Good Luck… for a Person Like You

These words were the last words uttered by a mid-Western wealth manager and his team as they walked out of the house of an NBA superstar several days ago.  For the preceding 90 minutes, we had methodically dissected a financial report that was filled with material misstatements, opaque investment instruments, and responses to questions which were evasive and untrue.  "For a person like" - the wealth manager's racist epithet meaning "for an African American athlete who, in his early 30's is retired and unlikely to understand how he's being duped" - was the justification for:

• not disclosing management fees;
• not reporting actual investment returns for normal periods (like years or quarters);
• not publishing performance benchmarks;
• not explaining the construction of an asset allocation; and,
• numerous negligent acts.

At one point in the conversation, when pressed on why the senior manager couldn't opine on whether a gross portfolio return of less than 4.5% in 2013 was good or bad (with a portfolio with nearly 50% U.S. equities exposure when the market was up nearly 30%), the investment advisor alleged that I simply "didn't understand the family's objectives," like their team did. 

This week the media jumped all over the latest professional athlete domestic violence cases with predictable ferocity.  In a week when thousands of women and children were beaten and abused by bankers, factory workers, accountants, politicians, and preachers, breathless coverage advised us about the desperate condition of families in professional sports.  Let's be totally clear.  Domestic violence is categorically unjustifiable.  Period!  And psychopaths - from malevolent sociopaths to religious corporal punishment apologists - are all perpetuating a culture of violence and abuse that destroys the fiber of humanity.  But we don't speak about the persistent helplessness experienced by many abusers which contributes to inflaming their terrible acts of violence.  Like having a 60+ year-old, white, paternalistic "wealth manager" steal money under the banner of a globally recognized bank and know that he can do so with impunity.  Like having "advisors" begin sentences about investments, careers, and accountability with a demeaning and derogatory preamble of "For a person like…".

When I first met Chris Uma of the Mekamui Defense Force in Bougainville, I knew of his militant activities and was warned that I should fear him.  After 45 minutes of deeply personal conversation, he and I were able to share enough information to realize that the real enemy in his world was the opaque colonial exploitation that was happening in Australia, the UK, and America - not simply from their agents on the ground in Bougainville.  No one has held the mining companies in Australia accountable for well-documented (and admitted) illegal acts.  The ASX, the SEC and the UK Serious Fraud Office have ignored every alert and notice to hold accountable companies trading on their exchanges that are in violation of national and international law.  Why?  Simple.  Because, "for a person like…" the person living around Arawa or coming from urban America our espoused civil standards of transparency, truth, and accountability simply don't apply!  And then we wonder why "they" become militant. 

Worse still, what we're unwilling to face is that while at the surface, we want to applaud what we wish were advances in dealing with racism and ethnic delusions of superiority, in fact the "for a person like…" is an antecedent to countless racist expectations of cognitive capacity, entitlement to transparency, and consensus social values.  And, while we can tirelessly roll the tape when violence and abuse erupts, there are no cameras when the systemic abusers callously rob, willfully misadvise, and gratuitously pander to those they see as the class (or classes) beneath their accountability. 

What was never supposed to happen in the predictable elitist world is that the NBA player was never going to be provided the opportunity to see the game film on how credentialed wealth managers steal money while blaming the player and his family for living an extravagant lifestyle.  What was never supposed to happen is a tenacious combatant was never supposed to be taught about stock price manipulation and securities laws violations to understand that his government - not just foreign corporations - were in fact shielding each other from accountability.  From sports agents to mining ministers - the same graft and corruption have the same effect: desperation and hopelessness.  But….

Things changed.  You can put names like Rio and Merrill in front of your corruption but that won't hide what crooked individuals are doing any longer.  You can sit in Raleigh, Columbus, Sydney, or Port Moresby and think that the veil of ignorance will never be rent.  But here's the part that you never calculated in your insular opulence.  If you're one of the world's best athletes or a military commander, you've probably got extraordinary capacities to learn and assimilate.  You've probably developed unusual capacity for strategic thinking and tactical adaptation with speed and precision that is deadened by countless steak dinners at country clubs.  And if "a Person like" is provided with the language and the strategy on how the game has been played against them, there's an outside chance that they may change the equation.  Dismissive contempt for any population has a half-life of the maintenance of segregation x completeness of ignorance.  Change one of those variables and you achieve a linear effect.  Change both and it's a logarithmic function.  And that's just the unwinding piece. 

What we're doing now is introducing a whole new calculus in which the genius of high level performance manifest in one domain can be adapted to perform in markets, political systems, and social reality.  By assuming that excellence is derived from integration and knowledge, we're not beating the system at an old game - one in which we merely change the abuser - but we're actually changing the paradigm altogether. 

Good Luck?  Where we're going, we don't rely on luck, gimmicks, tricks, or deceit.  Where we're going is a place where we're measured by the content of character rather than the conceit of consensus.  Let Justice roll down!

Monetary Intelligence Agency

Excerpted from Golden Handcuffs - An Essay on Money

We've been indoctrinated to eschew this conversation.  And the reason is quite simple.  If you want to control a society, the single best way to do so is to create an idol so inextricably linked to everything so as not to invite the meddling examination of a conscious mind at liberty.  Make the idol seemingly innocuous - maybe out of something entirely impermanent like paper - so its gravity cannot be considered.  Let it be the seduction whereby parents first instill incentives for good behavior or household chores with their children.  Encourage religions to use it as the agency of laudable values like charity.  Separate society between those "with" and those "without" to instill the essential dogma of scarcity and control.  And before long, power, greed, dominion and oppression become entirely justifiable based on an alleged uniformity of perverted human 'nature'. 

Let's get a few things straight.  The notion that human beings can benefit from representational artifacts which signify the conveyance of value - money - has some practical utility.  Yet why are we vaccinated against challenging the consensus illusion we call money today?  What would be so dangerous if people actually remembered the obligations they've made and repaid them in appropriate form or scale?  It's appropriate to examine the underpinnings of what we call "money" so that we can tell the difference between community recognized stored value units and imposed agencies of power, seduction, and control.

Money: Imperial State Succor

In the version of history we promote to justify our incumbent systems, we see taxation and tribute as far back as the first records of civilization on the fertile plains of the Tigris and Euphrates and the Nile Delta.  As with all systems, the impulse for perpetual growth gives rise to the expediency of subterfuge schemes promoted as efficient or in the public interest.  After a certain scale, a conqueror can no longer consume the fruit of the land and the product of labor and, refusing to discern sufficiency or enough, dictates monetary tax and tribute to fund greater expeditionary tyranny.  Far from responding to the exigencies of seasonal value storage, money served as a means of anonymizing both production and the producer.  And the more imperial the impulse, the more important the control of mintage.  After all, it's not just gold or silver - it's gold and silver imprinted with the visage of the deity.

Building absolute reliance on state-controlled money serves as the most efficient basis for taxation.  Anytime money moves, its movement can trigger a moment to reinforce the hegemony of the state.  Whether it is perpetual indenture by citizenship or reification of trade and the restraint thereof, nothing serves incumbent power as pervasively as the control - and the assent of the controlled - of money.

Barely a century after the American colonies revolted against what they saw as the tyrannical British impulse to levy taxes for the explicit purpose of maintaining an occupying military force they turned to taxation regime to pay for the Civil War.  The consolidation of the banking and monetary system in 1913 with the formation of the Federal Reserve was accompanied by the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which gave Congress the authority to levy taxes and paved the way for the financing of a century of World Wars.  And to be sure, in their haste to impose income tax, the government came to the painful realization that taxing to excess those who were wealthy was a risky proposition.  With general taxation came massive concessions to the extremely wealthy who, if willing to participate in the encumbrance of the general population, would be given the capability to shield their wealth through tax deferral and outright avoidance.  It is no surprise that money - not personal character and integrity - define the players on the political landscape in much of the Occidental world. 

Emancipation from the monetary addiction is the ultimate act of liberty and, when suggested or practiced, is met with fear from the enslaved and suppression by the threatened state.  The mere suggestion that one can act and engage in community and elect to give and receive value that is not denominated is received as treason both by the oppressor and the oppressed. 

Money: Network Intelligence

Through the contrivance of monetary unit reductionism, agencies of control can understand the associations of people and their engagements.  One of the primary uses of the not for profit corporate designation is to provide governments the capacity to know who is supporting what.  On taxation forms, itemized deductions for charitable contributions, certain educational or business expenses and the like provide intrusion in the name of "savings".  Monetary and taxation authorities are relentless in their insistence of representing all human exchanges in their monetary equivalent in part to extract tariffs but equally for the intelligence of association that such exchanges represent. 

Value for human exchanges of physical reality or services and experience are assumed to be reducible to a monetary quantification.  This taxation of ephemeral value - an innovation of the Napoleonic accounting schemes in the early 1800s (also to pay for war) - encroaches into numerous social experiences.  Illusions of appreciation of monetary value of physical artifacts (like real estate) are used to manipulate national economies and provide socialized subsidies for certain sectors (like banks and insurers).  Equally, illusions of depreciation encourage consumerism and extinction of natural resources - another subtle socialized subsidy for industrial producers.  We're not encouraged to discuss either of these illusions nor the masters they serve as doing so could destabilize entrenched interests.

Money: Agency of Separation

We're bombarded with statistics (counting money) telling us of massive asymmetry in monetary wealth between strata of society and between nation states.  "Rich" - measured by horded retention of profit vs. "Poor" measured by the absence of horded reserves are ubiquitous distinctions that are recklessly reinforced by incumbent and anarchist alike.  Ironically, the unconsidered nature of the very notion of profit is the manifestation of this agency of separation. 

And after all, what is profit?  Profit can be an excessive rent charged by one party over the cumulative cost to provide a good or service to another in which case a premium is demanded by the purveyor of said good or service.  Alternatively it can serve as an explicit metric of the failure to account for the true cost of the production of a good or service.  And in both cases, incentives for perverse separation are inextricably bound.  From Adam Smith to Karl Marx, the neglect of the planet and its inhabitants are intrinsic to the odious addiction to profit.  If, for example, I am an industrialist seeking a consumer base, my objective is to pay for resources and compensate labor at the marginal rate that allows the earth and laborer to barely make it with just enough excess income to buy what I want them to have.  The more I can reinforce the perception of scarcity or the illusiveness of my offering, the more I can appeal to the aspirational identification that inspires indebted consumption.  In the best of all worlds, I can price my product just beyond the transactional cost that would be deemed "affordable" so that I can charge additional rent (in the form of financing) to actually extract greater than market value in the form of interest.

I'll post the complete link to the article when it is published upon request

House Arrest - and the Three Little Pigs

I was fortunate to have a lovely conversation with an influential real estate professional in Australia last night.  In our wide-ranging conversation, I was fascinated to hear about his deep passion surrounding the need to improve the professionalism and ethics of his industry and its participants.  On the heels of Jordan Belfort's (the convicted Wolf of Wall Street turned "ethics" motivational speaker) visit to the AREC Conference in the Gold Coast earlier in the year, the impulse to improve the quality of people's behaviors and practices in the real estate market weighed heavily in the evening's discussion.

Writing for Bloomberg, Victoria Stilwell's August 28 article ("Boomer Wealth Dented by Mortgages Poses U.S. Risk") scratched the surface of an economic scab that may be covering an infected lesion on the global economy.  In her piece, she presented the chilling statistics on the number of Americans over the age of 65 who remain deeply indebted to their mortgages - both first and second.  She also pointed out the rather remarkable reduction in home buying among Americans under the age of 35 - down to 35.9% from 43.6% just 10 years ago.  She concludes that this does not only impact the housing market today but has significant implications for the period of time in which the younger generation will be indebted if and when they decide to purchase real estate.  The U.S. Census Department's 2014 report on home ownership shows that the decline in ownership (down from its peak in 2004) is continuing to slide dipping to 64.7% - now in line with levels last seen in 1995.  Less than 50% of families living on income less than the U.S. median income own homes as of the first quarter of 2014.

In his 1931 book Epic of America, James Adams defined the "American dream" as an ideal in which, "life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement."  Coming on the heels of the Great Depression, dream-inspired policy such as the National Housing Act of 1934 set in motion a costly illusion which has been exported from America's shores across the world.  Real estate purchases, it was argued, were an ideal way for individuals to invest their wealth and provide for a more stable economic environment.  However, a close examination of real estate investment and the public incentives to seduce the public into what amounts to a near permanent indenture of the majority of citizens shows that the beneficiaries of homeownership are those who actually own the mortgages of citizens, not the citizen homeowners.  Look at the ownership of CMOs.  They are banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, the Federal Reserve and the like.  Look at the beneficiaries of mortgage interest deduction.  According to the Treasury statistics, over 64% of the interest deductions for mortgages in the U.S. benefit the top 21% of the income-earners. 

And now, as Victoria points out in her article, one of the fastest growing segments of home finance is the reverse mortgage - the indebtedness of seniors to eradicate home equity value to support short-term, life-style mandated consumption.  It doesn't take an advanced degree in any form of math to see a rather interesting event horizon. 

Within the next 15 years, the double indebted primary and second mortgage holder market (a market that ballooned from 2001 - 2007) will converge with an inventory of up to 20% of the housing market being sold by investors - not homeowners.  These investors, unlike the "American Dreamers", can use a number of mechanisms for capturing returns including selling at a loss to create tax benefits.  They can create regional inventory gluts at a pace that is far beyond the normal elasticity in supply and demand.  In short, we know that the dynamics will change.  We know that they'll create heretofore unseen effects and we know that policymakers are turning a blind eye towards this challenge.

But here's where it lands in last night's conversation.  If you're involved in the real estate business - or any other investment advisory / facilitation role - what do you do when your professional mandate to maximize value for your client flies in the face of a changing economic condition about which a buyer is ill- or completely uninformed?  What does it mean to suggest 30-year mortgage terms as a cash management scheme when you know that employment, market values, and public subsidies for housing incentives necessarily will significantly change in the mid-point of the indebtedness?  Whose job is it to define the economic landscape into which an informed buyer would make an informed decision?

Regrettably, the answer is why we have shocks and boom/bust cycles.  Our ethical and professional standards are to blame for our incapacity to incentivize a fully informed consumer / investor.  And mind you, it's not just homeowners that are getting duped.  The exceptionally wealthy are repeatedly told that they need to adhere to Harry Markowitz's half-century old "modern portfolio theory" despite its out-datedness and invalid assumptions.  Private individuals are routinely asked to surrogate their financial stewardship to "certified" financial managers few of whom actually know the intrinsic structure and risk of the products and services they peddle.  Few actually stop and inquire as to whether homeownership is actually a value or whether it's a not-so-subtle seduction to manufacture mortgages which allow investors to benefit from the income of citizens.  Few pay attention to the fact that 401(k) and pension assets are not liquid assets - they're contractually bound for investor use and any attempt to use them as one's own is laden with significant financial penalty well beyond the tax liabilities associated therewith. 

We cannot begin to remedy this problem if we look to "certified" experts in the financial services industry to come clean on the reality of the investments the public is asked to make.  If we actually called homeownership what it is - perpetual income indenture based on the illusion of sanctuary for the benefit of private investors, banks and insurers - we'd probably have less fanciful illusions around real estate.  If we actually called tax-deferred pensions what they are - multi-decade speculative cash to enrich managers' fee income - we'd probably take the tax hit and invest income ourselves.  As I've written in previous posts, if there's a "tax-incentive" (deductions or deferrals) associated with a financial product, it's probably too weak to stand on its own merits and should be subject to considerable scrutiny.  The Wolf of Wall Street is merely caricature for a system filled with wolves in sheep's clothing.  Most of them are masquerading under the guise of professional management and it’s a few of them that will need to step into the light if we're going to set the market free from its House Arrest.

Exporting Entrepreneurial American Socialism

Let's face it.  For the past 65 years, what has been heralded as entrepreneurship has largely been a concession that raw capitalism does not work without the barely hidden hand of the State.  From its birth in America during the second half of WWII, anti-competitive incentives were deemed necessary to induce scientists, engineers and industrialists to overcome the technological superiority of the Third Reich.  Through the cunning use of excessive profits in military and government procurement (without which the American entrepreneurial milieu would have been still-born), to protectionist concessions to ultra-wealthy investors, to modern revenue shifting and tax base erosion, the world became entranced by the formulaic illusion we marketed under the monikers of Silicon Valley, Research Triangle, Boston, and the like.

The ingredients of that illusion included a variety of schemes including: isolation of ideas behind the protectionist walls we politely call intellectual property; underwriting credit market ignorance with public funds; and, persistently holding 'capital-access summits' in hopes that through sufficient convening, we could overcome our fundamental incapacity towards capital markets adaptation.  But the problem with our incapacity to understand the economics of an innovation-fueled economy has its roots not in Silicon Valley but rather in the manipulations a century ago - the illusion provided by socialized infrastructure and property finance.  There would be no Stanford but for the socialized rail inducements demanded by its namesake from Congress when he concluded that building a railroad across the mountains was difficult.  And by the way, if you think out-sourcing of labor to China is a modern phenomenon, think again.  Much of the dynamite that blasted rail fortunes into the pockets of California industrialists and financiers was laid by, you guessed it, underpaid Chinese.  Laying track was never profitable.  Forcing Congress to grant land and money for each linear foot and degree of grade was.  Thirty year mortgages and thirty year Treasuries are not randomly equal in their duration.  Take a look at the Fed's balance sheet and ask yourself why it's not filled with market assets.  It's because both Treasuries and mortgages on their own didn't work.  With government subsidy, they create the illusion of working… until they don't.

I've been interested in the resurgence of international efforts to use sovereign balance sheets (citizens' monies) to subsidize banks in an attempt to get capital flowing to entrepreneurial ventures.  From the U.S. Small Business Administration to the state banks in China, this idea has been frequently attempted and, to date, has not succeeded.  And the reasons for the systemic failure are quite simple.

1.         The State as underwriter cannot indict its own asset origination.  Whether its negligence on the part of sanctioned credit rating agencies lying about mortgage quality to patent offices issuing fraudulent patents, no state agency to date has evidenced the ability to impose qualitative critique on its own promulgation of 'assets' and therefore has no capacity to measure asset risk.  If one wishes to see innovative small business grow, one has to first insure that innovative isn't a façade for "ignorant of the activities of others."

2.         Most businesses aren't.  The recent proliferation of low- to no-revenue acquisition transactions does not vindicate the notion that a business exists because someone bought it.  If you closely examine the frequently hyped corporate acquisitions, it takes no time to realize that the acquiring companies are providing liquidity for their venture firm benefactors seeking exits - not purchasing accretive assets.  In the end, the common equity shareholder is losing for the excessive gains flowing to the venture partners.  If a market or a country doesn't have this nepotism, it cannot build free market entrepreneurship.  And I'm not suggesting that this be done to reinforce the illusion.

3.         It's customer - not capital - access that's the real problem.  Since the formation of the WTO, the world was supposedly aspiring to the reduction of obstacles to trade.  And it's fair to say that in internet and telecom enabled businesses, this aspiration has been partially achieved.  But for the majority of business, multi-lateral and bi-lateral agreements have been overweight in their favoritism to certain industries while leaving the majority of industry in the cold.  Governments who really want to support entrepreneurship should aspire to being premium customers - not bad underwriting surrogates.

Building a system equivalent to the past 30 years of American entrepreneurial socialism may present a political expediency to short-sighted governments.  But any careful examination will conclude that alternatives may be worth considering.  In a functioning system - operating without State subsidy and taxpayer money - one might observe:

1.         Rights need to be granted for trade use, not for speculation and imagination.  The world receives no benefit for granting proprietary rights to someone who does not practice or intend to practice their innovative ideas in actual output.  Restraint of hypothetical markets or research with hypothetical claims of invention are actually ludicrous. 

2.         Connecting innovation to existing impulses with existing production, sales, distribution, and infrastructure is far more accretive than forming redundant companies with redundant capabilities.  This means that the focus of the public sector is on facilitating communication - not mandating public policy through the pocket of the Treasury.

3.         It's still all about the customer.  In a non-interventionist functioning capitalist marketplace, the consumer affirms the value attributed by the producer or servicer rather than having the producer dictate a state-sanctioned monopoly mandated premium.  In short, if the consumer, participant or community seeks to partake in a mediated experience, than the same community attributes the premium they are willing to exchange for what they receive.  Regression to commodity pricing is the perverse extension of market mean reversion which is a legacy of Adam Smith - not a necessity of markets. 

When the public sector underwrites any sector - banking, suppliers or the like - with the public treasury, it must do so with the explicit objective of merely overcoming a short term market failure.  Persistence in such undertakings over an extended period of time should be called what it is: state intermediated socialism for targeted benefit.  Since the GFC, the public has born the expense of this type of intervention without receiving the public good associated therewith.  If we're going to aspire to market interactions, let's call a spade a spade and stop misleading the public with policies that inure to their detriment.

Fifty Years Later - Let 'er Ring

 Public Law 88-352 was enacted 50 years ago this past July.  Over the vigorous objection of Georgia's Democratic Senator Richard Russell who insisted that the Senate "resist to the bitter end any measure or movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races," a majority of House and Senate Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act.  And while this Act marked the beginning of a long march towards equal opportunity to access and employment, it conspicuously failed to contemplate the possibility that the previously disenfranchised could actually strive to transcend the state of their oppressors.  The high water mark in 1964 was to rise to the level of the status quo of the majority white population.

This week, I am deeply honored to stand with a few visionaries who foresee the possibility that We The People step beyond the limitations of "as good as" and work towards an actuality that recognizes that transparency, stewardship and opportunity are, in their perfect implementation color-blind, status-blind, gender-blind.  Fifty one years (just shy by a few days) from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream that his "children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," a quiet alliance has assembled to take a remarkable step through the dream and into reality.  Duncan Niederauer, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange Euronext Inc. is hosting the Sustaining Success Summit with PRO2CEO, an organization led by Keith and Kevin Carr.  This S3Summit is bringing together athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs on the floor of the NYSE to discuss ways in which economic wealth can effect positive social change. 

Rather than focusing on the economic disasters that frequently attend stories of young athletes and entertainers who find themselves in excessive financial stewardship roles with little to no information on how to manage money, the S3Summit is explicitly highlighting individuals and best practices which show that profligate destruction of economic wealth is neither inevitable nor universal.  With a diverse contribution from individuals who have evidenced the capacity to take their achievements in one domain and transition into impactful positions in many other fields, this gathering proves to be one of the most understated but impactful milestones in reframing expectations and prejudice.

Dreaming and aspiring to a "new" or "different" experience of humanity is a legacy born of a predisposition to futility and hopelessness in far too many expressions.  It's an entirely different undertaking to look at the wealth that one has at hand and align it to achieve an outcome far greater than one could have imagined.  On August 19th, Dr. King, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Senator Russell will all have an opportunity to see what none of them could have resolved through the lens of history.  Far from marches for change, change will be ringing the closing bell on the most iconic trading floor in America.

"This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

… and Dr. King, let's add to the mountains and hills the floor of the NYSE.  Thanks to the vision of its CEO Duncan Niederauer and Keith and Kevin Carr.

Trust? Me?

Actually, please don't!  Not because I intend you harm.  Not because I seek to mislead or coerce you.  Not because my motives are concealed.  In fact, the reason why I don't seek to be trusted is I have come to find trust entirely untrustworthy.  During three separate meetings within the last seven days, I encountered trust (or the lack thereof) in highly divergent venues and, in each instance, I found it entirely lacking. 

In the first instance, I was spending time with a gentlemen with whom I've been working to gain financial literacy around his capabilities to take responsibility in his investments.  Having recently seen the egregious evidence of a breach of trust at the hands of a celebrated investment advisor, he was conveying his experience of our interactions to others.

"What does David want for helping you?", he was asked by a friend.

"He hasn't asked for anything," was the truthful response.

"Then I wouldn't trust him if I were you," the friend replied.

A corrupt puppet President convinced a Parliament to pass a natural resources bill thoroughly entangling a corporate interest into the very fabric of law.  While denigrating his citizens as incapable of understanding legalese, he called on them to trust their leaders who, failing to read the massive bill, were acting in their best interest.  Dripping with condescension, this former priest administered an odious elixir of corruption as he offered up his land and his citizens to his patrons.

"The problem with what's happening here is that I don't trust you!"

This sentence punctuated an impassioned expression of total exasperation in an exchange within a relationship.  At the culmination of an intense dialogue on divergent experiences of life and perceived reality, the frustration of feeling that there was no shared grounding for expositions between two individuals resulted in the impulse to undermine all preceding exchanges with the blanket declaration of an absence of trust.

Why has trust become an agency of division in our social discourse?  Presented in either form - a declarative punctuation seeking to end further inquiry or objection ("trust me") or an affirmation or rejection of surrogated discernment and judgment ("do/don't trust you") - a central problem with "trust" is that, in its profligacy, it has been encrusted with prima facie evidence of its absence.  Our collective anaphylaxis towards trust is not without ample justification.  Wars, governments, churches, businesses, judges, religions have all appealed to trust (and its incarnate twin 'faith') when open inquiry and transparent disclosure do not serve the occult purpose for which all of these institutions are frequently organized.  Tragically, from a mismanaged billion dollar family office to a coffee table rending of relationship, not only do we eschew trust but we actually often settle into the comfort of known abuse, injury, and predation.

Ironically, often the only thing we seem to trust is our certainty in its manifest absence.  This paradox is fascinating on many levels.  If we receive kindness from a stranger or disproportionate care from an unexpected interaction with an associate, why is our instinct to question what ulterior motive must be present?  Is it possible that knowledge or life stories could be shared for their own sake without an expectation that they must belie an unspoken metaphor or occult meaning?

I wonder if the reason why we mistrust trust is because we despise the subtle hierarchy that so frequently attends its propagation.  The person imploring for trust may be cloaking true intentions and we're pretty sure that this is most likely the case.   By casting aspersions on interpersonal trust, the Agent Orange effect exfoliates every plant laying barren any semblance of verdant fellowship.  And once unleashed, mistrust has a lingering toxicity as, at any moment, it can be used to undermine intent, expression, or character.

We're probably at a state in our social systems where trust needs a to take a sabbatical.  Not that we don't need what it represents in an ideal form but, at present, it's capacity to evoke its antithesis is compelling.

In its place, I ingest and suggest the antidote of explicit manifestation devoid of contemporaneous exchange.  By this I mean developing devotion to service in which a counterparty can experience the evidence of integrity, fidelity, and loyalty without appealing to, or self-critiquing the absence of, trust.  Seldom is this practice more robust than the explicit interaction between people where value is exchanged but no mercantile impulse is denominated.  When the description of the context in which an impulse to exchange arises and explication of the relationship between and among parties is the sole focus of engagement and interaction, confidence - not trust - becomes possible.

What we want when we aspire to trust is most likely the confidence of those within our community or our sphere of influence.  However, community is likely more often harmed then helped when it's asked to set aside exhaustive inquisitiveness or blindly offer benign assent to a petitioner for trust.  Rather than pleading for or imposing a cognitive displacement aspiration in others, it's high time that we recognize the incomparable value of manifest evidence.  And, lest you infer that I'm optimistic, I'm not.  When you do this, it's still common for others to question intentions or incentives.  The difference is that if you recklessly engage in transparent, generative interactions in the world, you leave humanity somewhat more enriched than you found it.  And I trust that a few of you actually boldly enter that world with untrustworthy, integrity-filled abandon. 

If Tomorrow Never Comes

In the past several days, I've been too busy to write a blog post.  "I'll try to get to it tomorrow," I've said as I lay down in bed a night too tired to open up my computer.  Were it not for a late night flight to South Texas tonight, I wouldn't be writing now.  I'd be sleeping.  In my mobile office at 35,000' over somewhere dark the pale glow of my computer screen is beckoning to me and so, game on!

I had the honor of experiencing a four dimensional socioeconomic interaction in the past few days.  I couldn't help but see how much of what we tend to bring to our impulse to enter into enterprise is shaped by tacit perspectives that represent assent to volitional projections of others - sometimes across centuries or millenia.  Allow me to grossly simplify the dimensions for the purpose of elucidating some insight.

We were joined by stewards of North American First Nation, African American, Euro-American, and Asian Fusion heritage.  In our gathering, a number of energies were explicitly manifest in a rather ironic literal sense.  And, to be clear, we were assembled around a few common convergent impulses - the proliferation of meaningful and complete financial and economic literacy, ethical and transparent social impact, and, a shared sense that we could make a difference in the world.  As a participant-observer-orchestrator, I had the curious perspective informed by relationships with each of the assembled while many of them did not have a prior common link.

A couple observations.

There's a quantum difference between reacting to vs. conscripting engagement with perceived opportunity and challenge.  What did seem to define how people engaged in our collaborative weekend was the degree to which people felt capable of marshalling others into their sense of possibility.  When the convening impulse was presented as a response to a crisis or injustice, engagement foundered.  When the convening impulse was presented as an opportunity for an impactful contribution to the effort (not necessarily the outcome), engagement was immediate.  In short, if people were specifically equipped with knowing what they were asked to contribute based on their known capacity, enterprise flowed.  If people were presented with a potentially less consequential "cause", regardless of it's complexity, little emerged at all.  Conscription - the capacity to discern the specific contributions that individuals can make to an undertaking - outperforms conviction that something "should be done."

The currency of abuse is subject to counterfeit.  With modest perception, one can readily see massive social dislocation in each of the heritages represented.  Whether it's dislocation from homelands, dissolution of constructive familial ecosystems, susceptibility to environmental and political capriciousness or any of the myriad of challenges, each of the groups named above have experienced all or most of them.  However, when a perception of injustice or harm to a community with which one affiliates infects the capacity to engage with others, a strange dynamic emerges.  On the surface one could conclude that communities with the apparent longest exposure to persistent oppression should have the greatest sense of reactivity.  The casual reader could imagine, from the list above, the relative sense of reactivity vs. structural engagement represented in the societal classifications I used to describe the gathered above.  But such a projection would be in error.  Explicit first person experience of abuse (a more rational argument for reactivity) did not correlate with reaction vs. thoughtful engagement.  Let's face it: my ancestors who were imprisoned, tortured and, burned at the stake for their religious beliefs in Europe were no less displaced than North American First Nations.  When I hear ethnographers speak of "indigenous" or "aboriginal" knowing from land, sky, and flora and fauna, my heart yearns for the knowledge that was exterminated when my ancestors were driven from their homelands.  Is the remembrance of lost culture more painful than its temporal remote amnesia?  Of course not.  But invoking abuse as a means to alter present or future outcomes is empty.  The pain of separation and loss is a phenomenal opportunity to shun carelessness and expediency in unconsidered neglect today and a resoluteness to avoid repetition of callousness in the future. 

Our myths are broken.  With the aid of time machines travelling in any directional illusion, we'd likely find a distribution of decent people acting decently and a minority of bad actors acting badly.  And, I'd hazard to guess that in each period of any cycle, there'd be a complacent set for whom systems are working fairly well and for whom incumbency preservation is the mandate.  I suspect there'd equally be a large set operating under some imposed (self or other) subjugation for whom "change" would be the prayer.  Idyllic pasts are infused with as much revisionism as prophetic heavens.  And neither exist outside of escapist delusions.  From the Eden and Babel stories of a god that fears the created aspiration of his alleged own creation to the transcendental narcissism of sublimated auto-enlightenment, it's time that we discard the illusion of "creating a better" anything.  Our challenges do not arise from an absolute absence of anything other than our capacity and discipline to perceive and discern.  And when we organize our impulse towards a "better" outcome, it would be pretty helpful to accurately define the condition we seek to leave and the metrics used to discern arrival.  I'm getting dangerously close to a nut allergy around the "change for better" clamoring that I hear.  I'm far more interested in repurposing, co-opting, and inviting the system that is in place to consider its own self-interest in making things work with greater persistence and generative sustainability.

You can't see "diversity".  None of the social descriptors I used to introduce the assembled were effective at describing the life-force stewarded by each individual.  The more explicitly grounded to purpose and productive experience, the more effective the contribution; the more dissociated, the less effective.  And you'll notice that I referred to all the gathered as stewards of heritage.  None of them "were" the labels that can be irresponsibly applied.  The diversity that matters is that derived from assimilated experience and is manifest in receptivity to impulses to and from self and to and from others.  Our phenotypic profile is meaningless if we cannot enlist it to reintroduce our native self in engagement with the collaborating ecosystem.

Today was a great day.  The last several days were amazing and filled with productivity infused with fellowship.  I'm better for it and I trust, in its sharing, you picked up a little taste of what went down in our neighborhood.  But what really hit home was my resolution to live with all I've got now; make an impact; be stunning; be brilliant.  In that way, I'll continue to avoid the procrastinator paradox of piling into tomorrow what I should have engaged today.  Best of all, I'll be working with great people - as I was this weekend - with whom I'll get to celebrate the delicacy of each cumulative moment.