m-cause

The President of CSR Wire put out a call on Sept. 30th for a new code of conduct to establish “incredible transparency”  within companies.  In the article, he asserts that too much of debate on the current crisis focuses on the “credit crisis” and the political nature of the bailout.  He believes there has not been enough talk about systemic change.

Indeed, I believe those in the Corp. Social Responsibility world now have a big opportunity to lead the discussion around the development of even more transparent social, environmental and financial measures…though I am not sure if we can ever fully rid the world of greed & incompetence (two things at the heart of this crisis). Douglas Rushkoff notes the record number of foreclosures, credit defaults, and, now, institutional collapses is not the result of the churn of random market forces, but rather a series of highly lobbied changes to law, highly promoted ideologies of wealth and home ownership, and monetary policies highly biased toward corporate greed.

I highly recommend checking out Doug’s post…it is a MUST read.  For Doug, it “all came together” while attending a pretty sick “house flipping” seminar, presided over by none other than our ex Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan & George Foreman (to name a few).

And, building on Douglas’s quote above, some commentators are even pointing the finger squarely at American consumers…George Will had this to say in a recent gloomy roundtable on ABC that I picked up from this blog post :

We’re coming dangerously close to the truth, which is the sainted American people are the problem here. That is, they have 105 billion credit cards, that’s nine per cardholder. Self-reporting, they have about $12,000 credit-card debt per household; household debt is 139% of household income. I mean, they can’t go on like this. The refusal to defer gratification is a fundamental attribute of childishness.

What do you think about all this??