Locally Grown with Jim Fini

We are so pleased to have our guest Brian Barefoot with us today. Brian has one of the most distinguished careers I've seen in a long time. Not too many folks graduate from college, have an incredibly successful business career, then return to their alma mater as President. Brian did exactly this with Babson College outside of Boston, MA. In between, he had a long career in as an C-level exec...

Today I am finishing a 2-part series on the principles I believe should drive good government policy that I discuss in my book, Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government . Last week we talked about two main principles that act as the limits or boundaries within which everything else happens. They are Sustainability and Adherence to the US Constitution. If policy is unsustainable, like endle...

Today I talk about the principles that underpin the concept of Locally Grown Government.  The first two are the most important because they act as the limits or boundaries within which everything else happens. They are Sustainability and Adherence to the US Constitution. I think the structure of the Constitution was designed to be sustainable. It has allowed America to adapt to changing conditions...

Jim brings in two of his smart buddies from different sides of the aisle, for a civil discussion about the charges of systemic racism within our nation’s entire police force. We dive into an analysis of the recent civil unrest to determine whether the root cause is actually systemic racism or poverty.  In contrast to both sides of the aisle screaming at each other, we search for middle ground desp...

How do you think about your status as a citizen of your hometown, your state and the United States?   So how do you think about your “Local?”  I think for most folks, this is a new question.  But our Constitution requires that we think about it because it spreads power among those three levels of government, where we pay taxes and live by the respective laws. The beauty of the bottom-up government...

Like many Americans this past couple weeks, I watched in horror as protests and looting spread across America after the brutal police killing of a black man that was captured on video—shocking images that have come alongside a once-in-a-century pandemic and a Depression-like economic slide.  But is the past two weeks of violence and civil unrest really just about the killing of a black man by a wh...

In my book, Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government , I talk about how our country's bottom up design of 20,000 zip codes, 50 states and 1 Federal government, brilliantly distributes power within that bottom-up infrastructure. Our Founders intended most governance to be done locally. And about the inherent dangers of too much centralized power. My book exposes the unsustainability of...

 I marvel at the hubris of humans who think that we can design perfect societies and control nature. And then nature comes along and teaches us yet again that it is in charge and can change the world overnight. We went from the best economy in decades to a global Coronavirus pandemic that is threatening to usher in a global depression.  United We Stand. Divided We Fall. Each One for the Other, and...

Education is one of the most important aspects of the “Common Good” because it invests in our future generations. Appropriately, it is the third highest spending category at nearly $1 trillion dollars across all levels of government, with 88 percent of that funded and spent at the state and local level. Public primary and secondary schools represent about 70% of the total. In terms of important go...