Accidents happen

... but poverty isn't one of them.

Did you know that more than one in five children in the US live in poverty?  How might that have happened?

No one succeeds on their own.  Everyone needs help along the way.

Think about your own kids.  

You feed them for free because if you don't, they'll die.

You shelter them for free because if you don't they'll die.

You get them the health care they need, and you protect them every day.

Keeping them alive is just the first task of a parent.  The big one is equipping them and making a place in the world for them.  Education, training and thinking, decisions and interactions, skills and grace and strength.  When they stumble along the way, you help them get up and back on track. You fight for them and defend them and pray for them; you have their back and applaud their success.

Family does that.  Community does that.  Christians do that.  Food for today, sure, but equipping and enabling for life is the greater service needed.  Food stamps are perhaps just one small part of helping folks get on track and have a life.

What are the key elements of falling into poverty and for rising up out of poverty?  Thought about it?  Anything we might help with?

World Governance

One World Government - it's now the likely future, according to economists.

Prophets of doom and their signs of the end! 

World governance today has taken an interesting turn.  It is a bit of a surprise for those who expected governments to grow closer together and merge into the prophesied one-world government, perhaps in collaboration with the UN.  That or some similar path has been described by doom-cryers over the years.

What few expected was the subordination of governments by big business.  Regulatory changes purchased by corporate influence in recent decades have spawned multi-national corporations and banks that are bigger and politically more powerful than countries.

Businesses we remember from years ago have been purchased whole or in part by other businesses.  Brand names we thought were competitors all belong to a single parent corporation.  Banks we thought were staid and reasonably sized are now financially larger than countries and more powerful as well.  Given standing by the Supreme Court, corporations exercise more power and leverage in Washington than any other influence group.  Similarly around the world, corporations have greater influence than governments on foreign trade policies.  The extraordinarily influential oil industry comes to mind for its part in regional conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.  The war in Iraq is acknowledged to have fought for Big Oil.  This century's trade agreements serve big business almost exclusively.  Of the world's 100 largest economies, 63 are countries, and 37 are corporations.

Network Diagram of Linear Granger-causality relationships that are statistically significant at the 5% level

among the monthly returns of the 25 largest (in terms of average AUM) banks, broker/dealers, insurers, and

hedge funds over January 1994 to December 1996. The type of institution causing the relationship is

indicated by color: green for broker/dealers, red for hedge funds, black for insurers, and blue for banks.

Granger-causality relationships are estimated including autoregressive terms and filtering out 

heteroskedasticity with a GARCH(1,1) model.

Corporate goals are profit and winning.  The corporate ethic is exclusively bottom-line.  The only ethical constraints on their activities are in regulations imposed by governments, all progressively weaker over recent decades.

The financial and insurance industries are even more interconnected than the manufacturing sectors.  The degree of overlapping investment and interdependence has increased explosively.

As regulatory constraints were removed, banking morphed and merged into investment groups, hedge funds, and currency exchanges.  Risks increased exponentially, and unethical practices emerged faster than governments and oversight agencies could contain them.  They gave us the Great Recession which cost trillions from the pockets of the people.  The finance industry professionals came out rather well with mega-bonuses in the same year that investors and the economy experienced giga- and tera-losses.  We haven't recovered yet, nor will most of the citizenry except for the wealthiest 10%.

Foolish parents allow their children to play on the cliff tops. The results are predictable and in this case, probably irreversible. The question for us is perhaps how we might make our way forward individually and as a nation as the changes become more intrusive.

The banking industry has been transformed in recent years, not only with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in

1999, but also through financial innovations like securitization that have blurred the distinction between loans, bank

deposits, securities, and trading strategies.  The types of business relationships between these sectors have also changed,

with banks and insurers providing credit to hedge funds and also competing against them through their own

proprietary trading desks, and hedge funds using insurers to provide principal protection for their funds
while simultaneously competing with them by offering capital-market-intermediated insurance such as

catastrophe-linked bonds.

Prophets have spoken about events at the end of the age.  We're curious what they might have been shown that provoked the descriptions they've left for us.  What did they really see?  As the years pass, it perhaps becomes a bit clearer.  What's the good response on our part?

Ref: Econometric Measures of Connectedness and Systemic Risk in the Finance and Insurance Sectors
Ref: An Incredible Look At The Exploding Levels Of Financial Industry Interconnectedness

Creating Wealth and Poverty

Today, about half the world lives on less than $5/day per person. Improvements in recent decades have benefited the wealthy with comparatively little progress for lower income groups.

"... this process of poverty creation - the forceful extraction of commonly managed assets to serve financial elites - is exactly what recent social movements have called attention to. Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the African uprisings, even the anti-austerity stance of new political parties in Spain and Greece, all have one thing in common: the recognition that the only way for a tiny group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept chronically poor.

This cold logic of poverty creation tells us what needs to be done. Before obsessing about amounts of foreign aid, or pretending it can solve deep systemic problems, we need to all focus on changing the rules of economic systems to make them more inclusive, more participatory, more focused on creating well-being than simply extracting more aggregate wealth, and more accountable to those billions who are not being served by the current rules. This is how mass poverty truly can be brought to an end."  ~Jason Hickel, Joe Brewer, and Martin Kirk

Here in the developed world, we fuss over the availability of the bath soap we prefer or the car we really want or the house that measures up to the stature of the person we aspire to become.  The world's typical household, however, struggles to feed and educate their children, to fight off disease, to simply survive.  

It doesn't have to be like this, does it.  There are many things we as individuals can do.

Church isn't for me ...

Really?  Church services and such are great, but is it for me?  Just lots of pew sitting?

All these apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers ... are for equipping us for our work serving others.  (That's what it says in the book.)  And if I'm not equipped yet, just how long is it supposed to take anyway ...

As my wife points out, the purpose of church and teaching are perhaps mostly for the younger folks, to help them get their lives on track and their work begun.  She says us older folks don't go to church to 'get' but to 'give'.  

It raises a question about growing up.  Do we understand that while development and learning are continuous, those are not the purpose; they're the means. Surprisingly enough, the best of life seems to show up when we're involved with some good work.

Tremendous challenge and change filled our early years as is typical, and contrary to our expectation, it continues.  There's plenty of real stuff to do along the way.  That's where the fun really starts.  I.e., joy, love, grace, strength, plus the adventure, etc.



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What is church anyway?

The Goal in 96 seconds!

How hard can it be?

Thinking outside the box.  What box?

If your ask your daughter, she might point out how we consume at a rate we can't support.  Or how we've reduced ocean fish populations to a point that they'll take a century to recover (by best estimates), but only if we quit over-fishing.  She'll see our generation as responsible.

Your granddaughter might point out that those animals she so admires are endangered along with their habitats.  That's troublesome, and it's a battle between conservationists and monied interests.  She'll see our generation as responsible.

Then there's your dad.  He might point out that he'd paid the price to defend your freedom, your chance to change the world for the better.  He will see our generation as the one where economic inequality began to infect the entire world financial system.

And grandpa; he survived the market collapse and the Great Depression.  He'll point out that the lessons learned there were all discarded by our generation.  Our extraordinarily interconnected business world now overshadows governments and national policy.

At the bottom of the world economy, folks who live a basic existence are hard pressed.  In Africa, friends struggle to get by with a few goats and perhaps a breeding pair of camels in Djibouti, a family garden and a sailing dugout for fishing on the Gulf of Guinea, a small maize crop in Kenya.

There is a silver lining, perhaps.  Our poorest friends have a chance of surviving.  If the global economy follows the predictions, when the collapse comes, maybe it's the rich people (the developed world) who will starve first.  You have to wonder.

Those are challenges we face; ours to change or to leave for others.
Are any important issues being reasonably addressed by today's candidates for office?
How hard can it be?

There is no box.
Business isn't as usual.  It's evolving as rapidly as technology.
Finance isn't as usual.  It's reshaping the marketplace.
Parenting isn't as usual.  There are new issues.
Relationships -- okay, relationships are still the centerpiece of life, but ...
Family isn't as usual.  Culture seems to be eroding some of the important parts.
Right and wrong haven't changed, but many folks seem to think otherwise.
That's the world our children have to deal with, and we need to equip them for it.

José Rizal; in whose image?

Some folks find themselves in less than perfect circumstances, and they rise up to be perhaps larger than life.  Such was José Rizal who struggled with political and religious oppression under colonial rule.  He was a world changer.

In response to a narrow, lifeless religious rule, "No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space.  However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light.  I believe in revelation, but in that living revelation which surrounds us on every side, in that voice, mighty, eternal, unceasing, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal as is the being from whom it proceeds, in that revelation which speaks to us and penetrates us from the moment we are born until we die.  What books can better reveal to us the goodness of God, His love, His providence, His eternity, His glory, His wisdom?  ‘The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork."  --  José Rizal, more than a century ago.  

José Rizal was a doctor, a prolific writer, and a key voice in the emergence of the Philippines as a nation.  Rizal challenged political norms and aggressively advocated freedom of speech and assembly for the Filipino people.  For his writings, he was prosecuted by the Spanish colonial authorities, both governmental and church, as an inciter of rebellion.  He was executed, and the Philippine Revolution exploded immediately after his death.  

His books, poems and plays are seen as powerfully influential both at home and abroad, inspiring change for freedom and liberty, for education and opportunity, a grand vision indeed.  His first book Noli Me Tángere was initially banned by colonial authorities, but copies were smuggled into the Philippines.  A poem he wrote shortly before his death was later recited by Indonesian soldiers before going into battle for their own independence. 

Monuments in his honor stand in more than a dozen cities around the world including Manila, San Diego, Chicago, Madrid, Lima, and Hong Kong.  Nearly every town and city in the Philippines has a street named after Rizal.  He was thirty-seven.

Curious what triggered Rizal?  He read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.