Month: November 2024

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Business Ethics, censorship, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics-International, language, Marketing Trends/News, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side No Comments Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When Unilever acquired B&J’s, the agreement guaranteed the ice cream company the right to an independent Board empowered to continue B&J’s decades of social and environmental activism as they see fit. But apparently, Unilever, one of the largest consumer packaged goods (CPG) conglomerates in the world, disagrees with the Board’s repeated attempts to support the people of Palestine, a situation much more dire now after more than a year of constant Israeli attacks that have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and injured and/or made homeless hundreds of thousands more, including thousands who’ve had their replacement homes or shelters destroyed and had to flee multiple times.

Most of the time, Unilever is one of the better corporate citizens. It’s done a lot of good in the business world for environmental and human rights efforts. Many of its business units, beginning with Ben & Jerry’s in 2012, are certified B Corporations (a business structure that allows environmental and social good to be factored in alongside profitability)–and the parent company has been undertaking a Herculean effort (ongoing since 2015) to get the entire corporation B-corp certified.

But now, Unilever is censoring the B&J’s Board and threatening to dissolve the Board and sue individual Board members. And, once again, B&J’s is suing the parent company over censorship around Gaza.

Israel’s position is unusual because it is treated differently than other governments, in two different ways. Some people grant Israel special status because of its history, and some use that history to condemn it and even question its existence. Here are some of the reasons why Israel-Palestine conflict is treated differently than elsewhere:

 

The Pro-Israel Reasons Why Israel is Treated Differently

  • European and US guilt in the aftermath of World War II, when it became obvious that millions of Jews, Roma, lesbians and gays, people with disabilities, and political opponents of the Nazi dictatorship could have been saved by other nations and were instead murdered in Germany and the lands it occupied.
  • Extremely effective pro-Israel lobbying that has demonized Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians (overlapping groups, but not interchangeable) both within the Jewish community and in the wider culture. I recommend the film “Israelism” as the quickest way to gain understanding of how this has worked. This has been so effectively percolated into the culture that any attack on the Israeli government—even in its current super-brutal iteration—is labeled antisemitism.
  • The industrialized world’s continued reliance on fossil fuels from the Arab lands—and the widely-held view within the US government that Israel is our foreign-policy surrogate and enforcement agent in the Middle East (one of the most important strategic regions in the world: a crossroads of trade since ancient times and a place where political, energy, and military control conveys enormous influence over Europe, Africa, and western Asia).

 

The Reasons Why Others Condemn Israel

  • In the larger population, this role as US surrogate gets translated into accepting at face value the common belief that Israel is a bulwark of Western democracy in a region lacking in democracies. And that, in turn, causes conflict with those who criticize Israel’s appalling record of violence and subjugation in the Gaza war. The democracy meme is partially true. If you are a white Jewish citizen of Israel, you have rights under a democracy—but those rights are limited for your Israeli Arab neighbors and do not exist for your Palestinian neighbors in East Jerusalem and just outside Israel’s borders.
  • Pretty much every Israeli and Palestinian has experienced direct harm: the loss of loved ones, the destruction of and/or eviction from property, denial of human rights. For 76 years, Israel has oppressed Palestinians, dating back to independence in 1948—and Arab nations have repeatedly waged wars and nongovernmental attacks against Israel. More recently, Israel has initiated several wars. On my second trip to Israel and Palestine ten years ago, I listened to a man who had been only 11 years old when the Israelis told his family not to take a lot of their possessions because they would be back in a few weeks (scroll down in the linked article to the section on Bar-Am). He’s one of many whose story I’ve heard over the years that describe the oppression, loss, and bitterness —as the many Israeli Jews who’ve recounted their own losses through terrorism have also experienced. The gruesome toll affects people on both sides.
  • The denial of rights to ethnic and religious minorities within Israel and to majorities in the Palestinian Territories, the violence done to these populations, and the forced resettlement have all combined to make Israel a pariah in the eyes of many.

Unfortunately, what should be anger directed at the government of Israel is often misdirected into attacks on Jews. And it doesn’t help that so many people who should know better equate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Mind you—antisemitism is real and it is not OK. But there’s a big difference between “Israel, stop bombing civilians, stop denying food access, stop destroying hospitals, stop killing journalists,” etc. and saying that the heinous Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 was justified or that the Jews as a people should be destroyed. Those latter constructs are antisemitic. The former are legitimate criticisms of a government gone amok.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the head of the rabbinic human rights organization T’ruah, has a helpful article on how to tell the difference.

But legitimate criticism of violent and discriminatory Israeli policies and actions, even those before October 7, cannot justify what Hamas did. There is NO justification for kidnapping, killing and raping innocents because they happen to be Jewish and living in Israel—just as there is NO justification for killing and torturing innocents because they happen to be Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim. And there is also no justification for treating Israel far more harshly in the diplomatic arena than other countries brutalizing occupied populations. If it’s wrong when Israel does it, it’s also wrong when other countries do it. Not to make that clear is another form of antisemitism.

 

And How Does This Relate to Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s

What Unilever is doing to Ben & Jerry’s is just a less intense version of the censorship and repression on college campuses last spring when Palestinians and their allies demanded justice and peace. What it says is “we espouse values of multiculturalism but we don’t actually believe it. In fact, we believe in demolishing entire populations based on ethnicity, religion, or other factors that we say shouldn’t matter. And we will bring repression down upon the shoulders of those who defend the groups we want to marginalize.”

To make real change, we have to make space for dissenting voices, especially from marginalized populations. That gets stripped away when criticism of Israel’s malignant actions are blocked. If you agree, click to tell Unilever to stop stomping on dissent at Ben & Jerry’s. You’re welcome to copy and modify my message:

As a proud Jew and an activist for 55 years who’s worked on peace, Middle East, the right to dissent, environmental, business as a social change agent, and immigration justice among other issues, I take strong issue with Unilever’s unilateral abrogation of Ben & Jerry’s right to protest genocidal policies in Gaza. With the Board’s independence written into the acquisition agreement, the umbrella entity of Unilever is not obligated to agree with their position and nor does that position have to be thought of as representing the whole corporation—but you are obligated to let them express it. Palestinian rights are compatible with Jewish rights, and the world needs to stop accepting the argument that criticism of Israel’s government is antimsemitism.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Diversity, Mindset, Networking, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side No Comments Tagged with , ,
As the dust begins to settle and people are able to make room for action steps on the bench where our grief sits, and as I have been reading and listening and participating in several what-do-we-do now calls, I’m beginning to regain some faith in this country.

Wednesday morning, it felt like Donald Trump’s victory was all about rejection of the idea of a strong woman of color as president. I knew all along that this could motivate at least a quarter of the electorate, which is in fact pretty damn horrific. But on Wednesday morning, it felt like I had wildly underestimated that.
But I actually don’t think that’s true. The buzz is really about economic voters. Somehow, a whole lot of people bought into the idea that Trump could manage the economy better than Harris.
This is not based in fact, but as we all know, facts don’t always lead to conclusions and actions based on them.
Trump is really good at propaganda in the worst sense of the word. He blames his enemies for things he has done, makes promises he has no intention of keeping, and somehow gets people to believe he has all the answers.
Inflation hit the Democrats really hard in this election. That we had less of it in the post-COVID recovery than pretty much any other industrialized country didn’t matter to the people who felt like they were paying twice as much in the grocery store or at the gas pump.
The gas pump part is really odd to me. For the last 6 weeks or so, I have been buying gas at less than $3 a gallon here in Massachusetts. That was certainly not true in the Trump years. But inflation is real! Housing, especially, has gone way up. And with supply chain and labor shortages as we emerged from the pandemic, prices on a lot of other things went up. We had lower inflation and more job creation under Biden than any other industrialized country, but it was still grim for those who had to figure out how to keep their families fed and sheltered.
The Democrats didn’t do a sufficient job of pointing out that they have taken major steps to let people’s buying power keep up with inflation, not least by creating an economy that provided more jobs than any president I can ever remember. And Trump was able to capitalize on this.
Harris had some really good economic proposals that would create even more jobs while cleaning the environment and reducing our carbon footprint. Expect a lot of those jobs to go away as prompt dismantles the programs that put them into place. Expect prices to soar as he puts his anti-consumer tariff policies into place. Predictions from economists all over the spectrum put that hit at about $4,000 of extra costs to the typical family each year, and higher prices as businesses struggle to replace the workers–essential to our economy–who Trump deports. Unless you are a billionaire, expect higher taxes to pay for the massive amount of incarceration and deportation. Those things are not cheap! Expect further giveaways to those who already have far more than their share while the middle class and the poor suffer tax increases and service cutbacks. He may think he is president for life, but if there is the chance to vote again, and if he is still in office by then (which I doubt), he will be a one-termer again.
This still doesn’t explain the disturbing phenomenon of a 13 million drop in the number of people who voted for a Democrat for president this time despite the lunacy that obviously awaits us under Trump. But it does at least make me think that people were voting on their economic self-interest as they perceived it, rather than a desire to roll back the clock on human rights inequality. And make no mistake, human rights and equality will be on the chopping block.
But here’s something that gives me a lot of hope. Wednesday and Thursday, I attended four different calls about how we move forward and how we work to block the worst parts of Trump’s agenda. These calls were exciting and hugely attended. The one I went to yesterday had 140,000 registrants. If I’m not mistaken, that makes it the largest conference I’ve ever attended and one of the largest events I’ve been to in my 67 years, other than a few really huge public demonstrations with 800,000 to a million people. I’m attending another one this afternoon, much more niched. I imagine there will be a few thousand on that call.
Remember that we have lived through bad times before. We lived through Joe McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush II, and Trump I. We lived through slavery and wars. And now, with the benefit of all the organizing of 2017, 2020, and 2024, we are prepared for action. The actions will be non-violent and effective. The Democratic Party structure is involved. Harris’s concession speech was a brilliant call to stay involved, to get back into the trenches. To recognize that we have power and that our power is not based only on who wins an election.
And how will you get involved?
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Publishing, Sexuality and Gender No Comments Tagged with , , , , ,

I am asking myself two questions in the wake of Tuesday’s election results.

1. Why did so many people stay home? Why, despite a bazillion new registrations, despite enormous enthusiasm at every public appearance, despite a roster of endorsements the like of which I’ve never seen before did 13 million fewer people vote for Harris then did for Biden 4 years ago?

2. And why did 72 million people vote for a convicted felon who tells thousands of demonstrable lies, who based his entire campaign on hatred, othering, retribution, and the promise of fascism, and who was increasingly incoherent, physically exhausted, and obviously mentally unstable as the campaign went on?

I have a ton of respect for journalists. I trained to be one. But under the rubric of “journalistic objectivity” and pressure from owners who are more interested in ratings than reality, they had a lot of constraints covering this election. And thus I think at least part of the answer lies in a third question: why did the mainstream media consistently have a double standard of coverage: refusing to hold Trump accountable as they were doing first with Biden and then with Harris?

First, they went after Biden, even before his disastrous debate with Trump. “Isn’t he too old?” “What about inflation?” I even remember a shockingly biased Washington Post newsletter with a graph comparing Biden’s age at the end of a second term to Trump’s age at the beginning of one. So suddenly the three and a half year age gap looked like seven and a half years. Wtf?

And then after the debate, enormous pressure for Biden to step down. I do think he had become compromised and stepping down was the right decision. It was pretty clear within a couple of weeks that the debate was not a one-off (as it had first appeared) but a pattern that was emerging more frequently. He wasn’t up to the job for another 4 years and to his credit, and unlike his opponent, he stepped away to make room for a younger generation.

But then came the attacks on his replacement. “Why won’t she meet with us?” “How come they aren’t going to run the primaries again?” “Why doesn’t she release policy statements?” “Does she have the gravitas to be president?”

That would have been fine if they were asking the same questions of Trump. Not only were they not pressuring him to go into details on policy, but they accepted his softball interviews in front of Trump-supporting audiences venues like Fox News as an adequate substitute for actual journalistic interviews.

More worrisome was the normalization of Trump as a legitimate candidate. Where were they when it was time to question Trump’s gravitas—or his competence? As Harris herself noted, he is “an unserious man” in a position to do serious damage. The cadre of media that was so quick to jump on every little stammer of Biden’s not only tried to paper over Trump’s increasingly incoherent and delusional speeches, even on several occasions translating the nonsense into what he might have said if he had been talking in comprehensible English. They also papered over the genuine threats to democracy in the vague policy outlines he did provide and the much more detailed proposals from the project 2025 blueprint. His lack of gravitas showed again as he lackadaisically attempted to disavow in the face of evidence that his fingerprints and those of people close to him were all over it. And Vance? Vance has so little gravitas after just two years in the Senate that he whined the one time in his debate that he was fact-checked—after making up completely false and very damaging lies about immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets, as he himself admitted later.

There wasn’t even much hand wringing when Trump skipped out on future debates after Harris wiped the floor with him in their sole formal pairing. And then he skipped out on promised interviews with real media, who acquiesced.

And there was surprisingly little examination of his character until just a few weeks before the election. Where was the focus on his 34 criminal convictions, his liability in civil court for raping and defaming, the other 60 or so criminal felony counts that didn’t get to go to trial and now probably never will, the literally tens of thousands of lies he told before, during, and since his term in office, his authoritarian tendencies, his blatant narcissism and personal cruelty, and his totally transactional view of the world in which everything has to be a way for him to make money, gain status or power, and/or build his personal brand or else he is not interested. That this sociopath was treated as a normal candidate will be a shame on the media for decades to come.

And then there is Fox! I used to be a free speech absolutist. But free speech absolutism only works when there is a common core of decency that everyone respects, some minimum standards for reporting. The filth that was spewed by their commentators, the disgusting and completely false advertisements they were airing, and the way they shielded their audience from any negative news about Trump should disqualify them from any legitimate role as press. This of course is not new and has been going on since it was founded—but it has now reached extremes and probably has a lot to do with why certain sectors of the population voted for Trump against their own interests.

I happened to be at a restaurant one night that was airing a baseball playoff on Fox. They showed one Trump commercial accusing Harris of immigration positions she has never taken and policies that did not exist. I happen to know a thing or two about immigration issues. It has been the focus of my activism since spring 2019. This ad was so blatantly false that it made me wonder why it is even legal to air it. After all, a candidate who is attacked has no way to respond. Those messages go out into the ether unchallenged, whether or not they’re based in fact. Only when the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated in the Reagan era did Fox become even possible. And maybe it’s time for real-time fact checking to be standard operating procedure for any political debate.

We don’t have room in this article to explore WHY this biased coverage happened. But unconscious OR conscious othering (ageism, racism, sexism, bias against physical disabilities such as Biden’s stutter) just might have been a factor, don’tcha think?

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Environment, Ethics in Government, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Sexuality and Gender, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

As I was waking up this morning at 5:47 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, the New York Times was calling the election for Donald Trump. And when I checked a few minutes later, I literally burst into tears. I am not much of a crier but I feel upset, betrayed, a stranger in my own country.

It is going to be the worst presidency in the history of our country. This lying, thieving, predatory thug is going to do his worst to reverse all our hard-fought progress. Expect devastating attacks on:

  • The environment and the movement to reverse catastrophic climate change
  • The rights of immigrants, LGBTQ folks, people with disabilities, people of color, people who do not identify as Christian
  • Women’s reproductive freedom, and potentially even women’s place in modern society
  • Independent media featuring honest reporting
  • Low-income wage workers
  • Labor unions
  • And of course, democracy and personal freedom

But we can’t give up!

We have 2 months to organize a nationwide nonviolent resistance movement. We have four years to do what we can to clog up the evil work this man will try to do. We have been here before, in the 1850s, in the 1960s, and in the 1980s, to name three. We have resisted and we have survived. Never underestimate our collective power but never take it for granted either. Some of us may find ourselves organizing from  prison or exile. But we can still organize.
Study and train in non-violent resistance. Follow people like Stephen Zunes, Erica Chenoweth, George Lakey, the long list of people who organized Standing Rock, the shrinking list of people who were active in the many-headed nonviolent revolution that brought us the civil rights, get out of Vietnam, modern feminist, and environmental movements, and whose (figurative as well as literal) children and grandchildren have been active in stopping carnage in Palestine and elsewhere. That is our future, that is our hope, and that is our call to action. We do not give up and we are not going back! Even if our government is.
You may thing that nonviolent resistance doesn’t work. But you would be mistaken. Nonviolent struggles are slow but they do work. Historicallty, they’ve worked better than violent revolutions. On multiple occasions, they’ve brought down govenments.
One lesson I take away from this is it proves that yes, the perfect is the enemy of the good. I am totally shocked that 15 million fewer people voted for Kamala Harris then for Biden 4 years ago. It was about people staying home or voting third-party. That is the only way I can understand the huge drop between Biden’s 81 million 4 years ago and Harris’s 66 million. That’s where the election went.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, language, Marketing Trends/News, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with , , ,

Relax and take some deep breaths. Get time in nature and in physical exercise. And think about these truths:

  1. Just forget about the polls. They self-acknowledge that when an election is as they all seem to think it is, the margin of error is greater than the projected margin of victory. In other words, each state they forecast could go either way.
  2. Judge more by both the magnitude and demographics of early voting. 76 million people have voted ahead, even though society has recovered from the pandemic that created a huge wave of early voting four years ago. Women and youth are very prominent in these early returns, and that bodes well for the Democrats.
  3. Remember that we will probably not know the results Tuesday night and maybe not for a few days, because all these early votes have to be added into the tabulating machines and some states don’t allow that until after the polls close—and because really close races will trigger recounts (by hand, in some places). The only exception would be if the votes are so overwhelmingly in one direction that adding in the early votes won’t change the results. And that’s not likely in the seven swing states that will determine the winner. So don’t get anxious because the result can’t be called yet. That’s normal.
  4. As the campaign has progressed, so has enthusiasm for Harris, including endorsements from not just A-list celebrities with enormous followings but also many former Trump staffers. Meanwhile, facing diminishing crowds, lots of empty seats, and people leaving early, Trump continues to deliberately alienate large sectors of the electorate with his hatreds, vindictiveness, name calling—and rambling narratives that simply don’t make any sense. And not only is Trump’s mental acuity seemingly on a rapid decline, so is his vaunted physical strength. He had trouble opening the door of that garbage truck that he rode (he was in the passenger seat, so no, he didn’t drive it) around the airport tarmac).

So those are some of the reasons why you shouldn’t waste energy fretting about the result until we know the result. And by then, I’m hoping we’ll have something to celebrate. Last month, I blogged ten reasons why I think Harris will win. My analysis has gotten validation from a number of sources, among them Michael Moore and Rachel Bitecofer. One day before the election, and after spending four weekend afternoons knocking on doors in a swing state, I remain calm and optimistic.

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Politics, propaganda, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , ,

Joe Biden has been taking a lot of heat for his response to the blatant racism at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden debacle. The claim is that he called Trump’s supporters (plural) “garbage.”

But that isn’t what he actually said.

Here’s a piece of the transcript. He uses the possessive singular and follows it up with “his demonization of Latinos” (emphasis mine). Seeing them together, it is 100% clear: Both of these two uses confirm that he was directing his ire at that one particular supporter who spewing racism on the stage–and as I see it, that so-called comedian deserves the insult. Here is the quote, in context: “they’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

Meanwhile, Trump, in his arrogance, not only didn’t apologize, not only called this horrorshow a “lovefest” and said it was “an honor to be involved,” but then had the hubris to do one campaign event from the cab of a garbage truck, telling reporters “How do you like my garbage truck? This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden” and say at another, “We know it’s what they believe, because look how they’ve treated you. They’ve treated you like garbage.”

The only way I can interpret this is he’s is totally OK with calling Puerto Ricans “garbage.”

I have to wonder how any decent, moral person can support this man who goes against those values. He’s not only racist, he’s homophobic, he otherizes lots of groups from people with disabilities to both Muslims and Jews to military veterans. He has been convicted of 34 felonies so far, is a self-acknowledged sexual predator, has stiffed hundreds of small businesses that did work for him, was found in court to have not only committed “the equivalent of rape” but to have defamed one of the at least 69(!) women who have accused him of rape or sexual misconduct–and increasingly, he is advocating fascism. Increasingly, too, he is showing signs of rapid cognitive decline. He is also the only US President, as far as I know, to use the office he was elected to for massive business and personal financial gain. He has repeatedly betrayed the loyalty of those who stood by him, from his Attorney General, William Barr, to his Vice President, Mike Pence. He has been called unfit by dozens of people who worked for him.

He is not fit to be President. He is not fit to be trusted with any responsibility for others. Please share widely with anyone in your circle who is considering voting for this cowardly, criminal, immature bully.

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