Shawnee, Okla., tornado caught on tape - KOCOTV, http://youtu.be/1WoirMAj0SA

The TakeAway: Yet another deadly tornado has ripped through Oklahoma, killing at least 24, including 9 elementary school children. It came on the heels of severe weather yesterday, which generated at least two dozen tornadoes across Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa and Illinois. We can’t continue to let this happen, so many innocent people dead or damaged by Mother Nature’s fury because of what we’ve wrought. Before yet another tragedy strikes, please consider a series of 14 concrete actions we can take to fight against the destruction created by these catastrophic weather events, and the human-made climate change that helps create them.

The images are horrifying as whole sections of the Midwest are destroyed by massive tornadoes that wreak fury on land, lives, and livelihood, leaving “pockets of fright” (as one newscaster put it) remaining in their path. This afternoon, a massive tornado estimated to be  two miles wide ripped through Moore, Oklahoma, shortly after an earlier round of storms the day before.  Strong atmospheric winds—meteorologists call it “wind shear”—fuel the intensity at levels unheard of in regions familiar with tornadic destruction. A “tornado emergency” was declared, which means, Run for cover underground, there’s no likelihood of survival.

Search and rescue operations under way at Plaza Towers Elementary. NBC News

Schools were hit, children are being pulled from an elementary school in a desperate rescue mission, and hospitals are evacuating patients to ready for the rush of injured.

Overturned cars are seen from destruction from a huge tornado near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma May 20, 2013 (Reuters / Richard Rowe)

At this writing the full scale of the carnage remains unclear, but 24 people have died, 8 of them children from the Plaza Towers Elementary School. Emergency workers and neighbors go from house to house to see who’s in the rubble.

A child is pulled from the rubble of the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., and passed along to rescuers after Monday's tornado. Sue Ogrocki / AP

Those of us who grew up in the Midwest know that sickening feeling when a tornado “watch”, or “warning”, is issued. You don’t mess with these things, and everyone is taught from an early age where to seek shelter in the basement. Midwesterners, like most people, are a resilient bunch, and come together when emergency happens. We know that tornados are vicious and deceptive: when they touch the ground, they can leave unspeakable damage on one side of the street, while things are unchanged on the other side.

Having lived in New England for 42 years, I’ve never experienced this kind of fear—until a couple of years ago, when the first tornados in anyone’s memory landed in central and Western Massachusetts, killing four people and devastating 19 communities.

Those of us in the Boston area once again, just 5 weeks after the Marathon bombing, watch moving images as the tornado stories unfold, helpless in the face of sudden catastrophe, our hearts going out to those whose lives are changed forever. I live in Watertown, so have special knowledge of the ripple effect of the Marathon bombing, the bizarre chase for the bombers, their death and capture. (I swim where the kid brother used to work.)

But you don’t have to live in Boston to know that the Marathon bombings were caused by human hands and warped minds, and as people try to come to terms with cause—how do you prepare for the actions of a madman?—we know, deep down, that you can’t always prevent these kinds of terror.

But we can be more vigilant, more aware of the little things that add up to crazy, erupting with sudden force in ways that dwarf our petty self interests and apathetic “Whatevers”.

Natural disasters, it seems, are also caused by human hands and ignorant minds, as people refuse to come to terms with cause—how else do you explain the utter failure of our national leadership to pass comprehensive climate policy?—yet believe, deep down, that we’re not doing enough to prevent this kind of terror.

We need to be more vigilant, more aware of the little things that add up to crazy—our addiction to a carbon economy, our refusal to move our politics beyond gridlock, our apathetic, “It’s too big to address.”

Well, hell, that’s just downright dumb.

There’s a lot we can do, in addition to cleaning up the mess and donating to the inevitable rescue / recovery funds, helping to piece together broken lives, and praying for the dead and injured. We know their tragedy will live on, long after the media spotlight turns elsewhere.

Six years ago, while a fellow at Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership (IGL), an extraordinary program founded and led by the extraordinary Sherman Teichman, I wrote a White Paper on the need for businesses and government to address the immediate catastrophes posed by climate change, the immediate challenges to existing modes of disaster management, and the immediate need for better civilian-military partnerships.

The impetus for doing so was my disgust, shared by many, as the way in which Katrina was handled, and the fact that even as the corporate and investor responsibility movements place climate at the top of their agenda, the focus generally remains on long-term reductions of carbon emissions, rather than immediate calamities experienced by people throughout the country—and world.

Because of the complexity of the phenomenon, my monograph was a multi-sector analysis that identifies some of the major players, enabling platforms, and activities with respect to government, the military, the private sector, institutional investors and foundations, and social enterprise. The basic premise: Climate change, by definition, has created instabilities in business environments, so preventing and mitigating their impact becomes a part of the fiduciary duty for business and investors.

What we can do to fight nature’s fury.

The quick takeaway:  Tackle “opportunity gaps” that could be filled by innovative ideas, programs, and strategies.  It also advances a number of program ideas, intended to:

• strengthen military – civilian education while encouraging greater participation from the private and social sectors;
• engage citizens more fully through new initiatives as well as with existing planning groups and volunteer networks, in tandem with international, federal, state, and local emergency management teams;
• engage specific industries more fully—specifically the media and entertainment, real estate development / engineering / construction, pharmaceuticals and health, and utilities sectors;
• develop new industry-specific metrics that supplement current reputable reporting platforms (such as the Global Reporting Initiative, which is meeting in Amsterdam this week for its bi-annual conference) that can help guide responsible corporate and investor behavior on disaster mitigation and resilience matters. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) is establishing industry-based sustainability key performance indicators that are considered “material” according to the SEC’s view of materiality. Disaster mitigation needs to be included in that framework.
• cultivate pragmatic and flexible partnerships with responsible institutional investors, foundations, social entrepreneurs, and companies (especially defense contractors within the military industrial complex), as well as with the military;
• engage the media, including journalism, entertainment, and other interactive media, to encourage the incorporation of disaster management and food crisis issues into content and storylines, as well as public education;
• fortify existing professional development, education and training programs, in partnership with the emergency management education system, led by FEMA, as well as academic centers and programs, to develop curricular standards, education and training modules, and forms of evaluation and assessment, while developing new knowledge and pedagogical approaches;
• tap the power of Web 2.0, virtual software, gaming technology, and social networking in service to disaster management and prevention, and identify areas showing promise for future work.

A laundry list, yes, but there it is. I also periodically wrote about this here on MurnPost.

But there’s more, not just from 2007 but the last few weeks. It makes me want to scream.

The earth is choking. Ten days ago, we learned that that the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) trapped in the atmosphere reached a milestone unseen in millions of years. Carbon dioxide analyzers at the top of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano recorded CO2 levels of 440 points per million, a reading first seen at the Arctic last year but recorded on an hourly basis at Mauna Loa, the world’s oldest monitoring station that sets the global benchmark. On Thursday, 9 May 2013, the average CO2 reading for an entire day surpassed that level—the first time in human history.

Largely, if not entirely, attributable to human consumption patterns, specifically the use of fossil fuels, the rise “symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that reported the new reading.[1] “The increase is not a surprise at all to scientists,” he said. “The evidence is conclusive that the strong growth of global CO2 emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas is driving the acceleration.”[2]

“There’s no stopping CO2 from reaching 400 ppm,” said Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. “That’s now a done deal. But what happens from here on still matters to climate, and it’s still under our control. It mainly comes down to how much we continue to rely on fossil fuels for energy.” Ralph Keeling is the son of Charles David Keeling, who began measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in 1958, initiating now what is known as the ‘Keeling Curve’. Ralph Keeling has continued the Scripps measurement record since his father’s death in 2005.

Washington continues to fiddle. Last Thursday, the nomination of highly-qualified Gina McCarthy, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator-designate, was finally approved by a Senate committee Republicans abandoned their boycott of a vote; her nomination now awaits a full vote on the Senate floor.[3] According to ClimateWire, “McCarthy has assured anti-regulation lawmakers that EPA has no immediate plan to craft such a rule, though she refuses to close the book on action down the road.

“In the event that EPA does undertake action to address [greenhouse gas] emissions from existing power plants, the agency would ensure, as it always seeks to do, ample opportunity for States, the public and stakeholders to offer meaningful input on potential approaches,” McCarthy said in recent written comments submitted to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Jeff Holmstead, the former EPA air division chief under the George W. Bush administration and now head of a Washington environmental strategies group, said the consensus view within the utility industry is that EPA will attempt to regulate CO2 from existing coal plants. But he said there is considerable doubt over whether the agency can cap such emissions at every utility smokestack, or whether rules will have to account for a variety of other factors, including how a utility’s overall fleet is maintained and operated.[4]

Meanwhile, new policies throttling greenhouse gas emissions are waiting in the wings. A December 2010 settlement among administration officials, environmental groups, and states required the Obama administration to address utility carbon emissions.[5] In January 2011, the EPA was granted authority to regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs) by setting new emissions standards for fossil fuel power plants and petroleum refineries, two of the largest industrial sources that generate nearly 40 percent of all greenhouse gases in the United States. (The EPA is authorized to set new source performance standards for industries that cause, or significantly contribute to, air pollution that poses a danger to public health and welfare under the provisions of the Clean Air Act, in accordance with the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency). EPA set a “modest pace” for this planning process, due to significant industry and Republican opposition as well as Presidential election politics.[6]

Now, however, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue final regulations bringing new coal-fired plants under some form of carbon regulation. The first phase began last year with a proposed “Carbon Pollution Standard for New Power Plants” that remains in draft form.

>>>The EPA extended its date to May 24^th for two public hearings on the new Carbon Pollution Standard, to occur in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. A 30-day public comment period follows, until June 25^th.

Entities covered by the proposed rule “are strictly limited to new sources” and would restrict coal plant carbon emissions to 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity generated. Most experts agree the rule would make construction of new coal plants impossible for at least another decade until carbon capture and storage technologies are proved to work and then commercially deployed.

A second phase involves emissions controls on existing plants. The new EPA administrator has yet to assume her duties, and opposition to regulations remains robust.

Students are demanding change. And over the last few months, students have joined a fossil fuels divestment movement, calling upon colleges and universities (and other institutional investors) avoid or to sell their holdings in 200 of the largest fossil fuel companies. Sparked by last year’s “Do The Math” 21-city campaign led by the (350.org derives its name from 350 parts per million, the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) and its founder, longtime climate advocate Bill McKibben, organizers say the effort now includes more than 300 campuses.[7] 350.org recently launched an off-campus effort to rally support among pension funds, religious investors, foundations, companies, and other institutional investors with ties to the fossil fuel industry.[8]

It’s not worth the risk: Unburnable carbon and carbon bubbles. The fossil fuels divestment campaign uses evidence of “stranded assets” from the Carbon Tracker Initiative.[9] The Carbon Tracker Initiative was co-founded by Mark Campanale, founder director of the UK Social Investment Forum longtime expert on sustainable investment, and Cary Krosinsky, former VP of Trucost for North America and currently executive director of the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets.[10]

Stranded assets can pose a significant, systemic risk to institutional investors, say Carbon Tracker researchers, while posing the threat of a “carbon bubble” bursting—much like the subprime bubble that led to the financial crisis.[11]

According to Carbon Tracker, publicly-traded companies spend money totaling $674 billion dollars each year to find and develop more reserves. If they keep spending at this rate over the next decade, that’s $6.74 trillion of investor dollars that will be exposed to this looming carbon bubble, rather than being diverted to low-carbon growth.  Capital can be diverted to low-carbon growth—an argument divestment proponents are making. An excellent short video prepared by Carbon Tracker shows how companies on various stock exchanges throughout the world are exposed to carbon risk and the carbon bubble, industry. It can be viewed here.

What we can do to fight climate change

So where does that leave us as we watch the news, grateful for our own safety but heartbroken at the knowledge that life as they know it is shattered for countless thousands affected by the monster tornado?

• We need to get the Senate to confirm Gina McCarthy’s nomination.
• We need to ramp up organized pressure on federal elected officials and policymakers to get a cap on carbon emissions for existing power plants and refineries.
• We need to get a carbon tax passed.
• We need to ask our pension fund manager (if we have a pension fund) what they’re doing to address climate risk and the carbon bubble.
• We need to ask those institutional investors that we’re underwriting—all those hospitals, educational institutions, museums, social clubs, and more, that are tax-exempt and have enough money to invest in a portfolio—how they’re addressing climate risk and the carbon bubble. You say you don’t know who these groups are? Stay tuned—I’ll help you identify them

Most of all we need to blend science with sustainable stewardship—across all sectors and at all levels, local to global—and put our heads together to figure out all kinds of ways to confront Mother Nature’s fury throughout the 21^st century.

How many more people need to die before we do so?

*************

Update / Correction: As of 1.00 pm, 5/21, the death toll was revised downward due to inaccurate estimates at the scene. a high of 91 to 24 people. including 20 children; in my original post, only 7 children were identified. According to The New York Times, “Officials said Tuesday that it was far too early to say how many people had been killed. On Monday night, Amy Elliott, the spokeswoman for the Oklahoma City medical examiner, said at least 51 people had died and 40 more bodies were on their way, but on Tuesday, Ms. Elliott said that count ‘is no longer accurate.’ As of Tuesday morning, the medical examiner had confirmed 24 deaths, nine of them children, she said. Local hospitals reported at least 145 people injured, 70 of them children.”

Please take a look at what Tristanne wrote. It’s part of our “Voices of Young People” series, and what she said is worth pondering. There’s a lot going on to build a better planet and political economy, and we hope you think about how you might get involved.

Thank you!

—Marcy.

by Tristanne Davis, Occasional Contributor

The Takeaway:Today is Earth Day, and the environmental movement needs young people more than ever. We can help reignite constructive activism by inspiring and engaging the public in bipartisan ways that promote sustainable development thinking and action directed to public policy, business, and individual lifestyle choices.

Forty-three years ago today, we celebrated Earth Day for the first time. On April 22, 1970, approximately 20 million young people in the United States participated in rallies across the country to praise the earth and protest environmental degradation. To this day, that first Earth Day demonstration remains one of the largest political actions in the nation’s history.

Four decades later, we struggle to reconcile the meaning and purpose of Earth Day with a new kind of environmentalism in the face of the extraordinarily daunting environmental challenges that confront us in 2013.

Back in 1970, there was bipartisan support in Congress for environmental measures. Republican President Richard Nixon declared, “The ‘70s will be the environmental decade” and under his leadership the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created, and landmark legislation such as the  1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and 1970 Clean Air Act were passed.[1]

The momentous success of environmental action undeniably had much to do with the widespread popular support for environmental protection at the time. Pollution was a very apparent national problem, demonstrated for example when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted with oil-soaked debris that it caught fire in June 1969. The obviously poor condition of the environment angered the public and motivated large-scale involvement in the launching of the environmental movement.[2]

Mainstream media further set fire under the movement by publicizing it for the world to see. CBS News covered the 1970 Earth Day event with a Special Report called Earth Day: A Question of Survival and featured news correspondents from all across the country.[3] Public opinion was set in favor of environmentalism.

TIME to MOBILIZE

Today, environmental problems are much more complex: climate change; depleted fisheries; unusable land; water shortages; and energy security. The complexity of today’s environmental challenges elevates them to high-level policy status that requires lobbying the government and business for positive action.

Unfortunately, today’s environmental lobbies do not have enough angry voters behind them to meaningfully influence public policy. Partisan divisions in government, the corrosive influence of corporate lobbyists, and the rise of the modern anti-government right in American politics—all of these and other toxic forces paralyze federal action and hinder the environmental movement.

In addition, the mainstream media generally neglects many of the grassroots initiatives that do take place—for example, there was little coverage of the Forward on Climate rally held on February 17^th that drew more than 40,000 people to Washington D.C. Unlike the 1970s, environmentalism no longer is a unifying movement. Rather, people have taken sides and ossified into their ideologies. From this perspective, the environmental movement is a far cry from the bipartisan activism that took the world by a storm forty years ago.

DIGITAL NATION

Nowadays, young people can play a very important role in shaping the environmental movement and transforming it into unifying force rather then a source of division. Environmental activism today requires embracing mass information and communication technology, which enables the sharing of ideas and access to information on a global scale.

There currently is a whole network of movements taking place that are connected through online organizing communities which bring together youth on college campuses and in communities across the country. These online campaigns shed new light on grassroots organizing.

Online organizations such as 350.org and the Energy Action Coalition provide information and resources for environmental campaigns and serve to bring together activists from around the world. Campaigns for climate change action such as Forward on Climate and Power Shift are largely organized online.

There also is a student-led fossil fuel divestment campaign which has 260 campus participants around the country that have launched student- or faculty-led divestment campaigns, linked together by a virtual network of university activists, with support from a number of local and national organizations including the Responsible Endowments Coalition (REC), 350.org, and the New Economics Institute.

My generation’s environmentalism acknowledges the important role of technology, government and business in addressing increasingly complex environmental issues instead of villainizing them as they did in the 1970s. These movements also recognize that young people need to play a role in pioneering solutions and implementing programs in their communities rather then simply waiting for elected officials to act on environmental challenges.

SYSTEMS THINKING & SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Sustainable development has become the mantra of the new environmental movement. Sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”[4]

Environmental activists in the 1970s largely believed that economic growth was not sustainable and that industrial activity could not continue without severely depleting the planet’s resources.

Modern environmentalists believe it is possible to reconcile the needs of people with the needs of nature. The agenda of the new environmental movement seeks to make economic development maintainable rather than deviate from it and suggests that economic and environmental priorities are compatible.

Environmentalism in the context of sustainable development has the potential to lead society to develop in a way that addresses the world’s food, energy and economic challenges in an integrated manner. However, sustainable development has an inherent contradiction in that it is still driven by the market in the same economic-growth-has-no-limits paradigm.

When no trade-offs are involved, sustainable development is about the struggle to support the growing billions of people with increasingly meat-rich, energy intensive, and materialistic lifestyles. In this way, sustainable development has enabled individuals, government and business to incorporate the rhetoric of environmental reforms, but it has not changed their priorities.

Effective environmental activism will address this issue and work towards facilitating collective commitment to changing lifestyles and true sustainability and avoid “green-washing.[5]”

Young people today play an essential role in shaping the global conversation on sustainable development. Many of the current youth-based movements attempt to look at sustainable development from a “whole systems” perspective that strives to manage environmental and economic problems in an integrated way.

The campaign for the green economy is youth-led campaign that brings young leaders together to organize across issue lines and build a sustainable economy.

The New Economics Institute works with 14 college campus groups across North America to host “strategic summits on a new economy” and infuse demand for a people-centric, rather than profit based, economic system. These movements advocate new economic systems and consciousness that transcend the growth-based model we have followed up to this point. This is essential to the success of the environmental movement.

Whole-systems thinking requires more than environment rhetoric integrated into traditional economic models. It requires awareness of the importance of interconnections, relationships, and consequences. It involves eco-consciousness at the grassroots level, which defined the environmental movement in the ‘70s.

If the environment is allowed to become simply a question of policy choices rather than lifestyle decisions made by individuals, sustainable development will have taken the environmental agenda out of the hands of environmentalists and enabled it to be manipulated and shaped by political and economic interests.

The path to sustainability and the hope of Earth Day is that environmentalism becomes a force for real change in society. In order for this to happen, it will have to re-capture the public’s imagination.

********

Tristanne Davis is a young professional living and working in Washington DC in environmental consulting. She currently works at Abt Associates, a social policy research organization, with responsibilities for projects in environmental justice regulations, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and environmental cost-benefit analysis. She plans to pursue a Masters degree in sustainable development.

So does my old friend and mentor Dr. Barbara Brown Zikmund, a pioneering advocate for women in theology (the first female president of the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada [ATS] and so much more), who knows well the importance of ritual in public life. Zikmund, who has served as both a United Church of Christ seminary dean and chief (Pacific School of Religion, Hartford Seminary) as well as church historian, has an illustrious career spanning many decades – her papers are archived at the Union Theological Seminary library, now a part of Columbia University, her fans and accomplishments are legion – and continues to remain active, in spite of retirement.  I’ve known Barb – or “BBZ”, as most of her friends call her – and her husband Joe for 44 years, ever since I was an undergrad at Albion College in Michigan. They currently live in Washington, D.C. but will be moving back to Michigan sometime soon.

Anyway, Barb and I exchanged emails yesterday, working out plans for we three to get together here in the Boston area next month. I wrote in one that I figured they’d be watching the inaugural festivities from the comfort of their couch, rather than stand out in the bitter cold.

I should have known better. Here’s what Barb wrote about her “Wonderful Day”. Just an email between friends, but I thought it worth sharing with you because she touches on the simple, plain beauty of this momentous occasion.

It has been a wonderful day.

I am the eternal optimist.  I love civic rituals. I can get teary when I hear the Star Spangled Banner.  I get angry and discouraged, but I still think the diversity and unity of the USA make us resilient. As I watched the ceremonies this morning and heard Obama give his address, I was proud and happy.  We are not perfect, but we do amazing things in the midst of incredible diversity.  We fight hard. But in the end the winner is honored and the rule of law prevails.  When I look at the rest of the world, that is awesome.

So, this afternoon I went by myself to see the parade.  The Metro was not too crowded by 1 pm. I had to wait an hour to get through the security checkpoint, but everyone was happy.  Boy Scout volunteers were everywhere to help.  There were enough portapotties. The sun was shining.  I took my cane that has a built in seat and set it up on Pennsylvania Avenue between 6th and 7th.

I figured that I would watch the early part of the parade.  I could not go into the ticketed area, so it did not matter. Besides, once things passed I could head home. From 2 to 3:45 the crowd grew and waited. We did the wave, we looked at security people on the roof tops, and helicopters overhead.

We talked with strangers—many of whom had never been to DC, let alone to an inauguration. I struck up a conversation with a family from upstate New York (near Chautauqua).  I talked with a young African American couple who were from LA.  The guy was about 30 and teaches chemistry in a high school. He loves teaching. He works hard, he knows he can make a difference in some lives. He is proud that he can do what he is doing.

Finally the big black limousines showed up we decided that the ones with Secret Service agents walking alongside were important.  We caught a glimpse of the President and a waving hand from Joe Biden.

Everyone cheered as their cars crept by. I stayed for a while longer.  I watched the bands and the fife and drum corp. I looked at faces. I thought about the poem that Richard Blanco read this morning.  I came home on the Metro and Googled it so I could read it.  I love it.

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day: . . .

Looking forward to seeing you at the end of February.

Blessings,

Barb

The TakeAway: Charitable requests are a constant, but the end of the year brings a blizzard of appeals. In addition to our donor dollars, there’s a vast amount of untapped money power held by nonprofit institutions, particularly if they have endowments. Here’s a listing of some of my favorite organizations that are seeking to build more prosperous, sustainable, and just societies. The idea is to create a “virtuous circle” of exchange relationships, something as old as time itself. And not necessarily limited to end-of-year benevolence. Please consider making a gift, and becoming an Xchange agent for good.

We all know the drill: from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve, our inboxes – virtual and analog – are stuffed with appeals—occurring now on an hourly basis, as charities seek last-minute tax-deductible contributions. Their messaging urgency makes it seem they’re on their own kind of “fiscal cliff”, that somehow at the stroke of midnight tonight they’ll disappear, like Cinderella’s bejeweled coach.

Most of us wish we had more to support them. We do what we can, but beyond a few dollars here and there, how might we use our limited charitable resources to help bring about a better world? How can we look at the entire twelve-month cycle of charitable activity, and view ourselves as “investors” in their good works? In fact, how do we even know if they’re fully using their power as change agents – after all, all nonprofits exist to advance the public interest, which is why they are tax-exempt in the first place.

How can we lengthen our leverage, so to speak, so that not only do our donations make a difference, they also join an arsenal comprising several money pots: a charity’s investments, if they have an endowment; their grantmaking, if they’re a foundation; and the formula for allocating operational funds, e.g., program and administrative costs.

Here are the key questions:

• How do decisions affecting these overlapping financial pools square with a charitable institution’s primary beliefs, commitments, and values?
• Does the entity fully flex its fiduciary muscle to advance the public interest, consistent with its espoused mission?
• And, perhaps more importantly, How are we, the people, to find out the answers to these questions?

The Untapped Power of Xchange Relationships │ Our role as donors – and citizens – endow us with more power than we think. That’s because gift relationships provide the foundation of sustainable, prosperous, and just economic systems. They constitute transactions that have a “greater good” in mind: we transfer funds from ourselves to institutions, expecting something good in return—not necessarily for ourselves, but for a better world. They have “change-making” power, so let’s call our relationship to them, when we give them our time, talent, or treasure, Xchange relationships—where “X” stands for whatever is desirable: cleaner air and water; decent health care; affordable housing and education; cultural expression; social justice. The list goes on and on.

They’re gift relationships, with teeth.

At their core, economic systems are gift relationships, too—they’re transactions, exchanges of one thing for another, some of which are tangible, some which are not. Whatever the motive and means, exchange relationships occur with an eye toward something better—although nowadays that “something” usually benefits a tiny few, at the expense of the many.

But that’s not a reason to deny the simple power of gift relationships, of exchange relationships, to sustain and strengthen community. Indeed, the term “economy” comes from the Greek “oikonomia,” which meant “management of the household,” with the household connected to the production, distribution, and consumption of life’s necessities. The household, the family, however small it is and whether or not there are blood ties, is the fundamental unit of community—encompassing even those who are too poor to have a roof over their head. Oikonomia is a multifaceted word that sometimes is translated as “stewardship,” itself a first cousin of “fiduciary,” which means a designated agent occupying a special relation of trust, confidence, or responsibility in obligation to others.

The fiduciary duty, rightly understood and enacted, is mindful of the moral, social, judicious, and political dimension of human experience. That’s something French sociologist Marcel Mauss helped us understand 88 years ago in his wonderful little book, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.

But in recent decades, we’ve experienced massive fiduciary failure and institutional corruption. The fiduciary duty has fallen victim to a cynical, reductionist view of human behavior, leading to, as longtime corporate governance guru Nell Minow puts it, “ethical risk, the collective choice problem and conflicts of interest, amplified by informational asymmetry.”  The result, she says, fosters a self-perpetuating cycle of “perverse incentives and the imposition of externalities.”

Yuck.

Let’s make 2013 the year that we revive the fiduciary ethic by restoring “ethics” and “civic virtue” to it. As donors, you can look beyond outstretched hands and leverage your donor power to assure better corporate, investor, and nonprofit accountability to the public interest all year ‘round.  Tomorrow, on New Year’s Day, I’ll show you some ways this can happen.

But for the moment, in the waning hours of 2012, here’s a listing of ten of my favorite organizations – in no particular order – that are making a difference. They’re helping to restore the fiduciary ethic to its truest meaning, particularly in the realm of corporate and investor accountability.

• The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), a U.S. based nonprofit launched in early October, has embarked on a multi-stakeholder consultative process to establish material sustainability issues for 89 industries, suitable for corporate reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Get involved, if you’re interested in changing reporting requirements, and donate here.  (Disclaimer: I’m on SASB’s Advisory Council.)

• The New Economics Institute, helmed by longtime friend and colleague (and Murninghan Post co-founder) Bob Massie, seeks to “build a New Economy that prioritizes the well-being of people and the planet,” according to its vision statement. It’s exciting, and just getting started. Get involved if you want to build a New Economy, and donate here.

• The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) has been around for more than 40 years, leading the charge on economic opportunity and justice for all. Their motto: 41 Years of Faithful Investment in People and Planet. Building on the moral commitments and public theology of the civil rights movement, ICCR and other religious investors – more recently, Islamic investors – have drawn upon multiple roots to advance the idea of sustainable prosperity, an ancient idea going back to the oikos. Help them remain a force for good, encourage your house of worship to get involved (if they aren’t already), and donate here. They’re awesome!

• Ceres is a powerful network of investors, companies and public interest groups working to accelerate and expand the adoption of sustainable business practices and solutions to build a healthy global economy. Their impact is huge. If you donate by midnight tonight, your gift will be matched. Donate here.

• The Center for Responsive Politics operates OpenSecrets.org and has a powerfully urgent mission: track political money. It’s “the only independent nonprofit organized to follow all the money spent to influence federal elections and the policies that have an impact on American lives.” As stated on its website, Count Cash. Make Change. Donate here.

• Speaking of political money (and corruption), Rootstrikers.org is a grassroots network of activists fighting the corrupting influence of money in politics. As stated on its website, “There is no partisanship in the fight against this corruption. There are liberals, conservatives, and libertarians among our members. And while we don’t pretend that we share a common end, we do recognize our common enemy. Our project will live until that enemy has left.” Learn how to get involved to support their efforts, and donate here.

• The Responsible Endowments Coalition (REC) works hard to “build and unify the college and university-based responsible investment movement, both by educating and empowering a diverse network of individuals to act on their campuses, and by fostering a national network for collective action. We empower young people to defend human rights and the environment while making both corporations and universities accountable to global stakeholders. Our goal is to foster social and environmental change by making responsible investment common practice amongst colleges and universities, and to support the next generation of activists with a new and powerful toolkit.” Help the next generation make a better world by supporting their efforts, and donate here.

• No doubt you’ve heard of 350.org, which was founded by Bill McKibben. Its mission: “building a grassroots movement to fight climate change. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries.” According to May Boeve, Executive Director of 350.org, I got word that an anonymous donor was willing to match donations up to a total of $75,000 from NEW donors to 350.org. So if you’re new to 350.org, donate here.

• You probably haven’t heard of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), but you should. It’s often is a thorn in the side of mainstream organized philanthropy, and that’s a good thing, given the foundation world’s overall power and lack of accountability. NCRP, founded in 1976, “has served as the country’s independent watchdog of foundations. NCRP promotes philanthropy that serves the public good, is responsive to people and communities with the least wealth and opportunity, and is held accountable to the highest standards of integrity and openness.” They’re not just rabble-rousers. “Over time, institutional grantmakers, federal and state governments, and individuals have taken our recommendations and turned them into policy, such as our promotion of comprehensive financial reporting for foundations as well as the inclusion of advocacy organizations in the Combined Federal Campaign—now both widely accepted as ‘good practice,’” they state on their website. “One of NCRP’s early accomplishments also involved tackling United Way’s monopoly on workplace fundraising. It played a critical role in the development of alternative workplace giving funds, such as Community Shares, Earth Shares and Community Coalition Funds.” NCRP’s work is vitally important, and you’ll be hearing more about it in 2013. Donate here.

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is another nonprofit perhaps unknown to you, but has been fighting hard on your behalf since 1985. You don’t have to pay a lot of money to write documents, send email, or do other things electronically. “Giants like Microsoft and Apple are trying harder than ever to control the software you use.
  The FSF brings software freedom supporters together to amplify your voices and make an impact,” says FSF. “In 2013, our goal is to turn up the volume and reach more people than ever before with the message that all software can and should be free. To make this possible, we want to raise $350,000 by January 31st. If you’ve been following the progress bar on our homepage, you know we’re about halfway there. Can you help us reach our goal?” Support freedom. Donate here. (Disclaimer: MurnPost Technical Strategy Advisor Joshua Gay works with FSF.)

So there you have it. Ten organizations, working hard to make money and power more accountable to the public interest. What better way to ring out 2012 and ring in 2013 than to get involved with their efforts—or support organizations with similar aims? That’s a gift relationship that counts, and what it means to be an Xchange agent.

Happy New Year!

The TakeAway: The world may not have ended for us today, but it did for 27 women and children who were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday. That unspeakable tragedy reopens debates over gun ownership, violence, and mental health treatment. One dimension of “ownership”, however, involves not just the flow of guns but the flow of capital that makes gun manufacture possible. It’s time for investors to step up and make sure that their fiduciary role does not include investments in killing machines or other holdings that undermine human and planetary well-being. Rather than restricted to specific issues and certain portions of a portfolio – as was the case during the 1970s and 1980s’ debates over South Africa- and tobacco-related equity investments – the idea here is to view the fiduciary ethic as encompassing all asset classes and all issues. We need an Apocalypse Now, a positive approach that unveils the “ethics” of the “fiduciary ethic”, ethics that are nourished by civic moral roots that serve to inform and transform.

The world was supposed to come to an end today, according to apocalyptic interpretations of the Mayan calendar, but it didn’t.

But a week ago, for 26 innocent children and women, it did. That’s when their apocalyptic moment became burned into our consciousness. It wasn’t quite end times, but the world did feel turned upside down, and there were enough frightening images to keep you up at night, even if they weren’t from the Book of Revelation.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “apocalypse” commonly is associated with ancient Jewish and Christian texts from the second century B.C. to the second century A.D. that contain prophetic or symbolic visions. These images show the destruction of the world and the salvation of the righteous, the Rapture, and the “left behind”. Through the centuries, the Book of Revelation and its apocalyptic motif became canonic, despite the fact that in those days there were all kinds of prophecies and visions throughout Asia Minor and the Holy Land. Some were buried and forgotten, but Revelations lived on.

Indeed, an alternative interpretation of “apocalypse” begins with its ancient Greek meaning: to reveal something that’s hidden, to uncover, to unveil. The etymology of “apocalypse” – the Greek word is ἀποκάλυψις – comes from ἀποκαλύπτω (apokalúptō, “I disclose, reveal”), from ἀπό (apó, “from”) and καλύπτω (kalúptō, “I cover”). As such, apocalypse can serve as a neutral term that opens up other applications to modern life, more constructive ones that belie the fiery destruction of the Armageddon motif.

Let us ponder that kind of Apocalypse, a “great unveiling” that shows us another way of organizing our lives together, not end times but new times, where we rededicate ourselves to doing what is right, as God gives us to understand the right.

Here are a few ideas about what that means to me.

Politics and Policy │The impact of last Friday’s massacre at Sandy Hook was visceral, and continues to resonate. How could it be, that twenty precious children and six adult women charged with their care could be so brutally murdered? Policy and investment questions aside, as one whose sister was a young victim of heinous violence just over 40 years ago (and whose kidnapper and killer was never prosecuted), I know that the effects are permanent, that one never “forgets” because the sense of family wholeness and well-being has been shattered, forever. There will be no closure, no healing, no full sense of justice.

I also know that whole communities – even a nation – are touched by such tragedy, because it reaches into the core of what it means to be human. The suffering and grieving are shared, and rituals provide some source of comfort, a pattern that helps give expression to what otherwise cannot be expressed. The interfaith memorial service at Newtown was such an event, stunning in its simplicity. It was a plain but powerful platform for diverse religious traditions to call forth tender mercies in defiance of those who consider the gun “a reverenced god”, as Garry Wills so eloquently put it. At this service, held in a gymnasium with folding chairs, the starkness a reminder of how ordinary are those who suffer the most, President Barack Obama had his Gettysburg moment in the best speech of his presidency: that those slain shall not have died in vain, that, “whatever measure of comfort we can provide, we will provide. Whatever portion of sadness that we can share with you to ease this heavy load, we will gladly bear. Newtown, you are not alone….

In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.”

On Wednesday, the President made good on this commitment. He announced the formation of a Cabinet-level initiative, led by Vice President Joe Biden, that will reach out to stakeholders and develop concrete proposals suitable for legislative submission by the end of January. The package would include proposals for banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips. But the problem will be examined from educational, mental health, and cultural perspectives.  “There’s a space between what the 2^nd Amendment allows and no rules at all,” he said. “And [the Vice President] will be working to try and fill it.”

On Friday, President Obama expressed his support of a public petition on gun control. “I can’t do it alone,” he said in a video posted on the White House web site. “I need your help. If we’re going to succeed, it’s going to take a sustained effort from mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, law enforcement and responsible gun owners, organizing, speaking up, calling their members of Congress as many times as it takes, standing up and saying enough on behalf of all our kids. That’s how change happens.”

But also on Friday, the National Rifle Association, after days of silence, finally spoke out. Rather than support any kind of initiative aimed at curbing gun violence, the NRA called for Congress “to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation. And, to do it now to make sure that blanket safety is in place when our kids return to school in January.” It then offered up its own “school shields emergency response” program for doing so. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president.

He went on to blame the media industry for a culture of violence conducive to school shootings. “Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonize gun owners,” he said.  He then introduced former Arkansas congressman and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency official Asa Hutchinson to lead the effort, who said the “model security plan” featuring “trained, armed, qualified” personnel represents “one key component among many that can provide the first line of difference as well as the last line of defense.” Then the surreal press conference ended abruptly, with no questions taken.

Personal Grieving │Along with the grieving process comes an overwhelming desire to make sense of it, to find causal roots, to feel somehow that such violence and loss could have been prevented. “If only…” becomes a mantra, a counterfactual that gives one some semblance of power in the face of such overwhelming powerlessness. This impulse for rationalizing the unfathomable occurs at both an individual and societal level. That’s why almost as soon as the news hit the airwaves, the debates over gun control and mental illness swelled up to fill the space, that hole blasted through the social fabric held together by love’s innocence and the duty to protect and preserve.

The space that exists when you realize that really, really awful things can happen, that you are not safe in this world and utterly helpless in the face of such horror.

That space, as Elisabeth Kübler Ross described, between denial and acceptance, before it’s kicked in, where you have yet to absorb the shock and sadness, much less come to grips with the sheer magnitude that your life’s forever changed.

The families affected by the Sandy Hook massacre are at the earliest stages of a lifelong process, and no one can say how each person will be able to cope. For now, there are funerals to finish (27 in one week), holidays and birthdays to endure, thank-yous to those offering sympathy, composure to muster and show to the world—while inside you’re in pieces and don’t know if you’re coming or going.

For a long time daily life will be filled with harsh reminders of the sheer suddenness of it: unopened Christmas presents, favorite toys and pictures, the smell, the soiled laundry, the bed sheets and clothes of loved ones who will never return.  When my sister was murdered, there was no such thing as grief counseling – or, for that matter, mass school shootings – and we were miles away from understanding the neurobiological roots of psychopathy (or its allied field, “neurolaw”) or that even 9-year olds could be psychopaths. This time, it’s different, but only partly. Outpourings of love and support will provide some solace, and certain routines will provide some glimmers of hope that, somehow, life will go on. But the long, sad journey for those affected is a deep and private one, affecting relationships and worldviews for generations. No social policy or medical prescription will change that.

Social Pathologies │And it’s not just the Newtown families. Thousands of other families are suffering, too, but they’re not high-profile. Some grim (and bizarre) figures:

• According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, 14,612 people were murdered in the U.S. in 2011 (a decline from previous years, but still one murder every 36 minutes), with firearms killing 8,583.
• The U.S. has the highest gun ownership rate in the world, with 80 guns for every 100 Americans as opposed to 6 in England and Wales.
• There are more gunshops in the U.S. (58,000, according to government statistics) than there are Starbucks worldwide (fewer than 20,000, according to Starbucks).

We like to shrug our shoulders and say, “It’s too complicated. There’s nothing we can do. There’s always a crazy person out there who will find a way of doing what they’re determined to do.”

Really? Really? Is that what we’ve become? THAT IT’s TOO COMPLICATED??? Just who’s crazy here?

Writing in the Huffington Post, Geoffrey Stone, Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, tells us that during the last 20 years, fewer Americans think our laws regulating the sale and possession of firearms should be made stricter, dropping from 78 percent to 43 percent.

Meanwhile, the average firearm homicide rate for the United States is approximately 17 times higher than in our peer nations (Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, and Spain). “Of course it may just be that Americans are 17 times crazier than Canadians, Germans, Italians, Australians, etc.,” Stone writes. “Just ask the NRA.

They’ll tell you that’s the explanation. And it is. But the crazies are those who support the NRA and who systematically distort the facts, ultimately contributing to the bloody deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children every year.

Tell me, really: Who are the crazy people?

Looking for Remedies │ Meanwhile, at a wider level, as the investigation continues into the motives and means associated with the case, debates over gun control and mental health services – and video games and movies, and school security, and the criminal capacity for moral judgment – begin anew. There are many dimensions to this tragic story, and many questions and decisions to be made. Over time perhaps some good things will happen – many already have started – while others are discarded, or set aside for another day.

As for the rest of us, we may suffer what psychologists call “vicarious trauma” – I know I have – and feel compelled to do something – anything – to rebalance what’s gotten out of whack. For some, in addition to condolences and suffering presence, this involves small steps toward immunizing society from future atrocities such as this. At a personal level, we can hold all our children and loved ones close this Christmas, vowing always to treat them with love and compassion.  We can learn how best to talk to kids about what happened, and take care of ourselves, too.

At a societal level, we can apply our limited energies to areas that count – including the economic sphere – thus converting our grief and outrage into constructive action affecting the congeries of issues that cause such pain.

The ideas flowed: Famed TV doctor Dr. Mehmet Oz says we need a Homeland Security approach to mental health. Joseph A. Califano, Jr., top domestic policy advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, reminds us of earlier attempts at comprehensive gun control, and the famous two-week policy window within which to act.[1] Within the economic sphere, Dick’s Sporting Goods, a chain with more than 500 stores, temporarily halted the sale of “modern sporting rifles” in its nationwide stores, while removing all guns from sale and display at its Newtown region store.

These are great ideas, but now’s a good time to consider another approach, too—one that focuses on the production of these semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, in addition to their legality, distribution, and demand. The late Dr. Judah Folkman taught us that if you cut off the blood supply to cancer cells, they won’t grow and kill people. That approach should be taken to the manufacture of assault weapons and their bullets: you cut off the money supply to gunmakers, so they can’t produce products that kill people.

So what are those entities? According to the New York Times, Cerberus Capital Management is one of several private equity firms – perhaps the most prominent – that have holdings in gun manufacturers. Others institutional gun owners include Sciens Capital Management (which is advised by the Blackstone Group) and a fund operated by Credit Suisse, which jointly own Colt Defense “which was spun out of the maker of the .44-40 Colt revolver.” (A former Credit Suisse investment banker then moved to Colt.) Cerberus Capital built the Freedom Group, which owns Bushmaster Firearms International, manufacturer of the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle used at Sandy Hook. According to Bloomberg News, Cerberus bought the Bushmaster gun company in 2006, as part of a strategic effort to build the Freedom Group into a weapons production powerhouse—or “Big Shot”, said the New York Times headline from November 2011.

Of course, we can’t expect Wall Street to step up and cut their ties to these widely-available killing machines—it’s not the nature of their animal spirits, of profit at any price. Commenting on the reluctance of Wall Street to advocate against their own self-interest, the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin recently wrote, “private equity firms have a long history of investing in ‘sin’ companies, including guns, alcohol, gambling and tobacco, in part because the companies often are inherently discounted.”

But what about those beneficiaries for whom private equity firms serve as a fiduciary? Come to think of it, does upholding the fiduciary obligation mean that you always pick profit, no matter the impact or price? What if the price was the sacrifice of 20 innocent children? Is the fiduciary obligation to beneficiaries to be measured in lucre, instead of blood? Is that what retirees choose when they entrust their savings to money managers? That in exchange for pension earnings, you get “twenty dead six- and seven-year-olds in ten minutes, their bodies riddled with bullets designed to rip apart bone and organ”, in The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik’s stark words?

I don’t think so.

Flexing Fiduciary Muscle │ On Wednesday, Peter Kinder, one of the pioneers in socially responsible investing, wrote on his blog The Bell that Cerberus Capital Management, like many private equity firms, took its name from Greco-Roman mythology. That is, it comes from ‘Cerberus’, the three-headed dog, “which kept the shades in Hades”. That’s “an apt image for a PE firm, as would be ‘Bane Capital’,” Kinder wrote. “That endowments and pensions remain heavily committed to PE, after 25 years of maximizing shareholder value, tells all about their concern for anything other than the bottom line.”

That’s the argument former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer made. Writing on Slate, Spitzer pointed out the enormous power held by institutional investors to affect business enterprise.  Stating that it’s time to apply pressure to the private equity firm that dominates the gun industry, he called upon college students and pensioners to channel their moral outrage into inquisition, to find out if they’re indirect beneficiaries of gun manufacturers.  “Every student at a university should ask the university if it is invested in Cerberus. Every member of a union should ask their pension-fund managers if they are invested. Information is the key first step. From there, action will quickly follow.”

Within hours, state treasurers and institutional investors began to act.

On Monday, California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer announced he would ask California’s two major pension funds (the largest in the U.S.) – the California State Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the $155 billion California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) – to divest investments in firearms manufacturers that produce guns prohibited under state law. “CalPERS and CalSTRS should not be invested in any company that makes guns which are illegal in California,” Lockyer said. “These weapons have no place in our communities. Our families and children are safer without them.”

(Even though the Federal assault weapon ban ended in 2004, California has its own restrictions on gun sales. Other states, according to ProPublica, have loosened theirs. But as of late Tuesday, President Obama announced his support of California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s expected legislation to reinstate the federal ban.) CalSTRS agreed to review its investment in Cerberus, which has a stake in the Freedom Group. According to a CalSTRS spokesman, it also holds ownership stakes in Sturm, Ruger & Co. and Smith & Wesson Holding Corp., two publicly traded gun manufacturers.

Other states and municipalities followed suit: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and New York City are reviewing their public pension funds for direct and indirect holdings in weapons companies. Universities are, too; for example, the University of California’s retirement plan has investments amounting to more than $35 million in Cerberus.

Years ago, weapons manufacturers were the target of divestiture campaigns waged by church investors and others concerned about our engagement with war. These, along with tobacco, gambling, and nuclear companies, were classified as “sin stocks” that were anathema to responsible investors. More recently, sin stocks have receded as an issue, in part due to the far larger focus on sustainability and other definitions of “responsible investing”.  But now they’re back. Robert Zevin, founder of Zevin Asset Management and another pioneer in the field of socially responsible investing, told Boston’s WBUR.FM news on Wednesday that investors play an important role in affecting public policy, demonstrated by earlier efforts involving divestiture from South Africa and tobacco-related investments.

According to a spokesperson, Zevin believes “this is an opportune time for states to begin to express interest in addressing the cost of state police, prisons, healthcare and public safety while attracting investments from outside the state by reducing gun ownership and gun violence.  States could do this by first codifying their beliefs by divesting from such companies and then taking other avenues such as lawsuits against handgun and rifle companies as a beginning for legislation on these matters.”

Investor decisions to “stay” or “sell” also was picked up by ethicist and human rights activist Christine Bader. “Divestment is exactly the wrong outcome: Running away from the problem doesn’t solve it,” Bader wrote in a blog appearing on the Huffington Post. She said that investors should use their ownership power to “lobby company management, file shareholder resolutions, and work with peer institutions on initiatives that promote responsible investment….For all of the complexities and problems that companies can bring to a situation, they can bring leverage and scrutiny.”

This is a familiar conundrum, articulated by political economist Albert O. Hirschman in 1970 (the year my sister was murdered). Hirschman’s classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, made the case for either “exit” or “voice” as tactics for organizational change. In one of those ironic examples of timing, Hirschman died last week at the age of 97.

What Next? │ In response to this pressure, on Tuesday, Cerberus issued a statement stating it was selling the company to avoid being “drawn into the national debate” about gun control. Its decision to sell the Freedom Group came within hours of the California treasurer’s and CalSTRS’ announcements. (In a poignant twist to the story, Bloomberg News also reported that the father of Cerberus’ founder is a resident of Newtown.)

Commenting Tuesday on the speed with which Cerberus responded, Spitzer wrote on Slate that there’s “a significant message here: Ownership matters. Ownership can be more powerful than regulation. The capacity of pension funds and endowments to act collectively and use their rightful interest in having their funds invested in a way that reflects their core values is something we have largely forgotten.

It is too easy when things go fundamentally awry to call for more legislation or blame failed regulators. And surely we shouldn’t diminish the pressure we apply to Congress now to enact real gun control. But at the end of the day, it is those who own the shares and invest the dollars who can and must be held to account. And if those investors awoke to this responsibility and possibility, they could make enormous improvements in American life.

Imagine if investors in Wal-Mart really cared about bribery at that company’s overseas operations or safety standards at its overseas manufacturing plants. If investors pulled their capital, corporate leaders would have to respond.

Imagine if the pension funds and endowments that own much of the equity in our financial services companies demanded that those companies revisit the way mortgages were marketed to those without adequate skills to understand the products they were being sold. Management would have to change the way things were done.

And to return to guns, imagine if the shareholders pressured large retailers to cease the sale of certain semi-automatic weapons or risk having their shares sold? You can bet that those retailers would reconsider their gun sales.

Shareholders have the right and obligation to set the parameters of corporate behavior within which management pursues profit. The speed with which Cerberus said it was getting out of the gun business shows how easy it could be to change corporate behavior, if only shareholders set their minds to it.”

Ownership matters. Ownership can be more powerful than regulation. The capacity of pension funds and endowments to act collectively and use their rightful interest in having their funds invested in a way that reflects their core values is something we have largely forgotten. It is too easy when things go fundamentally awry to call for more legislation or blame failed regulators. And surely we shouldn’t diminish the pressure we apply to Congress now to enact real gun control. But at the end of the day, it is those who own the shares and invest the dollars who can and must be held to account. And if those investors awoke to this responsibility and possibility, they could make enormous improvements in American life.

Apocalypse Now │ The story of the Sandy Hook tragedy doesn’t end here, of course. Over coming weeks, the airwaves will be filled with passionate controversy over which approach, what policy, who should be accountable, and how. We know we need to stop the madness that’s infected our society, that devalues life and elevates profit.  Maybe we’ve reached a tipping point regarding laws affecting gun-related violence—I don’t know.

What I do know is that it’s up to each of us to decide how best to respond, in ways that are constructive and respectful and do not undermine what fragile ties remain in our great body politic. After all, words are bullets, too.

What I also know is that the families affected – along with those millions of other families touched by violence, who have borne a burden beyond belief – will go through this holiday season with heavy hearts. And as the seasons come and go, their pain will never go away. They will find, somehow, ways of making space in their lives for it, and carrying on.

And I know that the power of that interfaith service called forth a higher law that serves as a beacon for peace and prosperity affecting our economic and political lives, and how we govern ourselves. That’s a law that speaks to the core of what it means to be human, to be trusted, to take care.

If you ask me, we need an Apocalypse Now, a positive approach that unveils the “ethics” of the “fiduciary ethic”, ethics that are nourished by civic moral roots that serve to inform and transform. Ethics which are bounded by notions of trusteeship, of stewardship, of being a custodian or guardian. Ethics which are rooted in civic moral principles related to “the good life” and the “common goods” that can be harmonized with investment policy and practice. Rather than restricted to specific issues and certain portions of a portfolio – as was the case during the 1970s and 1980s’ debates over South Africa- and tobacco-related equity investments – the idea here is to view the fiduciary ethic as encompassing all asset classes and all issues.

The path I’ve chosen for the past 40 years is this: to make our institutions more accountable to the simple rules of love and justice, to try and dig deeper and articulate the fundamental civic moral principles that lie at the core of the fiduciary and stewardship tradition, and restore them to their proper place in 21^st century asset and corporate management practice.

It won’t bring my sister back to life, nor erase the decades of pain and suffering my family has endured, and continues to experience.

But it does aim for the roots of how we organize our economic, political, and social lives together, in shared common cause, even if we disagree about tactics. There are many roads to Jerusalem. And that’s a revelation, an apocalypse, I can live with.

Part One of Three

The TakeAway: The recent annual conference of the Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals focused on “The Shape of Things to Come”—that is, key issues and trends affecting corporate accountability and sustainable prosperity. In so doing, it provided further evidence of the importance of these underappreciated (and under-resourced) governance professionals, who are pivotal intermediaries in the restoration of trust in business enterprise and capital markets. Part One looks at how and why corporate secretaries matter. Part Two briefly summarizes what the conference covered. Part Three examines more closely the interrelated themes of psychology / behavioral science; education and learning; and moral reflection and judgment that undergirded conference proceedings—with ongoing implications for professional practice.

Okay, I know it’s vacation time, but here’s a pop quiz: Who’s the most underrated influence on promoting sustainable, accountable, and just business enterprise?

(A) Dissident shareholders;

(B) Prosecuting attorneys;

(C) Consumer activists;

(D) Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert;

(E) Corporate secretaries;

(F) Whistleblowers.

If you picked (E), you get to ring the bell. (The others, of course, are influential too, but they get far more attention.)

Bell ringing is what the Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals[1] did yesterday at Nasdaq, where Society President and CEO Ken Bertsch rang the closing bell. Nine days earlier, the Society wrapped up its hugely informative, entertaining, and cutting-edge national conference, the 66^th in its history. More than 800 paid attendees, sponsors, speakers, and guests descended upon Washington, D.C. (the first time in that city) to learn from presenters and each other about how best to address “The Shape of Things to Come”. They tackled an eclectic array of governance matters likely to occur over the next five years, affecting public, private, and nonprofit organizations of all shapes and sizes.

Why does this matter? Because corporate secretaries now play a significant but vastly underappreciated role in promoting corporate responsibility, sustainability, and good governance. They’re the link among owners, boards, and management, between internal and external stakeholders. As such, they’re pivotal intermediaries in reconciling complex and sometimes competing claims, and operate within a highly volatile environment featuring heightened public expectations about the right thing to do.

This is a far cry from days of old (that is, ten years ago, pre-Sarbanes-Oxley), when the corporate secretary’s job was far less dynamic, dominated by record-keeping more than anything else, within an adversarial operating environment.

The job has come a long way since 2002, a transformation on vivid display July 11 – 14, through both formal conference proceedings and offsite meetings and exchanges. “It’s the biggest conference we’ve had in a long time,” said conference chair Doug Chia, Assistant General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Johnson & Johnson. “We’ve managed to jam in a lot in just 2½ short days, with over 120 speakers.”

Jam in a lot, indeed. This Post, the first of three parts, touches upon key changes in the nature of the corporate secretary’s job. This is something CSR and sustainability professionals, mainstream media (both legacy and emerging), and the general public needs to understand.

Part Two summarizes briefly what the conference covered, in sessions devoted to key issues affecting shareholder engagement, board decision making, management operations, and professional skill building. Political and policy trends were on the agenda, too, including upcoming SEC rulemaking. (Ning Chiu of the law firm Davis Polk also provides an excellent overview.) Many of the sessions were recorded, presumably for access at some future point. Conference planners assembled an illustrious group: many were authors of recently published books on conference topics.

Part Three delves more deeply into three meta-themes I detected running throughout many of the presentations. They include the importance of psychological insights, educational pedagogy, and moral deliberation in making corporate enterprise more accountable and productive.

Chia, the planning committee, and the Society team received well-deserved praise for successfully organizing and running such a uniformly high-quality affair, which included separate tracks for spouses and families. While it was impossible to sample everything, they offered up tantalizing topics worth pursuing even after the proceedings ended.

Indeed, the Society might consider ways in which ongoing engagement and collaborative learning on conference topics might occur, offsite and online. That’s a juicy opportunity facing next year’s planners, chaired by Jim Brashear, Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary at ZixCorp. The 2013 conference is slated for Seattle, from July 10 – 13.

“There are so many conference experiences you can have within this one conference. That’s what we intended to create from the beginning,” Chia said.

Nota bene: an overview of conference-related Tweets with the hashtag #Society12 can be seen at the Storify page curated by Fay Feeney, Founder and CEO of Risk4Good and a “digital whisperer” to boot.

Evolution and Growing Pains

The corporate secretary’s role has changed significantly over recent years, as have expectations for what it takes to do the job well. Ken Bertsch’s appointment in the fall of 2010 signaled as such, as I wrote in October 2010.

In addition to being Type A organizers and good notetakers, they now need to possess intellectual, temperamental, and communication skills that enable them to work well with a wide range of ideals and people.

They must anticipate and help the firm address profound changes within the business operating environment having a material impact (where the definition of “materiality” is expanding), along with rising expectations from all sides regarding performance accountability and excellence.

They also must manage the tripartite balance among directors, executives, and owners, as well as interface between internal and external corporate stakeholders.

No longer the silent scribe, corporate secretaries now play multiple roles—trend spotter, educator, mediator, traffic cop, player-coach, shuttle diplomat, to name a few. They’re key agents in the movement toward more sustainable, just, and accountable enterprise. Yet their roles remain underappreciated and under-resourced in the more visible (and expanding) constellation of “good governance” professionals and players.

Doug Chia, in a web interview conducted during the July conference, reflected on the job’s evolution and growing pains, particularly given escalating demands for broader engagement with shareholders and other stakeholders.

“It’s put a lot more time demands on the job,” he said. “The corporate secretary’s job now is becoming a combination of the traditional corporate secretary, in terms of doing board work, general governance work and securities work.

But now you also have a role to play in investor relations. You have a role to play in public relations, government relations. You’re really being put at the crossroads of many decisions at the company, that involve parts of the corporate function that the corporate secretary probably didn’t have that much interaction with before. All of a sudden, they’re saying, We need the corporate secretary in the meeting, or you’re saying, I need to be in that meeting because I have stakeholders who really care about this issue.

I think that’s happening more than ever before. And therefore, a corporate secretary’s calendar can get filled up very quickly with all kinds of after-school assignments, if you will.

Meanwhile, as greater attention is focused on corporate boards, they’re leaning on corporate secretaries for information and counsel. But there are real implications for how the rest of a company responds, too. Changes in the corporate secretary’s job have a ripple effect, which affects how they’re perceived in the organization.

“It’s the director, but it’s also the management,” Chia told interviewer T.K. Kerstetter, President of Corporate Board Member, who, along with the Society, co-produces the “Governance Minutes” on-demand web show series. Governance Minutes launched last March; other segments include an interview with CSR pioneer Tim Smith, Senior Vice President of Walden Asset Management, on 2012’s environmental, social, and governance [ESG] proxy proposals; longtime governance expert Sarah Teslik’s take on broader proxy trends and patterns; audit firm rotation; and an interview with Anthony Horan, corporate secretary of JPMorgan Chase.

“I think that management is realizing that, or having to understand, that certain issues actually are corporate governance issues, where they might not have thought that before,” Chia said. “Your role is to be there to explain why or why not something is a corporate governance issue. So a lot of it is really educating your own colleagues that you work with every day, in terms of why is it that the corporate secretary is finding his or her way into so many areas of the corporation.”

Shuttle Diplomacy

This process of educating management is likely to grow, Chia believes, posing the biggest challenge to corporate secretaries over the next 18 months. That’s because “a lot of boards already understand corporate governance issues. They have a pretty good feel for this kind of thing. Many of them have been in positions prior, where they saw this, they had an external role.”

He acknowledges that different companies face different situations, that scale and scope affect priorities. Nevertheless, in addition to making room on calendars to meet with external stakeholders, corporate secretaries must help insiders understand why things like greater disclosure are important.

“People inside the company, they’re not quite sure, Why are people asking for additional disclosure? Why should we give it to them? If it’s not required, what is the advantage?” Chia said. “People are always going to find the downside of additional work, additional disclosure.

And there you have to play shuttle diplomat. You have to explain to people internally, why this is important on the outside. And explain to the people on the outside why disclosure is not just this kind of snap your fingers and numbers appear, and we can just disclose whatever we want in whatever form you wanted it.

So it’s really, you end up playing that shuttle diplomat, of trying to explain to the outsiders what the inside view is, and to the inside what the outside view is.

Next: A rundown of enduring standout moments at The Shape of Things to Come

The challenge to CEOs and governing boards is to foster a better climate in which the ethical beliefs and values of the firm can be embedded in business operations, relationships, and all forms of accountability. The challenge for rest of us – investors, depositors, employees, intermediaries, policymakers, regulators, the media and educational institutions – is to demand and enact a better climate in which the ethical beliefs and values of CEOs, governing boards, and capital investors can flourish.

“I’ve always tried to live my life by a moral code and things that I thought were right. And when I’ve been involved with institutions that I’ve been responsible for, I’ve tried to bring those standards of conduct into those organizations, and insist that those organizations live by that same kind of moral or ethical code…and that it conduct its business in a highly professional, responsible, ethical way.  I stressed that at Goldman Sachs in everything we did, and ultimately developed what we called Our Business Principles. It was a written statement of the special features of what we felt Goldman Sachs stood for, and there were fourteen of them. ‘The clients’ interests always come first, and if we serve our clients well, our success will follow.’ That was one of the principles. That was the kind of thing we talked about.”

—John Whitehead, former Chairman of Goldman Sachs, author of Goldman’s “Business Principles”, Interview with Marcy Murninghan, 1997

We need more John Whiteheads. Desperately.

We also need more ethical, engaged, and diligent boards, and investors that recognize their fiduciary obligation does not mean favoring short-term profits at the expense of other values, including longer-term sustainable prosperity.

At a bigger level, we need more conscientious capital markets, which recognize that the purpose of finance is to serve society, not screw it.

All of these come to mind as we witness yet another banking scandal, the latest in what feels like a conveyor belt of bad behavior where money, power, and politics are involved.

Sordid Saga

In late June, Barclays was fined $451 million by the U.S. and U.K. for submitting false interbank lending rates affecting trillions of dollars in interest paid by corporations and consumers for mortgages, car loans, and credits cards. The London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) scandal is widely viewed as the tip of the iceberg, affecting as many as 20 major banks. Investigations underway in Canada, the U.S., Japan, the E.U., Switzerland, and Britain are looking into possible rate rigging activity going back as much as 5 years.

Heads began to roll—and return back. First, last Monday, Marcus Agius, Barclays chair, announced his resignation. Then on Tuesday, July 3rd, Barclays American-born CEO, Robert E. Diamond, Jr., resigned, the day before his scheduled appearance before a Parliamentary committee. Also exiting: Barclays chief operating officer, Jerry del Missier, reportedly at the urging of the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, Britain’s top securities regulator. On Tuesday night, Agius was back again as full time chair, admitting Barclays had “a long way to go” to regain the trust and respect of its stakeholders. He’ll stay until a replacement for Diamond is found, and then step down, according to reports.

The fallout was fast and furious. See my companion piece, “What Others Are Saying: Rotten Culture“, for a rundown of reactions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Tuesday night, politicians heralded Diamond’s departure. On Wednesday, whilst we Yanks celebrated Independence Day, Diamond appeared before MPs on the Treasury Select Committee—some of whom used to work at Barclays. He came out fighting, reiterated his disgust with the behavior of those on his watch—and pointed to other institutions, regulatory and competitive, that are culpable. The widespread reaction was that his appearance did little to satisfy onlookers. Especially grating was the exceedingly friendly tone, with Diamond using first names to address his inquisitors add making frequent references to former Barclays employees.

On Friday, the U.K. Serious Fraud Office launched a criminal investigation, in response to calls from the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and Opposition Labor leader Ed Millibrand.

The murkiest, most disturbing aspect is the possible collusion between public officials and banks. There’s that 29 October 2008 phone call to which Diamond referred, the one from Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England, allegedly passing on concerns expressed by senior politicians that Barclays rates were higher than others. Apparently this was interpreted as a signal to “low-ball its reported rate,” says The Wall Street Journal. “We’d be surprised if any central bank officials in the U.S. or the U.K. weren’t privately encouraging lower rates during the crisis. They were already doing so publicly. Since the monetary authorities were attempting to manipulate interest rates of all kinds lower during the crisis, why would Libor be an exception?”

Outraged, Paul Tucker asked to give his side of the story, and did so today before the Treasury Committee. He denied “leaning on” Barclays, and reiterated his concern that BoE and the government feared Barclays needed a bailout.

Over the weekend, reactions escalated as the stain on London’s banking culture widened. Whilst initially the blame concentrated on low level traders – primarily male; testosterone is a huge part of trading floor culture – suspicion has sinced moved up the hierarchy. It’s now focused on what Bank of England officials knew, and when they knew it.

When banks can’t be trusted with other peoples’ money, what is government to do? That’s the question the Brits are taking up in earnest, with public hearings and pronouncements from public officials and political leaders. Calls for remedial action include limiting the £17 pay-out to Diamond after his departure; setting up a government-backed investment bank; breaking up big banks; and “fence-ringing” between commercial and investment banking activity. Earlier today Reuters reported that the European commissioner in charge of financial regulation will propose amendments to E.U. market abuse rules so that “loopholes” are closed and criminal sanctions tightened.

In the wake of Diamond’s departure, Britain’s “supersized” financial system needs a massive rethink affecting purpose and structure, editorialized the Financial Times, because “the reputation of banking in London matters.” If trust is to be restored, government needs to enact policies that it already favors, rather than conducting expensive, time-consuming inquiries. “A major part of the answer must be to separate the investment and retail parts of universal banks,” said FT editors. “This would not only deal with the financial risks and conflicts, it would address the deeper problem of culture that Mr. Diamond embodied.

The clash between retail and investment banking has always been evident. What is now clear, however, is that the hard-charging, revenue-seeking investment banking culture predominates when they are pushed together. The more herbivorous retail banking ethos – with its emphasis on patient stewardship – is marginalised. This seems to lead ineluctably to the proliferation of socially questionable trading activities and abuses such as the Libor scandal.

Indeed, separating “casino banking” from “stewardship banking” is something many in the U.S. are calling for, too. It means creating measures akin to Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law separating investment from commercial / retail banking that was killed off in 1999 after big banks flagrantly violated its provisions and lobbyists persuaded politicians to repeal it.

We’ve seen this sordid dynamic at higher levels. “You help me, I’ll help you.” Innuendo. Favors traded. The nod and wink of unspoken, yet direct, appeals, between public officials and private sector players. While I don’t know who’s guilty of what and can’t begin to predict the fallout from this, I do wonder, because this directly relates to work I do, what CEOs and boards and investors could do, as well as average people.

What steps can we take to support existing reform efforts, or generate new ones? What can we – as depositors, investors, citizens – do to restore integrity to banking and make banking better?

Thankfully, there are a number of initiatives underway aimed at building better banking, both within the U.S. and around the globe. I’ll turn to those in subsequent posts, and encourage you to get involved.

In the meantime, early last week, when the story first broke, I asked a couple of highly-regarded bankers I know what they would advise the Barclays board to do—aside, of course, from wholesale resignation. Ron Grzywinski and Mary Hougton are the two living co-founders of Chicago’s ShoreBank, the nation’s first community bank, a bank that’s been called “too good to fail” but had to close its doors in 2010. I’ll share what they had to say a bit later on.

The Need for Ethical Climate Change

I think there’s a human tendency to want to use one’s power to help the other—for approval, to be a good guy, for whatever the reasons. That can be a good thing, or it can be bad—it depends on intentions and outcomes, on context and character, on the judgment of those involved.

Unless you’ve got a deeply ingrained sense of conscience, it’s easy to veer off course. When no one’s looking, or challenging your actions, or questioning if what you’re doing contradicts or undermines other ethics and commitments, then bad things just keep happening—and escalate. That’s not just mission-creep; it’s moral creep, or self-interest, wrongly understood, to twist Tocqueville.

And institutional climate becomes toxic with its poison, affecting the public sphere, too.

No wonder there’s heightened interest in behavioral econnomics and finance on these matters; human foibles and passions play an enormous role, permeating hierarchies and work groups, from the boardroom and across so-called Chinese walls, to the barrooms where people mingle after-hours.

No command-and-control risk management system is going to completely counteract that. Throw in the cozy relationships between government officials and moneymakers, and…well, that’s what drives people crazy, from Citizens United, political contributions, and lobbying, to revolving doors between the public and private sector, to efforts to defang (or defund) new laws and regulations designed to protect the public from bad banking behavior.

It’s the sense that no one cares, that it’s too big and complicated, that they’ve got a good thing going, until somebody finds out. Then there’s a flurry of outrage and pledges to reform, but then gradually, things get back to where they were. Benign cynicism, a belief that we’ll always get screwed.

While some important changes – including stiff penalties and sanctions, along with a Glass-Steagall equivalent – are needed and may occur, the bigger problem is how to address the toxic ethical climate. Our internalized sense of the right thing to do, along with tolerance and respect for others, generally finds little support in the marketplace, frenetic media environment, or public square. Modesty and humility are in short supply, particularly tied to public professions of commitment to certain principles and values that cannot be bought and sold.

The reason we need more John Whiteheads is that we lack the kind of principled business leadership that sets a standard for others to emulate. When it comes to our major multinational institutions, we lack that sense of wise stewardship, of trust, of soulcraft.

And because each and every one of these institutions is self-governing, the same can be said for their boards: the failure of institutions to command public trust is, in large measure, a reflect of the failure of boards to fulfill their legal and moral duty.

Fortunately, some business leaders are beginning to acknowledge this. On July 4th, speaking at Chatham House, Rio Tinto chairman Jan du Plessis made a compelling statement about the need for rebuilding trust, particularly within the banking sector. (You can hear a recording of his remarks here.)

Doing so, he said, ”is going to require leadership within the business community. We are going to have to accept that trust is no longer a given and we are going to have to make every effort to re-earn and re-build the trust that we all so desperately need.

In particular, large corporations and multi-nationals now really need to take up the challenge. We need to reassess how we do business and the decisions we make, in order to identify those areas where we know stakeholders rightly expect us to do better. But once we have done that, we also need to go out proactively and explain to the numerous stakeholders around us why they need big business. I am afraid, all too often in the popular mind, small and medium size businesses are seen to be good and, in simple terms, big businesses are suspected of being bad. Business – in particular big business – has a good story, but unless we are going to stand up and be counted, we cannot expect others to do so on our behalf.

Du Plessis went on to argue for sustainable, ethical, and responsible business practices, including more equitable compensation practices and better transparency and reporting. ”This is a time for leadership – to demonstrate trust at the top,” he said. “If we show trust at the top and move the debate into something more dignified than that which we have seen in recent times, we can begin the long, slow process of rebuilding trust with those whom we seek to serve.”

De Plessis was talking about power, and how it’s used. He was talking about honor and integrity, a sense of ethics and duty, of following one’s moral compass—of even having a moral compass.

So how do you cultivate a moral compass? You don’t just go out and buy one.

Understanding and Enhancing the Moral Shadow

Years ago, in a project for Harvard Divinity School, I set about asking a group of 28 prominent men and women, mostly CEOs in the financial services, journalism, and entertainment worlds, this very question. In addition to John Whitehead, the effort was backed by, among others, Norman Lear, Gary David Goldberg, Bob Monks, Hodding Carter, and the late Peter Jennings, Jon Lovelace,Teddy Forstmann, and Frank Stanton.

The “CEO study”, as it was called, was a study of integrity, of the way in which personal spiritual convictions about “the good” are integrated with the multiple – and sometimes contradictory – definitions of “the good” embedded in professional, organizational, and public life.

More specifically, it was an examination of the moral values and visions – including their wellsprings, modes of replenishment, and forms of expression. I was particularly interested in learning about the ways in which their values and visions find their way into business policy and practice, as well as public leadership.  The rationale was that decisions about flows of capital, ideas, and images have a powerful public influence, both affecting and reflecting the quality of our civic life.

In a climate of concern about declining moral standards and ethical values, I wondered how a group of people with large amounts of institutional, financial, and intellectual power at their disposal think and act regarding spirituality and civic moral responsibility.  I became curious about how they could reconcile their obvious material and vocational success with the non-economic values so essential to human well-being.

In addition to their substantive answers, what I learned was that this was not a question often asked, and that each and every respondent was more than happy to talk. Even though most of them struggled to find an entry place to their discussion of personal spirituality, soul keeping, and moral identity, they all expressed appreciation for having the chance to think and talk about matters that are so important, yet swept away in the rush of day-to-day demands.

Most of them claimed little affinity to organized religion; indeed, several were critical of Jewish and Christian orthodoxies. Yet religious ideas, images, and institutions were like a moral shadow, a sort of scrim to the scaffold of one’s life story. Crafting a moral compass meant understanding and enhancing that moral shadow, enriched by the teachings of one’s parents and other significant people while growing up.

While the Divinity School study participants’ demeanor and vocabulary couldn’t be considered overtly religious or “churchy,” I did see them all keeping faith, of being “believers”—believers in a transcendent force. Believers in a series of timeless truths regarding right and wrong. Believers in  those values that speak to our most deeply-felt sense of human being, belonging, and becoming. Believers in the virtues of love, dignity, freedom, fairness, service, and truth. Believers in believing— in a world that sometimes seems to be falling apart. They tried to translate their beliefs into practice, to live the moral life.

In fact, months later, several interviewees continued to talk about the importance of the interview to them, personally—in some cases, telling friends and associates how it provided revelation into areas not previously understood.

And this was almost 20 years ago! So what does that mean for today? Why should today’s business leaders be any different? Indeed, I don’t think they are that much different from those I interviewed.

Reviving Banking Leadership and the Fiduciary Ethic

From rules-based to values-based reform │ Last April, an important report on restoring trust in capital markets was issued by the Group of Thirty (G30). The G30 is a private, nonprofit international body comprising prominent individuals from the private and public sector, and academia. In Toward Effective Governance of Financial Institutions, the G30 called on boards to do more to strengthen governance, and that moral values influence the behavior of those with governance responsibilities. The key to reform is to promote change in how these individuals think about their responsibilities—and act accordingly.

“Values and culture drive people to do the right thing even when no one is looking,” said Lord Adair Turner, chair of the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority, in the G30 report. “They are the “ultimate ‘software’ that determines the behaviors of people throughout the financial institution and the effectiveness of its governance arrangements.” (Nota bene: It’s not that he’s against regulation; on July 1st Lord Adair reiterated his call for tighter laws against banker misbehavior.)

The CEO │The CEO embodies the purpose of the company, and stands for an idea—the core idea behind the company’s activities, a way of thinking that defines the work of all the company’s employees, and a culture that includes its corporate values, connecting the company to the larger society, writes economist and best-selling author Robert J. Shiller in his wonderful new book, Finance and the Good Society.  The CEO represents a promise between the firm and its stakeholders that its purpose will be fulfilled, its mission at the forefront of strategy and execution.

Because the path is filled with ambiguities, biases, and distortions, the leadership challenge is to achieve what former HSBC Chairman Stephen Green calls “good value”, an ongoing process that follows certain guiding principles.

Green, who’s an ordained minister in the Church of England as well as a “Lord”, currently serves as Britain’s Minister of Trade and Investment. His reflections on seeking a moral compass in banking are contained within his Financial Times best-selling book, Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality, and an Uncertain World. Green says that although these principles are not new, in our current globalized era they are more relevant and urgent than at any previous stage in human history.

These guiding principles include integrity; treating others(colleagues and customers) as ends, not just as means; ambition; life balance; leadership; and, what he considers “the one that underpins them all, being able to look ourselves in the mirror and ask two questions about our role in the global bazaar: “How is what I am doing contributing to human welfare? And why specifically am I doing it?”

The Board of Directors │ This “human metric” applies not just to CEOs, but to boards, too. Through its composition, boards play an important role in fostering values-based dialogue and culture. They’re also custodians of a firm’s reputation and license to operate.

“The role of the board is to ensure that the proper people with the proper value systems are in place and that the corporation has an ethical environment worthy of its shareholders’ trust,” write governance experts Pat Canavan and Thames Fulton in a recent National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) blog, “Whatever Happened to Values-Based Corporate Governance?”

Barclay chair Marcus Agius’ resignation signaled board culpability when the Libor scandal broke, but now that he’s back, what comes next is less clear. Director boards feature numerous overlapping memberships, comprising an “establishment web, a hard-wired network of interests intertwined with regulators and ethics-setters,” writes Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. “A thorough sacking would send an electric culture-change signal.”

Institutional Investors │ Many people believe that investors served as enablers of the financial crisis, given structural deficiencies, short-term incentives, and passivity. As long as they were happy, few questions were asked about the manner in which superior profits were generated or what risks were being taken. Fortunately, the U.K. 2010 Stewardship Code emphasizes the important role played by institutional investors and their governance. And even though last October’s proposal for a collaborative investor engagement initiative aimed at banks went nowhere, this year the idea likely will find more support from groups such as the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) and the U.N.’s Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). This area has long been overlooked, and is ripe for reform.

Ethical Climate Change: Some First Steps

Let’s get back to my friends and colleagues, ShoreBank co-founders Ron Gryzwinski and Mary Houghton. I asked them last Monday, before the plot thickened, what they would recommend to Barclays board.

“How about encouraging the board to listen to Stephen Green‘s advice, and to Lady Susan Rice?” Houghton wrote me in an email. Rice, an outspoken proponent of responsible investment and ethics in the profession, spoke last June about the “hows” involved with restoring an ethical climate of trust, which involves values and behavior. She’s the managing director of Lloyds Banking Group Scotland, and chairs the Chartered Banker Professional Standards Board (CB-PSB). More on that in a minute.

“And listen to the New Economics Foundation and current state of their several projects.  This would be like an education session before they begin the search.” Houghton also said the board could take to heart the “very strong” public statements made on June 29th by Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England. The Guardian called them King’s “most scathing attack yet on the culture of banking in the five-year-long financial crisis.”

“I had a similar thought about hiring Green as an advisor to the board during the selection process. I also thought about adding an ethicist to the board and a couple of women if they don’t have any,” wrote Gryzwinski. “The whole question of board diversity should be examined.”

He went on to talk about something else, near and dear to his heart. “The board could adopt a Code of Conduct (Oath?) for the entire organization prior to hiring.  If Seventeen magazine can do it (today’s NYT biz section) why shouldn’t a bank?

That Code would include a statement about medium and long term increase in shareholder value and tie employee incentive compensation to that longer term increase in shareholder and STAKEHOLDER value! If they did that they would dramatically increase market share because they would discover that many orgs and people would prefer to do business with a bank that is an ethical leader if it also delivers customer satisfaction, or better, customer delight like Apple or the Japanese auto companies did until Obama “bought” General Motors and freed them from their imagined traditional restraints.

A Code of Conduct │A bankers code of conduct is central to the work of the Chartered Banker Professional Standards Board (CB-PSB). Launched in October 2011, the CB-PSB is a voluntary initiative of 9 leading UK banks and the Chartered Bankers Institute, world’s oldest banking institute (1875). It aims to “enhance and sustain a strong culture of ethical and professional development across the UK banking industry by developing a series of professional standards at Foundation, Intermediary, and Advanced levels”. The CB-PSB developed and published the 7-point Chartered Banking Code of Professional Conduct, “which sets out the values, attitudes, and behaviors expected of all banking professionals.”

On July 2^nd the group released its first Professional Standard – the Foundation Standard for Professional Bankers (Foundation Standard), also a first for the industry. The Foundation Standard supports individuals and organizations in applying the Code of Conduct by detailing expectations of all banking professionals in relation to two broad areas: knowledge and skills; and professional values, attitudes, and behaviors. It includes knowledge, skill, and performance indicators to assure the Standards is met, and guidance on related learning and development activities.

While the fate of this group’s work is uncertain, it’s a giant step in the right direction. We need something similar in the U.S.

Indeed, the challenge for rest of us – investors, depositors, employees, intermediaries, policymakers, regulators, the media and educational institutions – is to demand and enact a better climate in which the ethical beliefs and values of CEOs, governing boards, and capital investors can flourish.

And the challenge to CEOs and governing boards is to foster a better climate in which the ethical beliefs and values of the firm can be embedded in business operations, relationships, and all forms of accountability.

It means understanding and enhancing the moral shadow, so that leadership and the fiduciary ethic are revived, to the benefit of all.

____________________

A special word: There’s a lot of great material to help you understand the Libor scandal. In a separate post accompanying this one, I identify some of my favorites.

If you don’t understand what all the Libor fuss is about, here are some exemplary explainers and commentaries. The first batch comes from the U.K.; the second from American observers and experts.

• The Economist is outraged: In “The Rotten Heart of Finance” it said the Libor scandal “corrodes further what little remains of public trust in banks and those who run them.” In “Banksters” the editors call for a clean-up, saying, “Popular fury and class-action suits are seldom a good starting point for new rules. Yet despite the risks of banker-bashing, a clean-up is in order, for the banking industry’s credibility is shot, and without trust neither the business nor the clients it serves can prosper.”
• Up-to-the-minute coverage of the Libor scandal provided by the Financial Times and The Guardian give content and context to the fast-evolving story;
• Perhaps my favorite: FT’s piece on “How traders trumped Quakers”, which describes the erosion of Quaker values of integrity and trust as Barclays banking culture moved from respectable (albeit elite) to something else. John Piender describes the battleground between retail and commercial bankers on the one side, and investment bankers on the other—and evokes Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker in the process.

As for what Americans are saying, take a look at:

• Politico‘s backgrounder, with loads of hyperlinks, written by Cora Currier;
• Dylan Matthews’ explainer in the Washington Post;
• The elegant breakdown provided by Marketplace’s New York bureau chief Heidi Moore;
• The insights provided by New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, who pointed out the reaction in the U.K. is far more intense than here, and that, “Once again, it leads one to believe that bankers feel neither the constraints of the law nor of morality”;
• NYTimes business columnist Gretchen Morgenson’s call for American regulators to get cracking on similar reform. “It’s hard to believe, in the wake of the Libor mess, that Wall Street and its supporters in Congress would continue to battle against price transparency in any market. Then again, that’s precisely what they did after the credit crisis. With each new financial imbroglio, the gulf widens between Main Street’s opinion of Wall Street and the industry’s view of itself.” She should know: she’s an expert on how the Wall Street / Washington revolving door culture contributed to the  financial crisis

Most pungently, writing on GMI Ratings’ blog, governance expert Nell Minow justifiably dismisses broad-stroke spinning of the Libor story by calling it what it is. “The scandal is about price-fixing.  It is about a bank, or rather the executives and the board of directors of a bank.  It is about lying.  It is about crime.  It is about the ability of large, powerful private institutions to exploit the rules, undercut oversight, and avoid accountability.”

The Takeaway: To inaugurate MurnPost’s “Voices of Baby Boomers” section, Rosalie Hudnut Wright writes about the “disconnect” in our Presidential primary campaign between women’s well-being and social and economic sustainability. Recent rhetoric on birth control provides a cynical example of our impoverished politics, and reinforces power imbalances affecting the sexual and reproductive lives of women—which can lead to deepened inequality and even violence.

The other day I became aware of dangerous disconnects that seem to characterize the state of our contemporary politics these days, a reminder of how untrustworthy are those claiming to serve the public interest at a time when economic and environmental problems dwarf all others. I was watching Foster Friess, a major financial supporter of Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, say during an interview on MSNBC that in the good old days, a gal’s best and only necessary form of contraception was an aspirin held tightly between her legs.

The interviewer, Andrea Mitchell, experienced such a profound disconnect that she had to change the subject. Mr. Friess’s disconnect from women’s reality was painfully obvious—as was the conversation from what really matters these days.

The next day on CBS Morning News a furious Santorum slammed co-host Charlie Rose and the media for asking him for his thoughts on the matter. Santorum said that Freiss’s remarks were a “bad off-color joke” and that he, Rose, was practicing “gotcha” journalism for bringing it up because it had nothing to do with him or his campaign—another smiling disconnect. I thought, That’s like saying I take this man’s money, but I have no responsibility for his speech or actions.  I want to be President, but I will take no responsibility for the blunders of my administration.

Friess later apologized for the “joke,” stating that “many didn’t recognize it as a joke but thought it was my prescription for today’s birth control practices.”

Sitting in my tiny living room above Main Street, I, too, intended to disconnect, remaining calm and detached from these comments, but instead I felt numb and then nauseous.

I wanted to believe that my consideration of whom to support for President in 2012 was above so-called “social” or “wedge issue” politics. But I failed. I thought, Maybe the fundamentalists are right after all. It’s ALL  about social issue politics.

Before coming to my senses, the last thought that passed through my mind was a violent one involving a gun.

Power Politics, Social Inequality, and Violence

The image of a rifle was connected to a memory: the Eve Ensler and University of Michigan student performance of The Vagina Monologues at Ann Arbor’s Power Center for the Performing Arts a few years ago. I silently sobbed in the dark – and couldn’t seem to stop – at the words describing one woman’s story: “Vagina songs, vagina home songs. Not since the soldiers put a long, thick rifle inside me. So cold, the steel rod canceling my heart. Don’t know whether they’re gonna fire it or shove it through my spinning brain.”

Sitting years later, at age 65 in front of my computer and watching the smiling faces that accompanied the Foster Friess / Rick Santorum comments, I realize I am long past the need for contraception. I thought, Why didn’t she just keep her thighs together? I was crying again, outraged at the presumption of these men.

I know. I know.

Perhaps it’s a long way from a man telling me to keep my knees together to thwart his advances, to some guy raping a young woman with a rifle – but maybe not.

Violence against the Other begins with the certainty that you have the right and the power and the means, and the Other doesn’t. It’s an abdication of personal responsibility. It’s a dangerous disconnect from reality.

Who is this Foster Friess to dare to tell a woman how to defend her body against unwanted pregnancy? (I would have nominated him for sainthood if he had suggested that the best contraceptive was a man keeping his pants up and zipped).

And who was that soldier who destroyed that young woman’s vagina just because he could?

Both men started with the same thought: I have the right to do what I want to a woman. I am not responsible for the consequences to her.

The Politics of Disconnect and Low Expectations

Santorum likes to point out, with great gusto, his political record on contraceptives when, years ago, he voted for Title X, the Family Planning program that supports groups like Planned Parenthood. Nowadays he expresses his “personal” view that contraception “harms women”—that it promotes promiscuity and breaks down the nation’s moral fiber.

I’m quite sure I don’t want a President whose personal views on something as important to me as women’s reproductive health are in direct conflict with how he chooses to use his public influence in government. Santorum suggests his support for Title X was the “public” Santorum six years ago, and that this is the “personal” Santorum today. He has no problem with that.

Disconnect.

Moreover, Santorum says that pregnancy resulting from rape is no excuse for next-day contraception or abortion. (Lucky for that young woman in The Vagina Monologues that it was just a rifle. disappointing for those folks who might prefer a penis, so that at least a baby could have been brought into this world).

There I go again.

I have nothing against babies. But I am for women, and their choice to be mothers when they are ready to be mothers, or not to be mothers, ever.

I will not go into the obvious sound economic justifications for women exercising their right under law to full reproductive health services. Every child, a wanted child is a pillar of a healthy society—spiritually, psychologically, socially, and economically.

I just want to acknowledge the danger of the disconnect from reality that men AND women experience when they deny women the right and necessity of controlling their own sexual and reproductive lives. It’s an insidious form of power politics, bordering on violence, that has no place in modern life, and distracts us from the real work we need to do to build a better, more sustainable, prosperous, and just world.

Rosalie Hudnut Wright grew up in Lansing, Michigan and now lives in Michigan. As a teen, Rosie was a honors student, a student leader, and active in the Greater Lansing Youth Council. A longtime tennis enthusiast and now retired baby boomer, she taught high school students for 16 years, secretarial skills to women for 4 years, and continues to enjoy customer service work. She spent a couple of years in Latin America and speaks Spanish well. Rosie’s the proud mother of two good human beings. She was invited to offer her thoughts from time to time on social sustainability, particularly in regard to social justice issues. Rosie has a Masters in educational counseling from the University of Michigan and an undergraduate degree in Spanish from Hope College in Holland, Michigan.