Branson's Answers

  High-flying Richard Branson has been on a decades-long quest for answers to the big questions that face us.  His iconic status has put him at the forefront of the Conversation of a Generation.  He has created a forum for discussion that he calls Capitalism 24902 (the measure of the circumference of the earth). 

No anti-capitalist, Branson has been profit-making from the growing unrest over monopolistic free-booting that marks the genre.  He was demonstrating his dissent with single-purpose profiteering long before Occupy Wall Street became a cry for fairness and equity in the streets of America.  As such, he embodies the hope that enterprises can be self-sustaining, profitable and provoke social change.

Branson’s latest gambit is a book called Screw Business as Usual, which backgrounds his version of what The Economist calls his “philanthrocapitalism” in its latest issue.  The spark for this discussion is a fire that recently levelled his house on Necker Island, off the coast of Virgin Gorda and one of the minor British Virgins.  Necker Island is where Branson has huddled with rock stars, innovators and icons of equity and fairness like Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela to talk about ways to change the world.

A Caribbean retreat is a long way from the cold concrete squats of middle America.  So are the third world conditions Branson wants to correct.  But the principle of making more with lemons than mere personal fortunes is central to both trains of thought. 

Branson’s new book can be a primer for anyone who thinks seriously about where the “Occupy” movement could turn its attention next.  

Occupy the Blogosphere

Occupation forces have gone into hibernation in many places as the authorities have moved in to shut down their encampments. But the melody should linger on. Economic disparity certainly will.

In an effort to do our part, Prophets of Boom will feature two kinds of posts over the coming months. The first stream will be drawn from a book manuscript written a decade ago but unpublished because nobody was ready to acknowledge the threat posed to individual and collective sovereignty by mounting debt loads. Entitled "Futurehype", each post in the series will describe how North Americans were lulled into thinking that the honeypot of postwar prosperity was bottomless. 

 There will be stories of naiveté, of greed and of gullibility, to be sure.  American Greed wasn’t just discovered to explain the credit crash of 2008.  More to the point, there will be accounts of how faith in technology and the pipeline of mass communications overheated expectations.  In a real way we allowed ourselves to be brainwashed by our own ingenuity.  In the process, we lost sight of our core values. That, basically, is how we let ourselves get in so deep. 

 The second stream of posts in this blog will be based on our search for answers out of the current economic de-stabilization.  In this search we will be asking whether the Conversation of a Generation is beginning to take shape.  Is there anything happening out there to give us hope that the most innovative and productive society in history can work its way out of this slump?  What are people proposing to do differently?

 This series will not be a simplistic critique of capitalism run amok.  Rather, it will be an exploration of ways to shape our collective experience for the common good.

 Has Occupy Wall Street really signalled the start of something big?  Or are we programmed to sleepwalk into a new Dark Ages? 

 Along the way, readers will be urged to look for solutions themselves and tell the rest of us what they have found out.  We will be … and we will post our findings as they emerge.