Month: June 2007

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Politics, Uncategorized

Seven-year sentences for Richard Scrushy, former HealthSouth CEO, and his enabler, former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman (a Democrat).

Fraud during Scrushy’s reign is estimated at $2.7 billion (with a b).

Ken Lay may have gotten around jail time by conveniently dropping dead, but it’s good to see at least some of these scoundrels doing time.

Speaking of scoundrels…The Washington Post has run an amazing series on VP Cheneythis week–must reading for anyone who cares about politics and the future of the US.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Uncategorized

A politics-neutral report on how to vastly reduce New York City’s energy use could serve as a model for cities around the country, and around the world.

Some of the plans make a huge amount of sense, especially for a city like NYC with a well-developed transit system and large inventory of existing buildings.

In NYC, most of those buildings have flat roofs. I have long advocated using those roofs for food and energy self-sufficiency, through garden spaces and solar collectors. The report points out that solar hot water is 60-70% efficient–far better than photovoltaic (solar systems that change sunlight into electricity). In my own very non-urban house, my experience bears this out. Our solar hot water system works extremely well, but our photovoltaic panels generate a much smaller percentage of our energy than I’d hoped. The three hot water panels immediately sliced out a big part of our electric bill (we had been heating our water with electricity), while the four PV panels made a much smaller reduction.

Better still, says the report, would be a crash program to retrofit existing buildings with low-energy light bulbs and capture the heated or cooled waste air that escapes (often because tenants in overheated apartment buildings actually keep windows open in winter!).
Combine that with a serious program to switch from cars and trucks to other transit alternatives, and NYC would slash its energy use.

While this report mentions a number of technological alternatives to conventional fossil fuels, I feel one area where it’s weak is in evaluating those technologies. It gives lip service to the major problem of food displacement if there was a widespread switch to biofuels, but doesn’t go into any detail. And then it brings up tired dead horses with high energy and pollution costs, such as oil shale extraction. Haven’t we learned something in the last 30 years?

Still, this report has enough easily- and cheaply-implemented strategies to be well worth a look–as long as we use a critical thinking filter to evaluate the ecological and dollar consequences of each recommendation.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics, Uncategorized

If you need more context, read my post from earlier this afternoon.

As downloaded from the PDF on his website–scroll down to “Documents and Links.” The numbers at ends of paragraphs refer to footnotes in the original document:

Since 2001, Vice President Cheney has made repeated efforts to shield the activities of his office from public scrutiny. These efforts include exempting his office from the presidential executive order governing the protection of classified information, challenging the right of the Government Accountability Office to examine the activities of the Vice President’s energy task force, and refusing to disclose basic facts about the operations of his office, such as the identity of the staff working in his office and the individuals who visit the Vice President’s residence.

Exempting the Office of the Vice President from the Executive Order on Classified National Security Information. Over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from Executive Order 12958, which establishes a uniform, government-wide system for safeguarding classified information. In response to the protests of the National Archives, the staff of the Vice President proposed abolishing the office within the Archives that is in charge of implementing the executive order.1

Blocking GAO Oversight. In 2001, Vice President Cheney headed a task force to develop a national energy policy. After GAO sought to learn the identity of the energy industry officials with whom the Vice President’s task force met, Vice President Cheney sued the Comptroller General to prevent GAO from conducting oversight of his office.2

Concealing Privately-Funded Travel. Vice President Cheney has refused to comply with an executive branch ethics law requiring him and his employees to disclose travel paid for by special interests.3

Withholding Information about Vice Presidential Staff. Every four years, Congress prints the “Plum Book,” listing the names and titles of all federal political appointees. In 2004, the Office of the Vice President, for the first time, refused to provide any information for inclusion in the book.4

Concealing Information about Visitors to the Vice President’s Residence. The Vice President has asserted “exclusive control” over any documents created by the United States Secret Service regarding visitors to the Vice President’s residence.5 This has the effect of preventing information about who is meeting with the Vice President from being disclosed to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.

Allowing Former Vice Presidents to Assert Privilege Over Documents. An Executive Order issued by President Bush in November 2001 provided the Vice President with the authority to conceal his activities long after he leaves office. Executive Order 13233 took the unprecedented step of authorizing former Vice Presidents to assert privilege over their own vice presidential records, preventing them from being released publicly.6

Had enough? Click below to cast your vote in the national Cheney Impeachment Poll.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, Uncategorized

Item: Rep. Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, notes that Vice President Cheney has been claiming an exemption for his office from the rules governing handling of classified information. Hmmm, didn’t Scooter Libby of the Veep’s office get sent to jail for just such a security breach? Perhaps that’s what Waxman means when he writes, “I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions. … [I]t would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that apply to all other executive branch officials.”

(This is one of several charges against Cheney by Waxman. Click here for the full list.)

Item: Bush nominated John Rizzo as the CIA’s General Counsel–yes, the same Rizzo who wrote to Gonzales that U.S. laws prohibiting torture “makes plain that it only prohibits extreme acts.”

Item: Yes, they’re finally talking about closing that disgrace and embarrassment of a torture center at Guantanamo…but opening up a new one in Afghanistan, no doubt so they can once again argue that U.S. law doesn’t apply.

Item: the U.S. is openly discussing, and has for six months, having U.S. military special operations forces working on American soil. I don’t know about you, but that makes me very nervous. Do we learn nothing from studying Hitler’s early years in power? Read Naomi Wolf’s “The End of America,” published by Chelsea Green. (I have sent an article about her to my webmaster for posting, but it hasn’t appeared yet.

Item: Cheney’s KBR (subsidiary of Halliburton) just got another fat military contract, shared with three other companies and totaling half a billion dollars. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

All of these were brought to my attention in just a single news bulletin from Citizens for Legitimate Government, which sends out several such bulletins every day. They follow the news closely and link to the original, mostly mainstream media, sources–as I have done here. Subscription costs nothing. Be informed, or be sorry later. (Standard disclaimers: my only connection is as a fairly recent subscriber.)

And why are the Democrats still funding the war? And why aren’t they talking about impeachment?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Peace and War, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized

About ten years ago, a local PR agency decided to subcontract some overload copywriting projects. She asked me if I wanted to try out wrking together. The first assignment she gave me was for a manufacturer of luggage–sounds innocuous enough, right? This was a local company, and I knew that they had a number of DOD contracts to make cases for weapons.

Well, when she sent me their sell sheets, they were so jingoistic and pro-war that they made me sick to even look at them.

I knew the PR agent was overwhelmed and didn’t want to mess her up (especially on the first project)–but after an hour of thinking about it, I realized there was no way I could work on this account–it was too at odds with my values.

So I very apologetically called the PR agency and told her I’d be glad to help her out, but not on this account, and sorry to strand her.

She immediately gave me a different account. I’ve never been sorry I turned that first one down.

OTOH, about a decade earlier, I did some work for Smith & Wesson involving sales materials for their police training program. The material was not rah rah, shooting is good–but emphasized the need for cops to be well-trained before being unleashed on the streets with lethal weapons. I decided that well-trained cops was an agenda I could support, at least to the point of doing this assignment.

In Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I go on at some length about when to say no to a sale. Discomfort with the politics of the client is a legitimate reason. At the same time, you don’t want to suddenly walk away from a big chunk of your income.

And this works two ways. Although I disagree with the position of making gay marriage illegal, I respect the right of a right-wing fundamentalist to say no to an account promoting gay marriage, for instance. It’s not congruent with their values. (Something I blogged about this idea a year ago, in fact.) I hope we and other activists can eventually change those values–a very hard thing to do and a whole other discussion.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized

As a copywriter and editor, I spend a lot of time chopping out redundant words, phrases, and concepts–even though I’m aware of the saleswriting mantra, “tell them what you’re going t say, tell it to them, and then tell them what you’ve told them.”

Still, for the most part, I try not to be too repetitious.

But with technology, redundancy is a good thing. Any website should have redundant backups, any e-mail should have multiple routes available.

This week, I did a live two-hour seminar on book creation and marketing. My co-presenter brought two mini-recorders; I brought a laptop with recording capability. We presold a few copies of the recording and also have a web page up where people can continue to buy the program.

Thank goodness for our redundancies! Only one of the three devices worked. But it worked beautifully, and as soon as we do some cosmetic cleanup on the file, we’ll have a nice new product.

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By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Trends/News, Publishing, Uncategorized

While I’ve been blogging since 2005, at https://www.principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/ , I’ve been publishing the first two of my monthly e-newsletters all the way back to 1997 (I added another one in 2003, and had planned to launch a fourth son).

At the time I started my zines, I had one website, spam was almost a non-issue, and you could be pretty sure that when you sent an e-mail it would be not only delivered but likely read. At that time, I only had one website: https://www.frugalfun.com , which went live in the spring of 1996.

But I’ve been thinking for quite some time that e-newsletters have lost much of their effectiveness I know that e-mail deliverability is by no means certain anymore, and you can’t rely on getting a bounce notice if it doesn’t get in.

Also, I know that lots of mail that does make it through gets deleted unread. This is certainly true in my own ebox, where I simply can’t compete with the volume of incoming mail. A few weeks ago I started a big purge and got my inbox down from 2400 to 800–it’s already back up to 1190, after five days on a business trip. And that doesn’t count the approximately 100-2009 per day that I throw out in my spamfilter–or the dozen or so that I try to rescue from the spamfilter but never arrive (9ne of my biggest peeves).

This month I asked the 8000 subscribers of my two largest zines if the format was working for them–and got very definite feedback that while the content is valued, the long-form single-email text only format doesn’t work.

But I *know* HTML email doesn’t work. I’ve seen the hideous results when they are corrupted in transmission, and I also know a lot of spam filters automatically catch anything with HTML.

After thinking it over, I decided to convert to a blog. Yesterday, I sent the first one in the new format–a brief email with a sentence or two about each story and a link to the TOC on my blog (which in turn has live links to all the articles).

I’m sure it will evolve (and hopefully take less time to set up, now that I can refer back to certain repeating articles, such as the one about my books).

We’ll see what happens..

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, Uncategorized

While writing the post about slug lines, a thought occurred to me that I’d like feedback on.

What do other bloggers think about using sigs in blog comments?

I’ve been ambivalent. On the one hand, I love getting extra inbound links and visibility for my core offerings. On the other hand, I don’t see them used much, and I wonder if they’re offensive.

So sometimes I’ve posted and sometimes not, and I’m more likely to post on, say, a newspaper comment page than a blog.

This is the sig I’ve been using, when I use it–looking at it, it occurs to me that one obvious solution is to shorten it, pick one URL per sig, maybe have several versions of say two lines each–what do you think?

________________________________________________
Shel Horowitz, shel (AT) principledprofit.com, 800-683-WORD/413-586-2388

Marketing & publishing consultant/copywriter, award-winning author of

* Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts
People First https://www.principledprofit.com

* Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers
https://www.grassrootsmarketingforauthors.com

* Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World
https://www.frugalmarketing.com /

–>Join the Business Ethics Pledge – Ten Years to Change the World,
One Signature at a Time (please tell your friends)
https://www.business-ethics-pledge.org
_________________________________________________

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, Uncategorized

Ted Demopoulos commented that both Joan Stewart and I use a “slug” to identify ourselves in comment posts. In my case, it’s “Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert.”

Ted took it a step farther, and now has his slogan, “Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business,” incorporated as the name he uses when he posts to his own blog.

You’ll notice that starting with this post, I’m doing the same. We all learn form each other–I never thought of that before Ted’s post.

So much of marketing is about repetition of the brand. And people do notice.

Unfortunately for the strength of my brand, I’m a person of many interests and skills, and probably dilute my slogans too much–but I have more fun that way. Fortunately, as I write in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, the real brand is not the slogan but the customer/prospect’s experience of you–and in that regard, I do quite well at creating a very positive impression.

I can wear whatever hat is appropriate at the moment: ethical marketing expert, master copywriter, author of seven books, speaker, activist, even expert on having fun cheaply–to name a few. Somehow it all works out.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Events, Uncategorized

For seven years, Zheng Xiaoyu headed China’s Food and Drug Administration–a time in which that agency was filled with scandal, from tainted toothpaste to poisoned pet food. Both animals and people died in large numbers as a result, The New York Times reports.

Mr. Zheng, 62, has been sentenced by the Chinese government to death–not for the poisonings, but for the bribery that enabled them.

One more reason to stay honest, o ye corporate executives and government officials.

Of course, there are plenty of others–including, as I point out repeatedly in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, that it’s actually easier for an honest business to profit and thrive.

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