Month: February 2009

By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

“His Holiness [H.H.] thought it was prudent to make his office open and assessable to a more youth and technologically advancing audience.”

So says the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on his brand new Twitter page, which is responsible for His Holiness’s media presence. That presence now not only includes a website, Facebook (still below the 5000 limit on friends), and MySpace.

H.H. is keeping a pretty active profile on Twitter; launched just 15 hours ago, the stats are
Following 2,704
5,498 Followers
25 Updates

Oh yes, and when I went to H.H.’s Facebook profile, I saw that he is a fan of Burmese dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Somehow, even though he’s a generation younger than H.H., I can’t imagine George W. Bush having pages on these sites.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

Someone on a social network forum posted a really great article. The only problem was, it looked like the poster hadn’t gotten permission.

As entrepreneurs, we need to be careful to respect the intellectual property rights of other entrepreneurs, and that includes writers, photographers, etc. It is often not difficult to get reprint permission (I have over 1000 reprinted articles on https://www.frugalmarketing.com and https://www.frugalfun.com, and I have permission for every single one. To simply place a whole article and not get permission or give credit to the source, is an act of theft. If you published a book, you wouldn’t want someone taking your hard work and publishing their own edition.

I’m sure the person who posted was not acting out of malice but of ignorance. Many people don’t think of reprinting an article as stealing, just like they don’t think throwing a toxic cigarette butt on the ground is littering. It’s totally appropriate to quote the first paragraph or two, mention some key points in the article (in your own words), and post a link–or to go get permission from the author.

Let’s not do things that come back to haunt us.

Note: I have posted a whole bunch of articles about business ethics on my ethics site, PrincipledProfit–and yes, I have permission for all of those as well. I’ve also written an award-winning book on success through business ethics: Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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

Some random thoughts about the economy and ethics today.

1. President Obama took a small but welcome step toward curtailing corporate abuses yesterday, restricting CEO pay for those companies taking government bailouts to a “measly” half a million dollars. Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, endorsed the idea but said it didn’t go far enough, noting that the myth of the irreplaceable CEO was just that, a myth. He’d like to max out CEO pay at the same level a top general or admiral receives. Not a bad idea!

2. For those CEOs who can’t imagine living on that amount, I assure you that it’s possible to live comfortably, even luxuriously, on far less. I remember when $10,000 per year felt like an enormous sum of money to me. I actually had a job in New York City as recently as 1980 that paid $82 per week of hard work–that was part of the “research phase” for my e-book on having fun cheaply, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook. In fact, if you’re a CEO who finds this new “limited” income a hardship, contact me. I’ll give you a free copy of the e-book, and the $8.50 you save will be your first step toward frugality. ;-). It’ll save the typical reader between $500-$2000 per year. In your case, it might save you a million or so.

3. Talk about sleeping at the switch! Whistleblower Harry Markopolos not only claims (and, I understand, documented during his recent testimony) that he gave the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enough info to break up Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme as far back as 2000, but also laid it out for a Wall Street Journal reporter who was interested, but couldn’t get the go-ahead from brass, back in 2005. Markopolos had some pretty harsh words for the SEC:

I gift wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them and some how they couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority.

4. The left-of-center political action group MoveOn is jumping into the fray with a petition opposing the use of bailout dollars for executive bonuses. This is from the message you can send to friends after signing, which you can do at https://pol.moveon.org/bonus/?r_by=15503-5426570-ynLMRyx&rc=comment_paste:

Did you hear that Wall Street gave out $18.4 billion in bonuses in 2008? $18.4 billion to the people who crippled our economy with their recklessness and greed and then took $700 billion of our money. Outrageous, right?

Not only did I sign, but I feel any company that took our tax money and then paid even a dollar in bonuses should be made to pay it back. Just because the Bush administration was too incompetent to specify how this money was spent does not mean we have to tolerate this outrage. And forgive me for being out of touch, but I always thought bonuses were something you earn through stellar performance–not for running your company, and the economy, into the ground.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

President Obama came into office following a long and thorough process of checking people out, and with a particular (and very welcome) screen for ethics issues. Yet here it is, just two weeks into this new presidency, and there have been at least five nominees who’ve either raised ethics eyebrows or withdrawn entirely: Bill Richardson, Tom Daschle, Nancy Killefer, Timothy Geithner, and William J. Lynn III among them. And there are several others whose close ties to the industries they’re supposed to regulate could make people more than a little nervous.

What is refreshing, at least, is Obama’s willingness to stand up and say that he “screwed up.” After eight years of a president who refused to take responsibility for his actions, who could not come up with a single action when asked point-blank what his mistakes were–even while he was digging the country into several concurrent very deep holes–that is a good thing indeed.

This is not the rampant and blatant corruption and favoritism of the Bush presidency, or even the somewhat shady dealings under Clinton. But still, it does raise questions–lots of questions. And the biggest question in my mind is whether the flaws are inherent in the system. Do we need such wide restructuring that the revolving door is bolted shut? And if we do, how do we find people with the competencies needed to run these huge agencies?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Web 2.0/Social Media

Apparently, paying $2,715 a month rent for a two-bedroom apartment doesn’t even come with the slightest bitching privileges.

That’s what Katy and David Griffiths paid to live in a luxury apartment owned by Rockrose Development Corporation. But they were asked to leave, the lease not renewed–apparently because they tried to ask some pretty basic questions in a public forum, like why they were being assessed $600 per year to pay for a gym that wasn’t yet open. When David Griffiths’ post on that topic was refused by the building’s Internet forum administrator, he started a Google group for tenants; he suspects the company was monitoring.

The company claims he was one of only about 10 problem tenants out of 6000 units it controls around the city–but the action created a climate of fear. One tenant is quoted as saying,

Another tenant has circulated a petition asking Rockrose to keep the gym open later. It closes at 10 p.m., too early for some tenants, who pay a mandatory $600 annual amenities fee.

But she is unsure whether to deliver the petition. “I’m scared,” she said. “What if I need to renew?”

Ironically, the building was supposedly set up to encourage community. But this heavy-handed action makes you wonder.

Hmmm, almost sounds like Facebook.

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By Posted on Posted in Social and Economic Justice

Can’t say I’m surprised that the Bush bailout program lacked safeguards for ordinary people. It’s only the people’s money, after all. But I am a bit surprised at how blatantly the recipients are ripping us off. After the serious public relations fallout and public outrage around AIG’s lavish parties and the CEOs of the Big Three car companies begging from the cockpits of their individual private jets, you’d think they wouldn’t be so quick to rub it in We the People’s collective face.

Yet a big chunk of our money, supposedly designed to free up ultra-tight lending, found its way into huge executive bonuses–$18 billion worth–and to rolling up acquisitions of other banks. Credit doesn’t seem to be any looser. So when an institution is “too big to fail,” you let it swell even bigger so if it does collapse, it pulls down even more bricks of the economy? Dumb!

If I were Obama, I’d be issuing an executive order that demanded some accountability. Bailout money needs to be earmarked to bail out ordinary people trying to make it on 10 or 20 or 50K a year, not the fat cats with eight- and nine-figure compensation packages that got us into this mess in the first place through their bad management.

Surely there must be a way he can say, “look, the purpose of this bailout was clearly not executive bonuses and acquisitions. Money used for those purposes will be considered a temporary interest-free loan, and no payment will be forthcoming until that money has been repaid.” It doesn’t take any more chutzpah than it did to award those bonuses in the first place. (And whatever happened to the idea that bonuses are earned by high performance–and digging a ditch and pouring your company’s assets into it doesn’t qualify IMHO.)

Let’s see the bailout go to fund green jobs, antipoverty programs, and other ways to jumpstart the economy that bypass the greeditarians entirely, and put money in the hands of the people who’ve been hurt.

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