When Hildy Gottlieb (with whom I and Alexandra Peters were interviewed yesterday) speaks about raising money, you can see how awkward she feels about putting herself and her organization at the center of the picture. She lives in service to community. She wishes to treat all donors as peers, friends, citizens, as human souls, not as a means to an end to managed, processed, handled. And why should we treat rich people as special? Aren't we all special?

Progressive organizers, pastors, college professors, artistic types and feelings about money! There is a topic.  Businesslike people have no issues with it. Social entrepreneurs glory in it. But progressives and artsy types so often wish that money followed a spiritual course, that it was attracted to unsung virtue, that in perfecting ourselves gifts would find us magnetically. It don't. Water runs down hill. Steam rises. We have to generate the heat. Generally, that heat is already latent in the donor, as in wood or coal, or a burning ember. We begin with their passion, their community, their sense of calling, and connect it to service. How we can jointly serve the high and noble ends the funder burns to achieve, with us and through us.  Of course, the funder may also see us a vendor, or go-fer, as a dubious and slacking thing to be managed, rated, and compared with other things, to insure optimum return on donor dollars within the constricted vision of the counting house. Perhaps the hardest part of philanthropic fundraising is the servant leadership of those who would enslave us with extrinsic metrics. It can be done, Moses. But it may take a miracle or two. Meanwhile, if we all pull on the rope, we can add one more block to Pharaoh's tomb by nightfall. That in itself would be remarkable. We will in our own way last forever, as Pharaoh will, our sweat mixed with the lime. It sure motivates the heck out of me. (Pass the word: we break for it at dawn.)

Sam, of that $100 million how much do you want to go to your kids, how much to IRS and how much to charity?"

The answers framed as percentages may end us as 10% to each of the two children, none to IRS, and the balance to charity. That would be $80 million now and growing each year.

Now compare this with a "major gift" solicitation.

Sam, you are giving generously to us at $1,000 a year. Today, we would like to ask you to join us in advancing a very important initiative. We would like you to consider a gift of $10,000.

This becomes a "planned gift" if the fundraiser suggests $10,000 gift into a gift annuity.

The contrast between these dialogues (I teach both and work with those who do this one or that one) is jarring. The advisors plan for fractions of net worth. Gift planners start with annual gifts and multiply by ten to get a major gift, or consider any nickle and dime gift via trusts, wills, or benefiary designation, a "planned gift."

Planning really means starting with goals, considering all financial resources, and coming up with the best possible ensemble of tools and techniques, some of which are philanthropic when the client's goals and circumstances call for them. Gift planners need advisors because advsiors have access to financial data. To get to informed and effective philanthropy, though, the advisors need the gift planners because the advisor has no way to connect, in this case, $80 million to specific programs and projects that would advance the donor's ideals. Nor has the donor thought it through from the standpoint of impact. We (gift planners and advisors) need each other, is the moral. Our mutal clients need us to work better together.  To do that requires mutual respect, but also requires shared language, and a shared process. In CAP study groups we hope to evolve that.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Oversimplified, a B corporation is a corporate structure where you commit to additional standards of environmentally and ethically correct. Okay, you commit to a whole bunch of increased criteria and legal liability that means you’re going to be a highly ethical organization in a variety of ways. And the reality is this is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard in my life. Because what it says is this is a solution to the fact that we have a group of people who’ve just stolen $40 trillion. To me, if you said to me, “Let’s bring transparency to that and figure out how we get our $40 trillion back.” I’d say, “You know something? Now we’re going at real problems and real solutions.”

If you say to me, “You know something? These evil people have just stolen $40 trillion. And so our solution is we’re going to take the people who just lost $40 trillion and we’re going to add more legal liabilities and more requirements for them to be harder working and even more ethical than they are.”

And my attitude is let’s say we create a B corporation and we load up far more requirements and legal liabilities and everything else to that organization. Well you know something? That board of directors is still going to do whatever the guys who can kill with impunity tell them to do because they don’t want to get killed; they don’t want their kids to be killed. So it doesn’t matter.

What it just does is it makes their life that much harder, and that much more expensive. It’s completely nuts. If you look at the people who’ve been promoting the B corporations, from everything I can tell, the people who just stole $40 trillion are financing them.

Bonnie Faulkner: So do we have these B corporations?

Catherine Austin Fitts: I’m not saying that the people promoting them are not goodhearted people because we have a whole world of goodhearted people being financed by the people who control $40 trillion to come up what “solutions.”

One of my theories is you have all these people who feel terrible about what’s
going on and this is a way to give them a socially satisfying experience, or to come up with solutions which are pure fashion and don’t mess with the real power lines. It’s a way that they can process their grief. They feel like they’re doing something positive.

It’s interesting, when we had our little debate in Petaluma I said, “Look, we have people who are running around killing with impunity who are acting above the law. They’re a breakawaycivilization. That’s our problem.” And they said, “Yes, but we can’t solve that. So we want to do something positive.” I said, “Well great, but making the financial system more complex and cumbersome I realize it makes you feel good but it creates a regulatory burden for the rest of us, and we have enough problems dealing with these psychos over here without you loading on more.” They just looked at me like, “Well I know but we’d much rather pretend; we don’t want to think about that.”

The goodhearted people can get cycled into dead end solutions that are very, very dangerous.

 How the promoters of B-Corps see themselves, the drama in which they act as heroes, the curtain call where they take a bow is a Romance (a quest myth) or a comedy, the audience enthralled at a heightened image of themselves, where evil has never appeared or has been handily slain, and goodness has prevailed through the heroic quests of a young man or woman, through whose love civilization continues. The lion beds down with the lamb, the marriage guests dance all in a ring.  As we get older, though, we see are at risk of seeing more than Romance and Comedy can convey. And we may see that "do no evil" is not a naive dorm room motto any more, but a sinister board room dodge, when the firm in question is Creating Social Value through surreptitious surveillance and conniving with the security apparatus in countries Free and Un-Free. When I was a child I spoke as a child, now that I am a man I speak as a child because it is safer, more profitable, and goes over better.  Catherine's story is tragic - and cautionary. Vision achieved through redemptive suffering  (more divine comedy). Few would willingly pay the price she bore for her freedom. (Freedom as parrhesia, free spokenness, alignment of word, self, and world, sometimes call poetic license, or as I try to embody it, the voice of the "all-licensed Fool," to cite Lear. The martyr or scapegoat is another drama and how we often preserve the integrity of our civic illusions - burn the scapegoat at the cross roads that our purity remain unspotted.)

The Legacy Companies were formed by Scott Fithian and his brother, Todd. Though Scott died at a tragically young age, his own legacy lives on. He had hoped to bring advisors and planned gift officers together in a collaborative "virtual planning team." (See the Fithian's book, The Right Side of the Table: Where do you Sit in the Minds of the Affluent?) Now, nearly twenty years later, that dream is becoming a reality.  This is not glamorous philanthropy. It is not covered in Stanford Social Enterprise Review. It will not make the pages of Harvard Business Review. It is not covered at Council on Foundations. It will not make the social pages of any national paper. The clients and donors of those I cross train are what some have called "the silent middle," or the millionaire next door, or ordinary people who have often started a closely held business and now in later life want to pass on the business, their values, and their money consistent with their own commitments to family, faith, community, and country.

My metrics are as follows:

• 243 moral biographies produced in 2012 for 243 hyperagents and heads of Great Families
• A bank of boilerplate installed to produce biographies more efficiently and effectively based on market-tested archetypes (rags to riches, virtue rewarded, success to significance, once was lost now and found, disruption and innovation as the work of the world historical Leader)

What I am struggling with now is the impact part. How can I show that Great Families are more virtuous and the world more just? I have decided on a survey of ToP (Tip of Pyramid) families. I suspect it will show resoundingly that the world is even more just now than it was a few years ago and that their own Virtues have continued to compound nicely. 

I will then have to deal with causality. Sure, the rich are ever more virtuous, and the world is more just, but is this due to my efforts in particular or to the overall impact of Wealth Bondage: The Future of Virtue 2.0,  generally? 

It seems a lot of work to justify my meager existence. A bowl of gruel and a cup of water a day, a pallet of straw in an unused dungeon. How much proof of impact do I need? More! More, more, more!  Yes, Mistress. 

Scored as F. The human race. But to be Redeemed. One sweet day, God willing.

Another sign that the world is just are Flourishing Families. These are also known, in the wealth advisory trade, as Great Families. What makes a family great for a thousand years, or at least one hundred, is Virtue. (This is laid down as a primary postulate in the best books on this subject drawn from the most highly regarded Serving Professionals of All Genders. I have read these books by moonlight in my Dumpster, seeking the secret of personal Success under trying circumstances, including hunger, cold, and rubbing alcohol-induced dementia.) Great Families, with say a billion or more have financial capital, but also spiritual, social, intellectual Capitals. Thus, the virtuous make and keep wealth. Those without virtue either never make it big or dissipate wealth. Hence, again, the world is just.  I wish I could afford a highlighter to mark out the many passages making this essential point.

Another sign that the world is just is..... Well, for my own BoP status, I have only myself to blame.  High board scores, great schools, intellectual and social capital up the Ying/Yang, if only I had not gotten hooked on poetry. First it was stanzas. Then whole volumes. Soon I was reading The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy. How was I ever to climb out of that pit? By the time I was reading Paradise Regained, I was already reduced to writing moral biographies of Hedge Fund Billionaires for a penny a page. Flourishing Families Volume Three Hundred and Fourteen. I would keep the boilerplate and change the faces.  Virtue this, virtue that. But then I couldn't keep up the payments on the computer, much less pay the light bill. In my next incarnation, I will be born rich, and some schmuck with a liberal arts background will be writing my moral biography. What goes around comes around, if there is any justice in this world.  I am not complaining. You get what you deserve.

In the same vein, at a recent conference, I heard a rising star speak about creating the infrastructure to measure and manage the nonprofit sector. I wanted to ask his Board Scores, Class Rank, and whether or not he was Phi Beta Kappa, to see if he or I was smarter, and by how much, but I refrained. He was clearly smart enough to build a Taxonomy of Nonprofit Excellence, to disrupt, innovate, improve and manage the efforts of those nonprofts that grow to scale and to insure the Darwinian extinction (creative destruction) of those that do not. This will channel the most money to orgs that Do the Most Good. This is the Future of Good Enough.

I said to him, "For some of us the nonprofit world is a refuge from all that." He responded as the smartest graduate of the best schools today would: "Refuge!!!!" I said, "Sanctuary." He said, "Sanctuary????"

Render unto Caesar. And keep low, under the radar, until the wave of activity in the Colosseum, for the amusement of the Patricians runs its course.  The next indignity is the Christian Emperor, and the Holy Roman Empire, run like a Corporation, too big to Fail, with a double bottom line, and a huge secret bank. For the time being, as dangerous as the times are for the spirit to move among a few gathered here and there, it is still the best and most productive time.  There is no refuge. There is no sanctuary. Nothing to tax, manage or surveille.  Nothing is happening here.