Archive for February, 2016

One of the things corporate special interest group marketing takes advantage of is differences between the generations and their understanding of the economy.

You’ve seen the memes. The most famous example was Mitt Romney characterizing 47 percent of Americans as lazy.

Typically, I see posts like this on the Internet:

A Baby Boomer friend of mine explaining how hard he’s worked.

Implicit in my friend’s post is the idea that anyone can pull themselves up if they just work hard.

The problem is that things today are very different. There are no more paper boys. Or pensions. Hell, newspapers may not even be around much longer.

What my Baby Boomer friend experienced was very different than today’s reality. Because of these life experiences, it’s often difficult for Baby Boomers to understand just how different today’s economy is from the economy of the 1950s and 1960s.

How can you help people like this (especially in your own family) understand the realities of today’s economy?

I was lucky: I managed to get through college with only a small amount of debt.

I was able to do this because I was fortunate enough to have middle-class parents, I attended a state school, I received scholarship help, and I got into a co-op program that helped me cover some of the costs.

At the time, I didn’t realize what this would allow me to do. I didn’t realize that it would allow me to take some risks I would never have been able to otherwise.

It allowed me to fail. Not just once, but numerous times. And failure, believe it or not, is critical to success.

This is why I want to talk about how student debt levels today are not only hurting students and recent graduates, but are hurting our businesses—and our country.

What do excessive testing in schools, the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, speed cameras, and the recent lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan, all have in common?

They’re all symptoms of a new America. An America that is no longer a democracy. An America that is under the control of corporate special interest groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And an America that is being micromanaged by a mid-level tier of bought-and-paid for politicians who no longer work in the interests of the public.

The media keeps presenting these crises as one-off events, singularities.

If you take a step back though, there are clearly common threads. The first thread is that corporate special interests keep buying themselves out of responsibility (privatize the profit, socialize the risk). The second is that in order to keep people in check and execute on these plans, increasingly they’re relying on a tier of mid-level micromanagers. The poisoning of Flint is just the latest symptom of a country that seems to be more and more under corporate special interest micromanagement.

What does this look like?

Students from Texas Tech University build a house for Habitat for Humanity in 2010. (

In 1954, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif ran an experiment that could not be repeated today. Sherif was investigating prejudice and contesting Freud’s model of prejudice as an acting out of unresolved childhood conflicts.

At the Robbers Cave Boy Scout camp, Sherif wanted to test whether he could take a group of people, without any inherently hostile attitudes towards each other, and create conflict by introducing competition.

What Sherif found was not only that he could, but that he could also resolve the conflict if he introduced a shared goal. As I talk to people about politics and work for change, I always try to remember the importance of fighting with someone on something.

One of the best questions you can ask people in organizations that are struggling is:

If you could get rid of one thing, what would it be?

It’s a great question (and also one that should be asked in confidentiality) because:

1. It’s hard to think about changing everything.
2. It’s easier to think about one thing to eliminate.
3. People often have a really good idea about what that one thing is in an organization. Often it’s the elephant in the room that people can’t talk about publicly for fear of retribution. Sometimes, it’s a person.