Today, We Choose
Different.

On April 4, 1967—exactly one year before an assassin's bullet silenced him forever—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the pulpit of Riverside Church and delivered a diagnosis that America has spent sixty years refusing to fill:

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Spiritual death.

Not economic decline. Not political instability. Spiritual death. The death of what we are. The death of who we were meant to become.

Look around. Can anyone argue we have not approached it?

Something has gone terribly wrong. Not just one thing. Everything.

Every arrow points down. Every graph trends the wrong direction. Every institution fails the people it was built to serve.

This is not coincidence. This is not accident. This is architecture.

We have been told a lie. We have been told that the sole purpose of human enterprise—of all our striving, all our creating, all our laboring—is to maximize the risk-adjusted returns of shareholders.

Not our communities. Not our planet. Not our children. Not our health. Not our democracy. Not the miracle of existence itself.

Shareholders.

In 1970, an economist named Milton Friedman wrote an essay that would hollow out the soul of American enterprise. His doctrine was simple: the sole responsibility of business is to maximize shareholder returns. Nothing else matters. Not workers. Not communities. Not the planet. Not democracy. Not future generations.

Nothing.

This doctrine, elevated to the status of natural law over the past half-century, has metastasized into a cancer that consumes all competing values. It has transformed our economy from an engine of shared prosperity into a mechanism of extraction. It has hollowed out our middle class. It has poisoned our discourse. It has purchased our government.

When life itself becomes subordinate to quarterly earnings reports, something has gone terribly wrong.

This is not economics. This is a choice. A choice made by human beings. A choice that can be unmade.

Here is what they will not tell you: this can be unmade.

The doctrine that is destroying us is not natural law. It was invented. In 1970. By a man. In an essay. And it can be un-invented.

We've done it before:

• →When productivity soared in the 1930s, we chose to share the gains—we created the 40-hour work week, not mass unemployment.
• →When monopolies threatened democracy in the 1900s, we broke them.
• →When the Great Depression revealed the brutality of unregulated markets, we built a social contract that created the largest middle class in human history.

We know how to choose better. We have simply forgotten that we have a choice.

Today, on the day we honor Dr. King's unfinished dream, we launch 2B.org—not because we have all the answers, but because we refuse to accept that maximizing shareholder returns is the only question worth asking.

Our mission is simple: Restore our humanity to humanity.

• Put people before profits.
• Put communities before quarterly reports.
• Put democracy before dollars.
• Put the planet before portfolios.
• Put future generations before this year's dividends.

These are not radical propositions. They are the propositions Dr. King died asking. The propositions that built every institution we now watch crumble.

The question is not whether it can be done.
The question is whether we will do it.

So choose. Wake up. Join us. Build with us.