New Mars Forums

Thank you for your comments, Clark. I'll try to answer all your concerns in a single post.

Second question first.  PIECORP was incorporated as a Massachusetts nonprofit corporation on May 5, 2003. Our Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN) is 54-2112380, as can be verified on the Massachusetts Corporation Division website.

What is pending is our 501c3 status, which is the IRS designation for federal tax exemption and allows for tax deductable donations. (Incorporation is a state matter, tax-exempt status a federal matter.)

As explained on our home page, this means that current donations are NOT currently tax deductable. It also means that (since we filed our application within 15 months of incorporation as required) *if and when* the IRS grants us 501c3 status (there are no guarantees in this world), all donations from the date of our incorporation WOULD BECOME retroactively tax-deductable.

Of course, IANAL. As such, I was unable to do the complex and careful submission of the 501c3 myself, so it had to wait until we secured the pro bono legal services as noted. (I have paid for all corporate expenses to date out of my own pocket, including the $500 fee for the 501c3 application, but I cannot afford the kind of top-tier legal expertise Lucash, Gesmer & Updegrove, LLP provides us for free.)

Now, to your first question: I choose to do this as a nonprofit in order to avoid the ethical and moral contradictions inherent in trying to "make sense" while "making cents".  The venture-funded way required too many compromises with those focused on profits and commercialism, risk-avoidance and copycatting, to the exclusion of all else.  The language and thinking of commercial ventures is replete with "capturing market-share", "dominating the competition", "hoarding intellectual property", "exit strategies" and other warlike metaphors. I'm simply not interested in playing that zero-sum game. I'm not in this to "cash out".

What you choose to call a "failure", I choose to call...a learning experience.   (Of course, it took a couple of years of perspective and therapy to look at it that way).

I choose to do what I do in order to make a difference, not in order to make someone rich - including myself. By structuring PIECORP as a non-profit, I relinquished all rights to the project and any opportunity to "profit" on the back-end as I would have in a commercial venture. No stock options, no profit-sharing, no humonguous salaries.

Our "Corporate Compass" is a document I have created that provides ethical and moral guidance to the corporation, must be signed by ALL employees, including executive managment, and is an integral part of our legal charter--it can only be revised by vote of the board of directors, of which I am NOT a member.

Among other things, the Compass specifies that the highest paid executive in PIECORP will *never* earn more than 5 times *in total compensation* what the lowest paid full-time salaried employee will earn. It's a better ratio than the last Ben and Jerry's formula (7 to1), which they have since abandoned entirely. This is compared with the average corporate CEO who earns more than 400 times the *average* worker in the same corporation.)

I must admit to ignorance regarding past discussions on this topic in New Mars--I've been too busy getting this off the ground   The Mars First! concept, including the three colonies with different socio-political, economic and cultural roots, is over five years old, for what that's worth. The basic 3-group idea is nothing more than paper-rock-scissors, and is as old as the oldest game and as common as can be.

The Creative Commons licenses were created in order to fix what is broken with our current copyright system. Creative Commons allow authors to offer their creations for public use while retaining credit as author and protecting their creations from being grabbed by corporations and turned proprietary.

Creative Commons was founded by Prof. Lawrence Lessig, Eric Eldred and others. The Creative Commons licenses are written in plain English and are a nonprofit labor of love, freely offered by people dedicated to making IP better. You can learn all about it at: [http://www.creativecommons.org/]http://www.creativecommons.org/.

We'll take it into consideration.  

Skepticism is welcome and a good thing. As a rational thinker, I value skepticism as an essential tool in the critical thinking "toolkit". Cynicism is another matter, and is overwhelming our civilization with alarming rapidity, along with its pathological twin, apathy. I hope to encourage skepticism and critical thinking while avoiding cynicism and apathy. 

In a world where everything is either monetized or considered irrelevant, a message like ours sounds unusual. That is unfortunate, because all I am doing is attempting to approach each and every decision, consciously and thoughtfully, from the standpoint of how it makes a difference. It is nothing less, IMO, than we all should try to do in everything we do.

Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said,
"One day posterity will remember,
this strange era, these strange times,
when ordinary common honesty was called courage."

I don't think there is anything courageous in deciding to do what's right, and then doing it. It should be standard operating procedure for all of us. The fact that it sounds so odd is more a comment on our times than a comment on the principle. I can hardly imagine doing anything less. As I like to say,
"If it doesn't make a difference, what's the point?"

Thank you for your comments and feel free to contact me with any other questions at--pieATgalielDOTcom