Who Wants To Be A Billionaire? (and Archimedean Theorem V)

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Over the past three weeks, I have had the good fortune of wading through the gutter of our society’s delusional view of “innovation” and “exploration” and its illusory association with wealth creation. After learning that one of his venture capital backed technologies was not unique (just a mirage created by the technical amnesia of a faux “inventor”), a duped investor said, “Well, I don’t think any of us expected the invention would make us billionaires.” A few days later, in a meeting with an engineering firm I learned that they routinely have charlatan inventors present technologies to them thinking that they’re worth “billions of dollars”. I’ve been reviewing the history of one of the world’s largest mining deals and am once again struck by the asymmetry of speculation – a few million dollars of “exploration” entitles one organization to claim $16 billion dollars worth of control of a nation’s minerals! And for some mysterious reason, the sign that keeps flashing on my dashboard of conscience says: “Warning: Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.” Recently, I’ve been working on multi-billion dollar projects and still going about life pretty much the same way. I’m still bouncing around the world working like I have for 20 years. I’m still coming home and helping my son Zach clean out his pet du jour tank (this time a turtle named Squirt).

And I’m reflecting on the half-life of the perception of big. Just ten years ago, when I was still working with developing policies to govern technology transfer from universities in the U.S. and Japan, I remember hearing people say, “These professors think that their inventions will make them the next millionaire,” with disbelief and distain. In ten years, we somehow went from million to billion. And I think that in the process, something far more important happened. I think that on the way into the troposphere of our imagination we became more isolated and detached from our capacity to engage with genuine, meaningful endeavors. Note that, in 2007 and early 2008, ICAP traded over $1.3 trillion dollars in counterparty risk instruments a day every day! In a complex global roulette game, betting on the downside of a non-transparent financial market, the greatest notional value traded were bets AGAINST humanity’s honoring its commitments. While Inverted Alchemy readers have known this for two years, the perfect storm of municipal bond defaults, pension illiquidity, and slowdown in over-leveraged consumption finally made international “news” this week when the financial press finally said that we’re at least $3 trillion underfunded in reported state pension obligations which the public is required to pay – saying nothing of the crater in funding for corporate and social security entitlements which make $3 trillion a drop in the bucket.

I am intrigued by the callousness with which we throw around numbers. Did life in the U.S. or around the world improve by an order of magnitude in the past 10 years? Did we create an order of magnitude of value in the past 10 years? And, why, given our recent opportunity to learn the lessons of the ills of excess in our on-going Great Recession, have we chosen to extol the virtues of ever-bigger illusion? Is it not the case that we’ve instead become an order of magnitude less connected to our humanity? Have we not become an order of magnitude more insulated from the consequence of our actions on the rest of the world?

I was lucky. Last weekend, I got to take part in a reality check. Coming off a week of international deals and cross-border trade negotiations, I was invited to the house of Zach’s girlfriend’s family in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Every year, April’s family gets together in October (like many other families in rural Virginia) to make apple butter. Sitting above a small fire was a huge copper cauldron into which a heaping bushel of apples was placed. Starting at 2 AM, the apples boiled into applesauce and gradually thickened into a dark, syrupy sauce. The stirring paddle – a two meter pole with a large slotted paddle affixed to the end – constantly mixed the sauce making certain that no part of the cauldron was allowed to burn or stick. Zach got there at the crack of dawn. Katie and I showed up fashionably late around noon. We were immediately welcomed and given the opportunity to stand next to the boiling inferno and have the mix of smoke and apple steam burn our eyes.

Next to the apple butter contraption was Great Grandfather. He sat – mostly silent – save the moments when we’d ladle out a bit of sauce onto the plate for him to check the moisture content. If any juice still separated out of the dollop, it was more stirring, more smoke in the eyes. When the apple reduction was suitably thick, it was time to add sugar. We had 110 pounds of sugar in the sugar bin – 11 ten pound bags. “Start with five,” was the sagely advice from Great Grandfather. With bubbling apple concentrate burning my hands, I poured in 50 pounds of sugar while Katie, Tammy and others mixed the pot. Fully mixed, another test dollop. “Add two more bags.” In went 20 more pounds. Another test dollop. “I think that that’s about right,” reported Great Grandfather. “Oh no! Grandmom’s butter was much sweeter – we need more sugar!” protested one of the family. So in went another bag. And then, it was perfect. A bit of cinnamon, a touch of cloves and, voila, dark brown apple butter. The only thing lacking was Colleen’s homemade oatmeal bread… but that had to wait for three long days!

What I found particularly noteworthy was the comment that was made as I was cleaning the gooey, apple sugar mess off the stirring paddle after the last embers had died on the fire and after the last of 88 quarts of apple butter had been sealed. “That paddle has been around for about 100 years.” One hundred years of the same ritual on a crisp October morning! Amazing! Even more profound, however, was the story in the sugar. You see, over 100 years, wisdom had deduced that somewhere between 50 and 110 pounds of sugar is the range in which the “perfect” apple butter is produced. And in 100 years, the variability in this amount was governed by the sweetness of the apples (a function of nature’s rain and sun), the discerning palate of the eldest member of the family and the boisterous lobbying of the next generation who argued for 10 more pounds to evoke the sweetness of Grandmom. More sugar, you see, doesn’t make better apple butter. The perfect amount exists within a known, constant range. And while some of you, jaded by post-modernism will argue that this is just a Norman Rockwell anachronism in the Virginia country-side, I would suggest that we could benefit a lot from the lesson of the apple butter.

Human scale is not measured in logarithms and scientific notation. It’s measured in discerning dynamic ranges within which perfection is manifest. The pathologic obsession which celebrates perpetual growth infects incentives with an untenable mandate for ever larger, ever bigger, ever greater MORE. However, as academics like UVA’s Darden Business School Dean Robert Bruner and financial consultants like KPMG report, bigger not only is not better – in as much as 83% of M&A transactions, value is destroyed! Mind you, to the swindlers that promote them (aka Investment Bankers), they’re quite lucrative as they generate immense commissions. However if these same promoters were ever held accountable for their compulsive misrepresentations, the market would wake up and realize that there is a limit to growth and there’s a point at which we need to conclude that enough is, well… enough.

Which brings me to Archimedean Theorem V (yes, another one of these). If more than 6 zeros are at the end of any number associated with investment or transaction, insufficient accountability is most likely present. Precision is not an antiquated value – it’s vital to regaining a sense of integrity. If our “fudge factor” is over two orders of magnitude, we should go back to our assumptions and get them more carefully focused. I would welcome each of you to become critical consumers of zeros and realize that when they’re thrown carelessly about, it’s your time that is being wasted.

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Crimes Against (and by) Humanity

This week marks the two year anniversary of Inverted Alchemy. Two years ago I was encouraged by Global Business Network pioneer Napier Collyns to continue the multi-year tradition I had established as the economist at The Arlington Institute. We were in the throes of an economic collapse created by willful, reckless opacity in which the Bush Administration, the U.S. Congress, investment banks, rating agencies and insurers were all co-conspirators. In a contorted coup d’état, the public sector, in one month set in motion the nationalization of assets in an exhausted, last-ditch effort to consolidate the U.S. economy for the convenient bankruptcy filing with our largest creditor – China.

I chose the title “Inverted Alchemy” as a challenge. After millennia of esoteric efforts to turn substances into gold, I thought it would be a fascinating proposition to encourage humanity to end its gold addiction and see if we could turn gold into something that built a better humanity. Given that our only alchemical success to date is the transformation of natural beauty, homelands and cultures, and human blood into gold, I thought that there needed to be at least one voice persistently challenging us to act differently.

Two years later:

- the bankruptcy is complete as we see Treasury Secretary Geithner officially “recognizing” China’s currency policy against which the U.S. can do nothing (including the announcement this week delaying a statutory deadline of currency reporting in an election-year stunt);
- blog readers are familiar with the growing illiquidity of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) which continues to assume failed business pensions at a record rate;
- blog readers saw Inverted Alchemy break the story on the illiquidity of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) months before the FDIC made the information public;
- the Toronto Stock Exchange, the London AIM and the Australian Stock Exchange continue to provide global investors the opportunity to launder their cauterized consciences while they mint brokerage fee income on mining operations operating illegally across the globe;
…AND…
- we’ve seen authors and artists like Peter Buffett and Chip Duncan wake us up to hope in places devoid thereof;
- we’ve explored and deployed accessible Integral Accounting and have provided pathways to start acting and thinking differently;
- we’ve investigated the roots of our financial system and learned about interdependencies in ways not discussed before; and,
- we’ve seen a community of several thousand become part of the Inverted Alchemy blog conversation.

The most popular (based on download frequency and persistence) post in the history of Inverted Alchemy has been the March 2009 post on the AIG shell game. This post had a bizarre cameo relevance this month as SNL Financial reported what, on its surface, appeared to be a rather innocuous analysis that life insurers had a net loss of $900.3 million (down from an income of $8.9 billion last year). While their reserves were increased 17% from the previous year, their total REVENUE off of investment income increased only 3%. In short, they’re making a lot less with a lot more money in their control. This is ominous in light of the “Shell Game” post. On the superficial level we know that when Prudential, MetLife, TIAA-CREF, New York Life and AIG catch a cold, the global flow of capital gets…well…seriously congested! However, when you understand that since the establishment of the U.S. Federal Reserve system, it was life insurers who were at the foundation of the racket you realize that this loss has a long tail. Absent the actuarially dictated long-term investment allocations from life insurers, a major component of the global economy seizes up. And as we surmise from the extinct brontosaurus, a long tail can do a lot of damage when controlled by an un-evolved brain.

Building an economic system on actuarial management of life-expectancy is an experiment whose time has run. While the past 90 years saw excessive benefit flowing to a select few, the disparity of access to dignified living conditions for huge populations in the world grew disproportionately larger. And now, when we are confronted with the alignment of phenomenal growth in marginalized countries and the rare moment for humanity to actually back up the promises made at the millennial milestone regarding human rights, dignity of women and children, poverty eradication and global accountability, the response is to horde cash. Profits made on fear of death, profits made on covering end-of-life consumer credit leverage excesses, profits made from illegal resource exploitation operations, profits made on engines of warfare and death – now line the actuarial treasuries of those who see no future save the yawning void filled with the ghosts of their callous neglect.

We must break the cycle of a monetary system that rides of the mortality of human life for this is the insidious, pervasive Crime Against Humanity.

The last century worked (albeit, poorly) with the Keynesian notion that “natural resources” were free, that “labor” was a variable commodity (regrettably and ignorantly celebrated by the Nobel Prize in Economics this year), and that autocratic, central control of the public under partisan “isms” served as the expedient way for a few to lord over the masses. In 2010, we now have evidence that each of these conditions precedent are erroneous and prone to abuse. And, more importantly, we know that in their careless rush to option every food, metal, and energy resource on the globe, China is experimenting with a new imperialism which is on a collision course with the reckoning of its own neglect of China’s massive population still in poverty. Let’s face it. While we breathlessly watched as 33 miners were pulled to the surface after spending two months underground, the same week saw more than that number killed by rockslides, cave-ins, and actual violence against workers by mine owners and operators. The justification? Great copper and gold prices justify reckless mining practices for the benefit of….oh, that’s right, the investor. When mining agreements with countries call for “within economically feasible” standards for safety for workers and the environment, it is the INVESTORS and CONSUMERS who are actively or ignorantly supporting and enabling crimes against humanity. Whether it’s toxic sludge in the Danube, poison in the water in the Niger Delta, collapsed mines in China, Ecuador, or Chile, or silt slides in the Tabar Islands which bury gardens which sustain the food for a community, our addiction to metals and electronics is currently supporting the deaths of thousands. And we can stop it.

Much like public awareness contributed to the end of Apartheid, you can act today. The money that flows to those companies who trade on human lives passes through listing exchanges. The Toronto, Australian, London, and New York Stock Exchanges are directly involved with laundering these funds – insulating their investors from the expediency of having to confront business practices which result in the loss of lives and livelihoods. Today, begin the process of raising your voice to their compliance departments to call for an accounting standard that actually has listing eligibility requiring:
- local land owner and country interest participation in the LISTED stocks of companies benefiting from minerals and energy rather than in phony, illiquid shell corporations which accrue debt and expenses with no control of revenues;
- local land owner and country grievance procedures ON EXCHANGES so that shareholders are informed of business practices which violate human rights and environmental laws;
- de-listing for any company which resorts to contracted violence (mercenary or police action) to manage labor disputes; and,
- de-listing for any company which illegally by-passes customs and audit authorities and procedures in the host countries.
These are simple recommendations and, if a few of you begin to take the trouble of beginning the communication with exchanges, we’ll begin to be accountable for crimes done in our names. The ecosystem – including humans – is waiting for us to Invert Alchemy.

Your Attention, Please?

Today marks the eighth anniversary of the United States Congressional authorization for President Bush’s Iraq War. Letting it pass without acknowledging the hundreds of thousands of lives lost or permanently damaged by this fatal lack of judgment would be to perpetuate the assent to injustice and inhumanity unleashed by willful ignorance. In a country whose population consumes information with the attention span of a squirrel, our collective accountability for this blight on our generation is yet to be fully apprehended. From the mental and physical injuries on our men and women in the military to the thousands of Iraqi citizens who will live with unspeakable loss, the world is worse off today and, absent some change of behavior, will dishonor those who have lost so much.

On Friday, I had the opportunity to be reminded of why we went to war. During a conversation with two individuals who advocate changing the world for the better, I heard one of them say, “The problem is reading. You can’t expect people to read anymore. We need to engage people in a simple media platform with simple messages…like with Twitter.” For those of you who are not linked into the social media scene, Twitter is a social communication utility which has the intellectual depth of antiquated Morse-code telegraphs – messages limited to 140 characters! “We need a viral app that will get people to engage in virtual conversations which will shift humanity for the better.”

This type of analysis of engaging the human mind for behavior transformation is why we went to war in Iraq. This is why we still are unwilling to face the economic collapsing vortex which is continuing to render tens of thousands perpetually falling into unemployment and poverty. This is why we have a political leadership constipation of conscience in Washington, Brussels and Beijing. What’s the challenge? Your attention.

The issues confronting humanity were not developed on 140-character Twitter feeds. The CIA didn’t support and co-opt despot leaders and tyrants from the Middle East to Central America based on sound-bytes. The World Bank, the Commonwealth Development Corporation and the IMF haven’t had countries leverage their resource wealth for the benefit of a few financiers using short hand memos. The collusive financial racket that propped up AIG and took down Lehman wasn’t done on the back of a napkin. And in 1998, 2004 and 2006 when I reported the 2008 banking collapse, I wasn’t prescient. I actually took the time to wade through information that was hidden in plain sight. Ironically, corruption, treason, and greed have gotten so confident in your lack of attention that injustice is done in the open. And NOBODY pays attention. When SAIC floated their IPO, they reported vast unaccounted for sums of money associated with the Greek Olympic security contracts - sums that no accountable organization could verify - and nobody cared. When the New York court found Bulf Oil – a company owned by an Iran-Contra co-conspirator – guilty of numerous Iraqi Oil For Food crimes in which SunTrust, Texaco, BP and Chase Manhattan were all monetarily and materially involved, nobody cared. And when the Vice President of the United States used this same felonious network to prop up the “enemy” for our war on terror, few read about it or cared. When the U.S. government participated in the largest financial cover-up of accounting shenanigans in banks and insurers in 2008, they actually published the evidence in the public and nobody read it.

Do we suffer from a lack of information which would raise our consciousness? Would we pay attention more if we had an honorable, non-mainstream media source that would tell us the truth? Would the lives of Afghanis or Pakistanis mean more to us if we had a social media network that would allow us to use a defense-department funded network (called the internet) to unmask the truth and stand up to propaganda? Would we care more about those displaced and killed by mining and extractive industries if we had better social media platforms to display on our conflict-metal-filled-techno-gadgets?

No.

Our eyes are blind because we don’t want to see. Our ears are buzzing with the hypnotic MP3 players that are surgically attached to our virtual existences. Our hearts are calloused from our incessant need to care about tsunami, earthquake, and flood victims by donating $10 dollars to anonymous surrogates who are our consciousness ambassadors and who, once paid, are long forgotten and seldom held to account. And our minds have carefully formulated a protective cocoon which allows us to put our aspirations on par with actions – “as long as we’re thinking about a better world, we’re doing our part”, we tell ourselves. And the next gadget is not going to break us out of our profligate coma. No the problem isn't the information, the access, or the mode of dissemination. The problem is that we are unwilling to confront complexity as complexity. And as such, we cannot find the singularity upon which the complexity could be resolved - the fulcrum as it were. In our rush to serve up sound-bytes - even those from the well-intended - we dishonor the reality of a multifactorial system in which covariates are THE story. In isolation things don't exist and in isolation, they will not be substantially engaged or addressed.

On this day in which we mark the millions who have paid the price for our willingness to acquiesce to the sound-bytes that sold tyranny under the self-righteous banner of “freedom”, we are invited to actually do something. Rather than flagellating ourselves yet again for our unconsidered complicity in the march of injustice and the affront to liberty, we can actually take part in manifesting another narrative for humanity.

Today, we will inaugurate the Exemplar Zero Initiative in New York. This Initiative, launched to demonstrate the potential of private sector global citizenship which acts rather than waiting for an anonymous government to lead, is already working to make climate mitigating technologies accessible in Mongolia. In a country whose capital is ranked as the world’s most particulate-polluted cities, we are partnering with the public and private sector to begin a new journey. One that does not stand on speeches, white-papers, and feasibility studies. Rather, one that is willing to stand up, make good-faith deployment efforts, and when confronted with challenges, stands up again and again. Tomorrow, you will hear of the anticipated launch of the Global Innovation Commons 2.0 – the only global platform that makes innovation data available to every person on Earth who can access a computer or can link to someone with access. We will not wait for the next “killer app”. We will not abide another day when those who are marginalized are fodder for their abusers. And we will not let willful ignorance be the defense for inaction and non-involvement. And here’s the deal – if you don’t care about environmentally suitable technologies in Mongolia or open-source innovation in water, clean energy, public health, and food security for the world – that’s cool with me. Just share with the world what you do care about and we’ll work with you to transform your caring to action. For in the end, what we really need are people who are willing to act differently. We have all we need already – save the willingness to courageously engage. Let’s take that mantle and move forward together. And yes, it’s going to require thinking in complete sentences, paragraphs and even whole stories. Because the story of our seduction has been an epic and we need to learn the language of a new story that will never fit on Twitter.

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A Corpse Wrapped in a TARP

“The bank-bailout part of TARP was an astounding success,” according to Mark Zandi, Moody’s Analytics chief economist.

And if you’re Moody’s or an employee thereof, you’re probably partying about the two year euthanizing of the Bush, Paulson, and Congressional stroke of genius that left taxpayers $100 billion in the hole, left the economy foundering, and has placed the Obama Presidency in reputational shambles. Because if people would have been held accountable for their actions, Moody’s (like Arthur Andersen before it) would have been shuttered, its executives fined or jailed, and we would have had a modicum of a chance to actually restore some faith in our economy. Few organizations, incentivized with bloated fees, were more directly in the line of culpability for the economic disaster than Moody’s, S&P and other rating agencies. And remember, the same government that authorizes their monopoly to prop up its own shareholder interests and bogus pension accounts, has given them exoneration for falsely promoting investment quality when none existed. A bigger bullet couldn’t have been dodged. So, good on ya’ Mark, as my Aussie friends would say. The fact that there’s still an economist at Moody’s is an “astounding” fact indeed.

While I know that I’ve been reminding us of the classics lately, this week cannot pass without reference to Plato’s Republic, Book I:

“Observe also what happens when they take an office; there is the just man neglecting his affairs and perhaps suffering other losses, and getting nothing out of the public, because he is just; moreover he is hated by his friends and acquaintance for refusing to serve them in unlawful ways. But all this is reversed in the case of the unjust man. I am speaking, as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the advantage of the unjust is more apparent; and my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to do injustice are the most miserable--that is to say tyranny, which by fraud and force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane, private and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating any one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace-- they who do such wrong in particular cases are called robbers of temples, and man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and thieves. But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having achieved the consummation of injustice. For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing it. And thus, as I have shown, Socrates, injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man's own profit and interest.”

As I have spent the week with many friends in Ulaanbaatar Mongolia, I find myself an discontented consumer of this week’s report card on TARP. I was fortunate to be reading the companion document, the GOP’s Pledge to America and couldn’t help thinking that, if the GOP’s Pledge is connecting with anyone, he or she must be suffering from memory loss. Either that or he or she is incapable of being informed by Plato's Republic and its stern admonition against celebrating tyranny and injustice. It was the Reagan Administration that poisoned our innovation policy in the U.S. by turning the Patent Office of the U.S. into a forgery shop in an attempt to quell Japanese industrial threats thereby creating the illusion that we had an innovation-based economy. It was the Clinton and Bush administrations which created tax environments which made out-sourcing the path towards short-term profits. And it was the Bush Administration and a Republican Congress which failed to act on speculative credit practices while simultaneously reinforcing the incumbency of rogue rating agencies. It was conservative Congressional “home ownership” dogma that let Freddie and Fannie get intoxicated (the very entities now recommended for detox by their newly-converted, former dealers). While railing against government size, the GOP seems to be overlooking the fact that if they “right-sized” Washington, they would likely double unemployment. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for downsizing wasteful government but to say that these bureaucrats will find jobs in the private sector is delusional. Yes, there’s plenty of culpability on both sides of the aisle but, really? The Pledge is against the policies of just 3 years ago when its authors held sway.

Not surprisingly, I find myself haunted by Plato’s Republic.

This week injustice and tyranny did their level best. A country who once was the recipient of foreign aid in their time of need neglected their opportunity to reciprocate kindness to another country in need and robbed it of much needed international support. New information surfaced on a 1940’s Public Health program in which U.S. officials sanctioned the infection of women in Guatemala to study sexually transmitted diseases. The head of government from a mineral rich country was hosted by another in which a stock exchange has funded exploitation of people and their land. And the world continued its mad rush to buy gold before China makes its move in October integrating metal, and possibly energy, assets into its currency strategy.

However, this week the argument in Plato’s Republic was challenged by the bold moves of some great women and men. I was witness to a phenomenal woman who is fueling the fire that once led her to campaign for independence in Mongolia now continuing that campaign for the economic and social betterment of the now politically liberated country and its people. As I write this blog post, Brazil stands on the verge of the likely election of Dilma Rousseff – a woman who is no stranger to tyranny. She will have the singular opportunity to show the world what power can do if it’s tempered with the wisdom drawn from a tumultuous life. In many ways, her Presidency, if elected, may provide humanity a unique moment to contemplate the power of reconciliation and service beyond self. Whether she rises to this challenge awaits an election and then, true leadership. I worked with a dynamic woman who has risen to positions of great respect in financial and civil society in Papua New Guinea as we continue to foster transparency and accountability in gold mines littering the landscape and blighting the service of many. And I stood with a colleague in London as we press on towards the launch of a new day for energy paradigms that are suitable both for the planet and for people.

What we should gladly bury with TARP on this day of its demise is the acquiescence to squandered trust. The epitaph may be best written by Zandi. “Astounding”. And today we can all realize that, when the merits of corruption can only find the complicit co-conspirators to sing their praises, we’re actually at a good inflection point. Honorable women and men have been wise enough to call the robbery of the public exactly that - robbery. Possibility is upon us. A new narrative can be born. Take responsibility as a cloak of honor, not a burden. Embrace accountability as your character, not as duty. Liberate your mind and actions, and help those around you to do the same, and stand with the great women and men who are already changing our collective story.

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An Ox Cart and a Gordian Knot

The legend of Gordian Knot stands with other epic fables as a simple reinforcement of archetypal values. Telmissus, the Oracle of Phyrgia forecast that that the next man entering the city driving an ox cart would be king. Confirmed with the omen of an eagle landing on the cart, the peasant Gordias, father of Midas, was this man and became king. In gratitude to the gods, Midas tied the auspicious cart to a post with the Gordian Knot which was without identifiable beginning or end. Centuries later, in BCE 333, Alexander arrived in Phyrgia and found the enigmatic knot and, unwilling to be bested by the puzzle, drew his sword and cut the knot in two fulfilling yet another oracle prophecy that the man who would loose the knot would be a Great. With an auspicious thunderstorm accompanying Alexander’s cleavage of the knot the priests and oracles declared Alexander the future king of Asia.

In modern times, the Gordian Knot has become associated with last week’s blog post theme – namely an epic challenge stimulus which calls for heroic, forceful action. We celebrate the blade that splits asunder and he who wields the blade but we don’t examine the other elements of the legend – the oracles, the signs, and the knot.

On Thursday, my office hosted several would-be Alexanders. Like millions who have been lured to the sirens of “entrepreneurship” and “angel” or “venture” investing I was dealing with several people who were confident that they had devised the solution for things ranging from data encryption to energy to metals to specialized magnetic motors. Joining the chorus in our present lottery-odds Greek tragedy, they sang of solutions to great problems, the promise of riches from their respective technical blades. And, in a style befitting Shakespeare’s rendering of Greek tragedies, many were morose when confronted with the fact that their illusion of uniqueness and creativity was a function of insufficient knowledge of interconnectedness – not invention. Like the innovator heroes of our times, their focus was on the sword and its master – not on the oracle, the signs or the knot. By shifting their focus from the sword to the knot, we actually began a process of a collaborative destiny – kudos to some courageous souls that day.

We are presented with numerous challenges in our time. How do we power our world without toxifying our air and seas? How do we extract minerals without depleting and toxifying water and displacing communities? How do we finance creativity when it has no tangible artifact to have and to hold? How do we determine stewardship of shared resources in the commons? How do we enable endeavors without becoming slaves to reserve-based money? We are, in a word, vexed. In a fifty year economic experiment, we allowed subsidized models of entrepreneurship to be promoted as the keys to wealth creation but we failed to tell the truth about these models. Modern entrepreneurship cannot exist without preferential procurement from governments (the fuel that created the U.S. private equity funding base); preferential tax policy which incentivizes wealth to be placed “at risk” for unlimited upside benefit; subsidized, socialized research (bear in mind that taxpayers fund over 70% of the world’s basic research – not private industry); and an established merger and acquisition market – the fate of most venture backed companies. If any of these conditions are not fully present, incumbent models don’t work.

Market and greed sirens on the rocks engage in a macabre dance which includes “innovators” and “capital”. Buoyed by half-truths and the lure of disproportionate wealth for the few, tens of thousands are devastated when the myths are exposed but, unwilling to expose the fraud to which they succumbed, sit quietly while others follow the same path to disappointment and poverty of spirit (and checkbook). We are, as it was in Phyrgia, a people without the metaphoric leader or king.

However, an ox cart driven by a peasant is on the path. And if we can re-examine the Gordian Knot, we just may be able to create a different narrative.

First, the oracle. The last two years have demonstrated quite clearly that our current model doesn’t work. Evidenced by the recent small business economic development boondoggle promoted by the White House and Congress and its equally ill-conceived cousins in Europe, credit is NOT the problem – Customers (or the lack thereof) is. In our love affair with our projection of “free markets”, we choked off the engine of economic development which is revenue from buyers – even when the purchases represent preferential customer selection. Oh, now some of you free trade wonks out there will howl about how the market should be devoid of these contrivances and manipulations. However, your academic and “think tank” perches from which you criticize were funded by titans of industry who became thus by way of effective monopolies or subsidized markets. So get over your myopic amnesia and get real. We need value to be exchanged between customers and sellers – not indebtedness to tax-subsidized banking interests. And we know that collaboration (whether its called open innovation, crowd-sourcing, or partnership) models are evidencing greater value than the cold-war isolation from innovation enclosure models of the industrial past. In a world where proprietary price controls once gained their efficacy by managing scarcity, we now are in a world where collaborative efficiency in development, production, distribution, and reuse will be the fuel of profitable endeavors.

Second, the signs. The ox cart, the eagle, and the thunderstorm are intriguing and overlooked elements in the Gordian Knot legend. However we ignore them at our wisdom’s peril. The ox cart can be seen as a metaphor for trade and exchange across distances. The eagle can be seen as the collaboration and confirmation of nature. And the thunderstorm can be seen as a metaphor for the natural energy that comes from nature’s dynamism. In modern, Occidental minds, omens are seen as superstitious. However in communities who have a better understanding of nature, signs are appreciated as markers of time, signals for change, and motivators for community adaptation. Many times, they are rather detached from a religious, superstitious or “belief” impulse. Community and culture simply know that when one thing happens, it calls for a change in action. Which of our greatest perceived challenges could not be solved from a renewed appreciation for looking at all the signals, not just the ones that get broadcast from the avatars on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and Bloomberg? Why has humanity been given the opportunity to have several >7.0 magnitude earthquakes in a single calendar year? Is it to jeopardize our survival or is it an opportunity to learn? Why aren’t we studying why the 7.0 in Papua New Guinea involved no loss of life while the one in Haiti killed thousands? Why aren’t we letting the lessons be learned? And floods, desertification, energy shocks – all can be used as opportunities to learn and change behavior. None of this is possible if we see ourselves as “victims” looking for “hero saviors”.

Finally, the knot. What is notable about the knot is that it was tied as a symbol of gratitude and it was fashioned from living fiber. Quite possibly, the reason why Alexander couldn’t determine the beginning or end is because life had knit the two together. Any horticulturalist can tell you that certain plants and plant material actually seamlessly heal leaving their injury or graft undetectable. But what’s there to learn from the knot? Well, quite simply, it was constructed of multiple, living fibers. And here’s the key. We need to see innovation, capital, enterprise, trade and sustainability as an integrated ecosystem – not in isolation. Small business doesn’t NEED credit. Investors don’t NEED deal flow. To the contrary, we can take the artifacts of our isolation over the past 50 years and weave them into a network across which value can be exchanged by interconnected, inter-dependent efficiencies rather than scarcity based isolation. This means that every person who ever had an idea and wanted to take it to scale but failed, should be invited into a Gordian Trust. Every angel investor who ever put money into a deal (usually backing the person as much or more than the artifact) should be invited to place their deals into the Trust. And every researcher who was certain that just one more spin of creativity would have yielded a result should be invited to place their ideas into the Trust. Then, by explicitly interconnecting the seemingly disparate threads, an ecosystem could be built. This ecosystem would, from our analysis at M•CAM, have a present market value in monetary terms in excess of two trillion dollars based on what we know is in the public domain, sitting unused. And rather than ownership, every steward member of the Trust could participate as a common member of the trust dividing proceeds however they saw fit. Ironically, this would yield a structure that no blade could drive asunder and we just may solve – at long last – the real message in the myth. Maybe a knot, tied in homage to unanticipated success, has its finest destiny as a knot.

The ox cart is coming with an eagle flying in advance of the towering clouds…. FLASH!

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Dancing in a Barn…

“I need a hero, I’m holdin’ out for a hero ‘til the end of the night...He’s gotta be strong, and he’s gotta be fast, and he’s gotta be fresh from the fight…
He’s gotta be sure, and it’s gotta be soon, and he’s gotta be larger than life.”
- Jim Steinman and Dean Pitchford recorded by Bonnie Tyler

O.K., I’ll admit it. When I got the vinyl record of Footloose as soon as it was released in 1984, few things were more blood-pumping than to pop my home-recorded cassette copy of the album into the stereo of my fire engine red Plymouth Arrow (complete with a dragon hood ornament) and fly around the back roads of Lancaster County Pennsylvania. Windows down, I’d cruise past my horse-and-buggy driving Mennonite neighbors blasting this tune in hopes of letting someone know (even if was just the horse) that I was not going to be a conformist playing by anybody’s rules. By the way – same tape – Gloria (Laura Branigan, 1983) and Total Eclipse of the Heart (another Bonnie Tyler hit from 1982)! And in case you’re wondering – ABBA had its own tape!

As I waited for my flight in the US Airways Club in LaGuardia, I heard Anderson Cooper’s promotion of CNN Heroes awards. There was a great little piece on a young man – last year’s recipient – from the Philippines who created push cart classrooms to educate children throughout the country. “Send in your nominations,” was the admonition, “and then get ready to vote for your hero.”

I had come to New York on this trip for a number of reasons. I spent my morning meeting with a few folks who are looking a trying to deal with massive water contamination issues in the Rocky Mountain states where the oil and natural gas industries are dumping unimaginable quantities of water onto public lands. In the afternoon, I met with an exceptional couple who have grown a business from its humble start to a massive enterprise in seven years of hard work and tireless commitment. And then, in the evening I joined a few hundred fortunate souls in celebrating the opening of Ran Ortner’s Deep Water exhibition in Williamsburg – just across the bridge from the financial center of the expiring global empire.

Odysseus, Orpheus, Abraham, Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha, Achilles, Alexander the Great (did you ever wonder what happened to Alex the Mediocre or Al the Mundane?), Mother Theresa, Ronald Reagan, Osama bin Laden, Sarah Palin – pick your religion, culture, time, or insanity as the case may be and for some reason, we tell ourselves that we “need a hero.” Let “our” world collapse under our own greed and stupidity – as it has – and see a country like China actually see its fortune rising and suddenly, our spandex-caped superheroes like Tim Geithner, Chuck Schumer, and the horde of dysfunctional Congressional sycophant minions race to grab the mantle of bully-in-chief. What is it about our social value system which leads us to the pathologic addiction to seek heroes? Why is it that we seem to have a systemic incapacity to realize that what is needed is collective accountability and behavior adjustment? When will we have the courage to engage in anonymous change for a better manifestation of humanity?

I am reminded of a conversation I recently had with a dear friend regarding past lives. We were musing over the fact that most “past lives” aspirations seem to disproportionately claim ties to known figures. Few people recall being the village misfit. I’ve yet to meet the person who actually celebrates their past existence as an under-achieving, slothful dude at a pub who just drank his liver into oblivion. That’s it. Didn’t do a thing. Just coasted through a nameless existence and then, poof, died. Nothing. No, it’s far more interesting to be the person who stood in the rain with Joan of Arc, sword in hand, ready to do whatever was being done in the appropriately dramatically lit moment. It’s far more enchanting to have been Merlin’s alchemist. If we have sufficient humility, we realize that it’s pretentious to claim to BE Joan of Arc or Merlin but we certainly know that we were their right hand man or woman. Even better, we were their inspiration or muse! What’s even better is that many actually claim to have been mythical characters. I can’t wait to hear someone claim to be comedian Demetri Martin’s Paradoxataur – a mythical creature that exists only when you don’t believe it exists.

In St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City there’s a curiosity. If you go to the front of the church behind the altar, you see some of the most ornate wood carving in the place. In the Library of Congress, there’s a book cabinet with recessed hinges that are magnificent. In the Ming tombs near Badaling, five stories underground there’s a 10 ton stone door which swings effortlessly on a ball and socket pivot. At the Ha’amanga in the Kingdom of Tonga, three large stones are precisely placed to signify something very important that justified immense effort but has long been lost to time. And, in each one of these instances, the thing that stands out is that this unimaginable effort and mastery stands as evidence of greatness – anonymously.

As I watched Ran Ortner deftly glide around the gallery at the opening, I reflected on a conversation he, Adam, Colleen, and I shared previously. To understand how to paint his exquisite works, he took the time to understand HOW the masters painted. He wanted to know the chemistry of their oils and palettes. He wanted to know how restoration artists could reproduce centuries lost techniques. And then, through tireless experimentation, miles of canvas and gallons of nut, wood, and organic oils, he found HIS expression which now graces
the aesthetic of humanity alongside masterpieces of times before. Ran is not a hero. Rather, he’s an amazing role model of human discipline which confronts life with the humility of knowing that wisdom has come before and that the race against mortality is most delicious when lasting communications of wisdom can be shared.



Heroes are part and parcel of our reflex to see the world through the dramatic lens of crisis. We are not in an environmental or financial crisis. We are harvesting fruit long planted and entirely predictable. The fact that we’re the harvesting generation is not dramatic – it’s just the way things are. And we don’t need heroes. What we all are invited to do is realize that transformation happens not through Herculean bursts of strength. After all, the half-life of a reflex is only one quarter the time required to actually engage in cognitive response. Don’t believe me? Watch the squirrel on the road next time and see yourself in the mirror. Lasting transformation happens in the community accountability that recognizes that persistent performance – not panic – are animator, motivator and reward.

Bonnie, Laura, ABBA – I still groove to those tunes in the moments when the radio plays the flashbacks to the 80s. But like my cassette tapes and my Plymouth Arrow, we’ve outgrown this impulse addiction. But Kevin Bacon dancing alone in a barn doesn’t change a town. No, it takes everybody on the dance floor rockin’ a different tune. Let’s dance.

P.S. Thank you to the two contributors who actually shared information with InvertedAlchemists responding to last week’s challenge. See, there’s more than just a glimmer of hope for us all!

Sweet Little Lies

A record number of Americans now live below the poverty line. Four people lost their lives and hundreds were displaced by this week’s pipeline explosion in San Bruno. Two people lost their lives in Afghanistan during a protest of the threat of burning of sacred books. These are some of the facts that greeted humanity this week. And after we slowed down on the highway of life enough to create a traffic jam as we watched the stories unfold in disbelief, we passed another week with little more than a traffic jam. Next week, more headlines. Next week more cognitive traffic jams. Next week, more of…?

During the same week, violent clashes erupted in Guinea – the West African nation which is rich in aluminum and iron ore yet remains one of the most poverty ridden countries on earth with over 63% of the population officially under the poverty line according to UNICEF. The governor of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, Sir Julius Chan was quoted this week in an interview by Radio New Zealand as saying, “We do not support the expansion of the mine [LIHIR just taken over by Newcrest] because we are not convinced that they are telling us the truth about the impact on the environment and the tailings dumped 150 meters down into the sea.” Marketed by Bloomberg Businessweek (August 30 – Sept 5, 2010) as “The Evangelist”, Thomas Kaplan was celebrated along with David Iben of Nuveen Investments (another Bloomberg hero) for their market savvy generating massive investment returns at the expense of thousands of people and generations of environmental destruction. At a recent meeting in Ulaanbaatar, I had the privilege of hearing Mr. Zorigt D., Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy of Mongolia and President Mr. Elbegdorj T. challenge a global audience to hold up a single example where a resource-rich country actually succeeded in aligning such prosperity with benefit to its people. The list, they both said, of failed experiments is quite long. However, the examples of success are isolated and short-lived.

Coming off the seven-week series on Integral Accounting, the headlines and celebrants of the past week were particularly poignant. Somewhere along the line, we’re going to find out that the pipeline in San Bruno had known problems and that it wasn’t “cost effective” to fix them. Just like it wasn’t cost effective to fix the bridge over the Mississippi prior to August 1, 2007. Somewhere along the line we’re going to find out that declaring a “war on poverty” is as effective as a “war on terrorism”. By picking an anonymous, de-humanized enemy, we can pretend to be doing something while accomplishing nothing substantive at all. Remember how well the “war on drugs” worked? Ask yourself how much we’re spending to “secure our borders” with Mexico and see if you can see why our reflexive response to things we don’t really care about changing is less than stellar in obtaining any outcome whatsoever.

Lyndon B. Johnson, during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964 declared “War of Poverty”. To be clear, this week, we surpassed the poverty level that was the impetus for the war. Mission accomplished? I think not. Richard M. Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” June 17, 1971. This week, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were sparring on whether Mexico was as bad as Colombia. Mission accomplished? I think not. In March of 1954, Joseph McCarthy declared “War on Communism”. A tired Fidel Castro told the Atlantic Magazine this week that “the Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” Mission accomplished? Hardly. In fact the last bastion of communist economic and social planning is the bank from which our capitalism is currently over-drafted. And in a recent op-ed in the Huffington Post, State of the World co-founder Jim Garrison laments that the fact that the forces aligned to tackle climate change and global warming have failed in their mission.

So I was thinking about what one can learn from legacy of the summer of 2010. In the past four weeks, we’ve seen ourselves as a human race come face-to-face with the reality that our Wars On… responses have all failed. Iraq is no safer and Afghanistan is seeing escalation in violence. Aging infrastructure is crumbling and exploding while “Jobs Stimulus” money is being used for repaving over our rotten pipelines. Democrats and Republicans volley accusations about what to do about the economy while the G-20 leaders hang their heads in exhaustion facing the realization that none of the levers that they used to wield seem to work on the economic locomotive currently hurtling out of control. And central bankers can’t even find respite fly fishing in Wyoming as they know that new bank regulations won’t change the fundamental problem.

Wars appear to work when people are ignorant of all the facts. Wars appear to work when frenzy can replace facts. Wars appear to work when ideologues replace civil, respectful repartee with rhetoric. Wars appear to work when we accept the lies we are fed by the purveyors of propaganda. We’ve got to end the policy of accepting lies as explanations for the way things are. Bush era tax cuts didn’t create jobs and extending them won’t do a thing. Throwing money at road projects while sewers, pipelines, bridges and oil platforms rust and fail doesn’t stimulate the economy. Promoting “democracy” at the end of a gun barrel where ideologies have never valued individual freedom doesn’t get us closer to human rights. Celebrating mineral investment returns while seeing growing environmental degradation is NOT acceptable. Bloomberg should tell the other stories and see how they’re received. This past week, we highlighted one of the biggest tax abuses in the U.S. – the research and experimentation tax credit. For the past five years, the Internal Revenue Service has had evidence of massive abuses in this credit – they’ve even written internal memos about how abuse-prone it is – yet the Obama administration has the audacity of suggesting that making this permanent will “stimulate the economy and create jobs”.

To turn this around, we need to reclaim dignity and integrity. Beginning this week, tell the truth and expect the same in return. Beginning this week, if you see a bridge that’s rusted, write a note to the department of transportation. If you see profits being celebrated, take the time to look behind the numbers and see if that cheap aluminum in the airplane manufacturer’s product is coming from Guinea. Look at your investments in your retirement account. If you don’t know how the money is being made – FIND OUT! The only way lying works is if people like you don’t care enough to fact check what you’re being told. And if you start fact checking and sharing what you find, others will too. I challenge you to the following. Add one piece of information that you didn’t know about one of your investments to the end of this blog so that others can see it. One of two things will happen. Either none of you will rise to the challenge and thereby reinforce my point that we’re too lazy to care… or… some of you will do it and we’ll all be better for it. In the first instance, we’re still better off because when we know we don’t care, we actually are close to realizing that WE are where transformation needs to start. Let’s declare peace with truth and see if the warring impulse fades.