But as protesters gear up for Saturday’s “Occupy 2.0″ and the three-month anniversary of OWS, they’re also looking beyond Zuccotti. And most still say the movement is more than a moment.

‘IT’S NOT GOING ANYWHERE’

On a bright, brisk Saturday morning in November, Katy Ryan, 35, marched with hundreds of Occupy protesters from Zuccotti up Broadway, beyond City Hall to Foley Square. Ryan’s 8-year-old daughter, Mary Jane Thorne, held her hand and marched alongside.

They’d traveled from Jersey City to take part in the march, organized in conjunction with a campaign to encourage people to transfer their savings from large financial institutions to community banks and credit unions.

“I want her to see what it is to be an active citizen of her country,” Ryan said during a quick break. When asked what she thought about the march, Mary Jane looked bashfully at her mother, then at the ground. She did voice her opinions on another matter, however, when they resumed walking. “My sock is so annoying,” she said, yanking at the offending footwear. “It won’t stay up.”

The marchers spilled over the sidewalks of lower Manhattan, stalling traffic. The driver of a paralyzed SUV honked his horn, while passengers stuck their hands out from beyond tinted windows and made peace signs.

It was the first protest for Mary Jane, whom her mother calls MJ. “I put everything to her in the simplest of terms,” Ryan said of her daughter. “I did tell her about the bailouts, and how the average person is suffering more due to irresponsibility by the banks and our government.” Later in the day, MJ appeared on the OWS video livestream, sticking her tongue out at each bank as she marched by.

Little over a week before the NYPD raid on Zuccotti Park, Ryan speculated about the future of Occupy Wall Street. “Of course, I hope something more tangible comes of it,” she said. “I think we’ve only seen the beginning. It’s not going anywhere, even if they did come in and dismantle the park.”

In the month since police did just that, slashing tents, trashing books and arresting bus-loads of protesters, Ryan has become more involved in OWS. She says she visited the park the morning after the raid to see what was left and found herself galvanized.

Ryan has since joined Occupy Wall Street’s “direct action” working group, which currently meets in community spaces and office buildings within a few blocks’ radius of Zuccotti — which she and other protesters call “Liberty Square.”

The NYPD raid may have provided the jolt that Occupy Wall Street needed, Ryan said. A month ago, she had grown frustrated with what she saw as stagnation: a packed, stifling encampment beset by people more interested in photo ops than protest. “They made what we were all passionate about look ridiculous from the outside,” she said.

With those hangers-on mostly gone, Ryan said, it’s been easier to focus on “day of action” events. Most recently, she and her daughter visited Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood as part of a protest that occupied a foreclosed home.

But for Ryan, those events have been fewer and farther between as the holiday season has approached. A freelance makeup artist and hair colorist, she still manages to make meetings two or three times a week during “mom-allotted hours.” Mary Jane spends half the week with her father — Ryan used to spend those nights in the park.

“This time last year I was working at a salon for the 1 percent 10-12hrs a day,” Ryan said in an email Friday. “My old schedule wouldn’t have allowed for this, and who knows how my old employer would have responded considering the clientele.”

Still, she plans to make time for Occupy 2.0, the next major OWS event, scheduled for Saturday.

“We are re-occupying,” Ryan said in an email. “I’m glad I didn’t put my sleeping bag and tent back in storage yet too!”

Ryan said Friday that MJ will be attending the new occupation, carrying a yellow balloon identifying children of Occupiers and wearing a beloved T-shirt she made at an art station in Zuccotti. It features two scenes, as Ryan describes them: “In the first scene it was the banks stealing our money. The second scene was her strongest Pokemon taking it back and giving it to people.”

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SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

Some Occupiers are part of the movement more in mind than body, and have been less focused on protest in the month since the raid on Zuccotti, a key access point for both originators and onlookers.

Desiree Frias, 18, a student at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, was a casual Occupier in November. She and her fiance, Hector Acevedo, 22, who studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, attended rallies on weekends when they weren’t busy studying.

Frias was arrested after the OWS Move Your Money protest arrived at Foley Square. Hundreds of protesters flooded the square, which is usually a deserted public space surrounded by mammoth government buildings, and began an hours-long standoff with police who tried to disperse them.

Uniformed NYPD officers lined up across the street on the steps of the New York State Supreme Court building. After a couple of failed attempts to shoo the protesters away via megaphone — “We don’t want nobody to get hurt!” was the last such warning — police unfurled orange netting and began pushing the crowd, including a HuffPost reporter, back off the sidewalk. Others shoved protesters who resisted.

In the chaos, the police made an example of Frias, dragging her, sobbing, up the courthouse steps and cuffing her beneath the words of George Washington etched into its edifice: “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.”

“I just want to go back to college,” Frias cried as officers walked her back down the steps and beyond the barricade. She asked for help finding her fiance.

At the Manhattan Criminal Court Building, where Frias was expected to be arraigned, a security officer barred HuffPost from entering. Occupy Wall Street protesters had arrived to decry the arrests of Frias and at least 21 others, according to figures later provided by Moira Meltzer of the National Lawyers Guild. Authorities had the court building on lockdown until the crowd dispersed back to Zuccotti.

According to the court clerk, Frias was charged with assaulting an officer, a felony, as well as with obstructing government administration and resisting arrest, both misdemeanors.

“She’s freaking out, keeps saying over and over, ‘I want to get out of here,’” her fiance Acevedo told HuffPost that night, back at the OWS kitchen in Zuccotti. “She doesn’t even know what happened … I’m just staying here for the night, because that’s what we were going to do. If she doesn’t get out tomorrow, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

That was the only night Acevedo spent in Zuccotti. Frias spent it in jail. Since then, they’ve had to worry more about finals, work — Acevedo holds a full-time job — and Frias’ legal issues.

“Her trial isn’t over,” Acevedo said in an email. “We’re both still not completely over all that has happened.” He said he and Frias could not comment any further, given the pending court decision.

The crash course in political protest has not thwarted their interest in Occupy Wall Street. “If anything, it just made us want to do more than we already were,” Acevedo said.

In the last few weeks, he has switched majors, from criminal justice to political science.

BIG ISSUES, BIG MONEY

Upon returning from the protest of Frias’ arraignment, tempers ran high. A man who entered the camp’s “information tent” angrily questioned HuffPost about available bathroom facilities before two Occupy Wall Street organizers stepped in.

After shooing him off, one of the organizers, Darrell Prince, dismissed the incident and similar confrontations as “plant issues,” or attempts by opponents to undermine Occupy Wall Street. More serious cases of violence and drug use had arisen at Zuccotti, but Prince and other organizers likewise attributed such problems to malefactors from outside the Occupy movement.

Prince himself spent years in what he calls a “thankless job in finance.” Burrowed into his coat on a cold stone bench, he said he had been looking to claim a cause for his own at the same time that OWS started to receive donations on a scale that organizers had difficulty processing. Prince, who describes himself as a “rights person,” said he came to Zuccotti every day in the first week of the occupation and then most days after that.

When he first arrived, he said, a member of the finance committee was keeping $10,000 in cash in the park. “I made her go to the bank,” he said, shaking his head. They switched the money to the Amalgamated Bank owned by the Workers United labor union.

Like Katy Ryan, Prince, 35, said he’s been frustrated by the trouble OWS has had in managing its growth, though he cited the formation of a “spokes council” as the sign of an evolution toward centralized authority.

“Look, we wouldn’t be in Iraq right now if George Bush had to come in front of the [GA],” he said. “But it’s idealistic to think that everybody talking about everything at the same time will get you anywhere.”

On the night of the NYPD raid, Prince was at a media team meeting when he heard screaming, then saw the thousand-plus police when the NYPD trucks hit the park with their lights.

To prevent such surprises in the future, Prince said he’s now developing the OWS Transparency Act, an internal road map for Occupy communications. “Trying to keep abreast of what is going on is a full-time job,” he said. “There should have been ongoing negotiations with the city.”

A secondary goal is to increase transparency around the movement’s working budget, currently allocated by a new incarnation of the financial working group that Prince joined early on. It’s now called the accounting working group, and another member said the NYPD’s destruction of the Zuccotti encampment spiked donations to Occupy Wall Street, which have risen above $600,000 in total since September.

Prince also helped organize last week’s anti-foreclosure day of action, Occupy Our Homes, which some protesters saw as a new focus. He’s helping Occupy Wall Street itself look for a new, more permanent home.

During the day, however, he answers to a different boss. Back in early November, Prince said that he was back in sales and marketing. When asked where, he pointed toward the darkened skyscrapers of the financial district but declined to elaborate. His LinkedIn page lists his current occupation as marketing and operations consulting for Maria’s Cup, Inc., a private coffee company, but it does not appear to have been recently updated.

“Of course I see the irony, but I’m kind of looking to do something else,” he said of his time in business, which has included a stint at pharmaceutical giant Merck. “I’ve basically avoided it during the time I’ve been in New York. I don’t have a good feeling about the stuff they’ve done.”

Asked in November whether the Occupy movement can survive, Prince said, “Well, I hope so,” with some reservation. “We need an alternative voice.”

In an interview last week, he didn’t hesitate. “There are big issues, big problems,” he said, “and most people seem incapable of speaking about it.”

A CALLING

John Friesen has no trouble speaking, but he takes a different view. “By its own actions, the existing power structure has exposed itself as illegitimate,” he said last week. “These institutions and structures must be dismantled, and a more humane society must be built from the ground up.”

As night settled in after the arrest of Frias and others, Friesen began his “community watch” around the Zuccotti encampment with a stroll past a cluster of police officers. In pairs, community watch volunteers would spend several hours per night surveying the park for security concerns, both internal and external. Circling the park, however, gave them no forewarning of the thousand-plus riot cops headed their way a week later.

Many of the watch volunteers had not been trained for reconnaissance or security work, although some said at the time that they were taking mediation classes. Friesen, 27, described himself primarily as an activist from Berkeley, Calif., who had been involved in protests for years. He hasn’t held a “traditional job” since 2007, Friesen said, but “I have become extremely resourceful. I live more or less without money.”

He said he had been visiting New York to observe the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks when Occupy Wall Street began in earnest, and once he visited Zuccotti, he couldn’t imagine leaving.

Rumors of an impending NYPD raid had circulated through the OWS encampment in the weeks leading up to the police action. While the tents still stood, Friesen said he thought an “inevitable” police crackdown would only strengthen the Occupy movement.

When it finally began, Friesen was wrapping up a planning meeting in a small park nearby for a later Occupy day of action. He and other OWS organizers made it back through the police cordon and clustered around the kitchen at the heart of the park.

“They could not stand the direct critique, the nascent counterpoint of a free society, the explosive expressions of authentic freedom and humanity,” Friesen said of the police. “Though the raid physically scattered us, it also allows us the opportunity — compels us, really — to collect ourselves, re-evaluate and refocus, using the experience of these miraculous months.”

Friesen and many other OWS protesters still spend some days at Zuccotti, while at night they stay with hosts throughout the city. But he says he and other organizers have become more interested in actions that they believe will have a more direct impact, such Occupy Our Homes and a march to Goldman Sachs’ New York offices in solidarity with sister protests out west.

Friesen believes that many OWS protesters have been freed up to participate in more actions, now that they are no longer obliged to worry about maintaining the Zuccotti camp. “We’re attempting to reach out to marginalized communities that we haven’t yet passed the mike to,” he says, “and crank up the volume.”

THE EVERYMAN

One part of maintaining the camp consisted of maintaining order and good behavior. A sign headed “Good Neighbor Policy,” posted on the marble wall surrounding Zuccotti, listed the OWS rules:

“Following respectful and good faith dialogue / zero tolerance for drugs or alcohol anywhere in Liberty Square / zero tolerance for verbal abuse / abuse of personal or public property.”

Around midnight following the Move Your Money march, a protester standing atop the wall joined in a game of “Marco Polo.” Roy Sharkey, 51, read under a streetlamp nearby.

Sharkey has been many things, including a musician — “it’s schizophrenic, partly Jimmy Hendrix and part James Brown” — and a writer. A native New Yorker, he got involved in OWS after he saw the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge, the first OWS event that really got his attention. Before that, he says, “I thought it had been ‘Occupy for a Day.’”

After that, he spent most nights at Zuccotti, finding it harder and harder to return home to Long Island to sleep or shower. In the park, “even the young kids are knowledgeable,” he said, “and you really learn from people when you sleep shoulder to shoulder.”

Priort to the raid, Sharkey said, “I think I’ll be living here the rest of my life.”

Even the police stationed along the edge of the park offered lessons. Up the sidewalk from where Sharkey was reading, NYPD Officer Sun talked casually with a member of OWS. Both said such chats were common during the mostly-quiet night hours.

Sun said he and other police recognized the frustrations of Occupiers. “It’s like they have $100 bill in his pocket and are shoplifting a shirt,” he said as he gazed around the financial district. “We get it.”

At the time of the raid, however, Sharkey had made one of his infrequent trips home. Since then, he’s been in Florida visiting his two young daughters and largely “out of touch” with the movement. But Sharkey has never thought of OWS in terms of weeks or months. “I think it’s long-term, not a ‘this year’ or a ’2012 election’ thing,” he said in November.

A month later, he restated his conviction, suggesting that Occupy protesters ought to lobby members of Congress and perhaps form a third party. “The response since the raid has been to re-evaluate the movement and try to decide the best way to increase support from the American people.”

In an email, Sharkey said he was still determined to fight for the rights of all Americans, including those he derides as “pathetic scared rabbits whose heads are stuck in the sand waiting for everything to be calm and blissful.”

KEEPING THE MOVEMENT ALIVE

Zuccotti is almost as quiet in the early hours as it was on that chilly morning in early November when the medical tents that marked an early victory for Occupy Wall Street were still standing.

Then, Pauly Kostora, 27, a trained nurse with a bullring in his nose and a stethoscope around his neck, described his role in the Occupy Wall Street medical group as “AIC — Asshole in Charge.”

His mission, he said, was simple: “make sure people stay alive.”

“It’s not our responsibility to give you everything you want,” he added. “It’s our responsibility to make sure this movement goes on.”

Kostora, who is also a photojournalist, was on a five-month cross-continental road trip with his dog, Zephyr, getting by on dwindling savings and whatever his guitar could earn him when friends at home in New Mexico told him he should check out what was happening in New York.

In Montreal at the time, he headed south, intending to stay a few nights in Zuccotti and take photos, but the weeks passed quickly. “Time gets clumped here,” he said.

While on watch, he swapped war stories with the other medical volunteers, some who arrived after full-time jobs where they had daily rotations of eight to 12 hours. They wore red crosses made from electrical tape, which matched the larger crosses on the tents.

In a case that is still fresh in Kostora’s mind, a patient came in with osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone marrow. “That foot was like a well-done barbecue,” said Alex Homolind, 20, another medical volunteer.

“We’ve had a few heart attacks, saved a few lives,” said Maxine Dade, 17, a self-styled “street medic.” Despite the fact that Dade was more than a few years away from a medical degree, patients didn’t hold that against her. “There are a lot of people who come to see us who haven’t seen a doctor in years,” she said, “who wouldn’t be cared for otherwise.”

At the other end of the spectrum, retired New York doctor David Stead, 69, graduated from medical school decades before Dade was born. Stead came down to Zuccotti after seeing it on the news, and upon arriving, he volunteered for the medical team.

“I just believe in the cause,” he said. “I think there should be more equity and distribution of money, and more health care for anyone. It should be something people should be able to expect, because the U.S. really has the money.”

The night of the raid, Kostora was visiting a bathroom away from the park when riot police began to advance. He barely made it back to the medical tents, where one patient was being treated and another protester with heart problems was seeking protection.

According to Kostora, police dragged him and the woman with heart problems across the street and threw them to the ground. Dr. Stead stayed behind to attend the other patient, even as cops slashed open the medical tents, he said.

“I went up to every high-ranking officer I could find and told them we have patients in there, we have medical records in there, and they can’t — it’s illegal for them to enter without a court order, and they just ignored me,” Kostora recounted a month later.

Since the raid, Kostora has focused on “rebuilding.” His team has been making the rounds to sites throughout the city where Occupy protesters have gathered. This Saturday, they’ll debut four “mobile clinics,” which Kostora described as suitcases of medical equipment that the team can use during demonstrations. Other plans are in development for a more permanent, registered clinic “that will offer free health care to everybody, 100 percent,” and a medical observation team, currently seeking volunteers, that will attend protests to respond to — and document — protesters’ injuries.

On the whole, “I think that the leadership within the Occupy movement is starting to come out,” Kostora said. “We don’t have a park to manage anymore, so now we can actually focus on where we take the movement.”

But Kostora said Friday that he’s more or less run through his savings, now relying on OWS food and the generosity of friends. “I don’t really require too much,” he said, “besides dog food.”

He’s been looking for jobs but says his work with the OWS medical team is a full-time position.

“Don’t think I’m going back to New Mexico soon,” Kostora added, “or anywhere for that matter. I’m too deep.”

‘PEOPLE AREN’T GOING TO STOP’

Across from the medical tents, at the heart of the park, was the people’s kitchen, run almost entirely on an impressive stockpile of donated supplies and some cash from the finance working group.

The kitchen feed thousands daily, said volunteer Patrick O’Black, 24, back in November, seated on an overturned bucket in the kitchen while a large man — “Just Ice, from Jamaica, Queens, baby” — washed dishes in plastic tubs.

A truck driver from Morristown, N.J., O’Black quickly became enmeshed in Occupy Wall Street after seeing the same reports of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests that mobilized Roy Sharkey. His job has him on call around the clock to make deliveries across the tri-state area — “Basically, I just listen to NPR all day,” he said — but had been able to spend most subsequent nights in the park.

“I went from, ‘I’m gonna stay the night’ to ‘I’m gonna live here,’” he said.

Before the raid, O’Black said he believed the Zuccotti encampment was there to stay. When it was destroyed, he and his fellow marchers had just arrived at Occupy Philadelphia, en route to Washington, D.C, and they spent the rest of the night watching streaming video of the melee in New York.

“We knew the raids would happen eventually,” O’Black said. “The state responds to any threat with violence. We can see this repeating throughout modern history.”

Once the marchers completed their 240-mile trek to the nation’s capital, some extended their route another roughly 700 miles to Atlanta.

In the wake of continued crackdowns at other Occupy sites, some of those protesters took the raid as a challenge, pledging to “occupy the road” in lieu of an encampment.

O’Black, however, returned to Zuccotti, and has taken part in Occupy Our Homes and other “day of action” events.

“My role in the park now is very similar,” he said last week. “I still work, delivering clothing and food to those in need. We just don’t have a home base right now.”

Wherever it eventually goes, O’Black expressed confidence that the Occupy movement will endure. “People aren’t going to stop being upset about the current state of affairs in this country,” he said, echoing his call to action from a month earlier: “Why would you possibly sit there and let things get worse? How could you live with yourself?”

Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia said “time is up” and that it’s up to Democrats controlling the White House and the Senate to offer significant spending cuts as part of legislation to fund the government for the rest of the budget year.

“We’re going to need to see a deal struck where our members can go home and tell their constituents that we’re doing what we said we would do,” Cantor said.

Cantor’s remarks to reporters suggest that Republicans could advance a stopgap bill if an agreement is struck between Democrats and the White House that would need time to draft into legislation and pass through House and Senate.

Talks have mostly broken down, however, and the combatants are instead casting blame in a daily back-and-forth public relations battle. Democrats say that GOP leaders, fearing a tea-party rebellion, have pulled back from a near-agreement on an overall figure for spending cuts that would slash President Barack Obama’s budget requests for the current year by $70 billion or more.

Republicans say Democrats have yet to offer sizable enough cuts and that some of the many conservative policy additions added in floor debate last month must be included in a final agreement.

Current stopgap funding runs out April 8 and failure to act would precipitate a partial shutdown of every government agency, though essential workers such as military troops, FBI agents, homeland security workers and many others would remain on the job.

Cantor’s comments signal that such a shutdown is increasingly likely next Friday unless the pace of negotiations accelerates sharply.

But what if frustrations linger after spring comes? Then it may be time to reassess your career. If you’re like most professionals, you probably haven’t done so in a while — not voluntarily, anyway, given the paucity of opportunities available during the prolonged recession. Thankfully, your prospects are improving.

Where should you start? A former mentor of mine gave me some give advice that is worth repeating. “Start a career search by selecting the right industry,” he said. “Then think about the layers of choices beneath. There’s a right time to join an industry, as well as a right company, a right role and a right team of people.” Let’s start with the right industry.

If you were fresh out of college today and could choose, which industry would you select? The experts say go where the money is. Why? Because growth industries simply have more opportunities than industries on the wane. This may be obvious to people pushing fifty, but not as apparent to young men and women fresh out of college. Take the software industry. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of computer software engineers is expected to increase by 32 percent between 2008 and 2018 — faster than the average for all occupations. According to the latest Bureau figures, the median annual salary of a computer applications software engineer is around $85,000, and his or her prospects for advancement are considered “good.”

Now compare that to another exciting industry: graphic design. The outlook for these professionals is very different. Between 2008 and 2018, employment is expected to grow just 13 percent. Wages, meantime, are roughly half of what they are for software engineers, while job prospects are more limited. According to the BLS, “graphic designers are expected to face keen competition for available positions” in the future.

Does this mean that graphic designers should abandon their dreams for software? Of course not. But it might sway those with interests in software and design to choose an industry in which jobs, promotions and raises will be easier to secure. Will software always offer more opportunities? There are no guarantees, which brings me to my next point: timing. As my mentor told me, you can pick the right industry, but it doesn’t mean a thing if your timing is off. If you were an engineer with a love for automobiles, could you imagine a better job than designing Corvettes for a living? Not in 1959. But 20 years later? Plastics would have been a better choice.

There are all kinds of things that can influence timing, including technological innovation, government regulation, demographic evolution and more. Before deregulation, for example, working in the airline industry was a dream job. It was glamorous, lucrative and secure, too. Afterward? Not so much. Today, commercial airline pilots make less than what they did a decade ago, and their job security is no better.

From a pure timing standpoint, it’s hard to beat healthcare today. Consider: In 2010, there were approximately 39 million Americans aged 65 and older. By 2050, there will be nearly 90 million. To care for these seniors, the United States will need 14,000 more geriatricians than it has today. No matter what happens with healthcare reform, there will be tremendous opportunities for many professionals in this sector — and for years to come.

But at which company? This requires additional research. Often two or more companies in the same industry happen upon the right idea at the right time. But rarely do both succeed. Take the battle in social media between Facebook and MySpace. For a while, it was unclear which would prevail. Eventually, Facebook did because it had a simpler value proposition. While MySpace focused on building the definitive hangout for teen music fans, Facebook aimed to become the world’s largest online community. As early as 2009, it was clear Facebook was pulling away. A graduate offered a position with each company three years ago would likely have struggled to choose between the two — that is until he or she considered what the companies were trying to accomplish. If you find yourself in a similar position one day, consider which organization is positioned and aligned to win in the long run.

In addition to industry, timing and company, you also need to consider the role you choose. As much as possible, try to work in roles that are critical to the overall mission of an organization. Chances are you’ll have more opportunity for advancement — or job security, at the very least. If the law is your calling, for example, then you likely will have plenty of opportunity outside of a traditional legal firm or the criminal justice system. But will you advance as far? Practicing law at a company that makes toys will keep you busy, but it may ultimately hold you down as well.

Finally, think about the people with whom you will work. It might seem presumptuous now, but if and when you get to the interview with the company of your dreams, take a long, hard look at the men and women you will be paired with. Consider their skills, dispositions and experiences. And then ask yourself if you fit in from a cultural, ideological and even ethical standpoint. If you don’t share the values or dreams of the people around you, then you won’t likely be happy.

Over the years, this advice has helped me navigate my career. I hope it serves you equally well on Groundhog Day, an occasion we professionals hold dear. May the shoveling soon end wherever you may be.

Inder Sidhu is the Senior Vice President of Strategy & Planning for Worldwide Operations at Cisco, and the author of Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today’s Profits and Drives Tomorrow’s Growth. Author proceeds from sales of Doing Both go to charity. Follow Inder on Twitter at @indersidhu.

Skeptics (which predominantly include frustrated Midwesterners, some business journalists and dismissive coastal venture capitalists) have generally disregarded such optimistic economic proclamations as desperate political hand-waving and hopeful, yet hollow hype to win votes, mollify the economically depressed and justify their own existence. I can understand why one would be doubtful — it is easy to be negative these days. But today, I write to tell you that the skeptics and defeatists look to be wrong, and we have some early evidence to prove it.

It has been nearly a year and a half since I moved my family from the venture capital scene and beaches of Southern California to pursue what I believed was a greener, relatively untapped entrepreneurial landscape of Michigan and the Great Lakes region. (The decision to do so was laid out in my first HuffPo blog post, “Five One-Way Tickets to Michigan, Please”). For those of you who don’t know, the venture capital process is a long-term game — it often takes 5-7 years to say with certainty whether we have done well with our investments. My firm is roughly two years into the process of investing our $100+ million venture capital fund into companies that are based in or that have operations in Michigan. With a couple of years of hard work under our belts, I feel comfortable sharing some initial data points to demonstrate that the opportunity is indeed real, though it is actually bigger and more diverse across the capital need continuum than we originally thought.

Let me be clear, I am not prematurely rolling out the “Mission Accomplished” banner. As I mentioned, it takes years before a venture capitalist can claim victory for their fund. Think of this more as a peek at the scoreboard in the third inning of a baseball game… Attaining “victory” in our case is generally a three-step process: 1) Find 12-16 promising, fast-growing companies consistent with our investment strategy to invest into; 2) Work with the management of those companies over several years to build them and position them to realize their fullest potential; and 3) Generate a significant financial return for our investors through the realization of profitable “liquidity events” — the sale of our companies to larger companies or through an IPO. Here is a breakdown on how what we have done to date:

1. Executing the Investment Strategy — finding and completing investments
Our investment strategy is to invest $2-8 million into mid to later stage companies that need growth capital to expand their products, services or to enter new markets. We are not doing early stage ventures (i.e., two guys and a powerpoint presentation) with this fund — we felt the need for growth capital was particularly acute for growth-staged Michigan companies given the pronounced shortage of investment capital in the state.

A key assumption driving the aforementioned hopeful hype was that because of its manufacturing legacy and excess capacity, disproportionately high number of mechanical and industrial engineers per capita, existence of some of the largest research universities in the nation, amongst other things, the Midwest possesses many of the key elements for innovation, cost leadership and entrepreneurship to thrive, particularly in cleantech and health care.

To date, we have reviewed over 1,000 opportunities and have invested nearly $50 million into 12 companies (and have reserved another $25 million or so for further capital needs those companies may have). The breakdown by sector in terms of capital invested is roughly: Health Care: 42%; Cleantech: 33%, and IT: 25%. The proportional split of our portfolio indeed suggests the key assumption behind the hype is well-founded.

All 12 of our investments remain in good health and in all instances the core investment thesis (the reason we thought it was a good idea to invest in the first place) is still intact. Again, it is too early to break out the champagne, but we are on the right path and the early indicators give me the confidence to state that there are plenty of high quality opportunities to invest into in Michigan (and we aren’t done yet!) — it is no longer a hypothetical vision touted by a politician.

2. Building the Businesses and Positioning for Success
It is certainly premature to make definitive claims on this point, but I can say that all 12 of our companies have increased their revenues and/or are ahead of their technical milestones after the first year of our investment (some dramatically). Creation of jobs is a major metric of focus and natural benefit of venture capital investment. All 12 companies have significantly increased their workforce (relative to their size) and often times, given that our investment focus is on knowledge-based services or innovative technologies, many of the new hires are higher salaried jobs that contribute welcome increased tax revenue to shrinking state and local budgets. For example a recent investment, ReCellular, hired over 30 people within a couple months of receiving our fund’s investment and is continuing to grow its business and its talent pool.

3. Generating Financial Return for Our Investors
To our investors, returns are the ultimate determining factor of success, and at this point it is way too early to tell how things will shake out. Suffice to say, we feel good about where we are at this point but a lot of hard work remains and hopefully we are graced with a little bit of luck along the way before we call it a day.

I have always been a person who takes pride in doing what they say they are going to do. Stating my intentions on a Huffington Post blog post a year and a half ago may have been a bold place to do it, and as such, I felt a sense an obligation to my readers to check in and let you know if we are doing what we set out to do. Indisputably, we have moved beyond the political hand-waving and the hopeful hype – we are finding great companies and putting the capital to work. Now we must continue building market leading businesses that can enable a significant financial return to our investors and to make a positive lasting impact on the communities where our companies operate — it is then we can proclaim, “Mission Accomplished”. So far, so good…

For decades, Ms. Sherrod has been fighting for economic justice and access to property for those who have been left out of the system. Starting back in the 1960s, she and her family were at the center of an effort that assembled nearly 6000 acres of land in the south for farmers who had lost control of their land. Inspired by the Jewish National Fund and other groups which held land in trust, New Communities, Inc., fused the civil rights movement with ideas about economic justice into an ambitious plan to provide ownership stability for large numbers of small farmers.

But the land was ultimately lost again, as government officials withheld access to credit that was necessary to save their effort. Such discriminatory practices were ultimately successfully challenged in a class action lawsuit documenting decades of USDA wrongdoing.

In the full video that was manipulated to portray her as a racist, Ms. Sherrod instead advocates for economic justice for all. She puts the economic tidal wave that has affected so many of those in the lower middle end of the economic spectrum into a framework that moves past race. Her approach is timely, given current debates over where to target efforts to boost the economy.

Credit is the lifeblood of any economy. Those who get access to credit on fair and reasonable terms tends to prosper. Those who get credit on predatory terms fall further behind.
The legacy of treatment of African American farmers in the south is one of denial of credit, leading to dependence on predatory credit, and finally the loss of lands on a huge scale. Though well documented, though admitted by the United States, these farmers still cannot get their compensation appropriated.

In Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s, as in many parts of the country, the United States Federal Housing Administration determined that minority neighborhoods were inherently bad risks. Middle class homebuyers who had saved substantial down payments, and whose income was sufficient to make monthly mortgage payments, nevertheless still could not get a mortgage where the FHA had redlined a neighborhood. With normal credit options constrained, many buyers paid more for a house than it was worth, turning to contract sale arrangements where a single missed payment meant the loss of years of savings.

And in the subprime flood of bad loans into hundreds of communities that surged between 2000 and 2006, those who had trouble accessing normal credit channels again became prey to the peddlers of dangerous loans. Certainly some borrowers were on the make for a fast deal with cheap money. But many subprime borrowers were fully qualified for safer, fixed rate prime loans, yet were not being served by our regular banking system.

Time and again, middle income and lower income Americans have been unable to get credit on consumer-oriented, fair terms. Home loans, farm loans, credit cards and access to property ownership are far easier to obtain for those who do not have to overcome the misperceptions of those who often control access to credit. And when average families then need to turn to bad credit products, whole segments of the population are setback and lose gains toward building wealth.

As Elizabeth Warren wrote so cogently when calling 3 years ago for a Consumer Financial Products Safety Commission: “Indeed, the pain imposed by a dangerous credit product is even more insidious than that inflicted by a malfunctioning kitchen appliance. If toasters are dangerous, they may burn down the homes of rich people or poor people, college graduates or high-school dropouts. But credit products are not nearly so egalitarian. Wealthy families can ignore the tricks and traps associated with credit card debt, secure in the knowledge that they won’t need to turn to credit to get through a rough patch. Their savings will protect them from medical expenses that exceed their insurance coverage or the effects of an unexpected car repair; credit cards are little more than a matter of convenience. Working- and middle-class families are far less insulated. For the family who lives closer to the economic margin, a credit card with an interest rate that unexpectedly escalates to 29.99 percent or misplaced trust in a broker who recommends a high-priced mortgage can push a family into a downward economic spiral from which it may never recover.”

Many will take away from the Shirley Sherrod media incident merely that fact checking is vital when information is so easy to manipulate.

But there are more important lessons to be learned. The productive economic energies of average Americans are too often smothered in a morass of bad credit products, traps for the unwary, and terms that make it hard to build wealth. Passing a Financial Reform bill, promulgating a new set of credit card regulations, or revamping the housing financing market, are not enough.

We need teeth in their enforcement, and a concerted effort to level the playing field between consumers and their sources of credit. If we fail to do so, no one should be surprised to see more and more of the middle class fall economically behind, unable to recover alongside the financial sector’s recovery.

David Abromowitz is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, www.Americanprogress.org.

We Are All Involved

Not just the US, the Gulf oil spill is a disaster for all of us worldwide as supercomputer modelling demonstrates the rapid drift of the oil into Atlantic waters and beyond in the coming weeks and months. Whilst it is easy to lay blame on a single global oil company, as some are wont to do, this complex issue is much broader and deeper than that. It is a world-wide civilisation challenge. The whole global economic system is oil dependent. Even the financial world is an inverted pyramid resting on the fossil fuel energy that powers world growth. None of us are excluded. We would be truly surprised if we knew where the oil and gas burnt in our cars, boats and aeroplanes actually comes from and how it is transported, refined and delivered to find its way into our forever hungry fuel tanks! The complicit nature of our relationship with the oil industry is ill understood.

Man-made Disaster

The Gulf of Mexico gusher is a reminder that the oil industry is now a high-risk sector where the risk profile has grown exponentially. “Black gold” is running out and oil exploration companies are entering more and more risky areas of operation to keep production levels up. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has all the familiar ingredients of deregulation, deception, and knee jerk damage-limitation that typically characterise the relations between government regulators and multinational corporations in crisis after crisis. Enron, Worldcom, Lehman Brothers, AIG etc. The list goes on. It is a man-made disaster, like Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and Exxon Valdez in 1989.

Toxic Rain?

Not only are several million gallons of crude oil sitting within the Gulf of Mexico, with more pouring in by the day, but the region is relatively prone to hurricanes early in the season, which begin in less than a few weeks. In parallel, millions of gallons of toxic dispersants like Corexit 9500, are being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico to add to the pollution from the oil spill. Dispersants have never been applied on this scale. The oceans are part of a larger precipitation cycle, and scientists are concerned that soon the consequences of using dispersants could be falling from the sky. The hurricanes could take some of the lighter oil and toxic dispersant components with them and promptly drop the lot as toxic rain along the east coast of the US and beyond. This toxic rain could be fatal for all species — from the microbial level all the way to humans — no matter where it falls, essentially collapsing the environment from the bottom up.

Oil Consumption and Investment Exit

There is a fundamental change happening. The moratorium on offshore drilling is to be expected given the rising public concern. This is a direct result of the metamorphosis in psychological perception and attitudes amongst mass consumers and return-hungry investors in regard to the risk of oil. The Gulf oil gusher is ushering in an end to the era of oil investment and consumption without questions asked. Generally there has been a perception in the global financial community that the oil and gas majors are reliable, blue chip investments delivering a steady stream of above-average growth in profits and generous dividends. As fund managers see billions of dollars wiped off the value of BP and some US lawmakers want the company to suspend shareholder dividends, large investors will undoubtedly be keen to ensure they understand all the issues surrounding deep-water drilling thoroughly and begin to diversify away from their massive oil industry exposure. It is a big change in direction since oil has played such a large role in global investment strategy for so long. This will mean asking oil companies probing questions about risk management, contingency planning, crisis management and approaches to regulatory compliance etc. Investors’ scrutiny is likely to spread beyond offshore drilling to tar sands and then shale gas. For example, the half a trillion dollar Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, has demanded that major oil companies account for the environmental impacts of their tar sand operations. An extreme response to the spill may be for funds to exit oil companies altogether, for example into low-carbon clean energy alternatives. This could trigger the end of the oil era.

Eleventh Hour and Extinction

We have reached a collective turning point in history as we arrive at the eleventh hour. It’s time to shape up, to get our act together, and to find an equitable place in the interwoven fabric of nature, or else we face the possibility of extinction of a number of species with unintended consequences for ourselves. If everything is interlinked, how long before we pay a formidable price as a species? Whilst these questions may not be at the top of the mind of investment houses, their extreme risk aversion to oil stocks in coming months and years may prove to provide the answers that enlightened humanity has been seeking for decades. Common sense should now tell investors and consumers that the current industrial-scale exploitation of hard to reach oil fields in vulnerable natural spots is an insult to intelligence. The alternatives may be slightly more expensive but the risk profile is significantly lower. No sensible analyst can deny that we are bringing disaster on ourselves and the global ecosystems, when we engage in ruthless practices, such as deep sea drilling at 5,000 feet below the surface, with wanton disregard for safety and environmental security. The exorbitant cost of the Gulf oil spill cleanup is likely to deter future adventure licensing and high-risk investment in the oil sector. This is what will begin to mark the end of the oil era, step by step, just like the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979. That accident crystallised anti-nuclear safety concerns among activists and the general public, resulting in new regulations for the nuclear industry, and has been cited as a contributor to the accelerated decline of new reactor construction that was already underway in the 1970s.

Unintended Consequences

The business fallout from the Gulf oil gusher is likely to be widespread. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill could end up causing massive damage to companies that were in no way involved with the tragedy. Risks of different types of operation will be reassessed, new rules will be enacted, and the energy business will change radically.

Conclusion

What is the real moral in the Gulf oil gusher narrative? As the marginal cost of extracting oil has risen ever higher, it has been a red rag to the investment bulls seeking a return. However, given that the risk profile of extracting that extra barrel of oil has now grown exponentially. This is likely to act as a new deterrent. The risks are rising much faster than previously anticipated as we approach peak oil. Recalibrating the value we put on hydrocarbon extraction is now the new mantra amongst oil investors and analysts. This is no different from the changed perception in regard to bank stocks, which were considered to be solid cash cows until The Great Unwind (2007-?) and The Great Reset (2008-?) began. Beyond subprime and sovereign risk, as the revelations about high frequency trading and flash crashes manifest, coupled with trillion dollar bailouts, many financial institutions are also seen as high risk casino players. Similar changes are likely to occur in the perception of oil companies as safe cash cows, which they have ceased to be.

The inertia which has set in amongst governments, businesses and the investment community in regard to preserving the status quo is going to be knocked sideways by the Gulf oil spill and as the costs of the cleanup mount, it will become imperative to invest in cleaner and safer forms of energy. The change in direction will ultimately be driven by a forced change in our collective value system. The end of oil-dependency is likely to mark the end of an era for the globalised western civilisation’s model of oil-centric capitalism. If we survive, the age of oil will be followed by an age of recovery, restoration and a return to local generation of power through alternative means. What does the future look like without oil-dependency? Cleaner forms of energy are likely to proliferate. The possibility of a world in balance with natural resources, clean air, clean water, and with the natural environment, is like a shining light at the end of a dark tunnel. To reach a new agreement, to explore our way into a friendlier way of life could be fun, more interesting, more gratifying, healthier and happier! Generations to come will also thank us for this welcome change of direction precipitated by the global financial community’s new found risk aversion to the age of oil.