Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Gratitude, language, People Helping People, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , ,

Guest post by Jacqueline Simonds.

Way back in 1979, I worked in a Texas bar & grill. One of my co-workers discovered she had Graves Disease/hyperthyroidism. She was put on a medication and her slightly bulging eyes and weight started to diminish.

Then she discovered she was pregnant.

[Recall that in 1979, there were no home pregnancy tests available. By the time she figured out she might be pregnant, and got into the doctor, she was maybe 2 – 2.5- months along. That’s 6 – 8.5 weeks.]

She told the doctor who was treating the thyroid, and he freaked. The medication she was taking would 100% result in a mangled fetus. He insisted she get an abortion – for the sake of her health, and her family.

My friend, a Latina, was also very very Catholic, and already had 3 children with her husband. This caused a terrible crisis for her. So she went to her priest, and told him what the doctor said. He immediately told her she couldn’t have the procedure, because it was against God.

My friend was completely wrecked by the moral and ethical challenges before her. What should she do? She understood the danger, but the priest said it was wrong. She cried all day at work.

She called her doctor and told him what the priest said. Then the doctor did something sort of amazing.

He called the priest and asked him to come to the office.

When they met, the doctor explained what was happening in my friend’s body. He showed the priest pictures of what a healthy developing fetus looked like, and what would happen to this one. And then he described, in great detail, the life my friend and her family would have. That my friend would have to quit work, and take full care of the child, for the rest of its life (caring for a medically-challenged child was even more financially and emotionally draining then than it is now).

But more, the doctor said, is that it might just kill her. Then her 3 children would be left without a mother, her husband without a wife, the parish without a devout member. And how did this serve God? How, he asked the priest, can you help her best? (He did not demand that the priest give in to the doctor’s way of thinking.)

The priest was astonished at all this information, and asked for time to go and pray. The doctor told him he encouraged him to do so, but not to take too much more time. The procedure had to be done soon.

The next day, the priest called my friend and told her he felt God wanted her to lay down the burden of the pregnancy, and that the priest himself would take her to the procedure.

And he did. And she was saved.

My friend suffered guilt and remorse and sorrow on a scale I could barely stand to watch. But with all of our love, she got through it.

If the conversation between the priest and the doctor seems unlikely to you, it is because times have changed that radically. We were on the middle path back in the 70s, where you could object to abortion, but see its necessity. When you could be pro-choice, but have an adult conversation that didn’t involve a screaming match – and therefore might change a mind.

Extremism erases rationality and damages real people. Right now, we HAVE to fight right wing pseudo-Christian extremism, because it is a toxic poison to women’s bodily autonomy. Once we can force the extremists back into the shadows, we can return to a time of the middle path, where your decision is YOURS.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,
Multicultural contingent at a climate march. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Multicultural contingent at a climate march. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

You won’t normally see me starting a blog post with a bible quote, but…I’m quoting an article that quotes the Bible: 

In Genesis 1 God commands humanity: “Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (1:28). “Subdue” and “rule” are verbs of dominance. In Genesis 2, however, the text uses two quite different verbs. God placed the first man in the Garden “to serve it [le’ovdah] and guard it [leshomrah]” (2:15). These belong to the language of responsibility. The first term, le’ovdah, tells us that humanity is not just the master but also the servant of nature. The second, leshomrah, is the term used in later biblical legislation to specify the responsibilities of one who undertakes to guard something that is not their own.

–Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

The Jewish year divides the Old Testament into weekly portions that stay the same year after year.

My politically conservative, religiously Orthodox brother-in-law sent me the article I quoted, “The Ecological Imperative.” It turns out to be last week’s installment in a weekly series by a British rabbi on each week’s parshah, the Torah reading for the week. The readings assigned to each Hebrew-calendar week have stayed the same year after year, for centuries.

Joe knew I would like it. He didn’t know I’d be fascinated enough to write a whole blog post about it. I will share my takeaways from this article–but let me provide some personal background first.

 

My Back Story

I was a convert of the very first Earth Day, back in 1970, when I was 13. By 1971, I had joined my first two environmental advocacy organizations (one in my neighborhood, the other at my high school). That activism (and the lifestyle choices that support it) have been a strong part of my life ever since.

But my motivations back then were entirely secular. Three years earlier, my mom and dad had split up, and both parents had stopped being religious. I had moved from a yeshiva (religious school) with half the day in Hebrew to the regular public school. And as someone who’d not only been very frustrated with the many social and activity limits of Orthodox Judaism but who independently had questioned the existence of God by age 9, I welcomed those confusing changes in my life.

It was only many years later that I began to make space for a sense of faith. My image of God is very different from the classic image of the old man with a beard, throwing lightning. I don’t consider myself religious–but I can’t truthfully call myself an atheist.

In 2017, I began a process of reading major religious texts, starting with the Five Books of Moses, then continuing through the Four Gospels of the New Testament and now the Qur’an (Koran). So I’ve read Deuteronomy fairly recently. Of those nine books of the Old and New Testaments, I found Deuteronomy the most tiresome and challenging by far. It is largely a regurgitation in Moses’s voice of Leviticus and Numbers. As my secular side perceived it, it was a collection of random rules that made no sense in the modern world and maybe not much sense in the ancient world either.

 

Putting the Parsha in Context

But Rabbi Sacks reaches back from the week’s Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9 parsha (“Shoftim”) to the second chapter of Genesis, to show how the sages over these centuries have placed the commandment not to destroy your enemy‘s natural resources during a siege into a broader context of planetary stewardship, and even planetary healing.

The Sages, though, saw in this command something more than a detail in the laws of war. They saw it as a binyan av, a specific example of a more general principle. They called this the rule of bal tashchit, the prohibition against needless destruction of any kind. This is how Maimonides summarises it: “Not only does this apply to trees, but also whoever breaks vessels or tears garments, destroys a building, blocks a wellspring of water, or destructively wastes food, transgresses the command of bal tashchit.”[1] This is the halachic basis of an ethic of ecological responsibility.

 

Lessons and Takeaways

  1. Specifics in the Torah (and by extrapolation, other holy texts from other traditions) can be extrapolated to determine sweeping codes of social behavior/social responsibility.
  2. The texts support an earth-friendly interpretation that provides defense against the argument that the Bible commands us to subdue the earth and its other inhabitants.
  3. More than that, if we take these texts as the word of God, we are commanded to treat the earth as God’s creation, to treat it with great respect, and to maintain its abundance and its health for future generations.
  4. Given this imperative and the rapidly-closing window to solve the climate crisis, if we agree with #3, we have to support a political and business structure that encourages action. Presently, we face not only a global climate crisis (which I believe is still solvable through a combination of innovation and regulation), but a bunch of governments around the world, from the US to Brazil to the Philippines, that are actively attacking measures to preserve the environment (and, not coincidentally, attacking human rights at the same time). Just as Pope Francis’s climate encyclical provided impetus within the Catholic community, Rabbi Sachs’s interpretation can perhaps light a nonpolluting, non-carbon fire among religious Jews and even among Evangelicals (who of course see the Old Testament as part of the Word of God).
  5. The planet can’t speak up in front of a legislature or at the UN. So let’s get some movement going to get leaders who will speak on its behalf!

. 

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Ethics in Government, language, Politics, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , ,

Oh, for goodness sake. How much longer can we stand a United States president who has less emotional maturity than some two-year-olds?

In just the past week, this ridiculous man cancelled a meeting with Denmark’s Prime Minister because she didn’t want to sell off Greenland, accused American Jews of being disloyal if they vote Democratic, and retweeted someone who compared him to “The Second Coming of God”and a king.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (2019).

Last month, he told three Democratic Congresswomen of color who were born here and one who has been in the US longer than his own wife to go back to the “corrupt” countries they were from.

And of course, we’ve experienced hundreds of similar temper tantrums going back throughout this chaotic self-dealing administration, into the campaign, and even years before that. He betrays allies, cozies up to dictators, breaks treaties and agreements, attempts to grab unlimited power, and pouts very publicly when he doesn’t get his way. He seems unable to even make a sympathy call without trying to make it all about him.

In a private citizen, this level of immaturity might be amusing. But in the “leader of the Free World,” it’s downright scary. You don’t want to see tantrums in a man who has access to nuclear weapons!

Even the Republicans ought to have had enough long ago. Do they think that kowtowing will advance their agenda? Appeasement didn’t work for Neville Chamberlain against Hitler, and it isn’t working for the American people either.

Congress, do your duty! You’ve had cause to impeach since the day he took office while still violating the Emoluments Clauses, and he keeps building new reasons to impeach. If you don’t like that route, how about the 25th Amendment, Section 4 of which provides for removal for incompetence/insanity/inability to carry out duties of office?

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Psychology, Technology Tagged with , , , , , ,

Lately, my inbox is full of courses to market via Facebook Messenger.

I actually hit reply to one that began, “What if you could use FB Messenger to make up to $2,500 a week… in your spare time?”:
 
What if we could have ONE communication channel that doesn’t get polluted by marketers trying to hijack it? There is no refuge anymore! I remember when the only things in my inbox were things I wanted. I remember when I didn’t get blasted with texts from companies that don’t even know me. I am a marketer, and I understand the need to reach out. But damn it, we need some spaces where we’re not getting marketed to.
 
I do get it. Every time someone invents a great new communication tool, someone else invents a way to sneak marketing messages past the gatekeeper. And then someone else invents some protection. And usually, someone else invents a way to overcome that block.
 
Postal mail begat bulk mail, which begat opening mail over the recycle bin, which begat postcards and envelope teasers. Telephones begat outbound call centers, which begat caller ID, which begat robocalls with spoofed IDs. Email begat spam, which begat spam filters, which begat messages crafted to go around them, which begat Google’s Promotions and Social folders (which severely impacted legitimate newsletter publishers and didn’t seem to hurt the spammers much). 
 
It’s an arms race. The Cold War in all your inboxes. Ads in toilet stalls. Digital ads on billboards changing every few seconds. Ads on the frame around the taxi rates placard on the divider between the front and back seats in a cab.
 
But here’s the thing: all of these intrusive methods are dinosaur-marketing. Seth Godin told us 20 years ago about permission marketing.
Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.
Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.
 
Seth has permission to be in MY mailbox. His daily blog shows up every day. I actually open and read every column for his useful information and fresh perspectives. Often, he offers a program or product—but it’s in context .
 
Seth walks his talk. And I buy from him occasionally. (I also sometimes share or email him comments. That, plus writing a great book, got him to endorse my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.)
 
You don’t win customers by shouting louder; you win them by being relevant and helpful, and using the technology intelligently:
  • Instead of random texting, text your own customers who’ve given you their mobile numbers as they show up within a mile of you, with friendly, helpful information about today’s cool event (yes, geotexting exists)
  • Instead of using robocalls to make deceptive offers, use them to notify your customer base of important news, like a weather-related school closing or a construction delay on a major artery
  • If your Facebook page uses the automated FB Messenger feature, send links to your FAQ and three most popular or useful pages on your own website—but also make sure you have a human being reading the inbound messages and responding quickly. And figure out a way to only send that autoresponder the first time you get a PM from any specific person.

So here’s MY soft-sell pitch at the end of this useful (I hope) content: if you need help developing non-intrusive, welcomed marketing, drop me a line or give me a call. Especially if your business or product/service/idea contributes to environmental and social good.

 
 
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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Frugality/Frugal Fun, General Commentary, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,
Child brushing teeth (FreeImages.com)
Child brushing teeth (FreeImages.com)

We always hear from conservatives that they don’t see how we can possibly afford universal health care, let alone the Green New Deal. Thus, as a public service, I’m listing five ways (among dozens if not hundreds) we can locate the funds. This is not even pretending to be comprehensive (or in any sort of order), and I’d love you to add your favorite in the comments.

  1. Eliminate the private for-profit insurance system, which jacks up the price. According to The New Republic (2015), this is costing us between $375 billion and $471 billion per year. The savings in getting rid of the middlemen would more than cover the increase in taxes.
  2. Cap doctors’ salaries at something reasonable and generous. I’ll pull a figure out of the air: 200K per year for generalists, 300K for specialists—but it could be higher or lower.
  3. Eliminate the crazy subsidies and price protections in so many industries, and particularly fossil and nuclear fuel, Big Pharma, highways and bridges to nowhere, and chemiculture-based Big Ag. We are subsidizing all sorts of things that should not be subsidized! Our policies should support the changes we want society to make (but right now, our policies interfere with those changes.
  4. Cut the military budget down to the expenditure of China (the country second on the list). Right now, the US is spending an obscene $649 billion per year (2016) to “defend” 329,345,285 people (more than the next seven countries combined). Yet China manages to protect 1,420,615,635 people, more than 4.3 times the US figure,  with military spending of just $146 billion (2016), or less than a quarter overall, less than a sixteenth per capita. So if the US slashed military spending by 75 percent to match China’s, it would still be spending more than four times per person than China does. Surely that would be enough to protect ourselves!
  5. Increase the tax rates for multimillionaires and for multinational megacorporations. Under Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent; now it’s less than half, just 37 percent. Meanwhile some of the most successful corporations pay zero income tax even while decimating local economies built on mom-and-pop retailers; In 2018, Amazon managed to double its profits from $5.6 billion in 2017 to $11.2 billion, and paid zero income tax both years. Lets end socialism for the rich.
  6. Do a Marshall Plan-style investment program to convert the entire nation to safe, clean, renewable energy; the upfront cost will be quickly amortized by energy savings AND healthcare savings, since we’ll be eliminating major causes of asthma, emphysema, etc. Plus, the cost of converting to solar, wind, etc. will drop way down, as economies of scale kick in. Even without a big government investment in converting the whole economy, solar and wind prices are now often compatible with or even better than fossil or nuclear power sources.

So next time you meet someone who wonders how to pay for the world we want, this article gives part of the recipe. Readers, please add your own favorite ways to find the money for these improvements, and please include a source for your data.

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By Posted on Posted in language, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.
Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.

Editor’s Note from Shel Horowitz: this was originally published on Seth’s blog under the title, Where Will the Media Take Us Next? I am a long-time reader and fan of author and teacher Seth’s daily blog (and thrilled that he gave me a terrific endorsement for my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World). I have often linked to his blog posts on Facebook, and sometimes corresponded with him. This one struck me as one I wanted to share on my own website. Used with his permission. And now, here’s Seth.

Where Will the Media Take Us, by Seth Godin

Since the first story was carved on a rock, media pundits have explained that they have simply given people what they want, reporting the best they can on what’s happening.
Cause (the culture, human activity, people’s desires) leads to effect (front page news).

In fact, it’s becoming ever more clear that the attention-seeking, profit-driven media industrial complex drives our culture even more than it reports on it.

Thoughtful people regularly bemoan our loss of civility, the rise of trolling and bullying and most of all, divisive behavior designed to rip people apart instead of moving us productively forward.

And at the very same time, reality TV gets ever better ratings. So much so that the news has become the longest-running, cheapest to produce and most corrosive TV show in history. Increase that exponentially by adding in the peer-to-peer reality show that is social media, and you can see what’s happening.

Imagine two classrooms, each filled with second graders.
In the first classroom, the teacher shines a spotlight on the bullies, the troublemakers and the fighters, going so far as to arrange all the chairs so that the students are watching them and cheering them on all day.

In the second classroom, the teacher establishes standards, acts as a damper on selfish outliers and celebrates the generous and productive kids in the classroom…

How will the classrooms diverge? Which one would you rather have your child enrolled in?

We’re not in elementary school anymore, and the media isn’t our teacher or our nanny. But the attention we pay to the electronic channels we click on consumes more of our day than we ever spent with Miss Binder in second grade. And that attention is corrosive. To us and to those around us.

The producers of reality TV know this. And they seek out more of it. When they can’t find it easily, they search harder. Because that’s their job.

It’s their job to amp up the reality show that is our culture.
But it’s not our job to buy into it. More than anything, profit-driven media needs our active participation in order to pay their bills.

It’s an asymmetrical game, with tons of behavioral research working against each of us–the uncoordinated but disaffected masses. Perhaps we can find the resolve to seek out the others, to connect and to organize in a direction that actually works.

The first step is to stop taking the bait. The second step is to say, “follow me.”

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics: General, language, Networking, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

This thought-provoking and mercifully brief article in the Atlantic explains why DT fanatics refuse to face his evil.

Go and read it. I’ll wait. And yes, I know it’s almost a year old–but it’s still completely relevant.

It makes so much sense to me! It’s not that DT’s ardent followers can’t see the criminal behavior, the looting of the public treasury, the constant lying and bullying, the attempt to accuse someone else of whatever it is he’s accused of today. It’s that they define corruption very differently than the rest of us to.

Of course, if this is accurate, it poses a big challenge for activists. When facts don’t matter at all because ideology is paramount, it’s really hard to change people’s minds. 

I think it can be done, one conversation at a time. And those conversations have to be handled very carefully. They have to:

  • Respect the other person as a person (that means no name calling, among other things)
  • Seek common ground even when it’s hard to find
  • Avoid making the other person feel diminished, stupid, heartless, etc. and at the same time, not condoning the diminishment or insult of others (in the form of prejudice

This is a huge challenge. I recognize that. I’ve had some of these conversations. Van Jones has had some.

Van Jones, activist, speaking in 2015. Photo Credit: Department of Labor, Shawn T Moore

I’m deeply inspired by groups that facilitate dialogue between groups of peope who are opposite sides of deep divides. That could be Better Angels bringing together Left and Right in the US–or Combatants for Peace bringing Israeli and Palestinian former combatants together on speaking tours. Or dozens of other groups.

How do you find hope and opportunity while in dialogue with people you ardently disagree with? Please post in the comments.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Ethics in Government, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, travel Tagged with ,

I like to travel, but this trip is not about fun. I’ll spending the next few days in the grueling Florida summer heat and humidity, outside the gates–and the 30-foot wall recently built to prevent the kids from seeing their supporters–of a private “detention center” (prison) holding more than 2000 children whose only “crime” is coming to this country–usually because their lives are in danger at home. [Clarification: when we got to the site, we discovered that the fences, covered with cloth mesh to block the view, are “only” about 8 feet high around the compound for 13-16-year-olds and about 12 feet around the separate, windowless building holding 17-year-old detainees. By standing on stepladders, we were able to make visual and verbal contact with the younger groups.]

Since January, 2017, we’ve seen appalling abuses: children in cages, children torn from their families, families denied the right to even apply for asylum.

I am putting my body out there to say No. Enough! I’ve joined a Jewish affinity group from western Massachusetts, and six of the eight of us are sitting in the departure lounge in the Hartford airport.

This is the initial post on the blog I set up for our affinity group:

This blog will cover the actions of a small group of Jewish activists from the Northampton/Amherst area of Western Massachusetts (and one from Eastern Massachusetts) who came together as an affinity group to protest the jailing of innocent migrant children.

We are appalled at the gratuitous cruelty of the current US government and its private enablers such as the operators of the prison we’ll be protesting at. As an example, we’ve heard that they raised the height of the fence of the prison where we will be witnessing, just to block the incarcerated children from seeing the protests and taking comfort from them.

We are horrified that at least five children have died in custody nationally in the past few months. And our hearts are torn open that these thousands of children have been wrenched from their families. There is no good reason for this cruelty.

We choose to act as Jews, in the spirit of Tikkun Olam (healing the world) and the Biblical injunction, “Tzedek, Tzedek, Tirdof” (Justice, Justice, shalt thou Pursue). We are not a religious group, and we have as many interpretations of what it means to be a Jew and a Jewish activist as we have members.

Our first action is to participate in a Jewish–themed Father’s Day protest at a private prison in Homestead, Florida for a few days in mid-June. Members of our affinity group, Western Mass Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice, will use this space to post photos and writings about our time there, announce public events back home where we’ll share what we witnessed, etc.

This is part of a much larger ongoing presence in Homestead. You can read about it on the Witness: Tornillo. Target: Homestead page, just by clicking this link.

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Dear Donald, whatever happened to “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Your grandfather was an immigrant. So are two of your wives.

The cruelty and meanness of your administration do not make us stronger. They make us criminals.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts

I’m a big fan of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. She’s been my Senator for more than six years, and I was aware of her consumer advocacy for several years before that. In the crowded field of Democrats seeking the presidency, she’s my top choice.

BUT I still think she made a big mistake turning down a chance to broadcast a Town Hall meeting on Fox news.

I’ve been puzzling about this for almost two weeks, looking for something fresh to say that hasn’t been said before, as in this article by Megan Day:

In Warren’s scenario, Fox News’s politics will be defeated by a few principled liberal politicians engaging in a media blackout. In [Bernie] Sanders’s, Fox News’s politics will be defeated when the Left convinces a significant portion of the Right’s working-class base that they’ve been duped, and that the pro-worker left best represents their political interests...

By refusing to go on Fox News, Warren has demonstrated that she doesn’t take this task as seriously as she ought to. As Sanders has plainly stated, the power of the capitalist class is so formidable that it will take a huge movement of millions of united workers to actually overcome it in reality. Warren’s policy ideas are frequently excellent, but without a fundamental orientation toward the very people who stand to benefit from them, they stand little chance of materializing.

I agree with  Day. Warren’s better policy initiatives are not enough if she’s going to rely on the liberal elite to make them a reality.

And she should know this. She’s a born organizer, and her speeches are very approachable. Like that guy in the White House, she understands how to talk to ordinary people with in some cases limited education, to make them feel excited by (and ownership of) her ideas.

Yes, Fox is toxic. But when people have swallowed poison, you go in and pump their stomachs. The argument she makes that she doesn’t want to enrich the network or legitimize it seems spurious. After all, Bernie Sanders attacked Fox during the Town Hall they gave him and televised.

And then it hit me that my own start in journalism was very relevant.

In 1972, as a 15-year-old junior at Bronx High School of Science, I got my first article bylines–covering peace demonstrations and other progressive events. I didn’t get them in the official school newspaper; writing for Science Survey was only an option for the students in the honors journalism English class.

I got them in one of the school’s underground papers. A paper called Insight, published by a small group of right-wingers who identified as libertarians. They ran my stuff with disclaimers: “the following article does not reflect the views of the management,” etc.

But they ran my stuff! I was able to share my viewpoint, encourage the peace and environmental agendas of groups I was involved with, and build a publication portfolio that led to a 45-year writing career and the authorship of 10 books and thousands of articles.

And even at the time, I felt that maybe the best part was that they put me in front of an audience that was skeptical of my views. They gave me a forum to reach people who disagreed with me. I have no idea if I changed anyone’s mind, but I was given that chance.

Elizabeth should have taken that chance, too.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, Politics, Psychology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , ,

$2.5 billion is a lot of money even for a self-styled billionaire like the current occupant of the White House. That’s how much he convinced various departments at Deutsche Bank to lend him, according to an NPR Fresh Air interview with David Enrich, New York Times finance editor and author of the forthcoming book, Dark Towers: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Destructive Bank. The article reveals quite a bit of the psychology of these bankers, as well as of DT himself.

Climate marchers in front of Trump Hotel, Washington DC 4-29-17 (Clamshell Alliance's spiritual heirs)
Climate marchers in front of Trump Hotel, Washington DC 4-29-17 (Clamshell Alliance’s spiritual heirs)

It’s even more remarkable because “Don the Con” is not a good credit risk. Even before the New York Times revealed that he squandered and lost $1.17 billion just in the ten years from 1985-94, the banking industry was well aware of DT’s long history of failing to pay back large loans (and his other habit of failing to pay his subcontractors). Yet, DT burned Deutsche Bank several times. When the sourced documents finally go public, things are going to get VERY interesting.

This is one very good argument against siloed businesses, by the way. If these people had only talked to each other, they’d have been at far less risk for the subsequent loans.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail