Category: Democracy

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!

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, localism/locavore, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , ,

In his daily blog, Seth Godin wrote today,

The last hundred years have also seen a similar ratchet (amplified, I’d argue, by the technology of media and of the economy) in civil rights. It’s unlikely (with the exception of despotic edicts) that women will ever lose the vote, that discrimination on race will return to apartheid-like levels, that marriage will return to being an exclusionary practice… once a social justice is embraced by a culture, it’s rarely abandoned.

Unfortunately, those “despotic edicts” are all-too-common. While the general trend is not to reverse progress, there are far too many exceptions:

And, sadly, dozens more examples from around the world.

If you think “it can’t happen here,” do some research on Berlin in the 1920s–or read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). Or look at the scary anti-Arab and anti-Muslim acts of violence that started showing up regularly in the US starting in the aftermath of 9/11/01 and are still escalating.

Although this is a pessimistic post, I am ultimately an optimist. I think Godin is basically right–but there are many, many exceptions. Let’s work together for a world in which those exceptions are no longer tolerated–we can do this!

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics: General, General Commentary, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Freedom to exercise one’s own religion is NOT the same as freedom to stuff that religion down others’ throats. This is what the right-wing Christians have not understood about the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. No one is forcing them to marry each other–and they do not have the right to keep others from marrying the ones they love, just because their religion doesn’t agree.

When my family was kosher, I went to private Jewish schools (yeshivas). It may have been that part of my parents’ reasons was to keep me away from the “corrupting” influence of non-kosher food.

This post is inspired by a report of a Canadian mayor telling Muslim parents the schools would not stop serving pork–a report that was a hoax (which took about seven seconds to determine). But just because the report was false (and probably motivated by someone seeking to stir up religious divisions) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about the underlying issue: when does one person’s freedom stop and another’s start?

I am a vegetarian and I would never say to a school system, “don’t serve meat because it is offensive to me.” On the contrary, it is offensive to me when someone tells me I can’t eat the food I want because that food offends them, and I wouldn’t presume to make those choices for others. Sure, I wish more people would turn vegetarian, and I can list a dozen reasons why vegetarianism is good for the planet and good for our bodies.

I will say (and have said), “please don’t bring meat into a potluck at my vegetarian house.” A parent offended that foods he/she doesn’t eat are served in the cafeteria has other choices. There are schools where no pork is served–in fact, I know for certain that pork is not served at any Orthodox yeshiva or Islamic or Seventh Day Adventist school. It would be offensive if the Muslim kids and Orthodox Jewish kids and vegetarian kids attending public school were *forced* to eat pork. But it should not be offensive to sit in a cafeteria where others are eating it.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

I went to my first same-sex commitment ceremonies around 1979 and 1980, never dreaming that the day would come when such unions would be recognized in every state of the United States of America.

Thank you, Justice Kennedy for your beautiful opinion, and the other four Justices who added their names. And thank you, President Obama, for being consistent in your support since the day you announced that your thinking had evolved on this issue.

And thanks to the activists who brought the country forward, including those who were brave enough to do this long before it was legal.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Guest post by Paul Loeb

Remember the World Trade Organization, which slipped into the shadows after massive Seattle protests in 1999? The same day last week that Congress initially blocked the possibility of fast track approval for the TPP trade agreement, the House voted to overturn rules requiring country-of-origin labeling for meat. Those supporting the vote said they were responding to a World Trade Organization ruling, judging US country-of-origin labeling unfair competition with meat coming from foreign countries like Canada and Mexico, and therefore a violation. They said they had no choice for fear of triggering sanctions or lawsuits from countries exporting meat across our borders.

I don’t know about you, but I like knowing whether my meat comes from Iowa or Uzbekistan, Montana or Mexico, Kentucky or Kenya. So do 93% of Americans, according to a Consumer’s Union survey. People like supporting US farmers, cutting down distance travelled, knowing there will be at least minimal inspection standards, even if the delights of e coli occasionally slip through. It seems commonsensical that we’d want at least the chance to become informed consumers, whether with the origins of our meat, GMO-derived crops, or the amount of sugar and calories in our baked goods.

Maybe the House members are wrong in insisting that the international tribunals that adjudicate trade disputes would deem this a violation. But if this particular House bill passes the Senate and gets signed by Obama, even the mere possibility of a lawsuit will have struck down a wholly reasonable law that protects our health and supports our local economies. And if TPP passes the Senate, other attempts to regulate commerce for the common good will be potentially gutted as well, from attempts at financial regulation to limits on the prices charged for drugs, to environmental rules and seemingly innocuous actions like requiring accurate labeling. Some of this could occur through legal action, and some through the mere fear that such action could occur.

Now maybe TPP won’t contain rules on meat. Maybe it will simply limit other ways we might try to exert our sovereignty over critical choices that affect us. But we do know that this agreement—involving countries constituting 40% of the global economy—through what’s called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement process, will establish unaccountable tribunals with the power to let corporations collect damages for loss of profits. We don’t know the precise reach of the agreement because ordinary citizens haven’t seen it. Even Congressional opponents were prohibited from taking notes when they looked at it, and “cleared advisors” who’ve seen it have been legally prohibited from talking specifics. Yet we’re told it represents an inevitable future, that the benefits will trickle down to ordinary citizens, and that those who ask reasonable questions about its profound implications are merely obstructionist whiners.

So do we demand full transparency before moving ahead? Or do we trust that the corporations that negotiated these rules have our interests at heart, and would never, in the slightest, harm our democracy? Whether or not the country-of-origin labeling on meat survives or is ended by the House bill and WTO ruling, TPP plays for far larger stakes, the ground rules that affect our very potential to take common action. The meat bill is one more warning that there are some rules and agreements where we should be careful to eagerly swallow.

Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Much as I would love to see a Bernie Sanders presidency, I don’t think he should run. Why? This comment I wrote in response to a Facebook “fantasy” (her word) of a Sanders-Elizabeth Warren ticket explains succinctly:

Fantasies? Absolutely. Elections? Not so much–and I say this as someone who has voted for Nader and Kucinich and who feels Bernie Sanders represents me as well as Vermonters. We need them both in the Senate where they can actually work for change, and not marginalized as 3% presidential candidates who can be safely ignored or ridiculed. Oh, and Elizabeth Warren (who IS my Senator) needs to get off the Israel-right-or-wrong train.

Now, if we had instant runoff, parliamentary democracy instead of winner-take-all and some other much-needed reforms, it would be different. But right now, the system is totally stacked in favor of forcing us to vote for the least horrible mainstream candidate instead of the most wonderful fringe people. 20 years ago, I was excited at the idea that the day would come when I could vote for Hillary–but she was a different person then.

Among the other reforms we need is in campaign finance. It’s an absolute travesty that we allow our candidates to be bought and sold, and force them to spend so much time fundraising. We also need to look at the often-ridiculous way congressional district lines are drawn. The way we let candidates buy attack ads without proving their facts. And the way we allow TV to control the discourse in ways that restrict real discussion of real issues.

With those additional reforms, perhaps we’d get a viable party that actually stands for the people’s interest—or the planet’s. In Europe, which has a parliamentary system and a different way to fund elections, Green Party candidates often win seats and most countries have been governed by people-centered democratic governments. And, perhaps not by coincidence, things like health care and college education and maternity leave are considered fundamental rights. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with Tweedlebad and Tweedlehorrible.

Meanwhile, please, let’s keep Bernie and Elizabeth in the Senate.

That’s my opinion. Please put yours in the comments.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Environment, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

I saw “42” when it came out and liked it a lot.

It is hard to stay focused on changing the world when you look around and see not only the same battles all over again, but in many cases the same increasingly elderly activists joining those battles. For me, the wave of youth activism that started with Seattle in 1999 and crested with the Occupy movement–and will return when we least expect it—is very exciting, because it means there IS a critical mass for social change one and two generations younger than us.

I also avoid burnout by regularly thinking about all the areas where we HAVE made progress. And while police violence is an area that needs a LOT of work (since the 1960s, I haven’t understood why they reach for bullets instead of stun guns first), I think about what it was like for blacks in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the American South in my own lifetime…the way the environmental movement has gone from fringe to mainstream…the shattering of the idea common when I was a kid that the only appropriate careers for women were teaching and nursing and domestic work…the relatively new understanding that domestic violence and hate speech and school bullying are crimes we don’t have to tolerate…the string of fallen-dictator dominoes around the world, from throwing off the shackles of colonialism in Africa to the Arab Spring. (We may not always find the replacement governments an improvement, but the truth is, when the people say ENOUGH, governments topple and there is a brief space for something better. Once in a while, as in Mandela’s South Africa, that better thing actually emerges victorious.)

In other words, I look around and I see that within the brief span of my own lifetime (I turn 58 on Wednesday), we’ve made very real change on many fronts, even if it feels like we’re running in place or even backsliding.

These are what gives me hope and keeps me working for peace, justice, and the planet.

The above is my response to a friend posting her response to the movie, “42,” about Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball. She wrote,

Black Lives Mattered in that struggle against racism in baseball–perhaps the beginning of the civil rights movement…Sixty years later, same struggle. Oh, God help us win this time ’round. Does the arc of justice bend?

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

I got sucked into a debate on Facebook following a high school classmate’s posting a meme of some of Obama’s  economic achievements: Dow Jones increasing from 7949 to 17,830 (that’s more than 124 percent, if I’m figuring correctly); unemployment down from 7.8 to 5.8 percent; GDP from NEGATIVE 5.4 to POSITIVE 3.5 percent; and consumer confidence from 37.7 to 94.5 percent from the time Obama took office.

But as these kinds of discussions often do, it quickly turned toward non-economic politics. And good progressive that I am, I put in this comment:

Robin, you wrote, “OH I know Bush had his share of crap also but at least he proudly and openly loved this country.” I am sorry, but if loving your country means bringing it illegally into wars under utterly false pretenses, wrecking the economy, suppressing dissent (continued, to his shame, by Obama), instituting torture, dissipating international goodwill, etc., this is a “love” that needs serious social-work intervention. When an abuser says “I love you and I’ll never hit you again,” we’re skeptical. Bush was an abuser.

The person I quoted than asked me if I didn’t remember 9/11, and wasn’t Bush justified in going to war. She also asked me if I was “also a Jewish Democrat that thinks Obama is good for Israel or do you care”

I responded:

1. Of COURSE I am aware of the horrors of 9/11. I spent two weeks afterward trying to find out if my ex-housemate from Brooklyn days was OK; she was living two blocks from the WTC (she was uptown at the time, fortunately, and now lives in Colorado). And I’m one degree of separation from a couple of people who died that day. BUT Bush made war on Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with it (it’s well documented that Bin Laden and Saddam hated each other)–and, it turned out, didn’t have WMDs either. The terrorists were mostly Saudi. Afghanistan, along with Pakistan, actually did shelter the terrorists–but the appropriate response to a criminal conspiracy and criminal acts is not to destroy an entire country but to go in with a police action, capture the perps, and put them on trial. You talk about “an arrogant and narcisitic man who has tunnel vision and refuses to listen to the American people.” That would describe several US presidents, including both Obama and Bush, as well as Nixon, among others. I was out there as part of the largest peace demonstrations in history, urging Bush NOT to make war on Iraq. It was totally predictable that this would only create instability, blow away our foreign allies, and provide lots of recruitment material for terrorists. I think the Iraq war may be the worst foreign policy debacle of all US history.

2. As for Israel: I was just there this summer, and spent a LOT of time talking to all sides (including my Israel-right-or-wrong West Bank settler family members). This is not a simple situation, but ultimately, the repression and racism from Israel against the Palestinians is a far more destabilizing influence. Netenyahu’s policies do not encourage peace. They inflame hatreds. Then the Israelis cry that the Arabs hate us. There have been horrible crimes on both sides–but revenge is not the answer. Somehow, we have to get past that and make peace, as happened in Ireland/Northern Ireland and South Africa. Wallowing in the hatred just boils the cauldron harder. I do think that the majority of Israelis AND Palestinians actually want peace–but the extremists on both sides look for any wedge they can. I take hope from groups like Combatants for Peace and Neve Shalom, and it made me very sad today to hear that a joint Jewish-Arab school was torched by anti-Arab extremists. You make peace with your enemies, not necessarily your friends. Obama showed some leadership early in his presidency and then largely ignored the whole issue. He should show some more.

So, at the risk of throwing kerosene on the flames, let me ask you: what do you think of these two presidents’ foreign policy legacies? I will not censor dissent, but I will block name-calling and uncivility—so play nice, but tell me what you think.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Democracy, Ethics in Government, localism/locavore, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with ,

This week, a judge ruled that the Business Improvement District in Northampton, Massachusetts was organized without following certain laws. The judge ordered the immediate dissolution of the BID, putting several people out of work and leaving the city bereft of services it had performed.

For the past few years, the BID has cleaned the streets of downtown Northampton, maintained its planters, helped the city with snow removal, funded the holiday light decorations, and organized or assisted with various special events to promote the downtown business and arts  communities.

No one doubts that the organization did great work. But from its inception in 2009, it’s been fraught with controversy. Northampton BID was empowered by the City Council to negotiate contracts to perform these services in March, 2009—and just five weeks later—even before the BID was officially formed in July, 2009—a group of dissenting downtown property owners filed a suit claiming the petition signatures for the formation of the BID were not properly collected or certified. The BID could only form if at the owners of at least 297 properties within the proposed district agreed.

There was controversy over whether the enabling law wanted the count based on parcels or property owners—an important distinction, since many property owners owned multiple parcels. As the BID collected them, owners were allowed to vote once for each piece of property they owned or controlled in the district. One owner signed 15 times.

But there was also controversy about several other areas:

  1. Had enough diligence been expended to verify that the signatures were legible and that they were from people with ownership or delegated authority? The judge invalidated 63 that he could not read, bringing the critical mass well below 297, and strongly criticized the city government for failing to check the signatures carefully.
  2. Was it ethical to redraw the district’s boundary lines prior to formation, to include more properties owned by supporters (including Smith College, by afar the largest landowner in the downtown area) and exclude several owned by opponents?
  3. Membership fees paid for all the services the BID performed. When the BID was accepted in 2009, membership was voluntary. But a change to state law in 2012 made membership compulsory.
  4. A July, 2014 vote on whether to extend the BID’s charter through 2019 used voter eligibility rules that excluded all the people who were forced to join in 2012, and passed 40-0.

As someone who has written two books and used to write a column on business ethics, I find that these other issues sway me. No matter how much good the BID does, it cannot justify its actions as an organization that tramples on the rights of its opponents.

When you tell people that an organization has a voluntary membership, and then you make it mandatory to join and pay dues, that’s wrong. And it’s even more wrong to then exclude the recalcitrant members from voting on the organization’s future. It brings to mind words like “deceitful” and “slimy.” And yes, when your charter depends on certifying participation, you make sure those participants are properly certified.

The Sky Won’t Fall

It is a hardship when people are put out of work just before the holidays, with no notice. I feel sorry for the BID’s workers, and I hope the business community steps forward to hire those folks, even if the jobs are temporary.  While it would have made more sense to me if the judge had ordered a more gradual phaseout, letting the organization honor its commitments and its payroll for a couple of months to deal with past obligations and commitments already made, I disagree with BID proponents who seem to think the sky will fall.

Yes, it will be a scramble to get a holiday lighting program in place in time for the retail season. But it can be done. Presumably, it will not be difficult to transfer the contract from BID to the Chamber of Commerce or some other organization.

Yes, it’s going to impact the downtown when the BID employees who’ve been picking up trash stop doing it. But the city has a Department of Public Works.

The BID did not exist until five years ago. And the downtown thrived. When another program, the Northampton Honor Court, stopped picking up the downtown trash, it was a hardship and the downtown definitely looked more tired. But others stepped into the breach.

Again, I support the good work that the BID performed. But I do not support a process that’s tantamount to bullying, don’t support a double standard for BID supporters and opponents, and think it’s completely immoral to bring the organization in as a voluntary effort and then change the rules. Yes, I recognize that it was the state, and not the local BID, that changed the rules, but the blame for rigging the election to continue under the new terms is most definitely local, and deeply unfair.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail