A Look Inside

Our economy today is faltering for so many reasons that many people smarter than I have analyzed  and explained, and I have no idea what the right decision is to stem the recession and prevent a depression. I do, however, believe that no amount of money can reverse the methods of doing business that caused this crisis in the first place, methods will most likely perpetuate themselves into the future. We’ve arrived here because corporations drive consumers to consume even more of what they don’t need so that their stockholders get richer. (I certainly believe that I and my fellow consumers share in the fault by buying into their empty messages.) This incessant driving has paid off making those at the top extremely wealthy, giving others incentive to follow in their footsteps. Without a fundamental change to this model we will find ourselves in this same position again in the future.

I believe that the necessary fundamental change is to restructure the way profits are distributed. What if every company, not out of any obligation but out of civic duty, comitted to donating some significant percentage of their profits year over year to charitable causes. I wonder how much different the board meetings would look and how businesses’ decision making processes would be changed if they knew that the impact of their decisions determined, for example, how many homes in some 3rd world country received fresh water that quarter. I know many organizations already participate in socially responsible activities and charitable giving and I’m all for that, but I’m talking about taking this to the next level. What if each of us sacrificed a little bit of affluence and comfort to insure that we were taking care of our neighbor. How could this be a bad thing?

In days when we are reading about a former executive doing what I consider to be the criminal activity of spending upwards of one million dollars to refurbish his executive office as his company disappeared from existence, I think we need to look at the brand of captilism we’ve become. We now live in a society where our kids grow up thinking it is better to have a multi-room multi-million dollar “crib” than it is to insure that their fellow man on any continent has three square meals and a safe place to rest. A society where we glorify the lives of do-nothing celebutantes instead of making hero’s out of the people who sacrifice and spend their lives doing things to make this world a better place. It’s time for us to change what we work for and value, and what those whoe come after us will work for and value.

Maybe it’s time to form a new stock exchange, a Benevolent Market, where only companies that commit to donating 25% or more of their profits to charitable organizations can be traded. I’d rather put my money in that kind of market and support companies with that kind of commitment to making this world a better place for all of its inhabitants. I wonder how much better you would feel as an employee in the standard issue grey cube of one of these corporations knowing that your work wasn’t just making your executives richer, but that it was also helping to fund the research that will eventually find the cure for AIDS. I wonder if books would be cooked in a way that guaranteed the mortgaging of a company’s future, Enron style, if that also meant that the corporation’s ability to help sustain an inner city hospital would go down with it.

I guess this probably smells like socialism, but the beauty is it’s self-imposed. Maybe the exchange would have some branch of the SEC to insure that the criteria of giving was met but otherwise businesses would be free to give to the charities of their choice. The day-to-day grind of business becomes about more than empire building,  it would be about the outcomes of what the chosen charities would be able to do with all the hard work that the employees put in to allow the company to earn more and therefore give more. It’s time to stem the tide of greed in our economy before the market is no longer able to correct itself of all the lies and deceptions that have forged stock prices. It’s time to start evaluating ways to enter into the business of social responsibility.

Is it possible?