The Clean Money Revolution

Reinventing Power, Purpose, and Capitalism

Joel Solomon, Tyee Bridge, Tyee Bridge

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781771422284
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Business
• Index: Business

Discover your role in the $50-trillion "clean money" revolution that is bringing true prosperity to the world.

By 2050, $50 trillion will change hands in North America in the largest generational wealth transfer ever. It will remake the world and be the biggest money-making opportunity in history.

"Business as usual", founded on exploitation and environmental ruin, is over. Climate catastrophe, reactionary politics, and widening inequity have put the world on edge. Meanwhile innovations are shifting the economic ground, and an entire generation is pounding the table for real change. Capitalism is evolving into a force that can restore the planet, transform the global economy, and bring justice to people.

Joel Solomon, impact investor and change agent, lays it on the line. The Clean Money Revolution is part memoir of an inspiring thought leader's journey from presidential campaigner to pioneering investor, part insider's guide to the businesses remaking the world, and part manifesto for a new vision of profit, power, and purpose.

Meet some of the people behind this massive shift, and discover the role you can play in the $50-trillion movement toward true prosperity. A must-read for investors, wealth advisors, aspiring entrepreneurs, and all who want their values and money to work together to transform the future.

The Clean Money Revolution is on. Join it!

A Mighty Time

THE SOUTHEAST STORM is raging at gusts of 60 knots.

The Salish Sea is frothy and churning in the December storm, tossing floating logs and downed trees like toothpicks. Tree branches are flying like spears in the gale-force winds.

Our small group has gathered on BC’s remote Cortes Island in the northern Salish Sea. We are in a beach house, huddled around a cast-iron wood stove pumping out heat. Though we have to speak up to be heard over the howl outside, we are calling forth the biggest visions we can conjure. It’s 1993, soon after the quincentenary of the “discovery” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. I’ve proposed that we attempt a 50-year strategy that will undo some of the cultural and ecological destruction that has been ravaging the continent since 1492—and help build a regenerative economy that will benefit the next 500 years.

As audacious and far-fetched as that may sound, it’s no academic exercise. We have a real task at hand: one of our group has inherited a fortune. She wants the majority of it deployed to reducing humanity’s ecological footprint and ensuring that the biosphere supports future life on the planet—clean water, clean air, and clean food.

Idealistic? Of course. Silly? Not really. Impossible? Maybe. But we hope not.

At 39 years old, I’m about to embark on an amazing adventure: helping turn a friend’s personal fortune into a tool for changing history.

Early Roots

With my younger sister Linda, I grew up Jewish in Tennessee in the 1950s and ’60s. It was a momentous time in American history: the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests, the rise of feminism, and the clash of a burgeoning, multicultural liberalism with the dominant conservative values of white men. Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Tennessee was one of 17 states that enforced legal segregation, or so-called “Jim Crow” laws. Black and white citizens had been kept apart at schools, diners, baseball stadiums, movie theaters, even drinking fountains. (My family had owned several such “colored” theatres before our father went into the suburban mall-building business that made his fortune.)

As late as 1957 Chattanooga had a softball team openly sponsored by the KKK. A 1958 poll in the university town of Knoxville—considered then more liberal than Chattanooga and only two hours up the road—showed that 90 percent of white citizens were against desegregation.

I remember a party my parents threw about ten years after that particular poll. I was in my early teens and my job was to mix drinks and grill the steaks. What made it memorable wasn’t only the adult duties I’d been given, but that it was an “integrated” party with both black and white guests. I was told it was one of the first Chattanooga society had seen. For my parents it was edgy, possibly even risky. It was around the time that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, sparking riots and inflaming racial tensions across the country—including, of course, Tennessee.

As Jews in the South our family already bore our share of prejudice and scrutiny. My grandfather had moved to Chattanooga from Atlanta after the KKK there began marching around his neighborhood. But Chattanooga, the proverbial buckle of the Bible Belt, was not a perfect haven. My father, Joel “Jay” Solomon, had gone into the mall-building business in part because he felt shut out by the downtown business community. My sister Linda remembers picking up the phone one night as a young girl, saying “Hello,” and hearing a man’s voice on the other end of the receiver say: “Fucking Jews.” This was around the time our father and his cousins owned local movie theatres, and were showing one of the first movies to star an African American, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with Sidney Poitier.

“Prejudice was always under the surface,” Linda remembers. “Kids would come up to me at Easter and say, ‘Linda, why’d the Jews kill Jesus?’”

One of the most disappointing moments of my youth happened the first time I asked a girl out. I’d called to ask her to school dance. She left me hanging on the telephone for a long time. When she returned she was quietly sobbing and said, “I can’t go with you.” Three days later my father heard from a business associate that her father was telling people “that Jew boy” tried to ask out his daughter. My dating life took some years to recover. These personal encounters with racism and bigotry were minor, of course, compared to the experience of black citizens of the South, who were having firehoses and police dogs set on them amid lynchings and the brutal assassinations of civil rights leaders. It was all part of an entrenched culture of de jure and de facto prejudice accepted by the “decent people” of dominant white society.

There were no incidents because of our integrated party. It all seemed normal to me, and I’m not sure if I even understood the significance for my family. But I appreciate the example my parents, particularly my mother, set for me in that party and in their lives generally. Do the right thing even when the results may be frowned upon.

Linda, who now is editor-in-chief of the progressive online newspaper the National Observer, remembers our early life in much the same way. “They taught us that it was our duty to always be involved in politics and in what was happening in the outside world. This came, I think, in large part from the fact that they’d grown up during World War II, and witnessed Hitler’s rise, thankfully from the safety of the United States. They gave us a sense that there are always forces pushing against one another, you could call it ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ and that it’s a basic part of being in a democratic society that you become part of the push toward good.”

As the ’60s era of challenging convention reached its crescendo, courageous people faced down power structures that had long been tainted and perverted by narrow minds. The societal backlash against civil rights, “women’s liberation,” and Vietnam War protests made it easy to feel powerless and confused. But throughout that tumultuous time I saw leaders of all kinds choose vision and action over silence and complacency. Single mothers, students, artists, business people, politicians, and even Supreme Court justices challenged the status quo. They began dismantling cultural assumptions and laws that perpetuated injustice.

It’s true that our world remains flawed and unjust. But the progressives and social innovators of that era made huge strides and won great victories. They were models whose bravery and optimism made the world better.

We can learn much from the challenges of those times, and from the people who rose up to meet them.

Amid all of the of chaos of the 21st century, we understandably want to bury our heads in the sand—or throw down a beach towel on it, grab a margarita, and just watch it happen, debating what others should do to solve it. Neither of these responses is helpful. One is denial; the other is self-disempowerment. Most of us have much to offer. As Donella Meadows, author of the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, put it: “I’ve grown impatient with the kind of debate we used to have about whether the optimists or the pessimists are right. Neither are right. There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.”¹²

To pull a lyric from an old John Lee Hooker song, this is a mighty time. The stakes are high. There is reason to take heart, to be inspired, to remember what we are capable of. In North America and across the globe we have faced overwhelming challenges at various points in history, and risen to the occasion. We will do so again.

I’ve felt fortunate to be part of a growing movement that has already shifted hundreds of billions of dollars toward regenerative enterprises and meaningful change. I know it can be done. We can reinvent capitalism. We can join the revolution. All of us, and in particular those involved in the world of investment and finance, have something to offer. Each of us must soul-search the deep questions about our purpose, our direction, and our dreams—and most vitally, our sense of responsibility to our children and future generations. Together we have the resources to achieve what may be the greatest ethical and economic shift in human history.

One benefit of being over sixty—and being able to look back at your past and ahead to the future—is having a clear sense of your life purpose. Mine is to be the very best ancestor I can be. I do that by moving capital to invest in change. It took time, and many teachers, to figure that out.

My journey began when I started helping another Southerner, Jimmy Carter, get to the White House.

The Dirty Campaign against Al Gore Sr.

From grade seven to eleven I attended a military school in Chattanooga called Baylor. The public schools in our town were considered weak, and a “good education” was thought to be available only at private schools. At that time, the choice of private schools in my hometown was either military or religious. My father had graduated from Baylor and wanted the same for me, though my mother, the photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon, had a strong resistance to a military academy for her son. She only agreed to send me there on the condition that I could leave if I wanted to.

My family life was liberal, egalitarian, and lively. Baylor, on the other hand, was cut whole cloth from the dominant Southern culture of white male supremacy. Racism and misogyny were the norm. My parents were active in Democratic politics, and the dissonance between my days at Baylor and my home life were part of my awakening to the social and political rifts of the time. In 1970 I was sixteen and Nixon was in the White House. There he presided over the secret “Operation Menu” carpet-bombing of Cambodia and the Kent State murder of four students by the National Guard. This only heightened the tensions over racial desegregation, Vietnam, hippie culture, the sexual revolution, and what kind of blue jeans or haircut you wore.

At Baylor I was one of about ten Jewish boys in a school of five hundred. The discrimination against us was mainly of the subtle, exclusionary type, rather than overt intimidation, but I felt it and never truly settled in. I was a child of privilege like many of my peers, but unlike most of them, on Christmas and spring breaks my parents took Linda and me to New York City museums and Broadway shows instead of going en masse to party in Florida.

The highlight of my Baylor years—besides several close, lifelong friends—was attaining a degree of touch football stardom as a long-throw quarterback. By grade 11 I had transferred to the local public school, Chattanooga High. I was relieved that one third of the student body was black and, even more compelling, one half were girls. My long hair ended up frizzy and stacked on my head like a turban, but I wasn’t much of a hippie. I was on whatever side of the spectrum you’re on when you’re a white kid in the South whose first two concerts were James Brown and Wilson Pickett, not Tammy Wynette and Merle Haggard.

In 1970 I had my first experience of the realities of power and politics while working on the campaign to re-elect Democratic Senator Al Gore Sr., a nationally significant, liberal, pro-civil rights Southerner. I went out many nights putting up signs, knocking on doors, licking envelopes, and helping as much as I could with ground-level political grunt work. Mostly I was a teenager using politics to get out of the house and avoid the mainstream teenage culture of sports and alcohol. I was able to have nighttime adventures with my pals learning new parts of town and leafleting football game parking lots, when otherwise we would have been home watching television or sitting in those football bleachers. It was fun, and without knowing it, I was finding early empowerment. Exposing young people to politics is valuable learning.

It can also reveal ugly realities of human nature. Senator Gore was a stately Southern politician of a kind you don’t see much anymore, and I respected his stand for peace and civil rights. The campaign fought against him by the Republican Bill Brock was notoriously bitter and vicious. Brock was a Chattanooga native whose family owned one of the largest candy companies in the country. His race-baiting attack ads triumphed with the state’s large contingent of white, conservative, anti-integrationist voters. His victory in that election was the first time I’d felt crushing defeat by forces that had abandoned ethics and truth in favor of power. It wouldn’t be the last. Tennessee today sadly remains one of the most politically backward and conservative states in the country, even as its cities leap forward with a progressive, creative, and diverse urban culture.

I remember my spine tingling at Senator Gore’s speech after the election results were announced. “The causes for which we fought are not dead,” he thundered with the cadence of a gospel preacher. “The truth shall rise again!”

It’s a fundamental truth in business and politics: failure is never final. You get up, dust yourself off, and start again.

To the White House Door with Jimmy Carter

While Brock’s victory depressed me, the campaign hooked me on the necessity and importance of politics. I wanted to experience Washington, D.C. After my first year at Columbia University in 1973, my father helped me get a summer internship with the Democratic National Committee’s campaign arm. It was chaired by a new and relatively unknown Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter.

One of my favorite stories from that period is that I told my political science professor at Vassar that Carter was going to win the presidency because I had read the strategy document that outlined how it would happen. They were impressed enough with my earnestness to agree to bundle my classes on Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons. This allowed me to travel around New England on various duties during the rest of the week. I organized groups of Young Democrats on college campuses and drove Carter family members to small-town campaign stops. One memorable assignment was to help raise the $5,000 needed in 20 different states to qualify for federal election campaign matching funds. The Allman Brothers—one of my then-favorite rock bands—agreed to hold a concert in Providence, Rhode Island, where young concert-goers had to fill out election donation forms at the door. They booed when Carter came on stage to talk. They had no idea who he was and wanted the band they had paid to see. But we raised the money we needed.

I spent most of the campaign attempting to garner support for Carter in mostly obscure locations: the South Bronx; Vicksburg, Mississippi; and Lawton, Oklahoma. This was unpromising terrain, given to me as a kind of exile after being on the wrong side of an internal power struggle with the campaign manager and future White House chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan. I spent the final weekend of the 1976 election driving to rural Louisiana radio stations, dropping off cassette-tape ads in which former Alabama governor (and infamous segregationist) George Wallace gave Carter his endorsement. Talk about strange bedfellows! I lost a good deal of naive innocence in my encounter with political realities.

But I didn’t lose my idealism. Carter’s victories in Mississippi and Louisiana won him a razor-thin victory. The peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia—who had been a virtual unknown in federal politics at zero percent in the polls two years before the election—had risen to the most powerful political office in the world. This experience dramatically expanded my sense of the possible.

What inspired me most from the campaign was the original strategy document that chief strategist Jordan had drawn up at age 28, a strategy that mapped out Carter’s victory in the Democratic nomination in 1976. That a virtual unknown on the national stage could ascend so quickly to the presidency, on the strength of well-c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Jessy Tolkan
• Preface to the 2018 Edition by Joel Solomon
• Preface by Joel Solomon
• Preface by Tyee Bridge
• Introduction: The $100 Trillion Question
• 1. A Mighty Time
• 2. Quest for Purpose
• 3. Discoveries on the Edge
• 4. Nashville Calling
• 5. Through the Looking Glass
• 6. The Story Machine
• 7. Unleashing Philanthropy
• 8. Clean Money Emergence
• 9. Evolutionary Leadership
• 10. The $100 Trillion Question
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index
• About the Authors
• About New Society Publishers