In this 2009 portrait of the Supreme Court, Scalia is third from the right. Public domain photo found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supreme_Court_US_2009.jpg
There was one rather different situation: Abe Fortas, already on the Court and nominated by Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to become Chief Justice. Ethics considerations were the main reason this nomination went nowhere, though the argument about the change of administration was raised.
Senator McConnell and your cronies: Though you have been utterly disrespectful to the Administration and have ignored the strong mandate for change that elected Obama twice, we have been patient. Our patience is at an end. If you do not let the nomination go forward, we will not just flood you with calls and letters. We will picket you again and again. We will engage in appropriate nonviolent action. And we will do our best to bring about a Democratic supermajority in both houses of Congress.
I deeply resent Hillary Clinton’s message that we can’t go for what we really want. Barack Obama beat her in ’08 because his message was “hope” and “yes we can.” He made some of that a reality in spite of tremendous resistance–more than I’ve ever seen for ANY president’s policies. But he would have gotten much more accomplished if he’d continued organizing: bringing the same coalition that led him to victory into supporting his agenda and pressuring that reluctant Congress. As a former community organizer, he should have known this.
Bill Clinton’s presidency shows the dangers of the HRC approach. By dismissing any effort at real change right from the start, he allowed himself, over and over again, to back away from meaningful change and turn what should have been the post-negotiation fallback position into the starting gate, and then allow that to be whittled down further until the change was so small that Grover Norquist actually could drown it in a bathtub.
Obama made the same mistake. “Single payer isn’t on the table but we have a public option” turned into. “no public option.” And the ACA as finally passed was a giveaway to insurance companies. Yes, it made people’s live’s better and I’m glad it passed. But Obama squandered the potential for much deeper reform.
Isn’t it so much better to aim for what you really want and get only three-quarters of the way than to aim for what you think is “achievable”—and still get only three-quarters of the way? It’s a very rare football play that gets a touchdown from the kick-off point. Much more commonly, the team advances the ball, play by play, and starts again from the end point of the last play. Then they get the touchdown.
It took 100 years to eliminate slavery in the US. It took another 100 to pass meaningful civil rights legislation, and it may be another 100 before the cancer of racism is nothing but a memory. It has already taken about 80 years to get even the wimpy ACA; that doesn’t mean we say we don’t need to make more progress. And it certainly doesn’t mean you have to tear down the ACA before you have something better in place.
Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”
Muhammad Ali put it this way:
Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
And I personally have taken on the “impossible” goal of showing the business community how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—at a profit. Taking my cue from Ali, when I speak on this, my talk is called “Impossible is a Dare!” I’ve also written a book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, that demonstrates how these future victories are actually quite possible. I’ve done “impossible” things before. Why restrict ourselves by thinking small?
I have other issues with Hillary besides her willingness to settle for less even before the negotiations start. HRC’s ties to Wall Street make me nervous. Her hawkish rhetoric, even more so. And her Middle East policy is just plain shameful. As an American Jew, I stand up and say “Israel right or wrong” is as misguided as “America right or wrong” was in the Vietnam era—and I further say that we progressives knew that going into Iraq as we did was a terrible mistake. I was out there in the streets with millions of other Americans, saying “don’t do this, it will be a disaster.” There is zero justification for her vote to support the worst foreign policy disaster in history.
I will proudly—excitedly—vote for Bernie in the primary. Nonetheless, if Hillary is the nominee—and she probably will, due in part to Party rules that allocate delegates to high-status mainstream Democrats over and above those allocated in elections—I would support her unequivocally over any of the Republicans running. I think she has a good heart, I’d much rather see her in charge of picking the next members of the Supreme Court than any of that bunch, and I would see her election—as I saw Obama’s—as getting us closer on the path from the kick-off to the goal.
Top of a Bernie Sanders fundraising offer involving a very special custom pint of ice creamFarther down the page, showing the whole container
If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you already know I’m supporting Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. And if you read this blog regularly, you know I’m both a long-time student of marketing and a long-time advocate of marketing with honesty and integrity.
In light of this, I received a mailing from one of the groups allied with the Sanders campaign, and immediately noticed some things I wanted to share.
The product is totally in keeping with Bernie’s message, talking about the “1%” chocolate layer on top of the ice cream
Most marketers, when faced with the opportunity to offer a single unique item, set a stratospheric price—but even with a total production run of just fifty, and only one being given to this organization, the price is only $50 (once again reinforcing the brand messaging)
However, it’s something of a lottery; only one person gets the prize, but anyone who contributes $50 or more by the deadline gets to play
There are also a number of less exclusive rewards—democratizing the lottery somewhat.
Disclaimer and disclosures: I am not involved in any way with organizing this promotion and don’t benefit financially. I have given money to the Sanders campaign and I’ve probably also given money to Progressive Democrats of America, the sponsoring organization.
2016 is going to be a GREAT year for the green world, and the green business world in particular. I thought so even before two developments this past week that make me even more optimistic:
Add in the widely spreading understanding in the business world that going green the right way slashes costs, boosts revenues, and generates profit, and it’s not surprising that 2016 will be a year of great progress. (If you don’t yet see the connection, order a copy of my new book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. It’s got hundreds of examples ranging from Fortune 100 to solopreneurs.)
Expect to see lots more high-level research, looking for holistic steps that create big jumps in energy efficiency and big reductions in waste. Already, we’ve made amazing technological leaps within just the past couple of years. I’ll name two among hundreds:
Approaches like biomimicry—modeling how nature solves complex problems—will let sustainability ripple through the whole culture, relatively rapidly.
Electrical storage (a major restraint on renewable energy growth) has made huge strides, including the vaunted Tesla battery systems.
All is not sunshine and roses, of course. The Act of Congress that extended the clean-energy tax credits also opened up the door for some of the worst kind of carbon-intensive development: exporting the dirtiest types of fossil fuel energy. Public pressure—activism in the streets, in the boardrooms, and in the halls of legislative power—must hound every proposal to put in fracking, use or transport tar-sands oil, build unnecessary pipelines, etc.
One key meme has to be “honor the commitments we made at COP21.”
If the business community, especially, makes it clear that it expects the US to do its part in meeting the targets, and that exporting fossil fuels across oceans will work against this, that open door may stay largely unused. But it will take vigilance.
One not-so obvious trend
The above predictions are relatively mainstream in the green world, even if they appear startling to those outside of it. Let me conclude with a much more “out-there” proposition:
Businesses will go beyond merely going green. Sustainability will be seen as a first step. More and more companies will be going beyond sustainability to create a world where hunger and poverty turn into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
Why? Because they will see enormous profit opportunities, and because it feels so much better to oneself, employees, neighbors, suppliers and other stakeholders to see making the world better as a key success metric. How? I wrote a whole book to answer that question.
A similar international meeting (in Bonn, Germany)
After the failure at Copenhagen a few years back, I didn’t have big hopes for this year’s event. Yet, I’m beginning to think the big Paris climate change conference known as #COP21 may actually accomplish some real change.
Oddly enough, my optimism is rooted in something I would have seen a few years ago as a fatal flaw: that the results will be based in voluntary, not mandatory, compliance.
Why? Because:
We can’t GET mandatory compliance. In the US, that would require a yes vote in each house of Congress, or even worse, the 2/3 Senate support required to adopt a treaty. But even as far back as Kyoto, US electoral politics had become a toxic swamp of attack-dog partisanship. No climate change bill with teeth is going to pass Congress any time soon. And without US (or China’s) participation, any agreement would be useless.
The US and China have already agreed to take climate seriously, and have negotiated their own agreement. Weaker than I’d like, but a heck of a good start, and one that seems to have helped apply the brakes on China’s mad rush to coal (the worst scenario for averting climate disaster).
New technology makes it easier to do more with less, use. our resources far more effectively, and solve engineering problems with biological thinking (for example, letting bridge engineers study spiderwebs). We understand now, for instance, just how much energy and carbon we can save by going for deep conservation.
Early discussions about whether the world should agree on a 1.5 degree Celsius vs. 2 degree C cap in global temperatures compared to what existed before the Industrial Revolution means we’ve finally gotten past the question that’s been holding us back for so long: why do we need to contain rising temperatures in the first place? For the first time, the world is pretty much in agreement that it has to be done. Not just scientists, this time, but governments, too. Climate deniers (other than in the US Republican Party leadership, apparently) are now as marginalized as environmental activists were 20 or 30 years ago.
I could keep going, but you get the message—we can do this!
Visiting Minneapolis for the holidays, we happened to walk by the American Indian Movement Interpretive Center and its Thunder Before the Storm Gallery, located in the Ancient Traders Market, 1113 E. Franklin Avenue (at South 15th Avenue).
As a child in the 1960s and 1970s, I learned about the powerful activism of the American Indian Movement; they were in the newspapers constantly with bold actions around native people’s rights in the US and elsewhere.
Their multipronged approach included:
Nonviolent direct action such as the occupation of
Alcatraz Island and the Trail of Broken Treaties March on Washington/occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices
Shows of force, including the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota
Creating alternative institutions such as schools, community media (including a radio station), and career training programs
Later, in 1980, I attended the Black Hills Gathering, as did many people involved with AIM, several of whom spoke from the stage. The Black Hills Gathering fused the causes of environmentalism/protecting land and water/the safe energy movement with those of indigenous rights around the world, and particularly the native peoples of North America.
Along with the Seabrook, NH nuclear power plant site occupation of 1977, the Black Hills Gathering was a turning point in my own activist journey. I’d already been involved in the safe energy movement for several years, starting well before Seabrook, and before that was a high school and college activist on ending the Vietnam War, abolishing nuclear weapons, LBG rights, and students’ rights.
The Black Hills Gathering was my first deep exposure to the specifics of the indigenous people’s movements. Speaker after speaker drew connections among seemingly disparate struggles like the Dine (Navajo) people’s resistance to uranium mining in the Southwest, the struggle to replace a collaborationist tribal government on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, and the battles of native peoples around the country and around the world to block the corporatization and expropriation of land, water, and other resources.
I trace my advocacy on water issues, and my promotion of the idea that urban rooftops could be food and energy sources, to this 3-day outdoor conference and festival. Those are both areas that I still talk about 35 years later; they’re even discussed in my newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
Walking into the AIM Interpretive Center, seeing the photos on the walls, brought back all those memories.
The gallery doesn’t get a lot of visitors, but it is open to the pubic (and it’s part of a neighborhood that’s a hotspot of American Indian culture). We were lucky enough in our visit to meet Eric Byrd, AIM’s archivist and curator, who filled us in on plans for future exhibits and on the photo-history publishing program the organization is working on.
If you’re in the Twin Cities, pop on in. If you’re not, visit the website.
Screenshot of KPMG’s internal “higher purpose” video
This Harvard Business Review article and accompanying video are too good not to share. The video is less than two minutes and well-worth watching. Watch it with your marketer hat on. Pay attention both to the direct message and to the outcomes.
KPMG is positioning itself as an agent of social change, a social entrepreneurship giant involved in everything from keeping the Nazis at bay during World War II to certifying the election results that allowed Nelson Mandela to become the first president of a free South Africa.
I’m not passing judgment on the accuracy of the claim that the wonderful, world-changing projects highlighted in the video represent KPMG’s (and predecessor Peat Marwick’s) overall corporate culture over many decades. I haven’t done the due diligence on that, and frankly, I’m pretty skeptical of the claim. Big Four accounting firms don’t tend to be known as cauldrons of world-changing social entrepreneurship.
But clearly, the company decided to spotlight its role as a changemaker and to foster an employee culture of empowered action—and that’s terrific. Not at all surprised to see the excellent results. Every manager should look at the amazing engagement this campaign created, with over 42,000 stories submitted by employees and 76 percent agreement that their jobs had deeper meaning.
Be sure to note the graph at the bottom, contrasting several employee satisfaction metrics under managers who emphasized or didn’t emphasize a higher purpose.
If one of the largest accounting firms in the world can take this on, your probably much simpler business can do it too. Every person who supervises others should take that data to heart and make sharing their own organization’s higher purpose a consistent part of their own employee motivation (if you get stuck on this, contact me; I can help).
Once again, yesterday, I came across the tired old canard that the only way to fight bad things and bad people is to put weapons in the hands of good people. We hear it after every mass shooting.
And not only is it not true, it’s a very destructive thought pattern. Too often, when good people get guns, they turn into not-so-good people. Lord Acton’s famous dictum, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely” seems to hold very true. Dictators were often first hailed as liberators; as one of hundreds of examples, think about Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
Gandhian techniques were actually very effective against the Nazis. The scholar Gene Sharp documented this extensively in The Politics of Nonviolent Action trilogy. And frankly, the Brits in India were no saints. They were brutal and violent, though lacking the organized killing machine (gas chambers, etc.) the Nazis built. You may be familiar with the King of Denmark very publicly wearing the yellow star. That’s just one example of hundreds. Many of these incidents had better outcomes than a lot of gun-based responses. And even when they didn’t, the reprisals were directed against those who acted, and not—as so often happened when partisans killed Nazis—the entire community.
The segregated American South was also quite brutal and violent, as shown very effectively in the recent movie, “Selma.” Martin Luther King considered Gandhi a mentor. Gandhi in turn learned from (and actually corresponded with) Tolstoy. Mandela, I’m sure, studied both Gandhi and King, and in turn influenced the Arab Spring.
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
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!
What does that mean? Hundreds of thousands of vehicles “partying like it’s 1959,” belching unmitigated particulates into the air that you and I breathe. There were no emissions requirements at all in 1959, in case you were wondering.
This is outrageous! In addition to the recall and the fines, I think this is grounds for a widespread boycott. Being not just lied to but poisoned by a major company that pretends to care about the environment is not acceptable behavior. We as consumers need to stand up and say, ‘ENOUGH!”
And we consumers have power. There’s a long and honorable history of boycotts sparking change in corporate behavior. Just ask Nestlé.
The above link is to the New York Times article, but this act of deeply purposeful criminal fraud is all over the news media. This link goes to a Google search for “volkswagen defeat device emissions.” As of 6:09 p.m. Eastern on Friday, September 18, Page One results include stories in NPR, the Washington Post, and USA Today in addition to the Times.
