JOEL SOLOMON TALKS CLEAN MONEY
“If we fall into thinking the whole reason for money is to win and to accumulate a bigger and bigger wall around ourselves, then we actually cost ourselves a lot of beauty, we cost ourselves love, we cost ourselves the true wonder of the experience of being alive.”
SUBJECT Joel Solomon
INTERVIEWER Berry Liberman
LOCATION Vancouver, Canada
ANTIDOTE TO Old business
OCCUPATION Impact investor
PHOTOGRAPHER Grant Harder
DATE August 2017
UNEXPECTED Military school
The world is changing so fast you could be forgiven for thinking we are on a one-way bullet train to somewhere scary, unknown and predetermined by immorality, corruption and greed. I grew up in an era where everything was golden. It was the ’80s when money was king, profits were purpose and Ayn Rand-inspired capitalism reigned supreme over all beings. The environment was not a thing. To plunder was to prosper. We grew plump on an extraction economy with consumption as its engine. That’s part of the explanation for how we got to here, 2017, the year of the death toll and multi-trillion-dollar damage bill from a hurricane/flood/earthquake/heat-wave/fire-ravaged disaster rodeo which continues to roll across the world.
Boy did we get things wrong. So how do we pivot? What do you do when the whole system is failing? You re-design it. First you need to have the language for what has happened and new language for where we are going. You need wisdom and experience to chart a new course. Joel Solomon’s book The Clean Money Revolution is a clarion call to our generation. You won’t find many business books beginning with the words, “We need to start to talk about money in ways that dethrone it and make it subject to human ethics and standards of love and decency.”
With decades of experience in politics, business and investing, Joel draws a picture of a world re-made by using the trillions of dollars currently circulating the globe to heal the multiple crises we are facing. He puts a mirror up to all the dirty money practices we have come to accept as “business as usual” and argues that there is already a wave of “clean money” changing the face of business and the world for good. Those doing so, he says, are also taking advantage of the greatest economic opportunity in history.
If I had grown up surrounded by men like Joel Solomon, I would be forgiven for thinking the world was going to be alright because good men were living their truth, empowering those around them to be better, using what they had to make a difference. Joel reminds us that our world is what we make it, that the economy is a human construct and can be re-made from our highest intentions and our best selves. Imagine an economy driven by love, empathy, compassion and dignity. An economy designed to function within the bounds of the ecology and towards human flourishing. Now let’s go do that.
BERRY LIBERMAN: So before we get to the incredible thesis you’ve published in The Clean Money Revolution I think it would be important to articulate what your story is. How did you get to this point and these ideas that you’re exploring now?
JOEL SOLOMON: Well yes, so I was born in a context which made me a bit of the “other.” As a Jewish kid growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee in the ’50s and ’60s where Jim Crow was still in effect, and the separation of blacks and whites in public spaces, coloured bathrooms, coloured sitting areas. My family was in the movie theatre business. And they had a coloured theatre. That’s how it was in the ’50s and ’60s. And as a Jew, there were other dividing lines. I remember my first phone call to ask someone out on a date. And there was a long period when I was left on the phone waiting to hear her. And
