Investments

I've been chatting with investment fund types about what Quakers will or won't invest in.  Given a push towards improving infrastructure, ala China, there are moves afoot to contract with companies that build infrastructure.

The lunch meetup today, at a Chinese place, connected me back to the Hunger Project and Lynne Twist.  I'm listening to her CDs: Unleashing the Soul of Money.

She's a Bucky Fuller fan, like I am.  Bucky made a big difference throughout the est network.

Has she read Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years I wonder? She tells the myth that money was invented to rescue us from a "barter economy", a thesis this debt book questions.

Quoting a review by Charles Eisenstein:

Graeber ably and thoroughly debunks the commodity theory of money that holds sway in neo-classical economics, which says that money originated from early barter economies. This, as Graeber points out, is an imaginary history with no historical or anthropological evidence. Instead, it projects our own market-conditioned behavior onto primitive people, assuming that they, like we, were calculating maximizers of their own self-interest. A universe of competing, separate selves, interacting according to impersonal economic “forces”, is the economic analog of the Newtonian physics that was so spectacularly successfully up until the 20th century. It is obsolete today, as quantum mechanics reveals the dubiousness of the subject-object distinction.  

Do Quakers invest in Hollywood?  The military-infotainment complex depends a lot on turning theater into theater, i.e. the military saga into the blockbuster epic, or computer game.  Many Quakers do invest in Hollywood.  Whittier is close by.

Anyway, lots to think about.  I added this comment to QuakerQuaker this morning, copied here:

Comment by Kirby Urner 4 hours ago

One reason Quakers are no longer strong in business, compared to late 1700s (a time of peak influence in the private sector), is it's hard to work in the US without being a part of its military-infotainment complex.

Developing sprawling businesses that pointedly do not invest or contract with sociopathic institutions would be a huge challenge.  Meetings themselves, though businesses (if you believe the shoptalk), are not public enough to make a difference.  Schools, hotel chains, hospitals... if only.

Speaking of fundraising, Multnomah Meeting was successful in getting enough donations and pledges to install the new temperature control system. Thanks to our ad hoc committee for getting that organized.

A 1980s family picture, Dawn's side: Sam (Dawn's brother), Glenys (mom), Carla (sister), Dawn. This was taken before Dawn and I met, she the new bookkeeper at Center for Urban Education, me just back from Bhutan.

I driving over the mountains to Sam's memorial service next week.