Are Many Corporate CEOs Psychopaths?

BuzzFlash Reviews

Thom Hartmann's Independent Thinker Book Review of the Month: "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work" for January 2010.

By By Paul Babiak, PhD & Robert D. Hare, PhD

For about half of the 20th Century, corporate excesses were kept on a relatively short leash. Then, in the last two years of his administration, Jimmy Carter began drinking the Milton/Thomas Friedman Kool-Aid and “deregulation” hit a series of industries from travel to trucking.

Two years later, Reagan became president under dubious circumstances (involving his campaign manager and his VP candidate working with the Iranians to hold US hostages through the election campaign), and he blew the doors wide open. Corporations could ignore the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and its more recent updates, and get as large as they wanted. An unprecedented era of “Mergers and Acquisitions” or “M&A” activity exploded across the corporate landscape, mostly fueled by Leveraged Buyouts (LBAs). The mantra was “greed is good.” Bigger was better. Efficiency was the magic word, even when it meant destroying the lives of workers and employees.

The most recent incarnation of the sharks that came to both swim in and then dominate the waters of American business are called “Private Equity” companies, although they’re most often engaged in the same “pump and dump” and “slash and burn” techniques their “M&A” and “LBO” predecessors did.

This changed business landscape has been a boon for psychopaths, note two psychologists in their book “Snakes in Suits.”

While their book is entirely apolitical, and doesn’t get into the political setup that made corporate America psychopath-friendly circa 1978-2010 in the first three paragraphs of this review, the authors do raise the issue. They refer to companies being “in transition” and note:

Would someone with a psychopathic personality, turned off by earning an honest living in general, even be interested in joining one of these transitional companies? Unfortunately, the answer we found is yes, as organizations have become more psychopath friendly in recent years. Rapid business growth, mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures have inadvertently increased the number of attractive employment opportunities for individuals with psychopathic personalities – without the need for them to correct or change their psychopathic attitudes or behaviors.

They note that companies in “transition” – virtually the entire American medium-and large-size corporate landscape today – are particularly “attractive to psychopaths,” for three major reasons.

Psychopaths “find change personally stimulating.” While the average Joe or Jane just wants a stable and secure job, psychopaths “thrill-seeking nature draws them to situations a where a lot is happening and happening quickly.”

“Second, being consummate rule-breakers, they find the increased freedom to act to their liking. These pretenders capitalize on the lessened reliance on rules and policies and the increased need for free-form decision making that characterize organizations in a chaotic state.”

“Third as opportunists, they take advantage of others in ways that are not always obvious. In particular, the opportunity to get a leadership or management position is extremely attractive because these positions offer the psychopaths a chance to exert power and control over people and resources, they tend not to require involvement in the details, and they command larger-than-average salaries.”

I’ve often wondered – sometimes out loud on my radio and TV programs,in some op-eds, and in an entire chapter in my last book “Threshold,” how it would be possible for a senior executive of a “health insurance” company, for example, to sleep at night knowing that much of his or her multi-million (and in the case of United Healthcare, multi-hundred-million dollar) compensation came from saying, “No, we’re not paying for that medical care for you” to millions of people.

Similarly, how could people like Private Equity multi-millionaire Mitt Romney and others of his ilk live so lavishly and spend so heavily knowing that much of their income came from destroying the lives of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of working people? Or how people like Carly Fiorina could rise to power and influence in the Republican Party after, as the head of Hewlett-Packard, she oversaw the relocation of thousands of jobs from the American republic to the Communist Chinese dictatorship?

This book provides one possible answer.(It doesn’t speculate on any individuals, and I’m not charging the above people with being psychopaths. Just sayin’…)

In part, such people do so well and rise so high in business and politics because high-functioning, well-educated psychopaths are often the most charming people in the room. They’re “social chameleons,” say the authors, who spot normal peoples’ weaknesses and ruthlessly exploit them. The authors note:

Psychopaths have a great sense of superiority and entitlement, and think nothing of helping themselves to property that belongs to others. Their grandiose sense of self-importance leads them to believe that other people exist just to take care of them. Because they see most people as weak, inferior, and easy to deceive, psychopathic con artists will often tell you that their victims deserved what they got. Sometimes their sense of superiority is so great that they will say that they are conferring a gift by letting their victims support them.

"Snakes in Suits" points out that while there are probably an inordinate number of psychopaths at the Romney/Fiorina (my term, not theirs) level of corporate power, there are also psychopaths in every company in little corners where they wield inordinate power and delight in making the lives of others miserable. Ultimately, the book is a self-help book about how to deal with such people on the individual level if you’re caught working with one in the course of your employment.

As such, about a third of the book may be only marginally useful to you unless you find yourself in such a situation. But that just makes it a faster read – the last third of the book about what to do if you encounter a psychopath at work can be put aside for a future read if/when such an instance arises.

But the first two-thirds of the book do a brilliant job of highlighting in layman’s language how these “snakes in suits” rise to the levels of power they have, and how it’s possible that we can have a corporate and political landscape so heavily populated by people who don’t seem to give a damn about their actions impact on the lives of other people or the planet.

If you’ve ever wondered how John Boehner can be so proud about trashing health care legislation, or how Newt Gingrich could have led the prosecution of Bill Clinton while having an affair with his own congressional aide and handing divorce papers to his wife as she was recovering from cancer surgery, the answer may well be quite simple. They actually don’t give a damn about the consequences of their actions (except as they apply to themselves) because they’re probably psychopaths!

To the extent that this type of personality is largely unknown to the average American, this book provides an important service. Now we just have to figure out how to take our corporations and political parties back from the psychopaths among us…

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling Project Censored Award winning author and host of a nationally syndicated progressive radio talk show. You can learn more about Thom Hartmann at his website and find out what stations broadcast his program. You can also listen to Thom over the Internet.

Can’t happen to you? Think again…

Can’t happen to you? Think again…

Written by Ken_Sayer

What is wrong with “Employer Based Health” care and no “Government Option?” The fact that if one loses their job, they lose their health insurance and there is NO affordable option. For people suffering from heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or any number of serious health problems, could there be any other form of “rationing” that would be more malicious? With pre-existing conditions, they would be doomed. It is far cheaper to manage these conditions than to manage their crises.

When those fracking Republicans and so called “Blue Dog Democrats” speak of costs and socialism, they are just blowing smoke out of their, well, you know. It is time to take the demonstrations to their doors. Do they care about you? The following article, appearing in the Saturday edition of the N Y Times, explains what they have in store for you. Can’t happen to you? Think again… This is what happened to 63 year old Roberta Mason of Turner, ME.

“Laid off from her job as a supervisor in a shoe factory last January, Ms. Mason was able to keep her health insurance under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, known as Cobra, largely because of a federal subsidy that helped make her payments relatively affordable, at $199 a month.

But the subsidy, which was part pf President Obama’s stimulus package passed by Congress in February, lasts only nine months. And Ms. Mason’s time is up. In January, her Cobra payment will increase to $550, which is more than half of her $908 monthly unemployment check.

Her husband, Douglas, 66, is retired and receives about $1,900 a month in Social Security. His health care is covered by Medicare. But if Ms. Mason has to pay the full price on Cobra, she and her husband will have little left over from their two checks for living expenses.

‘For the past nine months I’ve been looking for another job,’ Ms. Mason said. But, at 63, ‘who will want to hire me, let alone give me a job that provides health benefits?’

Ms. Mason certainly needs the coverage. Her medications for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and chronic bronchitis would add up to hundreds of dollars a month without insurance. [snip]

AVOID A LAPSE when your subsidy ends, you won’t get a lot of notice. Most likely you will simply receive your next Cobra bill in the mail for a much larger amount than you are accustomed to paying.

If you do not, your Cobra coverage will end immediately. And then the clock immediately starts ticking on interruption of your health care coverage.

Under current law, if you have a gap in coverage of 63 days or longer, any insurance carrier from which you might then seek coverage could use any pre-existing health care issues you may have — like back spasms or heart disease — as a reason to deny coverage or charge astronomical premiums, far above even the expensive Cobra payments.”

This could ONLY happen in this country because every other civilized country in the western world has some form of a government option. Another thing that every other civilized country in the western world has that we do not is a LONGER LIFE EXPECTANCY and a LOWER INFANT MORTALITY. So tell the “Tea Baggers” to shove it and tell the Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats to start doing their job of representing YOU instead of Big Pharma and the rest of those Healthcare Crooks. DEMAND THE PUBLIC OPTION.

Cheer Up. Things Could Be Worse! Sure Enough, They Are!

Cheer Up. Things Could Be Worse!

Written by Ken_Sayers

“Cheer up, things could be worse,” goes the old joke. I cheered up and sure enough, things got worse. I actually said that to my friend as he was lamenting the passing of the most horrible decade in our lives. It was a joke last night. This a.m. it is no longer funny. I was even looking forward to the N Y Times and it’s rehash of the last year. It was not to be.

Last year there were a lot of regrettable moments. Over eight years old, the Iraqi war is certainly one of our blackest, least shining moments in our two hundred plus years history. It ranks right up there with Wounded Knee. Equally disgusting, I find, is the use of mercenaries in Iraq by our military and State Department. They answer to no one. So, you see why I was shocked, but NOT really, when I read the headline for January 1.

Judge Drops Charges From Blackwater Deaths in Iraq

Those mercenaries murdered 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded 20 others. Afterwards they lied and tried to cover it up. If I remember correctly, one member of Xe’s (Blackwater changed their name because of all their bad press) top level management, who had quit, later told the press that the head of Xe had attempted to bribe the Iraqis and most likely the Justice Department with millions of dollars to make that “go away.” It finally appears that he was successful.

There is no doubt in the fact that Xe committed these atrocious acts. NO ONE disputes that. The Justice Department, who should certainly know better, recklessly violated the defendant’s constitutional rights. That is exactly what the judge said who threw out the indictment. It appears that Blackwater’s millions were well spent.

It is bad enough that this country allowed the Bushes to steal two elections, lie to the American people in order to perpetrate an unjust war that is over eight years old and counting, have sent thousands of young Americans to their deaths and countless more to needless suffering as they forgot to plan for the casualties. Bad enough that they stripped away ecological protections, our civil rights, and, through their rendition and torturing of innocents and enemy alike, have even stripped us of our dignity. I won’t even go into how they have plundered the few shekels that the middle and lower classes managed to scrape together. But, this is too much.

I cheered up last night and enjoyed my Gloria Ferrer Brut, and sure enough, things got worse. Go ahead, drop those charges. AND now bring charges against Xe and the Justice Department for one of the biggest conspiracies and attempted cover ups in U.S. history as the Justice Department knowingly violated the rights of those individuals in return for millions of dollars in bribes. Someone has got to draw the line.

American Mantra: Free Market Capitalism and Obama

by Peter Phillips / January 1st, 2010

Free Market Capitalism remains the dominant American ideological truth. The decline of communism opened the door for unrepentant free marketers to boldly espouse market competition as the final solution for global harmony. According to the American mantra, if given the opportunity to freely develop, the marketplace will solve all evils. We will enjoy economic expansion, individual freedom, and unlimited bliss by fully deregulating and privatizing society’s socio-economic institutions.

The selection of Obama as the U.S. President placed into power the party of the trilateralist wing of the American corporate elite. Obama’s business/government revolving-door cabinet is comprised of just as many corporate CEO’s and business elites as any presidency in recent history. This new government elite will continue the work to see that the American mantra remains safe, globalized, and unchallenged.

Pesky socialist or nationalist leaning governments will be undermined, pressured into compliance or even invaded if they dare to resist the American mantra. The full force of U.S. dominated global institutions: WTO, World Bank, IMF, NAFTA, will focus on maximizing free market circumstances and corporate access to every region of the world.

Economic safety nets, environmental regulations, labor unions, human rights, become second place to the free flow of capital and investments. Indigenous resisters face overt repression, disappearance, or imprisonment by governments fully armed and supported by the American dominated New World Order.

So what is the underlying rationale for this American mantra? Are its dogmatic beliefs based on specific socio-economic facts? Are free market forces clearly the best mechanism for human betterment? Do these mechanisms work cross-culturally and are they efficient under all circumstances?

A closer examination of the American mantra reveals that “free market” essentially means constant international U.S. government intervention on behalf of American corporations. A public-private partnership that utilizes U.S. embassies, the CIA, FBI, NSA, U.S. Military, Homeland Security, Department of Commerce, USAID, and every other U.S government institution to protect, sustain, and directly support our vital interest —U.S. business.

American mantra institutions push market deregulation that transforms foreign economies for the benefit of U.S. businesses. Post-NAFTA Mexicans are now importing U.S. grown corn for their tortillas, as millions of formally subsidized peasant farmers leave the land to seek minimum wage work in the cities of United States. Los Angeles has become the center for new American sweatshops, as “illegals” compete for poverty jobs, citizens cannot afford to accept.

Government-assisted foreign market penetration by U.S firms often results in the buying out of successful indigenous companies and the competitive overwhelm of others. This situation leaves U.S. multinationals in dominate positions in foreign domestic markets and creates win-fall profit taking opportunities.

The free market mantra carries with it shock treatment policies of lowering public expectations, forced austerity measures, and dismantled human services. A privately run water system is deemed superior to a public system because the profit motive will create maximum efficiency. Yet there is absolutely no research that systematically compares public verses private efficiency levels, only the dogmatic assertion that this is so.

The American mantra affects the U.S. population as well. Poverty and unemployment are rising, the working poor expanding and homelessness one pay check away for many.

It is time to re-examine the American mantra and speak for global humanity. We must establish business socio-economic accountability standards and reacquaint our government with its responsibility for maintaining the common good.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University, and Director of Project Censored, a media research organization. Read other articles by Peter, or visit Peter's website.

This article was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 10:00am and is filed under Capitalism, Corporate Globalization, Neoliberalism, Obama, Poverty.

Published on Friday, January 1, 2010 by The Oregonian

A Decade's Top Ten Quotations

by David Sirota

While I'm loathe to write a top-10 list, if only for fear of falling short of Dave Letterman's legendary bit, I'm making an exception in this first week of 2010 -- a moment when we get to not only make New Year's resolutions, but resolutions for the new decade. As we make those prospective pledges, let's take a moment to look back at the Top Ten Quotations from the last 10 years -- the ones telling us some painful truths about our country, society and worldview; the ones that might inform us of what we need to do as we move forward:

10. "They frankly own the place." -- Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., in 2009 admitting the taboo about banks' influence in Congress.

9. "Haven't we already given money to rich people ... Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?" -- President George W. Bush in November 2002, acknowledging to advisers that he knew his tax cuts were giveaways to the super-wealthy.

8. "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." -- Anti-health care protester at an August 2009 congressional town hall meeting in South Carolina -- the single most succinct sign that our country has become an Idiocracy.

7. "We did this for the show." -- Falcon Heene on Oct. 15, 2009, telling CNN that the Balloon Boy chase was a hoax. The declaration demonstrated that the media's 24-7 knee-jerk sensationalism is irresponsible and proved that America's culture of celebrity aspiration is completely out of control.

6. "As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know they're some things we do not know. But there're also unknown unknowns; the ones we don't know we don't know." -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Feb. 12, 2002, effectively telling us that the government had no idea what it was doing by invading Iraq.

5. "Bring 'em on." -- President George W. Bush on July 2, 2003, daring al-Qaida to attack U.S. troops -- yet more proof that the elite defines "toughness" as politicians flippantly sacrificing young American lives for Washington's hubristic ideologies.

4. "The investment community feels very put-upon. They feel there is no reason why they shouldn't earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don't want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown." -- Daniel Fass, chairman of President Barack Obama's financial-industry fundraising party on Oct. 19, 2009, insisting that despite wrecking the economy and then being handed trillions of bailout dollars, Wall Street is a victim.

3. "$500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus." -- Wall Street compensation consultant James Reda on Feb. 3, 2009, giving The New York Times a good example of just how totally out of touch the super-rich really are.

2. "I didn't campaign on the public option." -- President Obama on Dec. 22, 2009, expecting the public to forget that his presidential campaign platform explicitly promised to pass health care legislation giving all Americans "the opportunity to enroll in new public plan."

1. "It doesn't matter." -- Vice President Dick Cheney on Nov. 5, 2006, referring to polls repeatedly showing the majority of Americans oppose the Iraq war -- a sign the ruling class truly does not care about the demands of the public.

These epigrams expose a nation that has internalized and accepted the forces of avarice, corruption, dishonesty, incompetence and insensitivity. Some of them are darkly funny, some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad -- but all of them are warnings. Whether we listen to them or not will be the difference between repeating the last decade's folly or learning from it.

Here's to resolutions for the new decade that finally choose the latter.

© 2010 Creators.com

David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book is "The Uprising." He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network-both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.

Published on Friday, January 1, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade

by Robert Freeman

The media are awash with talking heads bloviating about the top stories of the last decade. The wired-in society. The growth of organic food. The new frugality. This is the ritual that reveals their true function in the culture: pacification. It's their way of signaling the masses that Bigger Thinkers are looking after things, so go back to your Wii or Survivor or Facebook reveries.

The amazing thing is how little is ever mentioned about the stories that really mattered, those that affected the very nature of our society, its institutions, and the relation of the people to their state and society.

Those stories paint a picture of danger, of a people who have lost control of their government and the corporations that own it. But you'll hear nary a word about such difficult truths from any storyteller in the conventional media.

So here, in no particular order, are my Top Ten Stories of the Naughties, the ones that really matter.

1. The Supreme Court hijacking the 2000 presidential election. This isn't even a historical controversy anymore. Al Gore won the national popular vote by 570,000. And we now know he would have won the Florida vote as well if the vote counting had not been stopped by the Supreme Court. This was literally a right wing judicial coup d' etat, so it's understandable that it's never mentioned in the "right" kind of circles.

2. Bush knew of 9/11 long before it actually happened. Three years before Bush took office, the neo-cons' Project For a New American Century called for a "new Pearl Harbor" to galvanize the nation into a war to seize Middle East oil. And even before the event itself, Bush-as-president was warned dozens of times of the imminent attack, the most notorious being the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S". Amazingly nothing was done to prevent the attack. But even less is it advertised that Bush knew.

3. Iraq was all premised on lies, yet we're still there. Saddam Hussein wasn't pursuing Weapons of Mass Destruction. He wasn't involved in 9/11. He wasn't engaged with Al Qaeda. As with the 2000 election hijacking, we know all these things. And we know they were false at the time they were proffered. Yet, there we are, with no intent to leave, our very presence spitting in the face of International Law and the international community we so unctuously pretend to respect.

4. The Global War on Terror. Or more specifically, the ease with which the "GWOT" has replaced the Cold War as the justification for the ever-increasing militarization of society. What happened to the post-Cold War "Peace Dividend"? The U.S continues to spend more on the military than all the rest of the world combined. It continues to maintain over 700 military bases around the world. And it continues to manufacture excuses for foreign interventions whenever weapons makers and military logistics companies need more profits — which is forever.

5. The fact that 2/3 of all economic growth went to top 1%. John Kennedy's social contract had a rising tide lifting all boats. But over the last decade 2/3 of all economic growth has gone to the top 1% of income earners. Meanwhile the middle class has suffered a $13 trillion writedown in wealth as a result of the housing collapse. The banking bailout and the health care "reform" debate showed as never before the extent to which corporations have captured government and use it to redirect national wealth to themselves and their owners.

6. The Neo-Feudalization of the American economy. The top 1% of wealth holders own 41% of all the assets in the country while the bottom 40% own absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, workers are saddled with $12 trillion of national debt, an effective indentured servitude that will bind them to their corporate masters for the rest of their lives. This is the working definition of feudalism, where the rich own everything and everybody else has nothing but their proffered labor and their obligations to their masters. The Hapsburgs, the Tudors, and the Bourbons would be jealous.

7. The surrender of civil liberties. Despite the Fourth Amendment supposedly protecting us against unreasonable searches and seizures, the government can now read your email and listen to your phone calls without any probable cause. The Obama administration has gone to court to prevent the re-institution of Habeas Corpus, suspended during the Bush administration. We are much less free, much less protected from brutalization by our own government than we were just ten years ago.

8. The failure of "the free market" to sustain prosperity. The "free market" has long been an ideological dodge used to resist real government regulation of the economy. Still, the ideal was supposed to deliver prosperity in a stable, sustainable matter. Now we have the greatest global economic collapse since the Great Depression, with the government transferring $11 trillion to the banks to cover their sociopathically greedy bets that went bust. All in the name of deregulation, with future regulation vigorously resisted. Is this a deranged country or what?

9. The collapse of the media. We once imagined it would guard the hen house. Yet that was an anomaly, a freak event around Vietnam and Watergate when it slipped its leash. Since then, sixty independent media outlets have consolidated into five, all retailing the ideology of the powerful, the perpetrators, laundering their lies, covering up the truth, and harassing the truth tellers. In every story mentioned above, the mainstream media have worked to ensure that the people didn't know the truth about the forfeiture of their government, their wealth, their security, and their rights.

10. The meaninglessness of elections. This is the most embittering revelation of all. Despite the greatest electoral majority since Johnson crushed Goldwater in '64, Barrack Obama has betrayed everything he ran on. In every case where he had the opportunity to confront power — in financial bailouts, financial regulation, health care, wars and military spending, utilities and global warming, national surveillance — Obama has sided with the rich and powerful against the interests of the American people. He has probably engendered more cynicism, more disaffection with government than any president since Richard Nixon. It will deal a staggering blow to the hopes of mobilizing masses of people again for a real takeback of government. And he's not even one year into it.

History paints decades with broad brushes-the Roaring Twenties, The Depression, World War II. Historians will look back on the Naughts as the time when Americans Lost Their Country. It was the decade when all the institutions that they believed would protect them — the media, the courts, Congress, the market, a messianic new president — in fact betrayed them. It will forever more be a different country.

But not just yet. Did I tell you about the big move to locally-grown produce?

Robert Freeman writes on history, economics, and education. Email to: robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.

Take Your Money Out of the Hands of the Banking Oligarchs

Take Your Money Out of the Hands of the Banking Oligarchs

By Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson, Move Your Money. Posted December 30, 2009.

How? For starters, you could move your money to a small bank.

Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea: Move Your Money.

The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks -- JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.

Meanwhile, America's Main Street community banks -- the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of -- are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.

We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform -- including "too big to fail" legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don't we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?

Everyone around the table quickly got excited (granted we are an excitable group), and began tossing out suggestions for how to get this idea circulating.

Eugene, the filmmaker among us, remarked that the contrast between the big banks and the community banks we were talking about was very much like the story in the classic Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, where community banker George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls escape the grip of the rapacious and predatory banker Mr. Potter.

It was a lightbulb moment. And, unlike the vast majority of dinner conversations, the excitement over this idea didn't end with dessert. It actually led to something -- thanks in great part to Eugene and his remarkable team, who got to work and, in record time, created a brilliant, powerful, and inspiring video playing off the It's a Wonderful Life concept. (Watch it in the video player on the top right hand side of the screen).

Within a few days, the rest of the pieces fell into place, including an agreement with top financial analysts Chris Whalen and Dennis Santiago, who gave us access to their IRA (Institutional Risk Analytics) database. Using this tool, everyone will be able to plug in their zip code and quickly get a list of the small, solvent Main Street banks operating in their community.

The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be. It's neither Left nor Right -- it's populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It's time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don't have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks -- and unlike the big banks they don't provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.

Think of the message it will send to Wall Street -- and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill. That we won't wait on Washington to act, because we know that Washington has, in fact, been a part of the problem from the start. We simply can't count on Congress to fix things. We have to do it ourselves -- and the big banks are the core of the problem. We need to return to the stable, reliable, people-oriented approach of America's community banks. ...

Find a Bank

Not all community banks are risk free. Some of them got involved in the same risky behavior that took down some of the biggest banks. Thanks to the volunteer services of a group called Institutional Risk Analytics (IRA), you can get a listing of the most sound community banks near you. IRA lists only banks that, according to its rating system, which is based on government data, get a grade of “B” or better.

Credit Unions: Many folks have written us suggesting that people should examine credit unions. Like the FDIC for banks and thrifts, the National Credit Union Administration insures the deposits of credit unions and is a good resource for financial data on specific institutions. Credit unions do not disclose financial data in the same way as FDIC-insured banks. As a result, credit unions are not presently included in the IRA ratings database, which covers over 8,000 federally insured banks and thrifts. IRA is developing a method to rate credit unions in a way that is comparable to the IRA bank stress ratings. We’ll be updating users of “Move Your Money” on this issue early in 2010.

Enter your zip code below to find the community banks near you.

Join the Sea Change Find community banks in your neighborhood now! Enter a U.S. Zip Code. www.IRABankRatings.com a service of Institutional Risk Analytics

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Find more Arianna at the Huffington Post.