Local

Hi Dan,

Great to "hear" from you, as always.

Does Ode Magazine have a website (version)? I will look.

Interesting that you would introduce the topic of altruism, one that we were recently discussing on a "World in Common" discussion group.

I think that the profit motive of Capitalism, (versus the needs of people motive of socialism (at least in theory)) leads to social atomization and alienation and thus to very unhealthy cynical cut-throat competitive behavior which precludes altruism. It is interesting that the example that you gave was from firefighters, viewed by many as champions of PUBLIC SERVICE.

I, too, have some discretionary funds that I would like to put into trust for public service and altruistic endeavors. Perhaps, you and I (and others if we can find them) should investigate creating a local Peoples' Equity fund. My idea on that is to see if we can open a group trust account in a Credit Union, where each trustee would have an individual account, yet allocations to community betterment projects could be done collectively, with each individual signing off on the amount that they want to dedicate to the project.

The idea would be that we would "invest" in community betterment projects with the care that we would expect to only get the par value of our "investment" back or we could choose to make individual and/or collective tax-deductible or maybe tax credit eligible contributions to "qualified" 501(c)(3) community betterment organizations (CBOs)

CBOs could be not-for-profit, non-profit or both.

That's enough for now.

What think?


Mike