Ask Edward Jones to help reverse our national empathy deficit.
Their Grassroots Legislative Taskforce could be a force for retrieving the National Institute for Health Alzheimer's research funds stolen by (F)ELON POTUS.
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I have always aspired to care for my neighbors, known and unknown. In August 2020, I retired from Edward Jones as a limited partner after 30 years as a financial advisor. That same year, I retired to Empathy Surplus Network USA to devote more time to making empathy central to my constant public discourse.
In 2018, I announced to the firm my intention to retire to Empathy Surplus and launch a new project to give away a pocketbook version of the illustrated Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Penny Pennington, our new managing partner, donated $5,000 from the Edward Jones Foundation to that project. Thanks to generous donors like you, we’ve given away almost 8,000 pocketbooks since then.
Edward Jones has clients in every county of the United States except for one. They have been a national sponsor for the Alzheimer’s Association for several years. Local branches host Alzheimer’s Walks every year to raise money. If you are an Edward Jones client, consider joining me in writing to your financial advisor and managing partner, penny.pennington@edwardjones.com, asking them to activate their Grassroots Legislative Task Force. We want them to demand that all appropriated funding for the National Institute of Health’s alzheimer’s research stolen by (F)ELON POTUS be reinstated. Those stolen funds benefit Russian and American billionaires. It’s shameful.
The Grassroots Legislative Task Force has the potential to help save America’s Constitution and the rule of law for all. If the firm activated its task force today, 20,000 branch teams of financial advisors and branch administrators would be encouraged to call 7,000,000 American clients. In addition, General Partners could visit branches and talk to clients over lunch or dinner about the importance of curing Alzheimer’s. I hosted one early in my career with then-US Congressman Ted Strickland and an Edward Jones GP.
Not an Edward Jones client? Share this with your friends. Maybe you have a friend who is. But why is this important? Because alzheimer’s is just one proxy for all the essential protections and empowerments that are being destroyed by (F)ELON POTUS.
I am also a retired Episcopal priest. Most of the time, I served with little or no income from the churches I served. St. Paul called that kind of ministry “tent making.” My relationships with my Edward Jones clients were as deep and often more profound than those of my former parishioners.
I had those deep relationships because of the very nosy questions the law requires a licensed financial advisor to ask potential clients to determine what kind of investments suit that client. The duty to care for rights and freedoms became a part of English law in 1760 and was initially applied only to white male landowners.
In her book Inventing Human Rights: A History, historian Lynn Hunt devotes considerable pages to the importance of empathy in developing human rights in the lead-up to the US Declaration of Independence. She wrote that our founders and their wives read the romance novel Julie: The New Heloise and dreamed of freedom in colonial America, especially for women and the enslaved. Reread the 1776 document, which Hunt cites as the world’s first human rights declaration, for a lengthy list of how King George DID NOT CARE for his subjects in the colonies.
America, Great Britain, and our European allies reaffirmed “our faith in basic human rights” in 1942 and declared themselves the United Nations against fascism. After World War II, the Allies created the institution of the same name and passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.
Edward Jones’s son, Ted, fought fascists during that war and came home to serve as the last family managing partner before, at his death in 1990, giving the firm to the existing and future general and limited partners.
Because of the legal concept of our duty to care for each other, ethical businesses in effective democratic institutions of our republic often discuss how the “client comes first.” I loved my work and repeated the core value of caring for clients all the time with them.
However, today, our US Constitution is under attack by domestic enemies led by the current (F)ELON POTUS in concert with Russian billionaire president Putin, an indicted war criminal since his invasion of Ukraine. Mississippi GOP Senator Roger Wicker recently said that Putin should be tried and executed for his war crimes.
If (F)ELON POTUS succeeds in destroying the Constitutional rule of law for all, “the client” will no longer come first; we, the People, will no longer come first. In a fascist dictatorship, only the dictator comes first. Americans' moral protections and empowerment will be stolen, including the money that funds those agencies to enrich the (F)ELON POTUS and other billionaires here and in Russia. The cruel wing of the GOP that currently dominates Congress is already talking about ending Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Food Stamps, which will impoverish, sicken, and kill Americans.
Rachel Maddow reported this week that (F)ELON POTUS has the highest disapproval ratings of new presidents in 70 years. We don’t want to be impoverished, sickened, and killed, which will happen if (F)ELON POTUS isn’t stopped. She reminded us of specific caring tools of a democracy that could save our democracy - our 1st Amendment rights to free speech, a free press, peaceable assembly, and the freedom of and or from religion. By definition, speech that doesn’t advocate for the US Constitution and the UDHR is a hostile speech act versus free speech.
We are living out what founding father and plantation owner George Mason, warned us about when he refused to sign the original US Constitution after the Constitutional Convention concluded in 1787 because [a] it did not end slavery and [b] it had no Bill of Rights to protect ordinary citizens from the abuse of power. He wrote, “I would rather chop off my right hand than sign this document.”
Mason’s public stand cost him his friendship with George Washington. But it caused such a stink in the new United States of America that after ratifying the awful, original Constitution, the first session of Congress introduced 12 Bills of Rights, ten of which were later ratified. Therefore, we must find and channel our inner George Mason, stand up in public, and demand protection and empowerment. We know repeated demands to commit to our mutual duty to care works.