Mr. Kurland's professional approach is based on his belief that morality and ideas count. Good ideas work in the long run and inferior ideas eventually create their own problems. The first task of the problem-solver, therefore, is to present those he serves with a conceptual framework based on solid principle and logic. This allows for the most ideal solution to be determined, with compromise exercised only when necessary to move forward–to whatever extent is feasible–toward that ideal solution.

Throughout his life and career Mr. Kurland has observed that the most challenging problems facing society are not in science or technology. Rather, they can be traced to the growing gap between our technological environment and our institutional environment. The first environment we can see or feel; it changes with scientific discoveries and the invention of more efficient technologies. The second environment consists of "invisible structures" (i.e., laws, constitutions, and other social institutions), things we cannot see or feel.

This invisible part of our cultural environment–our "social architecture"–improves with advances in our core values and fundamental principles, especially our deepening understanding of Social and Economic Justice. The design quality (from both a justice and efficiency standpoint) of our laws and institutions determines how people "relate" to each other, to their physical environment, and to the process of technological change.

This unseen cultural environment reflects our ultimate values and defines the quality of our daily lives, even more than the tools we use. Ultimate values, like inalienable human rights, do not change as science and technology advance. But unless these fundamental values are preserved as we restructure our institutions to accommodate to technological change, the fabric of our value systems begins to deteriorate. Social institutions then become social barriers to growing numbers of individuals.

The deterioration of our moral framework and the emergence of social barriers to individual fulfillment lead inevitably to what social scientists call "alienation" or what Toffler called "Future Shock." These artificial barriers deprive some people of equal opportunity, and thus reinforce injustices and divisions in society.

Consequently, the faster technology progresses, the faster people become separated from their technological environment. By blocking human beings from reaching their fullest human potential and from controlling their own destiny, institutional barriers impede those individuals from working effectively with others for the common good. Therefore, everyone loses from this waste of human creativity.

To lift these social barriers means correcting the faulty ideas and institutional structures upon which they rest. Thus, real solutions ultimately depend on new ideas that better reflect fundamental values.

New ideas require people willing to be ahead of the crowd, willing to abandon their own ideas when they are wrong, willing to take risks, if necessary, for ideas that are right.

Norman G. Kurland is a founder, Managing Director and President of Equity Expansion International, Inc., a group of consulting professionals who specialize in the design and implementation of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and other expanded ownership technologies in the United States and internationally. He also helped found Equitech, a systems integration firm that merges the commercialization of advanced technologies with expanded ownership financing.

Among his civic activities, Mr. Kurland serves as President of the all-volunteer Center for Economic and Social Justice, which he helped to found in 1984. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Global Strategy Council and a now-inactive member of the Bar of the District of Columbia. He also currently serves as a faculty member of the International Law Institute, an affiliate of the Georgetown University Law Center.

He was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1985 as the Deputy Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice. In 1979 Mr. Kurland founded the Ownership Campaign, a bipartisan political action committee dedicated to making the expanded ownership message the centerpiece of U.S. presidential politics. For many years he served as a member of the Legal Advisory Committee and the International Affairs Committee of The ESOP Association. He was also a founding board member of the National Center for Employee Ownership.

Mr. Kurland comes to the investment banking and social justice worlds from a highly diverse background. After completing his undergraduate work in English Literature at the University of Connecticut in 1952, he spent five years as an Air Force officer. His service included command of two air defense installations in the Far East and training as an Air Warfare Officer aboard a B-47 bomber in the Strategic Air Command. With this hands-on experience he first witnessed the tremendous potential of American's most advanced technology.

After leaving the military, Mr. Kurland received a Doctor of Laws Degree from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was awarded a three-year full-tuition scholarship and won the Walter Wheeler Cook prize for legislative drafting. He also ranked first in his class in "Competition and Monopoly", a special course offered under the school's Law and Economics Program. Upon receiving his law degree in 1960, he dedicated his life to the pursuit of justice in the world. At this launching point in his career, he realized that serious structural deficiencies in existing laws and basic institutions were perpetuating social barriers to human development.

In 1960, Kurland thought that the place he would best leave his mark would be in the world of Washington politics, not in the business world. (He later realized he was on the wrong road.) As one of the earliest proponents in Washington of Milton Friedman's approach to solving basic economic problems, Kurland wanted to advance Friedman's "negative income tax" as a solution to the anachronistic problem of poverty in the midst of advanced labor-saving technology. He eventually came to see the deficiencies of this approach.

In a two-year stint as a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare where he specialized in welfare and education issues, Kurland learned from the inside how Welfare State bureaucracies worked and how they reinforced racial and economic barriers.

He left welfare and education law to become a government civil rights lawyer from 1962 to 1964. Kurland became deeply involved in the Mississippi campaign for "one-person, one-vote," a goal that many in post-World War II America believed would take another 200 years to achieve. He was a key Washington contact person for such civil rights leaders as Medgar Evers and Aaron Henry of the NAACP and Bob Moses of SNCC.

With the abolition of segregation and racially-based legal barriers virtually assured by mid-1964, Mr. Kurland turned his focus back to the problems of poverty. He joined the handful of individuals who planned the official "War on Poverty" launched by President Johnson. He became known as one of the government's most forceful critics of the top-down approach to poverty. He advocated structural changes that would equalize economic opportunities and maximize the participation of individuals in decision-making and programs of local self-help. Among his achievements during this period, Kurland authored the federal government's guidelines on "Maximum Feasible Participation of the Poor" in Federal Community Action programs.

Kurland saw within the original poverty program the potential for creating a new political constituency to support the Milton Friedman approach to income redistribution. He soon became frustrated, however, by the confusion, empty rhetoric, overblown promises, and defective programs generated by poverty bureaucrats. Gradually he began to recognize the inherent structural limitations of government for correcting basic social and economic problems, such as inflation and unemployment. He also came to recognize that income redistribution was the wrong goal and was headed on a collision course with what eventually became the American taxpayers' revolt.

Searching for a new pathway to economic justice in a high-technology society, Mr. Kurland found it in 1965 in the concepts and programs of expanded capital ownership conceived by ESOP inventor Louis O. Kelso and the noted philosopher Mortimer J. Adler. (Kurland later developed refinements to the Kelso-Adler theory of economic justice, adding the concept of "harmony" to those of participative justice and distributive justice. He also conceived the "two-tiered interest" rate strategy as a basic reform of Kelsonian monetary theory.)

In late 1965, Mr. Kurland joined Walter Reuther's Citizens Crusade Against Poverty as its National Director of Planning, a position which he took primarily to generate debate and understanding of the Kelsonian ideas and strategies within Washington leadership circles. This gave Kurland first-hand experience as Washington's first and only advocate of an idea whose time had not yet arrived. He systematically began to build a unique national coalition of conservatives and liberals supporting the Kelso Plan.

Kelso's ideas proved to Mr. Kurland that a revitalized private sector, not the public sector, would offer the greatest challenges and opportunities for those seeking to leave to posterity a more just and workable world. Not in government or in traditional liberal organizations would one find the new prime movers. Rather, Kurland became convinced, the most able and creative leaders of the future would be found in the meeting rooms of corporations and among investment bankers.

In 1968, Mr. Kurland officially joined Kelso as his Washington counsel and to activate the Institute for the Study of Economic Systems (ISES) as its first executive director. The initial ISES board built a bridge between Kelso’s supporters, mainly businessmen and conservatives, with grassroots, labor and social activists from Kurland’s networks. He and Kelso collaborated closely on a strategy for elevating expanded capital ownership as a primary new goal for America's future. Without any foundation support and limited funding, Kurland continued to expand the broad-based coalition of supporters for the Kelso Plan.

In 1972 a breakthrough occurred. Kurland saw an opportunity to convert what later became the Conrail system into a 100% employee-owned system, as an alternative to nationalization of bankrupt Eastern railroads. Kurland drafted an amendment to the Conrail bill being considered by Congress and found Senator Hatfield and four others to sponsor it.

On November 27, 1973, Kelso and Kurland met for four hours with Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana, then-Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and one of Washington's most powerful legislators. Even though it lacked the standard political currency of money or votes, Long became the ESOP's champion on Capitol Hill. This was the turning point in ESOP history.

In December 1973, Senator Long took Kurland's draft amendment and converted it into the first of many laws promoting Employee Stock Ownership Plans. As a result of the Conrail initiative, The New York Times described Kurland as "a one-man lobbying organization for Kelsonian ideas" in Washington. Business Week called him "the resident philosopher of ESOPs in the capital." A milestone in reaching the ultimate Kelsonian goal was later reflected in the 1976 Annual Report of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which called for "broadened ownership of new capital" as a major new objective of U.S. economic policy.

Mr. Kurland is generally acknowledged by the ESOP's earliest supporters as the initial pioneer, catalyst and orchestrator of the Kelsonian strategy on Capitol Hill. Under the effective leadership of Senator Long and others, Congress has given its "stamp of approval" to over 20 legislative advances for the ESOP since late 1973, all tacked on to other major bills. Upon this foundation, the ESOP enjoys probably the broadest bipartisan base of political support of any U.S. economic policy since Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862. As a result of these piecemeal ESOP reforms, over 11 million American workers in over 10,000 companies are now enjoying the benefits of ESOP, up from several hundred workers in less than a dozen companies when Kurland first learned of Kelso's ideas.

In the 1980 Presidential primaries in New Hampshire, Mr. Kurland, a political independent, was elected as the bipartisan Ownership Campaign's "Republican candidate" for President (a position which Kelso declined). With two "Democratic candidates" and a leader of the American Agriculture Movement as his "Republican" running mate, together with a $13,000 budget and a handful of weekend volunteers, this highly targeted campaign openly limited its objective to carrying the message of expanded ownership to America’s first primary. The Campaign’s most important "victory" was a major Sunday feature article by William Greider in the Washington Post. But the expanded ownership message was not lost on Ronald Reagan, George Bush and other Republican and Democratic candidates, when prominent liberal and conservative media in New Hampshire reported favorably on the new message.

Kurland worked with the staffs of Senator Gary Hart and Rep. Parren Mitchell who on March 1, 1983 co-sponsored legislation to make the ESOP and the General Stock Ownership Corporation (GSOC) major elements of the Democratic alternative to the Reagan Administration's "free enterprise zone" program. (The GSOC is another name for the Community Investment Corporation Kurland had earlier conceived when he worked in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant for the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty.) Under this approach, land development in low-income areas could be financed through techniques similar to ESOP so that area residents could participate as stockholders in the planning, equity growth, and profits that would normally flow to outside land speculators.

In April 1984 Kurland and others, including the late Rev. William Ferree (retired Chairman of the Board of Dayton University, author and internationally recognized scholar on Catholic social justice), founded the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) to promote globally the Kelso-Adler theory of economic justice as a necessary component of social justice.

Among Mr. Kurland's most noted business accomplishments was his internationally-acclaimed ESOP at the South Bend Lathe Company. In 1975, he devised the strategy and headed the team which enabled 500 employees to raise over $9 million to acquire 100% of the equity of their failing company and convert it into a money-winner within a year. It was the world's first 100% leveraged buyout through an ESOP. The South Bend Lathe ESOP was also one of the first in a non-publicly-traded company to allow employees to vote their allocated shares. In the South Bend Lathe project, Mr. Kurland conceived the original ESOP Industrial Development Bank, through which funds from private and public lending sources were mobilized for private ownership-expanding purposes.

However, the "new labor deal" that saved South Bend Lathe did not fit the traditional wage-system collective bargaining agreement. Even after repeated solicitations of their participation, the international representatives of the United Steelworkers Union, which represented SBL workers, refused to negotiate the details of the ESOP with management. Certain unresolved issues in the ESOP's design inflamed hostilities between SBL executives and international union officials and led to a strike in 1980–characterized misleadingly in the international press as "workers striking against themselves."

Since the time of the South Bend Lathe strike, the United Steelworkers Union, under new leadership, has become one of labor's strongest advocates of the ESOP for saving failing companies. But after 18 years of continuing "wage system" strife between labor and management, this inadequately structured ESOP company abandoned its ESOP in early 1993.

Despite the problems encountered at South Bend Lathe, this model set a new precedent in the history of American industrial relations. It served as the prototype for such world-acclaimed and highly successful 100% ESOP leveraged buyouts as Weirton Steel (saving over 8,000 jobs) and the $1.7 billion buyout by 20,000 American workers of the Avis rental car company.

Perhaps Kurland's most noteworthy prototype of a corporate incentive system combining equity with efficiency (one component of a business approach he calls "Justice-Based Management"), can be found at Allied Plywood Corporation (now the A-Wood Group of Companies) headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. Workers there have traded future increases in fixed wages and benefits for the more flexible and profitable gains of the ownership system. Since Kurland installed Allied Plywood's ESOP in 1977, the workers' ownership gains (in the form of monthly and annual cash bonuses, ESOP shares and dividends) have ranged in the thirteen year period, 1977-1989, from 90% to 300% greater than their modest basic wages.

Thus, even in years when there has been a decline in monthly cash bonuses as a result of declining sales in the home building industry (such as in 1982 and during the home building recession), the "flexible wage cushion" has allowed the company to avoid layoffs and even expand. The success of this profit sharing arrangement is reflected in the fact that employees in the "core Allied" profit center have seldom missed receiving a monthly cash bonus.

In 1982, after buying small blocks of shares from the original owners over a seven-year ownership transition period, the Allied Plywood employees purchased the control block of company shares with funds borrowed by the ESOP from a local bank. (Ed Sanders, the original owner, was Senator Long’s key witness for the 1984 ESOP tax-free rollover for owners divesting to their workers, an incentive he never enjoyed.) The bank loan was repaid within 24 months, wholly out of company profits. Today, the company is 100% owned by its employees, and, with its late 1999 acquisition of a large Florida company, has over 300 employees covered by its ESOP.

Hailed as a model incentive system by management guru Tom Peters, Allied Plywood has expanded from 19 employees in one warehouse in 1977 to a regional company with 15 locations from Maryland to Florida. As the company’s "outside" member of the board since 1982 and ESOP architect from 1977 on, Kurland succeeded in 1998 in getting other board members to restructure the company according to Justice-Based Management principles, thus giving full voting rights to all workers on their ESOP shares, establishing a democratically-elected Ownership Council through which non-management workers nominate candidates to fill three rank-and-file members of the board giving them equal status with three management board members elected by management workers, and up to three outside directors.

Kurland also served as chief architect for the first 100% bank-financed leveraged ESOP buyout in December 1985 by the employees of Mid-South Building Supply, headquartered in Springfield, Virginia. No employee put up a cent or made any wage or benefit concessions to finance the buyout, and the bank loan was repaid by March 1994. The original owner, benefiting from the tax-deferred rollover on the sale proceeds, served as guarantor on the bank note until 1989 when the company built up its own collateral. The company now has over 100 employees operating out of four locations.

Viewing the labor union as a necessary social institution for promoting economic and social justice, Kurland has long worked to promote the ESOP strategy within the labor movement. Involved in the early effort to win the support of U.S. labor statesman Walter Reuther for expanded capital ownership, Kurland brought Reuther and Kelso together. Kurland's efforts were rewarded when in 1967 Reuther, as head of the United Automobile Workers Union, made an historic statement before the Joint Economic Committee promoting employee equity ownership as an alternative to inflationary wage hikes.

In 1971, Kurland, working with the Banana Workers Union of United Fruit in Guatemala, gained U.S. Department of Justice support for an ESOP strategy to acquire the Guatemalan plantations of United Fruit, to comply with a U.S. anti-trust divestiture decree. Kurland proposed a self-executing anti-trust decree, never done before, where the anti-trust violator would be ordered by the court to sell the divested company to an ESOP, take back paper as a creditor-seller, and be repaid for the appraised value of the company out of future profits. The Del Monte Corporation–reportedly with bribes–won approval from the Guatemalan Government over the workers' proposal.

In 1972, Kurland was hired by the National Maritime Union to gain Congress' support for an ESOP strategy to save the American passenger vessel industry. The emerging taxpayer revolt had struck down subsidies for "the vacations of the rich." Without the subsidies, American-flag companies threw in the towel and petitioned the Congress for permission to sell five American luxury liners (also constructed with taxpayer subsidies) to foreign-flag companies. 5,000 NMU members lost their jobs to low-paid foreign seamen on foreign-flag vessels in the lucrative and growing East coast cruise business. The NMU, in desperation, found ways to cut labor costs by 50% and Joe Curran, the NMU president testified that they would do so if Congress would allow them to restructure the industry through a 100% leveraged ESOP, profit sharing and participatory management (i.e., Justice-Based Management). Ironically, this historic ESOP initiative on the part of a labor union was rejected by Senator Russell Long, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who in late 1973 was to become the ESOP's most ardent advocate in Congress.

When the Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice was formed in 1985, Kurland arranged for William Doherty, head of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, AFL-CIO, and Norman Weintraub, Chief Economist of the Teamsters Union, to be appointed by President Reagan. Kurland later served as a bridge in negotiating changes in the task force recommendations on trade policy, which satisfied both the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. All recommendations were accepted unanimously by this bi-partisan panel, and they remain a standing blueprint for U.S. economic policy in Central America and the Caribbean Basin.

Perhaps the most important of the task force's recommendations was the concept of a "free trade company" which could sell any products within the U.S. market without any quotas, duties, or trade barriers, if the company were majority-owned by its employees through an ESOP and if the workers were permitted but not required to organize a democratic trade union. This was seen by the AFL-CIO as a way to avoid the potential exploitation of workers in so-called "free trade zones" which American labor has always opposed.

While maintaining solid contracts and friendships with key leaders of organized labor, Mr. Kurland has also remained a strong critic of the "conflict theory" of industrial relations. Traditional "wage system" demands (i.e., progressively higher fixed wages and benefits) have proved to be counterproductive to the job security and incomes of workers and have failed to achieve the highest level of economic justice at the workplace, the original objective of democratic trade unionism.

As with their counterparts in corporate management, enlightened labor leaders are now in search of new directions. Mr. Kurland has convinced a growing number of labor officials from many countries, particularly in Bangladesh, Africa and the Caribbean, that the ESOP and other expanded ownership programs are beneficial to both organized labor and management and offer a wholesome new range of subjects over which to bargain in the future.

On a community, regional, and national scale, Kurland has developed several innovative and far-reaching programs and strategies applying the logic of ESOP financing. Kurland's major contribution to Kelsonian monetary theory involved his concept of the "two-tiered" Federal Reserve discount rate. (While leaving the cost of consumer or non-productive credit at market rates, this strategy calls for a radical reduction of the cost of productive credit to member banks, provided they channeled these "self-liquidating" loans through expanded ownership mechanisms such as family farms, small businesses and vehicles such as the ESOP.) In Kurland's view, this slight refinement of the Federal Reserve's existing powers could become the single most potent instrument for eliminating inflation and expanding the citizen base for free market policies in the United States.

Kurland publicly unveiled this reform for the first time in a paper, "Kelsonian Monetary Weapons for Fighting Inflation" that he presented as a member of the panel on "Kelsonian Economics" at the 1977 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Economics Association in Hartford. This paper was later made part of the record when Kurland testified before the House Small Business Subcommittee on Access to Equity Capital and Business Opportunities in May 1979. The reform was also a key part of his proposed Industrial Homestead Act (later renamed the Capital Homestead Act) that he prepared in 1982 for President Reagan’s Special Assistant for International Economic Affairs.

Mr. Kurland worked in 1978 with the American Agriculture Movement, a grassroots network of farmers who drove their tractors to Washington from all over the United States to protest against Federal farm policies and high interest rates. In their last tractorcade, farmers from all over America surrounded the Federal Reserve Building with 450 tractors to advocate peacefully Kurland's two-tiered interest rate reform. Kurland accompanied AAM leaders when they presented their case to Fed officials. This was the first time in history that any protesters targeted the Fed as the source of their problems.

In May 1994, Kurland was invited by Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy to be a "challenge speaker" at the USDA Senior Policy Retreat for 75 USDA undersecretaries and senior level managers working in the U.S. and in foreign missions. Presenting the "expanded capital ownership paradigm" as a new framework for addressing problems of trade, agriculture, and poverty in rural America, Kurland again raised the need for structural reforms to universalize citizen access to low-cost productive credit and to enable farm families to gain equity and share the upstream profits of the world food industry.

Almost twenty years after the farmers' protest, no effective challenge to the Federal Reserve's policy has been mounted. But Kurland's monetary reforms continue to pick up supporters as the U.S. economy remains shackled by confused and counter-productive macro-economic policies.

In November 1999 Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan gave the Center for Economic and Social Justice permission to publish on the CESJ web site an exchange of letters between him and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) on initiatives the Fed can take in promoting ESOPs and other ownership-expanding innovations.

Under Kurland's direction, a 1971 study was funded by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity to apply the Kelsonian philosophy and ESOP approach within a comprehensive regional development strategy for New England. This report introduced the Community Investment Corporation (CIC), a bottom-up approach to land use planning and development for prototype "new communities" and "free enterprise zones." It was based on Kurland’s work in the mid-1960s in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other poverty communities. As already noted, in 1983 Kurland worked with the staffs of Senator Gary Hart and Rep. Parren Mitchell to incorporate this concept (called the "General Stock Ownership Corporation"), along with the ESOP, as major components within the Democratic version of President Reagan's "free enterprise zone" initiatives.

In 1994 "empowerment zone" legislation backed by the Clinton Administration was enacted by Congress. Unfortunately this trickle-down approach to community development was grossly deficient on the issue of ESOP and other expanded ownership goals. (In other words, as designed it will make the rich richer and at best provide token ownership for workers and zone residents.)

Since 1997 Kurland has been working as an economic empowerment consultant to Illinois State Representative Wyvetter Younge to initiate a Community Investment Corporation in East St. Louis, Illinois, one of America’s poorest African American communities. The CIC would operate like an ESOP to attract bank credit to purchase non-productive land in the community so that ownership, control and profits can flow to all citizens as the CIC’s shareholders.

In 1995, Kurland and his associates in Equitech and CESJ formed a strategic alliance with former D.C. Congressman Rev. Walter Fauntroy to introduce Capital Homesteading reforms within a "Super Empowerment Zone" in the District of Columbia. As a pilot demonstration, a team of architects, engineers, scientists, lawyers, economists, social systems designers, penologists, community leaders and other experts have developed a proposal for replacing the Lorton prison with a $3.5 billion "New Birth Transformation" facility. The proposed structure would marry the utilization and commercialization of Space Age energy technologies, expanded ownership financing for creating ownership opportunities for prison employees, prisoners, and the voters of D.C., and proven approaches for transforming prisoners into responsible and productive citizens.

Among his legislative initiatives at the state-level, in 1972 Kurland worked with Minnesota State Senator George Pillsbury who created the first state-level ESOP law, even before the Federal Government officially recognized the ESOP. Senator Pillsbury, a board member of the Pillsbury Corporation, also opened the door for Kurland to conservative U.S. Senators in Washington, notably Senator Paul Fannin of Arizona, who introduced the first ESOP bill in Congress which Kurland helped draft.

In 1980, Kurland completed a study for the State of Delaware which resulted in a 1981 law signed by Governor Pete du Pont to encourage ESOPs and GSOCs as official policy for financing future growth of the Delaware economy.

In 1992, then-Mississippi Congressman Mike Espy, the first African-American elected from the Mississippi Delta, became a champion of the ESOP. Mr. Espy arranged for Kurland to address an economic empowerment panel of the Congressional Black Caucus. After joining President Clinton's team as his Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Espy took several initiatives to promote Kurland's ideas, directly with the President and by arranging in May 1994 for Kurland to present a "white paper" on rural development at his secretary's policy retreat for 75 top officials of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The paper argued, among other things, that the CIC should be a major component of the Administration's rural empowerment zones.

In May 1982, at the request of the senior White House staff, Kurland developed the concept paper and national agenda for an "Industrial Homestead Act" (later renamed the "Capital Homestead Act"), a comprehensive monetary, tax and broadened ownership strategy for revitalizing the American economy. Both political parties have been studying these proposals, some of which have become law, but neither party has taken any action to move beyond piecemeal and superficial reforms of the economy.

In 1983, Kurland prepared Project Economic Justice, at the request of the National Security Council. This strategy outlined basic monetary and tax reforms needed to encourage expanded capital ownership as a component of U.S. economic development strategies in Central America and in the Caribbean Basin. In March 1985, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs adopted as part of the Foreign Aid Authorization Act a requirement that the President appoint a Task Force on Project Economic Justice along the lines of a resolution drafted by Mr. Kurland. No taxpayers funds were involved and all task force funding was raised by the Center for Economic and Social Justice. The legislation, enacted as an antidote to Marxist revolutionary pressures in the region, attracted sponsors from both left and right extremes on Capitol Hill.

As noted earlier, this Task Force issued a highly acclaimed report which was presented to President Ronald Reagan and to Pope John Paul II in 1987. It recommended a series of proposals, including the concept of "free trade companies" and priority funding by the World Bank and USAID, to encourage ESOPs within the region.

In 1982, Kurland and several colleagues with international economic development experience formed Equity Expansion International, Inc. (EEI) as a prototype investment banking and consulting group to deliver ESOP services outside the United States. EEI's primary focus is to arrange financing so that workers, especially those in developing countries, could gain access to the same calibre of professional financial services as has been provided by traditional investment bankers to wealthy investors around the world. EEI's basic products include ESOPs tailored to the needs of developing and transforming economies, ESOP legislative modules which can be adapted to the unique cultures of developing countries, and other social technologies which have been designed primarily by Kelso and Kurland.

In 1985, as EEI's Managing Director, Kurland helped found the USAID-funded Center for Privatization, which served countries around the world trying to privatize their failing state-owned companies. He became the in-house critic of the traditional "trickle-down" approach to privatization. Kurland contended that the process of transforming a state-dominated economy was mainly political; thus it required broad-based political support, mainly among public sector employees and labor unions who might normally be opposed to privatization. He became the main voice within USAID circles for the "bottom-up" approach to privatization. This approach was eventually articulated in the "parallel legal system" developed for Costa Rica and the "two-pronged privatization strategy" paper he presented before the 1991 ESOP Association Conference.

Kurland's "two-pronged" strategy was to develop a "new economy" (based on comprehensive reforms to stimulate non-inflationary growth and new markets for the private sector), thus absorbing redundant workers from the "old economy." Political barriers to privatization, he asserted, could then be reduced by offering workers competent merchant banking assistance to enable them to acquire significant ownership incentives through the ESOP. Such a political deal would be conditioned on the workers agreeing to a "new labor deal," including "sunset dates" for a phased termination of subsidies, monopolies, and other privileges enjoyed by state-owned enterprises.

Thus, the government could cut its budget deficits and the workers could get a sizable equity stake in an "old company" restructured and managed in ways calculated to improve its odds of survival in the global marketplace. Those state-owned companies which could not meet this challenge would be allowed to fail, with their employees also absorbed in the new growth economy which would be launched simultaneously with the divestiture program.

Kurland's critique of the traditional Wall Street approach to transforming socialist economies went unheeded. By 1994 many former Soviet-dominated countries, advised by Western consultants and investment bankers, followed the Wall Street capitalist prescriptions for privatizations. The so-called "democratic capitalism" approach created such widespread social disorders that working people voiced their discontent by swinging the political pendulum back to the left by electing former communists back into power in Russia, Poland, Hungary and many other countries of the former Soviet bloc.

As a faculty member for the International Law Institute (Georgetown Law Center), Kurland delivers privatization seminars on structural reforms for encouraging more dynamic and just market economies. He has consistently received top ratings from seminar participants, who include high-level officials, lawyers and policy makers from transforming and developing countries. Kurland has also lectured for the International Management Group/INTRADOS, the International Development Law Institute in Rome, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the African Development Bank, the Caribbean Development Bank, the George Meany Center for Labor Studies, the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies, the World Institute for Development and Peace, Summit Council for World Peace, the Bangladesh Institute for Development Studies, the Bangladesh Independent Labor Council, the Bangladesh Human Rights Commission, the Caribbean Congress of Labor, the Reason Foundation, the National Center for Employee Ownership, and the ESOP Association. In 1985, as a result of this "seeding process," Kurland was given his first opportunity to deliver ESOP services outside the United States in a request that came from Egypt for a demonstration ESOP.

Under a USAID contract, Kurland led the team which structured the first ESOP in a developing country, at the Alexandria Tire Company of Egypt. This was a new $160 million private sector joint venture between the Egyptian state-owned tire manufacturer TRENCO, the Pirelli Tire Company of Italy, eleven other investors, and the "ATC Employee Shareholders' Association" (ESA). Kurland, with advice from a leading Egyptian lawyer on the EEI team, invented the ESA as a substitute for a legal trust, an entity not recognized under Egyptian laws.

The EEI team then negotiated and helped close on an $18 million loan to purchase 25.8% of the founders' shares on behalf of future ATC employees, giving the workers who had not yet even been hired the largest block of shares. As a result, each worker to be hired will have the opportunity to "earn" shares whose initial value will be eight times his annual salary, all paid out of future profits. According to conservative projections, workers are also expected to begin to receive "second incomes" from dividends equal to their pay by the eighth year of the ESOP operation. Egyptian consumers will gain a "state-of-the-art" steel-belt radial truck tire manufacturer capable of supplying 30% of the domestic market.

The Egyptian government and the media were extremely enthusiastic about this model, which was expected to serve as a prototype for further ESOPs in Egypt. Events unrelated to the ESOP delayed construction of the new plant, but ground-breaking got underway before the end of 1991. The Alexandria Tire Company has been fully operating with over 600 workers since late 1994.

In 1989, EEI was hired under a USAID-funded contract requested by Minister of Planning Ottón Solís to develop an ESOP law project for Costa Rica. In an interactive process with Costa Rican lawyers, accountants, businessmen, and labor leaders, Kurland led the team which structured a "parallel legal system." This legal module was designed to promote ESOPs in private sector companies and in the privatization of state-owned companies. It contained its own comprehensive set of tax, credit, and other incentives, and would operate alongside the existing legal system to create ESOP demonstration companies, whose productivity, profit, and fiscal impact could be compared with traditionally-owned and state-owned companies.

One objective of the Costa Rican Law Project was to avoid the complexity and high cost of implementing ESOPs that has resulted in the United States. (The U.S. ESOP laws are piecemeal and overly complicated, located haphazardly throughout the labyrinthine U.S. tax code, and have no coherent logic. This is largely because ESOP legal provisions have always been added as "riders" to other legislation.) Hence, Costa Rica allowed Kurland and his team to start fresh, taking into account all the experiences and abuses developed over 20 years of ESOP applications in the United States, the United Kingdom and Egypt.

To expedite the technology transfer process and reduce the "learning curve" for legislators, lawyers and accountants, prototype ESOP legal documents (based on the experiences of thousands of ESOPs being implemented in the United States and the UK, plus Kurland's experience in Egypt) were incorporated into the proposed law to be presented to the legislature for careful review by lawyers and tax accountants involved in the legislative process. Another purpose of the "pre-approved" model ESOP was to reduce the time, cost and red tape involved in getting approvals by whatever government oversight agencies might be involved in regulating and policing ESOPs in Costa Rica.

When the Minister of Planning left his position, the country lost the "prime mover" needed to champion the ESOP legislation. FEDEPRICAP, a regional private sector umbrella group headquartered in San Jose, held a conference in July 1990 in which EEI's "parallel legal system" was presented and received positive feedback from business and labor participants. But, without a "Russell Long" of Costa Rica, the ESOP initiative has remained in a holding pattern in Costa Rica.

As a result of the Costa Rican initiative, EEI was awarded a contract in 1990 over such competitors as Price-Waterhouse, to perform a study for implementing ESOPs in Guatemala. Working with Kurland on the team was one of Guatemala's leading corporate lawyers (a former Minister of Economy), the head of Arthur Andersen's local office, a leading Guatemalan consulting economist, and one of Guatemala's most progressive businessmen. The EEI team was thus able to gain excellent entré at the highest levels of Guatemalan financial, business, labor, and government circles.

The study, funded by USAID through the Cámara Empresarial de Guatemala (CAEM), a private sector umbrella group, recommended the adoption of the "parallel legal system" similar to the one developed in Costa Rica. This study was highly praised by CAEM and was submitted in July 1991 to President Serrano for his consideration. Also submitted was another proposal of Kurland's team, outlining a strategy for privatizing Guatel (a state-owned telecommunications company) through a sale to its workers and regular customers, the latter through a "Consumer Shareholders' Association" authorized under the parallel legal system. Having met with top legislators, Kurland now feels that the climate may be ripe in Guatemala for an ESOP law initiative. But the key to significant implementation of ESOP in Guatemala now lies in the hands of the new president.

In August 1990, Kurland was hired by The World Bank to study the state-owned SIDERMEX Steel Complex to determine whether it was feasible under current Mexican laws and policies to sell the operation to the employees through an ESOP. He concluded that this could be accomplished under existing provisions of the law with the support of the Finance Minister. However, no action has yet been taken.

Kurland was invited in April 1991 to Mexico City by the Instituto Tecnológico de México (ITAM), a leading think tank with close connections to Finance Minister Pedro Aspe who formerly served as an economist on the ITAM faculty. As a result of his discussions with ITAM, Kurland and his associates have been hired under contract with the Inter-American Development Bank to develop recommendations for encouraging ESOPs in Mexico, which hopes to serve as a model for the rest of Latin America.

Kurland’s professional career has taken him to over 41 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. In his work with policy makers, scholars and reformers in developing and transforming economies, Kurland has observed that many are seeking a "just third way" beyond socialism and capitalism–an approach that accepts free markets and private property while promoting broadly decentralized ownership of the means of production among citizens. The ESOP approach has been extremely well-received as a means for achieving this "just third way." This was evidenced in Spring 1992 when one of Kurland's papers on the subject was translated into Russian by the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow. In December 1996 his "just third way" presentations were well-received in Moscow before the State Duma Commission on Review of Privatization Results and before labor leaders at the Academy of Labor and Social Relations of the Independent Trade Unions.

Over recent years, Kurland has been establishing contacts with policy makers and pro-democracy leaders from the Peoples Republic of China. In February 1989, Kurland was invited for a two-week tour of China under the auspices of the State Commission for Restructuring the Economic System of China. After the Tiananmen Square crackdown of pro-democracy demonstrators on June 4, 1989, Kurland decided to postpone his trip to China until the climate improved for reform-minded leaders, some of whom are under house arrest, others in exile in the United States and other countries.

In 1991, Kurland began working with former Chinese officials and scholars now living in the United States who were among the vanguard of China's economic reformers. Kurland lectured on August 19, 1991 in San Diego before the Chinese Scholars in Political Science and International Studies (CSPSIS). Through his close contacts with the President of CSPSIS, Kurland assisted Chinese economic reformers in their development of a new constitution and legal system to encourage economic democratization through ESOPs and other expanded ownership vehicles.

Having authored numerous articles and presented testimony on the moral, economic and strategic aspects of the "expanded capital ownership" paradigm, Mr. Kurland was a major contributor to the publication of Curing World Poverty: The New Role of Property. This book, published in 1994 by Social Justice Review (St. Louis, Missouri) in collaboration with the Center for Economic and Social Justice, contains essays on "the just third way" by Louis Kelso and other leading international scholars, practitioners and business executives (including a series of articles by Mr. Kurland).

Curing World Poverty grew out of 1991 CESJ seminar presented in Rome for Catholic leaders and scholars. At the seminar, the CEOs of three 100% employee-owned companies–Avis Rent-a-Car, Fastener Industries, and Allied Plywood Corporation–were presented with CESJ's "Global Award for Value-Based Management" (later called "Justice-Based Management"). The chapter in the book on Kelsonian economics was written by Professor Robert Ashford who co-authored with the UK’s Rodney Shakespeare the 1999 book Binary Economics: The New Paradigm, the most scholarly presentation to date of Kelso’s economic theories.

In 2004, Mr. Kurland published a ground-breaking book (coauthored with Dawn Brohawn and Michael Greaney), entitled Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen: A Just Free Market Solution for Saving Social Security. This comprehensive economic agenda, expanded from a report funded by the William H. Donner Foundation to address the mounting Social Security and Medicare crisis, offers Kelsonian monetary, tax and expanded ownership reforms for growing the productive sector and building a true nation of owners.

Mr. Kurland's most important innovation in Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen was the introduction of the Capital Homestead Account (CHA) for every man, woman and child. This approach for democratizing access to capital credit and "new money" created through central banking system would place money power directly in the hands of every individual (subject to systemic checks-and-balances), rather than through often management-controlled trust mechanisms like ESOPs.

Following the 2004 publication of Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen, Illinois State Rep. and Majority Conference Spokesperson Wyvetter Younge introduced the first legislation to establish "Community Investment Corporations" ("CICs"). These expanded ownership mechanisms were first proposed by Mr. Kurland as a Kelsonian alternative to the non-profit Community Development Corporations. CICs would enable residents of a designated community, city or region, to share as owners in the equity growth, profits and governance of land planning and development. The legislative definition for the CIC was adapted from the definition appearing in the glossary of Capital Homesteading, with many of the specifications for the CIC drafted by Mr. Kurland.

Demonstrating the global implications of the Capital Homesteading approach, a specific application for Iraq that appeared in Appendix 9 of the book led to a meeting with Senator Rick Santorum and two top legislative aides. Senator Santorum's subsequent letter to the key assistant to Amb. Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority helping to rebuild Iraq, led to Mr. Kurland's presentation of the proposal at the Pentagon before senior officials of the CPA and a representative of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

To Mr. Kurland, there is no higher work than the pursuit and application of absolute values, expressed in ways that enhance the dignity and empowerment of every member of human society. But this work, while it may revolve around revolutionary ideas, necessarily requires an acceptance of the reality that social and cultural change is evolutionary. This becomes even more apparent if we take into account the normal habit patterns of human beings and the rigidity of accepted paradigms of thought. And, at best, as human beings we can only pursue absolutes like Truth and Justice, and can never fully perceive what remains hidden. But when great thinkers (such as post-scarcity visionaries like Louis Kelso, William Ferree and Buckminster Fuller) reveal truths that have eluded us in the past, our powers of reason tell us they are right.

Thus, social change is a slow and frustrating process for revolutionaries. Yet the true revolutionary knows that the key to the realization of revolutionary ideas is effective communication. Norman Kurland's legacy is in his writings and accomplishments, as well as his growing network and collaborations with other architects of change who, seeing the potential promise of technological abundance for all, are equally outraged by the senseless violence, pandemic world poverty, and other symptoms of breakdown of the moral order. These artifacts of his life are media for communicating and crystallizing new ideas to produce a freer, more just and more sustainable future for all present and future residents of our Global Village.