Broke: What Every American Business Must Do to Restore Our Financial Stability and Protect Our Future

The healthcare bill passed in congress in early November 2009 is just another example of how the United States has moved from a business-based market system toward a government-based economy in the last few decades – and that businesses must now take the lead to reverse this trend toward creeping socialism, and restore the market to the American people.   

BROKE (Wiley, December 2009, $24.95) by John Mumford is a startling wakeup call of where our country's future lies, as measured by key national priorities and issues of concern.  

Each chapter provides pragmatic action steps that will allow all business leaders – whether they are running their own small company or CEO to a Fortune 500 – to limit future risks, strengthen the present, and help to turn America around in our lifetimes.  Topics include: 

Debt. Our total financial obligations: The U.S. is $51.7 trillion in debt.

Solution: A 2% fee on every financial transaction until public debt is repaid and unfunded liabilities have money to back them up and enable future payment. 

The Environment. Mismanagement of natural resources is one of the main causes of the collapse of several past civilizations. Special interests drove compromise in the design, implementation, and lackluster enforcement of America's environmental cleanup record. 

The Solution: Every 18-24 year old will work for two years (4,000 hours) in the public interest at the minimum wage to help with environmental cleanup, support to government at all levels at home and abroad, and in other areas of special needs to move America back to being the “city on a hill” spoken of by the President nearly three decades ago. 

Principled business leaders will also not allow this deterioration to continue. They must lead with self-regulation and innovation. They must share in the real cost burden, as well.

International Relationships. Good foreign policy is based on the principles of friendship building. Yet for the last few decades, America's foreign policy has focused on world domination and subversion of enemies.  Its actions were short run, and its strategy was more opportunistic than rational. 

The Solution: Business leaders can help to make better friends abroad—one person at a time—by insisting upon local development and wage standards as a substitute for a long history of overseas exploitation. 

American businesses have been in a 50+ year cycle of economic ups and downs, many of which came without warning and at no fault of small and medium size businesses.  Business must cope with outside forces that threaten its existence. BROKE provides 33 lessons learned from these cycles and outside forces and offers 106 action items to assist business leaders to better prepare and to withstand these shocks.

In addition, BROKE details the key elements of a plan to: 

• Restore the liquidity to the Social Security System in six years
• Fund the Medicare and Medicaid trust funds
• Create 50 million new entry level and middle class jobs
• Modernize the U.S. infrastructure ($10.4 trillion in 10 years)                                 

Needless to say, this strategy would result in the strengthening and restoration of the free enterprise system in the United States. But time to act is short. BROKE provides the plan and the leadership examples to make it work in our lifetimes.

As a consultant with more than four decades of experience, John Mumford has helped clients by designing and implementing vast changes in program and process with astonishing results—all when their situations were dire and they had no place to turn for help. On numerous occasions, he had the lead role in saving failing businesses when hundreds of jobs were at stake. All were in dire straits. All were successfully saved.  

Now it is the entire country that is in those dire straits.  It is time for bold initiatives and decisive action.  Broke makes the case for those bold initiatives, led by the institution most at risk--business. And it will be a catalyst to rebuild a declining America.