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Yes to this: "the importance of the confederation of the labour movement and the environmental movement".

Many of us are passionate about creating a new economy that is right for our times in the 21st Century, but too many of us are just as passionate, maybe even more so, about protecting and perpetuating the current, old economy ecosystems for making social decisions.

This is creating a kind of social activism bipolar disorder.

As activists, we become manically excited each time the old economy ecosystem makes a new round of promises: this time, surely, things will be different!

Then we fall into despairing despondency when the old economy ecosystem continues to make old economy choices and take old economy actions, actions that don't help, and actually make things worse. Disappointment become anger. Anger builds towards violence. Is violence ever really a good thing?

What if there is a better way?

Would we ever consider innovating a new ecosystem of social decision making that is created by design to fit the purposes of a new economy of social equity and habitat longevity in the 21st Century, and beyond?

The connection to this post is that the labor movement, through worker pensions, and Scientists, as key figures of civil society, are each uniquely well-positioned to initiate this innovation, and are both uniquely safe from losing ground as the old economy ecosystem gets replaced. In fact, their standing in the new ecosystem will be substantially enhanced!

The hard part is getting comfortable with an awkward word that is the legal word for caring: fiduciary, a legal duty to care. And to learn to see the faithlessness of fiduciaries in the old economy ecosystem.

Faithlessness. A break with faith. A break with faith by our pension and endowment fiduciaries. That's the break in our economy that we need to fix.

There's another word for breaking faith that is maybe a little easier for people to understand: betrayal.

Betrayal is personal, emotional, moral. Fiduciary is public, transactional, legal.

That's why we need to talk about fiduciary. To make it legal, transactional and public. A matter of concern for all of us.

So, get ready for a burst of things fiduciary. Are you ready?

The idea is to catalyze a new social narrative that restates and updates the standards of fiduciary duty as they are applied to the institutional fiduciary owners of tens of trillions, collectively, worldwide, of society's shared savings aggregated into intergenerational fiduciary money for retirement (pensions) and also for civil society (endowments) - notice the commonality of interest between Labor/pensions and Science/civil society in the fiduciary faithfulness of fiduciary money - to innovate a new ecosystem of Fiduciary Finance for directing Fiduciary Money into fiduciary-grade enterprises to shape a new fiduciary economy in the 21st Century, and beyond.

That's a lot of "fiduciary", I know. But fidcuiary, you will find if you use it for a while, is a powerfully empowering word, one that will pay vast dividends as our reward for doing the work of learning how to use it.

It will create new possibilities for:

• work life, as mediating the tensions between present and future, which is the essence of fiduciary finance, and also of our uniquely human way of being in the world, and

• civic life, evolving our shared common sense of fiduciary/non-fiduciary in the mediation of that tension through a new 21st Century public discourse among new 21st Century Global Citizens in a new 21st Century Global Commons of Fiduciary Money.

Labor Unions, through their Capital Stewardship programs, have unique standing to demand that the fiduciaries in charge of their pensions listen to them. And once the listening begins, logic takes over, reason takes over, conversation leads to curiosity which leads to insight, which leads to co-creation. And collaboration. The need for violence ends. The work of building a Bright New Future begins.

All because we took the time to learn this word, fiduciary, and make it a part of our world.

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