GoHuman Blog

I’ve written about Goldman Sachs and Piggies before, but my daughter inspired me today, feeding change to her pig.

Goldman’s is a story of greed, power and collusion. They fueled an enormous Real Estate bubble by creating  toxic assets from doomed mortgages.  They called them safe and sold them to trusting people.  Mountains of money from whitewashing risk wasn’t enough, it gets much worse.

Using AIG, they bet against their own products, cashing in on their customer’s misfortune.  Outraged yet?

Next, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson fed them the Fed bailout.  After defrauding a billion people with the free market lie, they use our taxes to post record profits of $3.44 billion, while 10% (or 17%) are unemployed.

Read Matt Taibbi’s article to learn more.

When my 18 month-old saw daddy empty the bank from the bottom, she tried, but couldn’t.  She quickly got fed up feeding an unfair pig. Game over!

We can feed a different kind of change to rich pigs.  Stop giving them your allowance. Don’t let them enslave us with their free market.

Reason #3 Why GoHuman.com? A marketplace with change for everyone.

Teaching Zoe that Pigs eat your money!

Reason #1; Reason #2;

Reason #4; Reason #5; Reason #6; Reason #7; Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

There are certain occasions which are imprinted on our memories so strongly that we never forget where we were when they happened. For me, some of the dates which stand out are when Pope John Paul II was shot, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded and the date Concorde came down in Paris. 9/11 goes without saying! There are good times too of course, such as the breaking through of the Berlin Wall, and that evening when I first met my wife-to-be (which can’t go without saying).

Today takes me back to December 3, 1984, driving my 1972 Chevy Nova back from seeing the governor of California at the cinema in the film Terminator. I turned on the radio to hear the news that at 10:00 AM California time, midnight in Bhopal, India, a pesticide production plant owned by Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical), suffered a release of large amounts of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas. To avoid too much detail here about a horrible tragedy, I will just summarize with some facts. More than 500,000 people were exposed. The death toll from hospital records is put at around 20,000 – and that’s not even considering the destroyed families, lives, resultant diseases and birth-defects.

The court cases continue to this day, as does the suffering. Go and do a simple search for yourselves. Put the one word “Bhopal” in a search engine. I have purposely not provided a link to any article here because it is impossible for one link I might choose to properly convey the price paid by the victims. They aren’t the only ones who have paid of course – Union Carbide has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars as a result, and no doubt their shareholders have felt that pain very severely.

It is somewhat stomach-churning that we can use the words “paid” and “pain” to describe both what the shareholders felt, as well as what the local population felt – and continues to feel.

I don’t know all the facts of course, and I’m not in a position to properly decide specific blame and compensation. But it is obvious even to the most casual observer what the main problem is.

Why would anyone build a pesticide plant in a developing country, in a highly-populated, poverty-ridden area?

I think we all know the answer. The main price of progress is always paid by those too poor and powerless to stand up for their interests. The rich and powerful pretty much do what they want, when they want, and use Jeremy Bentham’s argument of the Utilitarian economists (“the largest benefit for the largest number”) as their excuse.

And there we have it. Large institutions pursuing the financial bottom-line, assigning some complex financial calculation to lives and health – in which the lives and interests of the poor and powerless are assigned a very low value indeed.

Here at GoHuman, we believe a life, or someone’s health, cannot be assigned a price. We recognize the sad fact that the human aspect of business tends to decline as the size of a business grows. That is why we promote our services to support smaller businesses. Businesses where a relationship with customers and community are critical success factors. Businesses where reputation is placed above immediate profit.  Businesses that GoHuman because they are human.  Businesses like yours.

Have a look at GoHuman.com. We think you’ll like what you see!

Since I wrote about Goldman Sachs’ apology, investors are calling for a bigger share of profits. Don’t owners have a right to demand this?

Corporations are created to limit investor risk while making money. Sincepowerful corporations can cause enormous damage, layers of governance are added. A balance of forces and laws grow a company as big as Goldman Sachs. Then individuals personally profit from investing in, or working for, these enormously fattened pigs. Some gorge themselves on very large pieces of pork.

Governments become enmeshed and corrupted by capitalism. Bailouts become billion dollar opportunities for greedy individuals to exploit. With the balance of power and control being challenged, Investors, Executives and employees all scream for bigger slices of bacon. The Beatles nailed it in “Piggies”.

GoHuman.com promotes a sustainable model of equitable rewards and a new transactional model at the local community level. We celebrate the power of trust, built on transparent reputation. We look beyond the fallacy of so-called “Free Markets” to open markets of equal opportunity.

I’ll be blogging about these topics in the coming weeks. Thanks for the trust you display in working with us to change the way the world works.

Say cheese! or pork?

Decades ago Bob Dylan sang that the times were changing. There are again welcome indications of serious change underfoot. They are the real green shoots cropping up. One of the most recent ones I saw was the $500M apology from Goldman Sachs.

If anyone doubts that this is change, consider this. Goldman Sachs first blustered in defense of it’s profiteering coming out of the near global economic meltdown. They were obviously very happy to reap the spoils in a game of global chicken, in which the last one standing can make out like a bandit, if of course the horrifying crash is avoided.

They also took the standard arrogant stance that they deserved the out-sized bonuses they pay themselves for sucking enormous amounts of value out of the system, at the expense of those at the bottom, who’s blood they are harvesting as they squeeze the proverbial turnips.

But now they are apologizing. And in delivering the $500M to small businesses who have suffered from their exploitation of the so-called free markets and the resulting global economic serfdom.

So this is indeed a welcome start. It’s an indication that, ultimately, the world is programmed towards a new level of maturity. One in which the actual worth of each individual voice is equal, independent of their net worth.

Today is Tuesday, November 10, 2009, and it is the 40th birthday of Sesame Street!

Sesame Street is one of the longest-running children’s programmes, and has spun off numerous films, the Muppet TV series, and one of everyone’s favourite Disney attractions, the 3-D Muppet Theatre. It has played host to numerous celebrities – Michele Obama has recently appeared in an episode.

Sesame Street broke new ground with its formula of appealing to both children with a mix of fun, friendly, cuddly and sometimes mildly-scary monsters, while also appealing to the parents with jokes and skits which played off popular culture and historical events. Sesame Street was an educational programme which found a perfect balance between entertainment and education. It related life-lessons about bullying, about being different and being proud of it, without playing the race or gender card. It managed to teach children facts and concepts – while also helping parents to understand how to deal with their children.

The writers and producers of the Disney and Pixar films we all love today must have been heavily influenced by Sesame Street. We can see the same formula of simultaneously appealing to both young and old with all the jokes which play on multiple levels. I would argue that your sense of humour, and how you see the world, has very likely felt that influence, and you are the better for it – even if you’ve never seen the show.

I grew up on Sesame Street – although I have lived in the UK for the past 23 years, I grew up in the USA, and among my best childhood friends were Oscar, Cookie, Grover and Snuffleupagus. We don’t have the current series here, but I’m constantly amazed by the number of Europeans who know and love Sesame Street as well. It’s one American export of which the USA can justifiably be proud.

Arguably, Sesame Street has changed the world.

So let’s all raise a glass of milk (or pickle juice) to Sesame Street – happy 40th birthday!

And, for any business or anyone offering a service – there’s a lesson here. Build a reputation of being decent and positive and delivering what customers want with a bit extra – and not only will they love us, they’ll celebrate our success. If you haven’t already, check out the GoHuman services, and see that is a huge part of what we’re about.

Couldn’t help but share this article by James Altucher of Formula Capital who made minor headlines with his recommendation to legalize insider trading.

This comes in the wake of the demise of Galleon Group, a hedge fund whose head billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, was caught with a big hand in the insider trading cookie jar. This welcome clampdown on some of the real perpetrators, as opposed to the symbolic arrest and incarceration of Martha Stewart a few years back, is met with someone who should know better calling it a victimless crime.

I guess if the crime is not personal, meaning it’s committed against any and everyone indiscriminately, then those who are leveraging their positions of relative power and influence feel no one is really victimized.

Here at GoHuman.com we take a bit more of a holistic view of things. Our marketplace of local services is designed to be transparent, built from the bottom up, with shared ownership. We seek to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for insider information to even exist, much less be exploited by a privileged few at the top.

We hope you’ll catch the vision, spread the word, and help make this marketplace the wave of the future.

A recent Time Magazine cover article praised Twitter’s “game changing” nature – touting the brilliance of its simplicity, and the ecosystem built around it. It described a “home depot” of ways outsiders tweak the way tweets are created, reviewed and leveraged for a variety of purposes.

Another Time article, on facebook, discussed how divorce lawyers mine Social Media for personal information. When Susie shares on facebook that Bob bought her a necklace, Bob’s wife’s lawyer uses it in court. Or if his wife claims she can not work to increase her case for alimony, Bob’s lawyer uses Jane’s discussions on LinkedIn with potential employers.

The real news here isn’t technology, it’s the behavior of people. This may be an endless chicken and egg discussion, but it’s clear people are exercising less caution about sharing things – in writing – publicly. Facts previously hidden are coming to light more often.

In general, I find this to be a good thing. Our founding fathers established a balance of power which includes a Judicial branch – our legal system – for the sake of justice. The unveiling of facts, the sharing of secrets, enables justice to triumph, where, otherwise, the more savvy lawyer has carried the day – truth and facts be damned.

Will the growth of Social Media result in more truth? Can we handle the truth?

GoHuman.com’s advanced reputation model is designed to both catch and grow this wave, on our way to a more transparent, and therefore more effective, not to mention fair, marketplace.

Are you ready for transparency?