Dear Lord Mayor,
Writing recently on the matter of Inclusive Capitalism you have said:
"If too many people remain or become marginalised, they are less likely to be enfranchised, empowered and effective as workers and citizens, rendering them unable to make an economic contribution at best, and resulting in civil unrest at worst. Everything a firm does from the very top to the very bottom should demonstrate on a daily basis our desire to see a stronger, better evolution of capitalism."
You have asked "Who will challenge traditional thinking, if we only have people like us in our teams? "
Today, we live in an age of information where ideas are exchanged freely by many of those pursuing social change. One source of this exchange is Wikipedia where you will find "Inclusive Capitalism". As you will understand, those who challenge traditional thinking will in turn, often be challenged by vested interests, so you'll have roll back history five years to find what I've contributed ...
In 1996 with a white paper for the Committee to Re-elect the President, honorary researcher Terry Hallman proposed the concept of people-centered economic development as an inclusive model of capitalism for the information age. It was published in synopsis online in 1997. Proof of concept was demonstrated in sourcing the Tomsk Regional Initiative in 1999 in the wake of Russia's economic collapse, as an alternate bottom up approach to economic development. The Tomsk initiative was managed by USAID with FINCA Tomsk as the microfinance partner. Moving on to Crimea in 2002 to offer a similar strategy for the repatriated Tatar community, he is later interviewed by a diaspora leader representing the International Committee for Crimea and relates the history of his people-centered model for more inclusive capitalism. I offer the information above with the declaration that in 2004, I incorporated this model as a UK based social enterprise named People-Centered Economic Development UK, which continues to fund advocacy for inclusive capitalism and activism in Eastern Europe. – (talk) 10:18, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
In 2004, our UK business plan, which was shared with the social enterprise community, made this point about economic exclusion, referring back to what US President Bill Clinton was warned in 1996:
The opportunity for poverty relief was identified not only as a moral imperative, but also as an increasingly pressing strategic imperative. People left to suffer and languish in poverty get one message very clearly: they are not important and do not matter. They are in effect told that they are disposable, expendable. Being left to suffer and die is, for the victim, little different than being done away with by more direct means. Poverty, especially where its harsher forms exist, puts people in self-defence mode, at which point the boundaries of civilization are crossed and we are back to the law of the jungle: kill or be killed. While the vast majority of people in poverty suffer quietly and with little protest, it is not safe to assume that everyone will react the same way. When in defence of family and friends, it is completely predictable that it should be only a matter of time until uprisings become sufficient to imperil an entire nation or region of the world. People with nothing have nothing to lose. Poverty was therefore deemed not only a moral catastrophe but also a time bomb waiting to explode. Poverty reduction and relief became the overriding principle and fundamental social objective in the emerging P-CED model.
Dealing with poverty is nothing new. The question became "how does poverty still exist in a world with sufficient resources for a decent quality of life for everyone?" The answer was that we have yet to develop any economic system capable redistributing finite resources in a way that everyone has at minimum enough for a decent life: food, decent housing, transportation, clothing, health care, and education. The problem has not been lack of resources, but adequate distribution of resources. Capitalism is the most powerful economic engine ever devised, yet it came up short with its classical, inherent profit-motive as being presumed to be the driving force. Under that presumption, all is good in the name of profit became the prevailing winds of international economies — thereby giving carte blanche to the notion that greed is good because it is what has driven capitalism. The 1996 paper merely took exception with the assumption that personal profit, greed, and the desire to amass as much money and property on a personal level as possible are inherent and therefore necessary aspects of any capitalist endeavour. While it is in fact very normal for that to be the case, it simply does not follow that it must be the case.
Profits can be set aside in part to address social needs, and often have been by way of small percentages of annual profits set aside for charitable and philanthropic causes by corporations. This need not necessarily be a small percentage. In fact, there is no reason why an enterprise cannot exist for the primary purpose of generating profit for social needs — i.e., a P-CED, or social, enterprise. This was seen to be the potential solution toward correcting the traditional model of capitalism, even if only in small-scale enterprises on an experimental basis."
"Traditional capitalism is an insufficient economic model allowing monetary outcomes as the bottom line with little regard to social needs. Bottom line must be taken one step further by at least some companies, past profit, to people. How profits are used is equally as important as creation of profits. Where profits can be brought to bear by willing individuals and companies to social benefit, so much the better. Moreover, this activity must be recognized and supported at government policy level as a badly needed, essential, and entirely legitimate enterprise activity."
The author was by this time homeless, having returned from Crimea to fast in North Carolina for the US government to ratify the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, which embraces a Living Wage.
What he introduced to the UK 10 years ago as a business with a primary social goal, has recently appeared under a the new title of predistribution.
As the uprisings he warned of spread around the world in the summer of 2011, the only known practitioner of "Inclusive Capitalism" died in poverty, in Ukraine, where our business had been focussed on national scale social reform, a "Marshall Plan" strategy against issues which threatened not only Ukraine, but all of Europe.
Our particular focus were the disabled and abandoned children left to die in remote locations known as psychoneurological internats, aka "Death Camps, For Children". It might be worth considering how the typical speaking fee for Clinton, could have been applied to fund some of the 400+ rehab centres Ukraine's government had agreed to.
The current international crisis should be illustration enough that we were unable to find support.
Today, a global elite in control of around $30 trillion are saying that we need an Inclusive Capitalism. Between them they cannot seem to deliver one example, but they are willing to help themselves to the work of a homeless pioneer who died in poverty.
As he argued himself, you can't build an ethical market by means of unethical behaviour
I owe it to him and the many children who have perished to ensure that does not happen.
Yours sincerely,
Jeff Mowatt
