GoHuman Blog

Capitalism is driven by advertising.  It pays for our lifestyle but at what cost?

Global corporations reverse-engineer our psyche with mega-million-dollar advertising budgets, and program us on what to buy.  A system of systems arose profiting from the consumption of crap – euphemism intended.  Stellar brands for worse than worthless products are built by these machines.

Coke “adds life” – and 8 teaspoons of sugar to a nation struggling with diabetes and obesity epidemics.  Sugar free versions contributed to cancer, alongside a cancer causing scourge sold to us by sexpots, future presidents, babies, Mickey Mantle and Santa Claus.  What no-one wants can be sold for massive profits.

What’s wrong with that?

Maybe sponsorship is merchandising the bodies and souls of men?  If that’s too dark, Raj Patel’s video on The Value of Nothing is a good chaser.

Why GoHuman.com? reason #5: Our business model is not advertising.  Our growth depends on members taking owning up, not selling out.

Does Santa Clause cancer?

Reason #1; Reason #2; Reason #3; Reason #4;

Reason #6?: Food Fight!; Reason #7; Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

Goldman Sachs operated behind the scenes, defrauding millions of little guys & gals.  Our government failed us then, and continues to fail us. Check out this link to see how the government we elected has let Citigroup have its way with us, even after we became owners.

It’s our fault.

Americans, and everyone else on the planet, must own up, grow up, and participate more fully in ownership and governance. This nation was founded on these principles, but mass markets want to play vs. pay. Paying is acting responsibly; shouldering the burden of change.

But my daughter’s expression of frustration with her bank’s behavior, in tossing it over the gate by the stairs, was the real inspiration for this blog.

There are better ways to solve an economic crisis. Geithner’s failure to protect our interest, and Zoe’s latest antic, both highlight that responsible adults must be owners. It takes maturity to build something lasting. Spread the word and help us build it.

Reason #4 Why GoHuman.com is: We must own the global problem and work to change our own community!

Zoe solves the credit crisis her way

Reason #1; Reason #2; Reason #3; Reason #4; 

Next #5: The high cost of free; Reason #6; Reason #7; Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

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

I recently blogged about how the top 20 Global Companies dramatically highlight the unbelievably unsustainable nature of the current global economy.  I’m following up with an online article about #43 on the list.

End of the world predictions are usually the domain of fanatics and fringers, but this global powerhouse is advising its clients how to prepare for global collapse.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

#2 of 19 random reasons Why GoHuman.com? is that a strong, connected, local community is an essential insurance policy if the worst of doomsday predictions were to come true. And investing in a local economy is by its nature more sustainable, not to mention the marketplace we are creating.

We hope you’ll catch the vision and spread the word. We can make a difference. We can change the way the world works.

Reason #1;

Reason #3; Reason #4; Reason #5; Reason #6; Reason #7; Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

Speaking of gargantuan corporations, Fortune’s Global 500 proves our planet’s economy is completely unsustainable.

Seven oil companies: Holland (1) UK (4) France (6) China (9) and the U.S. (2, 5 & 7) are in the top 10.  These giants exploit nonrenewable resources.  #3 is big-box retailer Wal-Mart, under siege by environmental and local activists.  Dutch financial services titan, ING (see #1) is #8.  The world’s largest car company, from tiny Japan – which could be car-free, is #10.

By 20 we get 4 more oil/energy companies and 3 more car manufacturers.  If you are horrified, or at least care, watch the award winning documentary The End of Suburbia. Even if you don’t buy the logic of “peak oil production” (which I don’t) or Who Killed the Electric Car (which I do), it’s a revelation.

Sustainability is #1 in a series of 19 Blogs, in no particular order, of answers to “Why GoHuman.com?”.  A shocking recommendation by company #43 is next.

Picture of Crude Awakening – a Burning Man Event

Reason #2; Reason #3; Reason #4; Reason #5; Reason #6; Reason #7; Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

I’ve quoted from Money and Markets before, but a recent issue has the perfect followup to my last blog on Goldman Sachs, edited here for brevity:

“The AIG rescue was the biggest taxpayer rip-off of all time, initiating a whole series of Wall Street taxpayer rip-offs…:

1. The U.S. Treasury bails out AIG, protecting AIG’s counterparties from direct losses they’d suffer if AIG failed.

2. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York pays off AIG’s creditors in full. As U.S. investors lose fortunes in financially viable companies, 16 major banks lose nothing in a company otherwise bankrupt, like…

3. Goldman Sachs, with Wall Street’s most extravagant executive bonuses in 2006 and 2007, and the most lavish payer of employee bonuses in 2009.

The money flow is clear:
* From taxpayers to AIG…
* From AIG to big Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs…
* From Goldman Sachs to its employees in the form of lavish bonuses.”

The true cost to our institutions is erosion of trust.  Trust cannot be bought, it is built painstakingly, over time, through the delivery of promises and expectations.

Our economy may recover, in the short term, but the bankruptcy of trust will be much harder to undo.

GoHuman.com targets the underlying problems.  Change the way your world works, locally, at the level of basic human interaction.

Trust is rebuilt one handshake at a time!

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.

Susan Nieman, in a recent EnlightNext article titled “Idealism for Grown-Ups”, explains a basic tenet of philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Claims of reality and the claims of the ideal should be given equal weight”.

It’s a sophisticated philosophical underpinning of a truism I heard as a teenager. Every week Casey Kasum told American Top 40 listeners to “keep our feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars”.

Fans of GoHuman.com intuitively embrace this principle and see no disconnect with our “Change the Way Your World Works” tag-line. Others, put off by our grandiose vision, view our approach as naive and doomed to failure. We respect their perspective, and welcome their criticism, especially if they include constructive feedback.

Even Flamers help keep us honest. We “drink our own Kool-aid” about quality and local relevance, with the humility to “Make it Right”; another valuable component of GoHuman.com.

It’s in our nature to be idealistic. I’ll reach back much further than Kant for an admonition I learned as an undergraduate Theology student. The Hebrew prophet Zechariah, speaking to ancient scoffers, gives very modern advice: “Do not despise the day of small things”.

So grow older and wiser without losing idealism. Work at ground level and stretch for the stars. Align with the forces of nature. People who say GoHuman.com can’t don’t know the meaning of Kant.

You Can! Just click Share This to change the way your world works!

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.