Month: October 2008

By Posted on Posted in Politics, Uncategorized

You’ve just got to wonder. What are these people thinking?

“When I started talking to them, it kind of became clear that they were kind of just telling people to leave that they thought maybe would be disruptive, but based on what? Based on how they looked,” Elborno said. “It was pretty much all young people, the college demographic.”

Elborno said even McCain supporters were among those being asked to leave.

“I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said ‘Why are you crying? and she said ‘I already voted for McCain, I’m a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn’t look right,’” Elborno said. “They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked.”

Let’s hear it for those good old American First Amendment values of free speech and assembly, Senator McCain. Is this kind of profiling any less despicable than racial profiling?

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

Am I the only one outraged by this total misuse of taxpayer dollars? The companies that just got that $700 billion bailout are supposed to use this money to revitalize the stagnant loan market and kickstart the economy. Hello! This is OUR money you’re squandering!

  • Shareholders are lining up at the trough to capture dividends–and AIG doesn’t even know how it blew through its tax-funded payday. How can these companies take taxpayer money, claim it’s an emergency, and then pay dividends? Where is the shared risk?
  • CEOs and high executives at these companies are still expecting to take home mammoth compensation packages, after running their companies into the ground. Is it so unreasonable to expect these crooks to live on, say, three times the pay of a teacher, rather than 300 times?
  • Oh yes, and then there are the lavish parties and sales events that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn’t this a place to cut back when you have your hand in the public’s pocket?

    • And meanwhile, thousands of honest, hardworking people without financial savvy are losing their homes to foreclosure, often related to actions like balloon payments built into mortgages they didn’t comprehend, drawn up by these same companies. Can you say “taxpayer revolt”?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics, Uncategorized
  • Good summary of all the race-baiting, commie-baiting, Muslim-baiting McCarthyistic crap coming out of many corners of the McCain campaign, most of it apparently condoned by both McCain and Palin: at least 13 separate incidents, including some real nasties, like the woman who made up the story that she was mugged and disfigured for supporting McCain and the robocalls to Jewish voters in Pennsylvania warning of another holocaust if Obama is elected (that one actually did get disavowed, but McCain personally endorsed a sleazy brochure that tried to tie Obama to 9/11). And several more dirty tricks, many targeting black voters, listed here.
  • Front-page story in The Times of London (owned by Rupert Murdoch, but still a reputable paper) has several Vietnamese involved in McCain’s capture/rescue and imprisonment denying that he was ever tortured–in separate interviews. American mainstream media has apparently been ignoring this story, and I’m not convinced it’s true, but you’d think the press would want to investigate, since the torture story has been the basis for his entire career. The closest I could find to corroboration was this anonymous report that claims to be from a fellow POW

    • According to a fellow POW, John McCain sustained some injures after ejecting over North Vietnam, but was never tortured or mistreated. Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of what the new Republican Nazi Party might do to him and his family, he said, “Hell, they didn’t have to torture McCain. He talked incessantly. We didn’t nickname him “Songbird” because he was cute or had a pleasant voice…”

    I’ve known McCain for years and while he’s a lot of things, a straight talker he is not. Even though I was shot down twice in Vietnam, I wasn’t captured. The records show that most pilots did their very best to avoid being captured, and those who were, carried out their orders according the United States Military Code of Conduct, especially Article III. There is no record of John McCain trying to escape or aiding others in their attempt to escape. I also know that like me, McCain is one sick old man. He’s eaten up with PTSD and hate, and it’s not the North Vietnamese, North Koreans or even the Taliban he hates. He hates Americans for leaving him to rot in a POW camp. Evidently, the Pentagon didn’t believe McCain warranted being rescued to the degree that McCain believed.

  • McCain’s hypocrisy shows up on just about every issue. As one example, how about John McCain pushing Reagan to meet with terrorists without preconditions.

    In 1987, John McCain cast several votes in an attempt to force the Reagan administration to meet with RENAMO1, a guerrilla organization in Mozambique that State Department officials at the time described as a “terrorist group,” 2 without requiring that the group meet any preconditions.

    Oh, and how about Palin’s ties to a terrorist separatist group in Alaska–much less tenuous than Obama’s ties to Ayers?

  • The ridiculous and desperate attempt to pin vote fraud charges on Acorn, and by implication, Obama–while the Republicans continue the biggest disenfranchisement campaign in US history

    This is only the tip of the iceberg. I could chronicle this stuff all night. “Mr. Straight Talk” has some serious explaining–and apologizing–to do.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

    Outrageous! Sarah Palin thinks putting her daughters up at the Ritz-Carlton, in their own room (one room for two daughters), is an appropriate use of taxpayer money! A different time, when she shared a $709.29 per night hotel room overlooking New York’s Central Park for four nights.

    Another time she stayed five nights in order to give a single one-time speech. Associated Press reports repeated use of state money to fly her kids around on questionable “state business.”

    Here’s another incident mentioned in the AP story (and there are many others):

    a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel.

    This is the “maverick:” and “reformer” who stands for ethics? Yech!

    Oh, yes, and she lied to say they were on official business.

    I can smell the stench all the way in Massachusetts, 5000 miles away.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media

    Does your skin crawl every time you hear Ann Coulter, William Bennett or some other radical-right wingnut savor the pleasure of saying “Barack HUSSEIN Obama”

    Did you take pleasure in learning the famous story of World War II Denmark, when the Nazis ordered all the Jews to wear yellow stars–and the King of Denmark proudly pinned one on, as did many of his countryfolk?

    Well, we’re not alone. Mark Hussein Gordon, of sonomacreative.com, has set up a Facebook group called Hussein is my name too! All you have to do is join, change your middle name in your profile, and remember to change it back after the election, and you can show solidarity both with Barack and with the Arab and Muslim communities by being Hussein for a couple of weeks.

    I think this is brilliant. And I thank Robin Hussein Blum for drawing it to my attention.
    Shel Hussein Horowitz

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

    Dear American people:

    These are some names I’d love to see in the next President’s Cabinet. Who are your choices? Do you know visionary thinkers, with strong Green, ethical, and social justice credentials, who are also good administrators? Add your choices (or echo mine) in the comment section. (And speaking of ethics…Obama’s transition team has an excellent ethics mandate that is a welcome change from the corruption of the last couple of administrations–I expect to blog about it in detail when I get a chance.) Meanwhile, here’s what I’d suggest to Senator Obama, who might actually listen.

    Dear Senator Obama,

    On the strength of your call for change, your overall vision, your coolness under fire, and lots of other reasons–you are likely to become the next President of the United States. Here are some people who can really implement that change we will elect you to bring.

    Secretary of State
    Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations. (I could find nothing requiring that Cabinet Secretaries have to be U.S. citizens.)

    Secretary of the Treasury
    Hazel Henderson, futurist, ethicist, and Green economist. Alternative: Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and NY Times columnist.

    Secretary of Defense
    Gene Sharp, America’s foremost researcher on nonviolent alternatives to military–shifting the focus to actually defending the country. Alternate: Cindy Sheehan.

    Attorney General
    Michael Ratner, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights and one of the leading lawyers defending against the radical right-wing abrogation of rights at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

    Secretary of the Interior
    Winona LaDuke, Native American (Ojibwe) and environmental activist, extremely smart. Nader’s running mate in 2000.

    Secretary of Agriculture
    Annie Cheatham, former director of Communities Involved in Sustainable Agriculture in Deerfield, Massachusetts, one of the most successful community organizations nationwide in promoting local, sustainable farming, and one that grew enormously during her tenure.

    Secretary of Commerce
    Judy Wicks, restaurant owner and founder of Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, a national group working to support local business.

    Secretary of Labor
    Alisa Gravitz, Executive Director of Coop America/Green America.

    Secretary of Health and Human Services
    Cynthia McKinney, former member of Congress from Georgia, strong crusader for the rights of poor people, for an economy based on peace and sustainability.

    Secretary of Homeland Security
    Juan Gonzalez, Pulitzer and Polk-winning investigative journalist, co-host of the award-winning news and public affairs show Democracy Now, New York Post reporter, former Visiting Professor in Public Policy and Administration at Brooklyn College, and former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, author of three books including one on the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, who has covered both terrorism and police issues for many years. Alternate: Richard Clarke, former security advisor to President Bush.

    Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
    Ron Dellums, long-time Congressman and Mayor from Oakland, CA. Alternate: Rev. Jesse Jackson.

    Secretary of Transportation
    A mass transit advocate willing to learn from the amazing example of Curitiba, Brazil, which created a bus system as efficient as any train system, at a fraction of the cost.

    Secretary of Energy
    Amory Lovins, energy visionary who understands not only the need to convert to renewable, nonpolluting resources, but the need to do it in ways that come out of abundance and not deprivation–that actually increase business profitability AND quality of life. Has been on the forefront of this movement since at least 1975.

    Secretary of Education
    Senator Hillary Clinton: Smart, aggressive, and a long-time leader on education.

    Secretary of Veterans Affairs
    Michael T. McPhearson, Executive Director of Veterans for Peace.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice

    By Shel Horowitz
    This post is in three parts:

  • My Personal Poverty Story
  • What’s Wrong Right Now
  • Prescription to End Poverty

    • 7000 bloggers are joining together today to talk about one issue: poverty. I’m proud to be one of those 7000.

    My Personal Poverty Story
    Poverty is something I know something about, first-hand. In the 1970s and early 1980s, I was desperately poor, and for a portion of that time, on food stamps. I jokingly refer to those years as the “research phase” for my e-book, “The Penny-Pinching Hedonist.” But I didn’t just pinch those pennies. I squeezed them so hard it might have drawn blood, if pennies could bleed.

    When I got a job as a VISTA Volunteer community organizer, with the princely salary of $82 per week (and they let me keep getting food stamps), it was a major step UP the economic ladder for me; before that, I’d been working a single day a week in a neighborhood fruit store. I seem to remember that I earned $15 for those shifts, but that would have been below minimum wage even then, so it must have been more like $26.

    I do know that I thought long and hard about every discretionary purchase other than food; with the food stamps, I didn’t have to worry about that, at least. But if I could get around New York City by bike instead of subway, I did–all over Brooklyn, where I was living and where I was charged to build the local Gray Panther chapter, and lower Manhattan, where my community organizing office was. If I could find clothing at a thrift shop, I did–even if it didn’t fit quite right. I found entertainment like poetry readings, that didn’t cost anything. I read the books and listened to the records I already had, on a stereo I’d bought used while a college student.

    Even then, I knew I was lucky. All around me, I saw people who were trying to support a family; I had no dependents. I saw people being forced out of rent-controlled apartments so that landlords could quadruple the price under vacancy decontrol; I had found a small apartment in a warehouse district that I shared with a friend; my half was only $150, which meant that once I got the organizing job, I was able to earn back the cost of housing in less than two weeks and have the other two weeks’ pay to live on for the month. Before that, I’d been paying the rent out of small and precariously dropping savings since losing the entry-level corporate job that had brought me to New York. And even during that time of unemployment, I scraped by enough that I didn’t have to deal with the intimidating and humiliating welfare bureaucracy; the food stamp office was far more humane, according to my friends who’d been through the welfare system.

    Gradually, in the 1980s, I moved out of the city, started the business I still run, and eventually got to a living wage, and then out of poverty.

    What’s Wrong Right Now
    But I still get very angry when I hear politicians and toxic talk show hosts who have no first-hand knowledge of poverty ranting about welfare cheats while passing out massive subsidies to their friends and funders at the very top of the economic ladder.

    And it shocks me that we’ve allowed the disparity between the poorest and the richest to go totally haywire, much like the Latin American dictatorships we always heard about in the 1970s and 80s. CEOs take home nine-figure compensation packages, while poor and middle-class people lose their homes. This is not fair or just, and I’m hoping the current world-wide financial crisis will lead us to change those percentages. What would life be like if no CEO got more than 25 times the wages of a full-time employee making minimum wage, or for that matter, 25 times as much as the check that a welfare mom is supposed to live on while she supports her kids?

    Some companies manage to get by paying their CEOs much less than that! There are companies where the CEO makes only eight or ten times the lowest paid employee, and others, collectively owned, where every worker makes the same salary. Somehow, they survive and thrive and attract great talent. Because they have a mission they can believe in that’s not just about lining their own pockets.

    Okay, so I’m the one ranting now.

    Prescription to End Poverty
    But this is Blog Action Day. I’d like to finish with some action steps that we can take as a society, steps that address some (by no means all) of the systemic causes of poverty, and whose adoption will lift up the bottom. Changing these could take whole communities from poverty to abundance.

  • Switch to sustainable, renewable, nonpolluting energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, and small-scale (non-invasive) hydro. Surely, if we can find $700 billion to pump into the financial system, we can find a few billion for a Marshall Plan-style initiative that would eliminate dependence on foreign oil, slash carbon emissions, create thousands of jobs, and put money in the pockets of rich and poor alike.
  • Retrofit all buildings with proper insulation, water-saving plumbing, and other sustainabiity measures. Again, this lowers costs, creates jobs, and reduces carbon as well as dependence on oil imports (and thus global warming).
  • Decriminalize the petty offenses that fill up our prisons, taking away income-earners, making it harder for them to get jobs again when they get out, and leaving their families with a huge financial burden. We have no business throwing people in prison for using drugs or feeling forced into prostitution. Dealing is one thing; it harms society. But using harms only the users and their families, as long as they don’t get behind the wheel or operate dangerous machinery.
  • Revitalize mass transit. Poor people get to work on buses and trains, and the more places transit systems reach, the more job opportunities for poor folks. Added benefits once again: reduced carbon, reduced foreign oil imports, reduced traffic congestion.
  • Urban community food self-sufficiency: an organic garden on every flat roof and in every vacant lot! Lowers food costs, boosts nutrition, freshness, and flavor, builds community, reduces carbon and more.
  • Adopt, finally, the sensible system of government-salaried doctors not beholden to insurance companies that has allowed almost every other industrialized country in the world to make health care a right, not a privilege. This is something we advocated for when I had the community organizing job with the Gray Panthers almost 30 years ago, and it’s still a good idea–and long-overdue.
  • Oh yes, and save poor and middle-class lives as well as vast boatloads of dollars by getting out of the illegal and unconscionable war the Bush administration lied its way into in Iraq. the $700 billion per year saved could provide seed capital to fund all the rest of it.

    • So there you have at least part of my prescription to create jobs, reduce costs, lower pollution, and shift our country’s trade and overall deficits. What are your ideas? Please post them, and let’s get started!

    While this post is copyright 2008 by Shel Horowitz of https://www.principledprofit.com, I hereby grant permission to reproduce the post in its entirety in any medium as long as attriubtion is included, and to link to the post without restriction.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Social and Economic Justice

    When I found out the other day that no sooner had insurance giant AIG accepted a huge bailout from the taxpayers–that’s us–that they had spent $400,000 on a posh weeklong retreat at the St. Regis Monarch Beach, a very expensive resort, including a $10,000 tab at the bar, and $24,400 on spa and salon services, I was too steamed to even blog about it. I knew that if I let my fingers loose on this one, I’d probably say something I’d regret. So I kept my mouth shut.

    Today, I found out that they’d planned to have a similar retreat a week later, at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California, but this one they canceled–not because they’ve come to their senses, but because of the very understandable public backlash about the first retreat. Meanwhile, they’ve got their hand at the public trough, asking for another $37.8 billion. And they have the nerve to complain about cancellation fees!

    “We’ll certainly lose some money in cancellation fees, but it’s just beyond the point of trying to conduct these meetings given the uncertainty that’s taking place.”

    Yes, there are usually cancellation fees when you cancel a large event at the last minute. These things are booked months in advance and the hotels can’t resell all that space on that kind of timeframe. But still–you pay the fees, grit your teeth, and at least pretend that you care enough about the taxpayers who are bailing you out that you don’t go on expensive and totally unnecessary junkets. And you sure as anything don’t stick the public with your bills at the bars and spas; those should be borne by the individuals consuming the services.

    Rooms at these hotels range from $400 to $1200 per night. The government should demand repayment of every penny spent at the St. Regis on this pig-in-a-poke. Can you imagine what Limbaugh and the rest would say if they found a “welfare queen” enjoying this kind of high life at government expense? Well, when corporate executives are the ones getting welfare, the standards should be similar.

    You want to run up big bills to reward your high performers? Fine–but don’t ask us to pay for it.

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics

    Yes, he’s sold his soul to the devil and gone back on everything we used to think he believed in (even opposition to torture). But a recent article in Huffington Post makes me wonder if it’s all a front. Apparently McCain thinks he can start assembling his government after the election.

    The Democratic nominee has enlisted the assistance of dozens of individuals — divided into working groups for particular federal agencies — to produce policy agendas and lists of recommended appointees. As evidence of their advanced preparations, officials provided a copy of the strict ethics guidelines that individuals working on the transition effort are required to sign.

    John McCain, by contrast, has done little. Campaign spokespersons did not respond to requests for elaboration. But one official with direct knowledge, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, expressed concern with McCain’s approach. The Arizona Senator has instructed his team to not spend time on the transition effort, according to the source

    Hey, John–if you want to turn an aircraft carrier, you start the process before you get to the place where you want to turn.

    Meanwhile, a very well-researched piece in Rolling Stone claims that the nasty, no-principles, and incompetent McCain we’re seeing is totally consistent with his history: that his goal all along, even in his Hanoi days, has always been McCain first, and never country first, and his competence was always in doubt. He may have been the only airman ever to wreck three separate aircraft. Most airmen who are not sons of admirals don’t get the chance to wreck a second, let alone a third.

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