GENERAL ASSEMBLY: Occupy Wall Street

LINK to Who We Are, General Assembly Excerpt: dr.ron on October 2, 2011 at 12:08 pm said:"The problem is not that a small grouping of people are making a lot of money, it is how they are making the money. Here is just one of many examples. Putting AAA ratings on bad mortgages, then selling those to pension funds is shifting money from working people to the very wealthy. One can debate as to whether what happened was theft or not. However, there is little question that working people and business owners who want to create real economic value should not stand for this. A small number of people on Wall Street think they are smarter than others and that they can just take money from others, as long as they lobby for laws that let them get away with it. Lawrence Lessig has documented how large companies have gotten a 600-2000 percent return on investment (ROI) by lobbying for tax breaks. This "smartness" and ability to manipulate the legislature does not help anyone other than the greedy people who employ these practices. Contrast that with a smart person who invents a better way to collect solar energy. On September 22, 2011, I was at the Mashable and United Nations "Social Good Summit" Startups Challenge (http://mashable.com/sgs/startups-challenge/) and the winner was a 19 year old woman who has invented a patent pending device that rotates a solar panel to keep it perpendicular to the line of the sun as the earth rotates. This is an example of what Umair Haque, Harvard Business Review Blogger calls "thick value." And, while I may disagree with many things they do, even Walmart, when they create sustainable fisheries, is producing "thick value." Unfortunately, too many of the people on Wall Street are creating their personal wealth based on taking it out of the pocket of someone else. The housing bubble created the illusion of growth and personal wealth in the minds of too many people, which led to them spending money they did not have. Real economic growth needs to be based on creating "thick value." I hope that the complaints about occupywallstreet not having clear objectives is just the first step in lifting the veil of obfuscation created by those on Wall Street and that we can begin to engage in a discussion of what real and sustainable growth would look like. An economy works when people are exchanging goods and services. In our current economy, we share something with the recent Arab Spring. That is that there are many talented and educated people with rich and varied skills sets who could be working and creating real growth, but instead are unemployed or under-employed. The challenge ahead is not simple, but I believe there is hope in the growing occupywallstreet movement and that we will be able to crowdsource ideas for real social change. We each need to be humble in how we play our respective roles. We each need to look at how we live our lives and how we do business. And we must each ask ourselves: "Am I part of the problem, or am I part of the solution?"