Insure

Insurance covers debt expansion and societal breakdown
Isolationism
Now they offer payment protection for insurance payments
Protection against debt fallout
Push sales to increase debt
Push insurance to increase debt
Push loans covered by loans for assets to increase debt
Spend way beyond your means to keep the banks in business
Spend to stimulate the economy
Stimulate the economy
So when money travels fast
The velocity of currency
Moves towards expansion
Expand – bigger, bigger, big
Until burst, correct, fallback, not
Fallout and then
Expand again
Beyond - as definition of expansion
Towards
What you argue as random
If random then how do you explain
Continual advancement
Continually
Century after century
Monarchy after monarchy
Empire after empire
Constantly forward
To where there must be a purpose
Where
To meaning
Beyond means
Beyond today
Beyond the tangible
Of the paper and coins
Once gold and silver
Now electronic
Later psychic
There is unity
Consolidation
Numbers are symbols like anything else
As money is number
So is the computer’s circuitry
One and zero
Something and nothing
Towards infinity
There is matter
Dense
Consolidated
Into singularity
Conformity
Undifferentiated symbols.
Insure against that.

I wrote this poem on February 22, 2002 while in a course at Wells Fargo in Seattle to become a retail bank manager. Although I was grossly overqualified for the job, I was also going through a nervous breakdown and so to be employed at all during that time was a blessing, which only now can I see clearly. A classmate from the Yale School of Management who was working at Wells Fargo corporate in San Francisco helped me to get the position. (He is now one of Wells Fargo’s leading analysts, with a focus on the insurance side of the business.)

The company’s double-digit growth strategy didn’t make sense to me then. They weren’t creating value in their retail shops, just crooks. Many bankers opened up false accounts to make sure they met their sales numbers, which had to be reported daily on district-wide conference calls. The pressure to sell debit and credit cards, checking and savings accounts, home equity loans, refinances, and payment protection took away from any possible long-term relationships with customers. This wasn’t about customers at all, in fact. It was about working the system to build market presence. Staff, especially managerial positions, turned over – mostly by promotion or relocation – so often that customers resented their inability to feel connected to their local branch.

The Texas boys had moved to Washington to show us how it was done, but it’s not the Wild West up North. The President of the Pacific Northwest region seemed heartless in his concern for his employees. And when I found out later that he had recently undergone a heart transplant, which very few people in the lower ranks of the company knew about, the knot between the literal and the figurative world tightened and I knew it was my time to move on.

So, here it is all now, proof positive of why it all didn’t make sense. There was no sense, just greed. And vulnerable, sensitive, spoiled girls like me got kicked (self-kicked really) to the curb. There was no place for value – not in the healthcare business (my first job out of graduate school), not in the Internet start-up business, not in banking, and I would soon learn, not even in the nonprofit do-gooder sector. Corruption loomed everywhere, and there was no place to hide, not even in the high altitudes of the Rocky Mountains.

We know that starting small businesses enjoys a roughly 80% failure rate, and this would seem to be imprudent for a nonprofit charged with the public good. Nonprofits enjoy some favors; their Boards are (or should be) folks of worldly experience and significant relationships, and more and more funders are discovering that “providing patient capital” is much more effective in creating social change than “making a charitable donation.” More and more we have come to understand a blended value of social, environmental and financial capital accumulation; we need all three, and accumulation of any one enhances the accumulation of the others. You can’t make money in a destroyed environment or an impoverished society. You can’t salvage the environment without money and a social structure of care and cooperation, and there is no such social structure without adequate resources and a healthy environment.

Nobody should be surprised at an intersection between the ideas and practices of venture capital, starting new businesses, and social enterprise, the starting of new businesses by nonprofits. And where has today’s surplus wealth been created? By the venture capitalists of the post-industrial age, entrepreneurial to the core. There is a gathering of forces for social change, for a sustainable world of people all of whose lives are precious and have meaning. And there are establishments that are threatened by these forces and mobilize themselves to resist change along lines of enterprise too.

The great community organizer Saul Alinsky said; “The struggle is the victory.”

Reading George, you can hear his optimism compared to mine. He is hopeful, and yet when you sit down for a meal with him and chat about the world he will tell you how shitty it’s all going. I am hopeful too, but I suppose I am angrier about the world, perhaps because I am younger and in the midst of it. George rarely sounds angry. In fact, when I replay all our interactions in my mind, I don’t hear anger or bitterness. More of an understanding with a majority of acceptance, yet room for improvement.

Patience is not one of the primary four Fs of Darwinian evolution, feed, fuck, fight, flight, which are rather immediate. Patience, delayed gratification, is measured by a discount rate, what percent of value do we assign to a future benefit compared to an equivalent benefit now? Annualized rates of 6% to 10% are common in the financial arena. Since finance, money, is a reflection of our lives as markets for experience, the same rates apply roughly to social and environmental values. A benefit to be reaped 6 or 7 years from now has a value to us now of about half that benefit today. This kind of calculus is natural, for unless we survive from now till then there’s no value at all.

We discount future environmental and social capital; we drive SUVs and fail to vote, etc. Greg Dees writes; “Social entrepreneurs play the role of change agents in the social sector by:

• Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value),
• Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission,
• Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning,
• Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand, and
• Exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability to the constituents served and for outcomes created.”

The word “patient” is neither used nor implied; add to this “Patient Capital” and one can predict tensions, but this where more of the nonprofit world is going.

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