Category: Abundance and Prosperity

Looking at abundance as not necessarily monetary–how to get your needs met and desires fulfilled without necessarily needing money to do it.

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Through the 26 dynasties that made up its history until 1911, China developed a unique culture, strongly rooted in a visual aesthetic and a behavior code rooted in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism.

The 20th Century saw several massive shifts. The Qing Dynasty fell and the Republic of China was formed under Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. The Japanese invaded in the 1930s. Led by Mao Tzedung, Communists forced out Sun’s successor, Chaing Kai-Shek. Mao’s 1960s-70s Cultural Revolution deliberately abandoned (and criminalized) both Chinese and Western traditions. After Mao’s death, new leaders starting with Deng Xao Ping began to embrace western-style capitalism, both by encouraging Chinese entrepreneurs and by inviting western companies in.

One of the many pieces of public art in the Beijing subway system. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
One of the many pieces of public art in the Beijing subway system. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

Today, in Shanghai, it’s hard to find the old China. The wide boulevards are lined with stores like H&M, Apple, and Starbucks (we were told the coffee chain has over 180 locations in the city). Billboards advertising glitzy western luxury goods—and using about 15 western models for every image of a Chinese. Recent construction waves favor enormously tall highrise apartment buildings going out for miles from the city center (and we were told that most have only two elevators). If the residential areas are not 60-storey megatowers, they’re either Soviet-style cheap apartment buildings of 20 storeys or so, or six-storey walk-ups—both constructed in massive numbers following the Communist takeover. Bicycles have been largely pushed out by electric mopeds, and cars are crowding those off the road. Highways are layered up to four deep at some complex intersections, with crazy systems of ramps spiraling from level to level.

In Beijing, the situation is similar, but many old hutongs—close-knit neighborhoods in one- and two-storey buildings—still flourish. Of course, the majority have been torn down for new construction, but the remaining ones are easy to spot. Also, many important historic sites and temples remain open in and around Beijing.

But in Shanghai, the extremely toursity neighborhood of Old Shanghai—with 500-year-old buildings hosting a lot of western quick service restaurants—is almost the only respite we saw from new construction except the Bund, whose riverside prerevolutionary hotels and trade edifices are mostly about a century old. The entire Pudong (eastern) side of the city is new, with some 8000 skyscrapers constructed on former farmland since about 1990, and the population doubling from 12 to 25 million.

We saw surprisingly few industrial areas (of course, we weren’t in factory cities like Guangzhou or Wuhu). And we also saw remarkably little evidence of China’s role as a world leader in solar. While most buildings have visible solar hot water systems, we saw almost no photovoltaic. Given China’s major air pollution problems and its heavy reliance on dirty fuel (especially coal), it’s surprising to me that more solar hasn’t been installed where it’s suitable (and there are plenty of them).

One of the West’s more obvious exports to China is status consciousness. Although places to live are expensive and hard to find, motor vehicle registration plates cost up to $15,000 in Shanghai, and imported luxury goods are taxed at 300 percent even if they’re made in China in the first place, all four cities we visited include a significant population that buys expensive clothes and expensive cars. In Shanghai, I saw a Ferrari, three Porsches, numerous Audis and Mercedes, a few Range Rovers, and several other luxury/sports cars I couldn’t identify. Of course, there were plenty of cheaper cars. In the business districts, the streets are full of fashionistas—not to the extent of Milan or Barcelona, but far more than, say, Boston. Chinese women with lots of disposable income shop at Prada and Sephora, while those with fewer resources go to the many bargain stores. Two of our guides made the same joke about getting to work by BMW: Bus/Metro/Walking. One of them also told us that single Chinese women in their thirties (who can be pretty choosy, because men outnumber them significantly) look for men with “five cs:” Condominium, Cash, Career, Car—and Cute (in that order).

We heard that people who go abroad bring back as much as they can and share it with their friends, to save on that 300 percent tax.

In some ways, the country is modernizing and westernizing rapidly. A lot of people drink western-style soft drinks as well as coffee, and the cities are full of large hotels now.—many of them connected with an american or European brand. Public bathrooms in many tourist attractions and better restaurants include at least one western-style toilet.

Yet at the same time, the average wage for people outside the capitalist sector is quite low, and those who were not into fashion were often somewhat shabbily dressed.

And while the subways are fully bilingual, it was shocking how few people even in high-tourist-contact jobs had any English at all. The hucksters knew how to name prices and negotiate them, but even staff at airlines and hotels often had no English. I don’t go around the world expecting English to always be available. I was not shocked that our innkeeper in remote Goreme, Turkey or a store manager in a small town in the mountains of the Czech Republic spoke no English—but I do expect that the cabin crew on a flight from Shanghai to New York will have basic conversational English. This was apparently unrealistic. Over and over again, we encountered people who simply did not have the language to answer even very simple questions. However, even ordinary folks in non-tourist neighborhoods were skilled at communicating despite the language barrier. Talking at us nonstop and gesticulating, they usually got their point across. And those few we encountered who do speak English had excellent fluency; we didn’t encounter any half-baked attempts of people with just enough English to confuse.

Although China recognizes more than 40 ethnic groups, Han Chinese make up 92 percent of the country. Considering that some areas, like Tibet or the Muslim Uigur area bordering Central Asia, are majority non-Han, that means the cities I visited are almost monoethnic. As white westerners, we were constantly gawked at and asked to pose for selfies, especially by Chinese tourists from far-away regions. A young blonde in our group got it far more often than the rest of us.

Shel Horowitz’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, shows how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—using the power of the profit motive.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Business-general, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Photo of debris after Hurricane Katrina
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook

It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.

And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”

(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)

The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.

So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.

Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.

While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.

Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”

Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:

  • “Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
  • Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
  • “Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
  • “Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
  • Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves

Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”

But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.

And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months,  could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.

Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:

We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.

Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,

“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Greenwashing, localism/locavore, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,
Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fish. Photo by Shel Horowitz

Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fish. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fishing. Photo by Shel Horowitz
As a vegetarian for the past 42 years, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about fish. But I went to a talk, “Food Grabs vs. Climate Justice: How capitalists and climate deniers are locking up access to land and sea, and how Food Sovereignty movements are creating real climate solutions,” part of the Center for Popular Economics’ annual summer institute in Western Massachusetts.

Moderated by Sara Mersha (Grassroots International), panelists included Michele Mesmain (Slow Food International), Betsy Garrold (Food for Maine’s Future), and Seth Macinko (Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island). Both Macinko and Mesmain focused on fish and fisheries.

Both experts agreed on the need to control overfishing–and both said there’s a better way than the current widely embraced privitization “solution”: taking the public resource of the sea held in common, and giving it, for free and in perpetuity, to large corporations who are already catching the most fish. These corporations then can lease fishing rights back to the local fisherfolks, who used to be able to fish them for free–or simply force them out of business.

Macinko said you can manage a resource to prevent overfishing without savaging the historic commons rights, and noted the unholy alliance of environmental groups (including Environmental Defense Fund), academics, corporate-oriented major foundations such as Pew, government and trans-government authorities including the World Bank, the Big Fishing lobby, and, lo and behold, the Koch Brothers’ foundation pushing for this rights grab. Then Mesmain showed three models of successful fisheries management without privitization: a 1000-year-old guild governing France’s Mediterranean coast, a much more recent initiative in the Basque region of Spain–both involving open-sea fisheries, and one through the Okanagan Nations Alliance (8 nations/tribes in Washington State and British Columbia) covering inland river salmon fisheries.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, People Helping People Tagged with , , , , ,

Guest Post By Yosef Rabinowitz, Managing Director, TBRC Cost Recovery

Yosef Rabinowitz, founder of TBRC Cost Recovery
Yosef Rabinowitz, founder of TBRC Cost Recovery

Back in 2003, I signed up a small business for telephone and internet service through one of the carriers that we represent at TBRC. After a few years of the client being on the service, I received a call out of the blue from a telephone bill auditor whom the client had hired to examine their monthly bill to see if there was any money to recover for past billing errors or if there was any way to save money going forward. The client wanted me to assist the auditor in his search.

In that instant, given that I had what I thought was an excellent relationship with my client, I felt blindsided and quite upset by the fact that he didn’t call me first (especially since we also do phone bill audits). My reaction internally was “Well that’s gratitude for you! After all the lengths we’ve gone each year in order to make sure that they’re getting great service at a great price? No WAY am I going to help them out with this audit.”

After about 30 seconds of (silent) childish brooding, though, my ego gave way to reason, and I did the right thing by guiding the auditor through the various charges on the client’s bill (he had never seen a bill from this particular carrier before).

That evening, as I went to bed, I had a bit of crisis of conscience. Even though I did assist the auditor, how could I have even THOUGHT to not help him, even if he’s a competitor and encroaching on my “turf”, so to speak (or so I felt in the moment when he called)? That’s not ME! That’s not who I am! I wrestled with this issue for several days (mostly in a state of quiet shame) before a friend pointed out a very basic concept of life:

We’re all human, and in the eyes of the law and common decency (and God, for those who believe), we humans are ultimately judged by our actions, not by our thoughts. So while I may have been upset at myself for even considering doing the wrong thing, I ultimately did what was right for my client (and my conscience) in the face of initially strong feelings to the contrary. I saw his point and felt a lot better after that.

Fans of the original Star Trek® series will recall the episode where Capt. Kirk comes through the transporter and is split into two beings…his good side and his evil side. The “evil” Kirk wreaked havoc on the ship with his impulsive behavior. However, the other Capt. Kirk, with only his good side and no access to his ego/evil side, couldn’t make any decisions. He NEEDED the “evil” side for that. And so do we. The bottom line is that life is going to throw “situations” at us from time to time. It’s OK (even natural) for ego to kick in at the beginning and make us WANT to lash out and do the wrong thing (it’s there to alert us that a need of ours isn’t being properly met), as long as we eventually keep ego in check so that we can move in the right direction.

Epilogue: Helping the auditor (rather than impeding his audit) worked out well in the end. Afterwards, he introduced me to the other 40+ telecom auditors in his company and a number of them have since referred clients to us for carrier services.

Yosef Rabinowitz is the Founder and Managing Director of TBRC Cost Recovery, LLC, a New York City-based consulting firm that examines business and nonprofit telecommunications bills for past billing errors and future savings opportunities. This article originally appeared in the June 2015 issue Off The Hook, TBRC’s monthly newsletter.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, People Helping People, Politics, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,
Happy mother and baby
Happy mother and baby—photo by Cynthia Turek

The 2015 edition of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s World Happiness Report is out. It lists the five happiest countries.

Drumroll, please…

 

  1. Switzerland
  2. Iceland
  3. Denmark
  4. Norway
  5. Canada

Isn’t that interesting? Every one of the five is a social democracy with a strong safety net. The four European countries are also known for their leadership in reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint; in fact, Iceland’s stationery power needs are met almost entirely through (renewable, clean) geothermal and hydro. These are countries that take care of their own. Their citizens correctly assume that medical care, education, and so forth are their right, and that government will do what it can to assist in preserving the earth as human habitat. The social services are funded by higher taxes than we pay in the US, but they get something for their money. And none of them are highly militarized or known for excessive violence. (Yes the Swiss do have universal male military service— but they don’t fight wars, and in my two trips to Switzerland, I’ve hardly even seen a soldier.)

Despite the cold climates where all five are located, these are happy people.

Now, if only we could get politicians in the US to pay attention.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Peace and War, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On a LinkedIn discussion board, someone asked, “So, why has bettering the world become a mantra for a new generation of entrepreneurs?”

This sparked a very lively discussion, mixing the cynics and the optimists.

You can view this discussion here (you might have to join the group first).

My first comment was quick and straightforward, discussing my new work at Business For a Better World:

I’m 57 years old, been in business since 1981, and my business has *always* been about fostering a better world. This year, I took it further, beginning a campaign to show business how solving hunger, poverty, war, climate catastrophe, etc. is not only the right thing to do, but can be highly profitable (and we actually already have a lot of the technology to make it possible).

But as others responded, I felt a need to go deeper, and I want to share my responses to two of them with you:

Tim asked, “…If these entrepreneurs are so hot on giving to humanity, why not put their technologies in the public domain? There’s a topic for debate: Which is the better outcome, the Gates Foundation or Wikipedia?…”

Tim  – great question! The Gates example has always interested me, in that it follows the pattern of 100-150 years ago, when predatory ubercapitalists like Carnegie and Rockefeller began to seek out a higher purpose later in life and became uberphilanthropists–yes, some of Microsoft’s practices were quite predatory under Gates’ leadership. I can’t think of an equally prominent example in the years between the “Robber Barons” and Gates. (I also think Melinda may have had a lot to do with Gates finding HIS higher purpose–but he has fully embraced it and discovered it provides meaning in his life.) Most towns in my area of New England are still using little public libraries built with Carnegie money.

Warren Buffett is another very interesting example, but his choices and motivations, I suspect, were very different. Buffett never seemed to care personally about accumulating wealth to “better” his own life. He still lives in the simple ranch house he bought in the 1950s. And as far as I know, Berkshire Hathaway under his leadership was not a predatory company. It didn’t shock me when he gave away most of is fortune–to the Gates Foundation (which kind of brings this discussion full-circle).

But I propose that it is possible to be socially conscious from the get-go AND do quite well financially, and that getting wealthy is not a sin. Prominent examples include ice cream superstars Ben Cohen and Jerry Silverman, Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, and many others. I suspect the Chicken Soup guys (Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen) are in this category; they do not shy away from the trappings of wealth–but they also find many ways to use their wealth to better the world. Jack I know for sure started from very humble beginnings; I have no clue about Mark’s early years, nor can I quickly find anything in public sources.

Jennifer commented, “…The world is in crisis – how do we milk it for all it has now people are focusing on the bad guys that have put the world in crisis. ‘We make the world seem like we care’ – new market. But hang on – ‘we kind of do care – well some of us anyway’ – but hang on ‘the global village concept doesn’t seem to be working’ – Ok; so now what?

Let’s make the world betterment program a thing for entrepreneurs – get rich while you increase people hopes even though those hopes are false…”

Jennifer  – Yours is one of several cynical posts in this discussion, but yours is ambivalent while the others are pretty much set in stone. So I choose to engage with you. I think we need to harness the cynicism and skepticism about business’ ulterior motives to create the action we want, despite our suspicion of their motives. For me, seeking personal wealth has never been as important as making the world better. My millionaire colleagues would laugh at my income. Let them laugh! As long as I can motivate them to make a difference.

I am personally very cynical about the ability to solve our biggest problems–hunger and poverty, war and violence, catastrophic climate change–based on the ways we’ve always done it. Too often, we’ve tried to motivate on guilt, fear, and shame–and it doesn’t work.

So I’m taking a leaf from the libertarians and ubercapitalists and attempting to motivate based on self-interest. If your goal is personal material wealth and I can show you how to realize that goal by seizing the opportunity to make money, and the work that governments and NGOs have failed to do gets done, then fine, take your fortune and go live in your big house. Think about a super-profit-driven company like Walmart: not exactly a tree-hugger hangout. But Walmart realized years ago that there was a lot of money to be made selling organic foods, low-watt lightbulbs and other green products–and a lot of money to be saved implementing green into its own operations, deeply. I have many issues with Walmart in other areas, but on the environment, I give them BIG props. Working from the profit motive, they have done more to spread green consciousness *and* green *practices* through society than I have in a lifetime of speaking and writing and consulting.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, language, media-general, Politics, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

A libertarian participant on a LinkedIn discussion group posted,

how does business do anything to make you miserable ??

dont like their products then dont buy them

without biz making those things you would [be] naked growing your own vegetables in the wilderness

My response:

William: I know you espouse libertarianism but I don’t think of you as naive. I was once a member of the Libertarian Party, and still see a great deal of merit in libertarian approach to foreign policy as well as civil liberties; I would love to see Ron Paul as US Secretary of Defense, because if HE were willing to go to war, the situation must be dire indeed. But when you write,

You come across as VERY naive. Or are you pulling our collective (yes, a loaded word in libertarian circles) chain?

Consider…there are many corporations that do great things, create reasonably enjoyable workplaces, and work to heal the planet. BUT, worldwide, there are others that 1) create utter misery for their employees (think about the sweatshop workers in the factory that burned in Bangladesh a year or two ago); 2) pollute and destroy the neighborhoods they’re located in, causing severe adverse health effects for their neighbors and others; 3) rape the earth for their raw materials and then dump the toxic leftovers back on the poor, beleaguered planet, taking no responsibility for their actions.

You will say to #1 that no one forces people to work in slave conditions; they could just go off and start their own business if they don’t want to work for “The Man.” I did that, and from your ID line, it looks like you did, too. But that’s disingenuous. Not everybody can think through that alternative, not everybody has access to even a sliver of capital. If you’re making barely enough to keep your family from starving and from being thrown out of your one-room shack, even a few bucks will be too much.

I started my own business with $200. I was pretty poor at the time, but I did have the $200 (and even a bit more) in the bank. And I had to survive during the very lean start-up phase. At the time (1981), I knew almost nothing about marketing and was in a community that had little use for the service I was offering. I made $300 the first 6 months—before we moved to a more supportive community—and lived on a mix of rapidly depleting savings, odd-job income, and what my wife-to-be brought in from her meager job at a restaurant. But I had that luxury! I had a couple of thousand in the bank that I could draw from. Many people in developing countries, or even in our own inner cities and poor rural areas, do not. If they have no job and they start a business that isn’t immediately viable, how do they eat?

I would have more respect for the libertarian position if it accepted responsibility for #s 2 and 3. But libertarians discredit themselves with me when they claim that it’s their right to plunder the earth because they got there first, and that it’s perfectly OK to extract the resources, pollute and dump wastes just because of that arbitrary fact.I don’t object to profit; I make a chunk of my living writing and speaking about how to be a better capitalist, after all. But I have no respect for businesses that claim they have every right to privatize their profit while externalizing—dare I say socializing—the harm. A true libertarian would see overharvesting and pollution/dumping as theft from others, forcing them to incur economic costs to clean up someone else’s mess. But somehow, the libertarians I know sound a theme more like “we got here first, too bad for the rest of you, and the mess is not our problem.”

Libertarians often cite economist Milton Friedman on the social responsibility of business to maximize profits. However, even Friedman saw a need to limit business. I went back to the source: his New York Times Magazine essay of September 13, 1970. And to my amazement, I found that Friedman added some major conditions to his remarks. Here’s what he actually said:

In a free-enterprise, private-property sys­tem, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct re­sponsibility to his employers. That responsi­bility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while con­forming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. (emphasis added)

At the very end of the essay, he quotes from his own textbook and repeats the qualifier, phrased a bit differently:

“there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use [its] resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” (emphasis added once more)

To put it another way, in this essay, Friedman was totally willing to concede that self-rule doesn’t always work in the business world. Government is needed to keep business from exercising its self-interest at the expense of others’ self-interest and the wide society’s interest. Whether it’s a retailer avoiding the cost of health insurance by paying its workers so little that they qualify for government assistance or a manufacturer spewing poisons into the air and water and land, expecting that the government—in other words, the taxpayers: we the people—to clean it up,  I would definitely count as “deception or fraud”: the externalizing of responsibility for the mess.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Green Marketing, Marketing Trends/News, Socially Responsible Investing Tagged with , ,

A new report confirms (yet again) what I’ve been saying for years: consumers flock to companies that actively support companies with a clear environmental agenda. A survey of 31,000 consumers around the world reported:

• 21 percent of American consumers often or always bought a brand they perceived as more responsible over another in the past year.
• Factoring in respondents from other countries, that figure rises to 34 percent—that’s more than one in three
• 67 percent would like to make purchasing decisions based on social responsibility in the future.

And it’s not just consumers; it’s employees, too. Another study notes that an astonishing 71 percent of Americans would choose employment by “a company whose CEO is actively involved in corporate responsibility and/or environmental issues.”

Thanks to envirojournalist Debra Atlas for pointing me toward both these studies.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

Maybe my family’s organic garden (and my neighborhood) is a microcosm of the changes in the world ;-). We normally stop getting zucchini by the end of July. Last year, it went halfway through August. And this year, the one surviving plant finally died today, and I harvested the last two very tiny zukes on October 7. The season was approximately five weeks longer than usual,even though hey like hot weather and we pretty much didn’t have any.

Tomatoes, on the other hand, are normally extremely prolific until the first killing frost, usually very late in October. This year, the season peaked in early August, and even at its peak, we had far fewer than usual. I did manage to put a few pints of sauce in the freezer, and a few jars of dried tomatoes in the pantry, but the abundance that normally covers our entire counter never materialized—and the tomatoes had pretty much gone away by September 1, producing only one or two not-so-big tomatoes (many of them bloghted) and a handful of cherry tomatoes every few days since then. Normally, our six plants produce two or three dozen every day this time of year.

Our berry bushes were odd this year, too. The one blueberry plant gave one to two pints a day for about ten days, but one of our raspberry plants produced next to nothing, and the other a fairly paltry amount. On the very best day,I got half a pint. Ditto our blackberry bush. Normally,I’m able to put several pints by. This year, I managed to gather together and freeze a single half-pint of mixed blackberries and raspberries in July; we ate the rest as it came in, and it wasn’t much. But the bigger raspberry plant actually produced about eight very tasty fruits in September, a time when we’ve never gotten berries from it before.

Our celery was severely stunted, only about six inches high and mostly leaves, on very thin stalks. In the past, we’ve had celery that looked as good as supermarket varieties. We grew potatoes for the first time, and they came out great.

Nobody cultivates them, but I like to go gather Russian olives this time of year. I went to one of the two groves I know and found a total of one berry from several dozen plants. Fortunately, I know another grove, which was its usual prolific self.

Farmer neighbors who grow winter squash did not get a crop this year. Neither did several of the local apple farmers.

In short, not-normal is the new normal in the garden. Do you think, just maybe, global climate change has something to do with it?

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Democracy, Environment, language, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

As Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union speech last night, I found myself agreeing with upwards of 95 percent of it—something that NEVER happened under his predecessor. And it’s good to be reminded in very concrete terms of how much progress has been made on the economy, and in drawing down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (one of the few bits of foreign policy that made it into the very domestically focused speech).

Of course, some of why I agreed with such a large percentage was because of what he chose to omit: government spying, drone attacking civilians, support for highly dubious massive energy projects, and other things that I find strongly objectionable. He did mention the disgrace that Guantanamo is still open.

And he left out other things that should have been in there. I’m still waiting for him to call for a Marshall Plan-style conversion to clean, renewable energy. I’ve been waiting for that for years. He talked briefly about energy independence and the success in switching much more to US-based power sources—but failed to put it in context of solving environmental problems as we change our energy sources.

But the real question is: How will he get it done? Despite his calls to the Republicans’ higher selves, and his pointing out repeatedly that he could have moved a lot farther if he’d gotten some cross-party cooperation, implementation is the problem. He needs to motivate his base to be heard in the halls of power, to be convincing their Senators and Representatives that it’s in their own self-interest to end the gridlock.

With less than three years left in his presidency, he still has time to claim a place in history as one of the great presidents. But he’d better get started with that.

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