Month: September 2008

By Posted on Posted in Politics

For months, of course, the McCain campaign has been an embarrassing collection of blunders, bloopers, mean-spirited ad hominem attacks, and recantation of everything he used to claim to stand for. But the last few days make me wonder if he and his advisors could pass a sanity test administered by a competent psychiatrist:

  • This absurd and desperate ploy to cancel both the presidential and vice-presidential debates on the grounds that McCain wants to roll up his sleeves and save the economy–the same economy that he said just the other day ws fundamentally sound. Does anyone really believe this is not just a pathetic attempt to duck out on the challenge form a better informed and more articulate opponent who can clean McCain’s clock on the economy and seems to actually have a better grasp of McCain’s supposed area of strength: foreign policy
  • Acting like the press, once a strong sector of McCain support, is some kind of enemy to be starved of information–and then being surprised when the press turns negative
  • Claiming that an initiative Obama supported to help children differentiate between appropriate and abusive touch was “sex education for kindergarteners”

    Conservative columnist George Will today said that McCain has been acting like a “flustered rookie” and that he’s not fit to be president. And Will noted that McCain’s peculiar idea to replace SEC Chair Chris Cox with Andrew Cuomo even attracted the ire of the Wall Street Journal:

    “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”

    But the best commentary I’ve seen was a scathingly hilarious piece by Bob Cesca on Huffington Post called “McCain’s foreign Policy: Blurt Out Random Crap.” I would not want to get on the bad side of this guy.

    • Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Social and Economic Justice

    Yikes! Seven hundred billion of our tax dollars to bail out Wall Street–and that’s on top of what’s already been spent on Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG.

    That’s $700,000,000,000. Now, I might support a bailout if we got our money’s worth out of it–but not this bailout–not only doesn’t it give us what we want, it includes one of the most dangerous and far-reaching clauses ever included in any legislation in this country:

    “Decisions by the Secretary [of the Treasury] pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

    That’s worse than a mere blank check. It’s complete and total immunity from oversight.

    What on earth is the rush to pass such a bill? No one should have that kind of power.

    Then let’s look at the rest of the bill. As I understand it, it…

  • Passes bad debts and other liabilities to the taxpayers, but not good assets–or control
  • Sets no limits on CEO compensation, so the same people who wrecked the economy get to take home annual compensation packages in the tens of millions
  • Allows the government to subcontract out the management of these firms…probably to the same bunch of ethical midgets that broke them in the first place
  • Doesn’t do much to help homeowners facing (or already in) foreclosure

    In short, this is a free gift: break our economy and bring home a prize. Can you say, “corporate welfare”? And rather than paying for it out of general revenues, forcing those who never benefited to cough up the dough, let’s look at the bailout funding plan proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, taking the revnue from a surtax on those who made their killing and now want to get off with no consequences–yeah, it was OUR economy that they killed.

    If it were up to me, I’d say the public should gain equity in the rescued companies, and any CEO compensation package should not exceed a percentage of the net profits to the company, and layoffs or bankruptcies mean automatic forfeiture of all bonuses. And salary, as opposed to bonuses, could be set at something realistic, say, $200,000-$500,000 (or as a reasonable multiple, say, 10-20x, of the lowest-paid full-time worker’s income). That’s still far more than most Americans have to live on. Bonuses beyond that should be based on performance: creating profitable companies, jobs, investments in renewable energy, etc. This system of rewarding the worst behavior and the worst performance is just plain crazy.

    I’ve already told my Congressional representatives. Have you?

    • Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Politics

    Okay, so it’s bad enough that McCain picks a running mate who has only been out of the country once, visiting her state’s reservists–and has the chutzpah to claim Ireland as a place she’s visited because her plane paused to refuel there. And it’s horrendous that someone running for VP had no clue what the Bush Doctrine was and shows amazing ignorance of the situation in Iraq. Presumably she’d have a year or so to get up to speed before McCain’s heart gives out–or maybe he’ll be lucky like Cheney and actually live out his term.

    But McCain…McCain is supposed to be the big foreign policy hotshot. This is supposed to be his core strength. Well, I am not impressed! He’s made at least three HUGE gaffes this campaign:

  • Had to have Joe Lieberman whisper loudly in his ear that he didn’t really mean Al-Qaida, just extremists (even Fox News picked up that one!)
  • Actually said, with a straight face,“In The 21st Century Nations Don’t Invade Other Nations.” John, my dear–has anyone ever mentioned Iraq or Afghanistan to you? Both invaded in the 21st century–by the U.S.
  • When asked by a reporter if he would meet with Spain’s Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, McCain said no, and didn’t seem to know who the reporter was talking about, even when she clarified it. He seemed to think it was something in Latin America. Either he’s really ignorant or so arrogant as to start destroying relationships with Europe even before the election. Of course, he has a history of this sort of thing in the run-up to the war, as the citations in the above link prove.

    Maybe I should run my dog for president. He understands a few things about foreign policy that McCain and Pallin apparently don’t: Start a conversation with diplomacy: in a dog’s case, sniffing butts. Ask for what you actually want, and not what your pollsters tell you. Being friendly wins you friends. And in imitation of Theodore Roosevelt, speak softly and carry a big stick–he likes to run down the mountain with his mouth wrapped around logs of six or eight feet.

    • Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Social and Economic Justice

    Apparently there’s a serious proposal on the table to limit public access to Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, and sell space to the highest bidders as corporate sponsors. This is what I wrote on the comment page:

    The First Amendment is part of what makes America great. Taking away the right to assemble at the Presidential inauguration is a bad idea, and selling off to the highest bidder is just plain un-American. This is part of our heritage–to watch, and perhaps to p0eacefully protest.

    As a business owner, a writer, and a concerned citizen, I urge you to maintain Pennsylvania Avenue for all citizens who wish to see the inaugural.

    Deadline for comments is Monday. Make yourself heard.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Politics, Web 2.0/Social Media

    A certain popular website, that I will not name or link to, posted a bunch of Sarah Palin’s government-related e-mails posted through private, non-government, non-archived accounts.

    This is, to put it mildly, not according to Hoyle, and especially because there was even a conversation about how to keep prying eyes away from these posts by using “private” email.

    Of course, as Palin found out, e-mail is never really private. It’s not a secure medium. It’s also not particularly reliable. and you shouldn’t expect to have any privacy.

    However…while Palin had absolutely no right to conduct state business over non-government e-mail–and certainly no right to delete the emails and the account and thus destroy evidence of possible wrongdoing in the Troopergate scandal, I have just as big an ethical bone to pick with the site that unmasked her.: it listed the emails of her correspondents, in big print, and in hackable form.

    I’m sorry, but it is not anybody’s right to have the personal e-mails of her kids and others who corresponded with Sarah Palin. These people will have to go through a lot of time and trouble to change their addresses, notify correspondents, etc.

    Palin was wrong. But so was this website.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics

    I can’t help wondering–would Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and other fallen giants be in such trouble if they’d followed common-sense ethical principles?

    My award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, suggests a number of reasons to say no to a sale, focused on core ideas of honesty, integrity, and quality. In other words, successful businesses have standards both for how they behave and for whom they choose to do business with.

    So many of the loans coming apart in the subprime crisis didn’t meet the basic criteria of quality–there was no assurance that the borrowers had enough resources to pay back the loans.

    Yes, these loans provided a path to home ownership for many Americans who could not have otherwise afforded them–a worthy goal. But those ownerships turned out to be temporary, and those forced from their homes are now in worse shape. Perhaps if proper lending criteria had been applied, the market would have responded by lowering inflated home prices–and those who got burned would have had a safer and more secure path to real home ownership, and the financial titans wouldn’t be fighting for air.

    Oh, and one more question: Why was Bear Stearns considered worthy of a bailout (something I wasn’t at all sure was a good idea) but not these latest casualties?

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in media-general, Politics, Uncategorized

    How come we’re not hearing about this in the mainstream press? An on-the-scene blogger (and an articulate one who obviously has some journalism training) called it “the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state.” She’s got photos and videos on the link, too (as well as over 1000 comments, so give it some time to load)

    Yet, all three pages of unduplicated results of a Google for “AK Women Reject Palin” (the name of the rally) brought up 24 blogs and one story–it’s unclear whether it’s a staff piece or a hosted blog–at washingtonpost.com. And in the Post story, I learned the delicious irony that the anti-Palin rally was held in front of the public library. Nice!

    By contrast, the first page of a search for “Welcome Home” “Sarah Palin ” brings up a different, cheerleader story in the Washington Post, as well as a mildly critical story in the Boston Globe, and coverage in the L.A. Times and Miami Herald. In all, 59,200 results versus 113 for coverage of the protest.

    Of course, in sparsely populated Alaska, whose entire population is about equal to Boston’s, that only took 1400 people. Still, it dwarfed the 1000-attendee pro-Palin “welcome home” rally held the same day.

    And I find it hard to believe that such an important event could be completely ignored by the mainstream media. Yes, we have free speech in this country (if you don’t get too close to convention halls/corporate events and your skin is the proper color, and you’re not identified as Muslim)–but the media censors the message.

    Earth to mainstream media: stop feeding us “Soma” (to use Aldus Huxley’s term) and start reporting the news!

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability

    Here’s another entry in the Alice-In-Wonderland contradictions of our world: An auto-industry trade group, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, launched a national campaign to cut fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, caled Eco-Driving.

    All well and good–except that this is the same group that bitterly resisted attempts to achieve a fleet average of 52 miles per gallon by 2030.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

    So Obama used the phrase “lipstick on a pig.” He’s used it before and so has McCain, according to this morning’s NPR news report. In fact, they both used it long before Palin was on the scene.
    It’s old and tired and clichéd, and Obama can do better. But if McCain’s people think this is an attack on Sarah Palin, let it be noted that this infers that McCain’s people, and not Obama, are the ones who think Palin is a pig.

    Yet the same camp that wants to pretend Obama called Palin a pig has no shame about a really horrible distortion in a McCain-approved ad–that tries to paint Obama as teaching sex to kindergarteners because he supported a measure to help children distinguish between proper and improper touching–a measure that can actually reduce pederasty and help bring pedophiles to justice.

    And that is truly vile. Oh yeah, wasn’t McCain the “maverick” who stood for ethics?

    Karl Rove may be proud. But I am disgusted.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Politics, Social and Economic Justice

    The week of attacks on First Amendment freedom in the streets of St Paul is finally over–a shameful episode in American history. But the legal struggles have only just begun. I’ve already referred to the riot charges brought up against legitimate journalists for Democracy Now, the AP, and elsewhere who were just trying to do their very important job: covering what was really going on at the RNC.

    Those cases, if not dismissed, will drag on for years, and suck away resources that should be used for reporting.

    Now comes word that eight activists have been charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism”–for nothing worse than planning to block some streets, as county officials were well aware–they had infiltrated the organizing groups for up to a year (a crime in itself).

    Sound like Chicago in 1968? These activists are facing serious time, even as no one seems to be holding accountable the police who ran rampant and created a climate of fear before and during the convention week.

    Let’s listen to the father of one of the eight, interviewed on Democracy Now (you can read the entire interview at the above link:

    AMY GOODMAN: David Bicking, your daughter Monica is one of the eight. First, can you talk about her, talk about her activities?

    DAVID BICKING: Yeah. My daughter Monica is a wonderful person, very concerned—

    AMY GOODMAN: How old is she?

    DAVID BICKING: —very committed. She’s twenty-three. And she and all the people—I mean, the people they have charged here are not criminals. They’re some of the best people in our society. She’s really dedicated to her activism. She’s experienced activist already. She’s come about this through her own experience in her life over a long time. She is always concerned about the feelings of others.

    She has done some travel abroad. And when she was eight, we were in Ecuador for four weeks, and she saw the poverty and the children begging, but also humanized it by playing with the children, the maids in the, you know, inexpensive hotels there. She has—went to Honduras for eight weeks after her junior year to work in a very remote village, humanitarian work.

    After high school, she took off a year before college and worked as an intern with the American Friends Service Committee, which is a Quaker peace group. She was based in Chicago and helped in their organizing and their peace work and liaison with other groups.

    So she has a lot of experience, and she’s really seen what it means when—you know, the United States’ actions through war, through injustice at home, through poverty and how that’s affected people’s lives. And it’s affected her very deeply. And so, she’s strong. She’ll get through this one way or the other.

    AMY GOODMAN: Is she still in jail?

    DAVID BICKING: She is still in jail right now.

    AMY GOODMAN: When was she picked up? How was she picked up?

    DAVID BICKING: She was picked up on Saturday morning at 8:00 in the morning. She was staying in her house, which she had just bought a month before. And there were several roommates there and a whole bunch of people who had come in for the week. And at 8:00 in the morning, they were woken out of a sound sleep. The police came banging through the back door, held everyone at gunpoint. They had automatic weapons, assault rifles, forced everybody—ordered them to the floor, face down, handcuffed them behind their backs and then proceeded to search the entire house, just ransack everything.

    When I got there forty-five minutes later, she and her boyfriend Eryn and a housemate, Garrett, were already in one of these big black SUVs they have, you know, and were taken off to jail just after that. And then, for the next hour or so, they released the other people in the house one by one, after photographing them, checking ID and searching them.

    Then the search of the house went on for another like six hours probably, as they carted all sort of stuff out of the house. I watched, you know, as they took things out of the garage. There were old tires. I suppose those could be burned someplace. You know, there were just the sort of things homeowners would have, especially people fixing up a house. Many cans of paint, each which was patiently labeled and loaded onto the truck. It was just an absurd, absurd overreaction.

    Are they going to try to tell us that Quaker peace activists are considered terrorists now? For shame!

    You can be part of the movement to demand that charges against both the 8 and the journalists be dropped immediately, as outlined in this email from Democracy Now (note that you have to replace the spaces at written out word “at” with the @ sign:

    Here’s the letter I sent in response to this appeal:

    I am totally appalled that working journalists were arrested arbitrarily during the RNC. I have watched the video of Amy Goodman’s arrest and do not see how the simple act of asking to speak to the officer in charge in order to help her just-arrested colleagues was in any way arrest-worthy. I find the unnecessary force used by the police objectionable. And I find the act of ripping a journalist’s credentials off her neck and telling her she won’t be needing it to be straight out of Kafka.

    I am even more appalled that the terrorism conspiracy statute was dredged up for the first time against Quaker peace activists who were in no way terrorists. Blocking a street is not akin to bombing a building. And the right to dissent is fundamental.

    Tens of thousands of young Americans have died to protect our freedom. When the government tries to suppress peaceful protest and censor/arrest journalists covering that protest, I have to wonder if those brave young men and women died in vain. As a business owner, an author, and an American, I urge you to remember the Bill of rights, the Constitution as a whole, and the importance of safeguarding our democracy.

    The U.S. is not supposed to act like some two-bit totalitarian country where freedom doesn’t exist. Drop the charges.

    CONTACT THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE – DEMAND THAT ALL CHARGES OR POTENTIAL
    CHARGES BE IMMEDIATELY DROPPED:
    Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner
    janet.hafner@co.ramsey.mn.us and
    susan.gaertner@co.ramsey.mn.us
    (cc: dropthecharges at democracynow.org)
    651-266-3079

    Susan Gaertner for Governor
    info at susangaertner.com (cc: dropthecharges at democracynow.org)
    (612) 978-8625
    (612)804-6156

    St. Paul Mayor Christopher B. Coleman
    chris.coleman@ci.stpaul.mn.us
    Bob.Hume@ci.stpaul.mn.us
    sara.grewing@ci.stpaul.mn.us
    (cc: dropthecharges at democracynow.org)

    Make your voice heard in the Ramsey County Attorney and St. Paul Mayor’s
    offices. Demand that they drop all pending and current charges against
    journalists arrested while reporting on protests outside the Republican
    National Conventions.

    The Ramsey County Attorney’s office is in the process of deciding
    whether or not to press felony P.C. (probable cause) riot charges
    against Democracy Now! Producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole
    Salazar. Please contact Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner by all
    means possible to demand that her office not press charges against
    Kouddous and Salazar.

    The St. Paul City Attorney’s office has already charged Amy Goodman with
    misdemeanor obstruction of a legal process and interference with a peace
    officer. Contact St. Paul Mayor Christopher Coleman by all means
    possible to demand that the charges against Goodman be dropped immediately.

    Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful
    detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried
    out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the
    Republican National Convention.

    During the demonstration in which the Democracy Now! team was arrested,
    law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion
    grenades and excessive force against protesters and journalists. Several
    dozen demonstrators were also arrested during this action, as was a
    photographer for the Associated Press.

    IMPORTANT
    Be sure to cc: dropthecharges@democracynow.org on all emails so that our
    team can deliver print outs of your messages to the St. Paul City
    Attorney, the Mayor and Ramsey County Attorney offices.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail