldwide. This course will enrich donor understanding about how and why gender matters and contribute to expanding awareness about the role of philanthropy in society. If you work for an institution that is trying to reach women donors, register now and take advantage of a great opportunity to encourage them to sign up for this course. If you are a donor and want to learn more about how women are changing the world, don’t miss this educational opportunity.

Boston College Professor, Lisa Dodson, interviewed supervisors of very low paid workers. She found many who are slipping a few extra bucks into the paypackets of those who are, effectively, starving. The supervisor is cheating the employer to help the employees that the employer is exploiting. What, this article asks, are the ethical implications? Would you slip a starving worker in a bakery a loaf of bread?

One of these guys mugged 100,000 homeowners (now homeless) with a subprime loan after taking Business Ethics from me. I tried to pick him out of the lineup, but candidly, I see thousands of these students every year. After awhile, all I pay attention to is their check. Does it clear? The rest I leave in the hands of the Almighty Market. If God did not want American Consumers to be stupid, he would not have made them that way. We all must follow Market Signals. To do otherwise would be Socialism.

You can't manage what you can't measure. What gets measured is what gets managed. To conduct business ethics in a businesslike way, we must first measure the ethical state of every employee and provide management with a "score card." From quarter to quarter we can then measure ethical improvement. We can also measure the cost. We can graph these, and provide ratios. We will then have the proper basis for testing which tools and techniques are most cost-effective in improving the morals of management, staff, and the rank and file employees. I say, sermons, public relations, bromides, case studies, and hypocrisy will work best, as being the cheapest and least costly in terms of sales, and the least disruptive of business as usual. My former mentor, now disgraced, The Happy Tutor says that bare butt spankings starting at the top and working down will produce the best results, or time in a Dungeon hanging by their thumbs, or public disgrace, the wheel, rack, and pillory. We can test both methodologies, and we can then see which produces the best ethical outcomes at the lowest total cost. May the best Morals Tutor win! Let's televise me against The Happy Tutor and let the people decide. Tutor being as drunk and disorderly as he is pretty much assures my victory, but times change and Tutor's methods are practically Medieval.

63-year old Joe Bageant pan frying tortilla's in Mexico and waiting for his Social Security check to arrive:

There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other "developed" capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy.

Well, philanthropy is still the best investment in saving capitalism.

Mark Moreford:

Tiger wasn't apologizing to actual people, to his wife or kids or even his confused fans. Tiger was apologizing, straight up and to the bone, to capitalism itself. To his own brand. It was a scary attempt to shore up the multimillions in endorsement deals, his future as a billion-dollar icon. Tiger the man was apologizing to Tiger, Inc., mostly for tainting its earnings potential.

If the heads of the bond rating agencies were to apologize for their fraudulent ratings of subprime-backed bonds, and if Congress were to apologize for not prosecuting each other, and the justice department were to apologize for structural injustice, we might have a merry night of it. We would be clear by show's end that we might as well celebrate malfeasance as fight it. Tiger may retire from golf and start a porn channel. Or maybe he could join Dr. Drew's Celebrity Rehab. Why not? We the People want it all ourselves, including obeisance. To see the great grovel for our forgiveness, how great is that? We are in charge here, as Kings and Queens of Consumerland.

To be aware of a single shortcoming in oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in someone else. Dalai Lama.

Perhaps this is why immortal satire, other than my own, is written within the persona of a Fool, Madman, or Hypocrite.  The wounded healer, the physician dying of the plague he would cure. The Fencer of Stolen Goods hanging the Highwaymen who supply him. The Hack deploring the decay of learning. "Physician, heal thyself!" The correlative dictum, posted over the Delphic Oracle, was "Know thyself." We demonstrate self knowledge when we limn ourself as an apprentice Dungeon Master to the Stars in Wealth Bondage. Of course that was then, when I was young and foolish. Now, as a legit Morals Tutor to America''s Wealthiest Families, I can honestly say I am a good man doing good thing for good people for good causes in a good way. Excuse me, the Special Envoy from Lloyd Blankfein is on the line re: Uplifting the downtrodden.

Marked down from $37.99 to $19.99 for those seeking to bestow bogus Papal Indulgences as part of some philanthropic pr effort upon the sage advice of their fellow Harvard MBAs. I once ran the philanthropy Scene Room in Wealth Bondage, dressed as a Carmelite Nun, so I am not pointing fingers here. Whatever Blankfein has done, I did worse and for less money. If I had a Harvard MBA I would probably be running Wealth Bondage by now. Ah me, the choices we make. I could have had a billion dollar bailout instead of begging for alms. We are all fine people to be taken at our word. Keep the indulgences, give me the money.