In 1994 there was a government agency created that didn’t create a lot of scandal and to a large extent went unnoticed. But this government agency has made a huge contribution to the quality of life for all who get involved with it. It is the agency called Americorps created by the Clinton Administration to replicate the success of the Peace Corps to tap the power of national service to aid those in need across America.

There has been a lot of talk in the last decade about whether the current generation of young people are as “great” as the generation who fought valiantly in World War II. What the Americorps experiment set out to learn was whether the current generation was as lazy and unpatriotic as was being said in the tabloids or if the current generation, given the chance, could themselves be the “greatest generation” for our times.

The results have been phenomenal. Hundreds of thousands of young people have come forward to volunteer to serve their country and their fellow citizens through national service. National service is a concept that at one time was a core value to all Americans. At one time, children were taught that upon graduation from High School, every young person owed it to their country to serve at least two years of national service before starting family or their new careers.

What the Americorps experiment found out is that this value has not vanished from the American consciousness. Thousands of young people have flooded to Americorps in such numbers that there is a waiting list to get the chance to be of service. President Clinton’s vision to create an agency that would attempt to replicate the success of the Peace Corps of the sixties set a high standard for quality for Americorps to reach. The Peace Corps has become a standard that we all look to of an agency devoted singularly to contributing to the well being of our fellow man around the world and tapping the energy and good will of youth to accomplish this high goal. The stories of lives that have been changed of both those being helped and of volunteers to the Peace Corps are legionary.

What few know is that since 1961, 160,000 people have served in the Peace Corps. By comparison, since its inception in 1996, more than 200,000 have served in Americorps in hundreds of different capacities. Americorps has surpassed the model for a great example of national service and it has done so quietly, without fanfare and without the recognition that it deserves.

It is easy to recognize the good being done by a service based on the tapping the power of volunteerism in the nation’s youth. We have seen some dramatic examples of how Americans will pour out their service, their hard work, their physical resources and even their money to help their fellow Americans in times of need. Out of some of the most devastating events of our nation’s history such as the 911 attacks and the horror of Hurricane Katrina, we have witnessed some of the most touching moments of human compassion and social consciousness as neighbor reached out to neighbor to help those affected by terrible tragedy.

But it isn’t just the victims that are helped by services such as Americorps. Maybe the ones more blessed are the volunteers. They say that you get back far more than you give when you volunteer. The testimonies of those who have given some of their time to national service are solid proof of that theory. Young people in their late teens and early twenties are just beginning to define who they are and what they will become. By having some months or a few years where their lives are dedicated to helping others will instill a long-term commitment to service, to thinking of others rather than themselves and to patriotism.

The patriotism that takes root in our young people form their time in national service is not just the flag waving, song singing kind we see on display on July 4th. It is a patriotism that we saw in World War II in our soldiers and in our forefathers that gave all to make the country great. If national service can instill that kind of patriotism in our youth, we have no worries that America will not continue to be great for many decades to come.

“Transparency” is a term that gets used on television a lot as something desirable, particularly in government terms to require that that our elected officials are being open and honest.. What transparency means is that there is nothing hidden and the people “employing” the elected official have complete knowledge of what is going on at all times.

Sometimes we think that even in the world of business, “transparency” would be a good policy as well. Very often the consumer world gets suspicious that businesses are not doing business in an honest and forthright fashion. But it is not uncommon for a business to have a need to sustain a certain level of secrecy about their products, their marketing and their business plans. This is not always because the business is crooked. It is just a fact of life in the business world and one that has given us a legal framework for trade secrets and confidentiality agreements of various sorts.

What would be the circumstances that you would want to take advantage of the legal status of trade secrets to keep the internal operations of your business a secret? Well, the most common rational for utilizing legal trade secret protection is to retain the marketing advantage that you might have to stay one step ahead of your competition. The world of business can be a cut throat environment to be sure. If one competitor learns of the secrets of how the competition makes a better product, utilizes a superior distribution or marketing plan or has a organizational philosophy that gives them the edge, the competition is more than happy to exploit that knowledge to capture business away. So it’s in the best interest of any business to protect their advantages from becoming well known to make sure they can capitalize on their hard earned edge in a competitive market as they deserve to do.

Trade secrets generally fall into either the “technical” or “business” related categories. Technical trade secrets, as the name implies, are discoveries or new ways of doing things to create something new. This would include the technical plans or specifications for a protected product or new design, the methods you have designed for manufacturing a breakthrough technology, notes and insider design documentation on failures in testing that would tip off competition on how you innovated this new product.

Business trade secrets are just as valuable because they include exclusive management and organizational methods that make you more profitable, marketing plans that would give your competition a heads up on “where you are going to hit them”, information about your customers and details about your employees and specialized talent that you retain to make your business run better than the competition.

There is a lot of “corporate espionage” between companies to crack the secrecy of another company to gain a competitive advantage. But as a new business just putting together plans for security, there are a few things you can do to legally protect yourself. A common practice for businesses in need of trade secret protection is to have their business partners all sign what is called a “Nondisclosure Agreement” which basically requires that anything your partners learn about your business will remain a trade secret even if the partner relationship does not continue. This is a legally binding document you can use if that partner uses or leaks your trade secrets and you lose business or market advantage from it.

Many companies require similar kinds of documents from employees and even add a “Non-compete” agreement to make sure an employee or partner doesn’t use trade secret information to compete for business from them. Your lawyer can help you decide what is the best way to protect your business and how to use these documents wisely.

One of the founding principles of our system of government is “one man, one vote.” The implication is that every citizen gets one vote in each election and that each vote will have the same potential impact on the outcome of the election as any other person’s vote. The implication is also that, in a perfect world, no citizen will ever be denied his or her right to that vote and that all will be able to and will willingly engage in the privilege of voting for their elected officials freely, openly and eagerly.

Now, right away we can think of exceptions to how this principle works out in reality that might cause us to doubt the validity of the “one man, one vote” system. But we should not let that happen. Because despite these kinks in the system, the democracy of the election system is still fundamentally intact.

When this thing that has often been called “The Great American Experiment” got underway, our system of voting, elections and the rule of the people was virtually untried at a national scale such as it was envisioned by the founding fathers. Much of the language that is so poetic in our cornerstone documents such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence read like philosophical treatises rather than documents grounded in a hard fought awareness of reality.

But in a way, that’s a good thing. Yes, the authors of these documents were philosophers of their time. And yes, what they were describing in their vision of how this great new country would function was theoretical and based on political theory drawn from historical sources rather than immediate historical precedent. But we only have to look at the outcome to admire that it’s a good thing that the founding fathers were wiser than they were practical.

We as a people were not too small to live up to the high expectations of our founding fathers. Over the decades, amendments to the constitution were put in place, legal precedents were made and social attitudes changed so that more and more of the nation’s citizenry gained the same rights that all should have, to be able to vote in the elections of their country. Some of those landmark moments in history included?

* The fifteenth amendment which granted voting rights to African Americans.
* The fourteenth amendment which guaranteed equal protection of all citizens under the law.
* The nineteenth amendment which guaranteed voting rights for women.
* The civil rights act of 1964 which put further enforcement around these previous laws and amendments to assure equal treatment of all so access to the government is truly a right of all citizens.

Since these improvements to the original founding documents were put in place, phenomenal changes have taken place that provide concrete proof that the vision of the founding fathers was indeed something that could be a reality and not just the philosophical musings of an educated few.

One of the most noticeable social changes that has come along with the legal recognition of the rights of minorities and women to participate in the system is that the composition of the government has changed dramatically and that for the better. The three branches of government today would be virtually unrecognizable in the narrow world view that prevailed when the nation was born. But today it is common in any state in the union to see black mayors, women in congressional seats or in the governor’s mansions handling those responsibilities with the same wisdom and good judgment that male leaders tried to exhibit in previous decades.

These changes have had a positive effect not only on the fairness of how the government works but in the sense of enfranchisement all peoples feel for the affairs of the nation. Indeed, because we now see women, Hispanics, African Americans and people of all color and persuasion serving honorably in leadership, our policies are more equitable and we are much closer to having a government that really does represent the population of the nation.

Now we stand at a time when we could easily see a woman or an African American in the highest office in the land, the Presidency of the United States. And if that happens, we will see one more institution conform to the vision of the founding fathers where every citizen can participate at any level just as every citizen gets one vote.