Category: Ethics in Government

By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

For more than 30 years, one of the arguments I’ve made against nuclear power is the chilling effect on our freedom.

Now, it seems that Japan may have passed a law heading down that slippery slope. Or not—I am not so far convinced that the claims are accurate.

A blogger for the UK Progressive put up a rambling, jumbled article claiming that Japan has passed a law giving sweeping powers to shut down bloggers, people who post videos on Youtube, etc. when they’re critical of the government and/or TEPCO.

I did a bit of Googling and found dozens of other blogs basing their story on that same article, which I consider unreliable. But I did find this in the Tokyo Times, which seems to be a genuine news organization that fact-checks and posts corrections. The Tokyo Times article says the Computer Network Monitoring Law was passed on June 17.

It also says that during March and April, even before the law was passed, government agents sent 41

“letters of request” to internet providers, telecom companies, cable TV stations and others to take measures in order to respond to illegal information, including erasing any information from the Internet that can be seen as harmful to morality and public order.

However, this article links back to coverage in the Examiner which again ties back to the original, untrustworthy blog post. I certainly am not going to pore over all 6000 citations to see whether this story is legitimate. But it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government

Here’s the latest installment in the Associated Press’s very disturbing report on nuclear power plant safety.

Adding to the previous reports’ deep concerns about neglected maintenance and regulators who scale back requirements rather than enforce them, the newest installment demonstrates that regulators have basically ignored massive population growth in many areas around  nuclear power plant sites.

Part of the “safety planning” (such as it was) for nuclear plant siting was to place the plants in relatively remote areas (still far too close to major population centers, but usually 20-50 miles away). But suburban/exurban infill has changed the picture dramatically. Evacuation plans designed to move out a rural population have in most cases never been upgraded to deal with the new realities.

As one of many examples cited in the study, a 10-mile radius around Florida’s two-reactor Saint Lucie complex had only 43,332 residents in 1980; now, the population is 202,010 (more than 4-1/2 times as large).

Following the Fukushima accidents, the US government recommended that its citizens living closer than 50 miles evacuate. If there were a 50-mile evacuation at Indian Point, 24 miles north of New York City, 17 million people in three different states would be affected. Ever try to get out of NYC at rush hour? This would be far worse. Even the 268,906 who live within 10 miles of the plant would be quite challenging to evacuate.

HOW have we allowed this madness to continue?

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, National Conference on Media Reform, People Helping People, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , , , ,

By Shel Horowitz, GreenAndProfitable.com

Michael Copps: There’s no larger question in the US right now than how do we get the media back?

We started out in 2002, 03, opposing Michael Powell’s plan to loosen media ownership rules. I said the people have a real interest in this, and thanks to FreePress and other groups, three million people contacted the FCC. We’ve conducted some good holding actions, but it’s time to win the battle.

The real question is, shouldn’t consumers be deciding where they want to go and what they want to do online, and that’s what Net Neutrality is about.

We’ve lost a lot of public interest territory over the years, and you don’t get that back an inch at a time.

How do we ensure that everyone has access to broadband? It’s the future of democracy. The facts are gone; the investigative journalism is gone. Thousands of journalists no longer walk the beat. How many facts are buried so deep that the few journalists left can’t find them? Let’s have the data. I have watched the evisceration of the public interest all of these years. I think it’s the most important issue facing the country. The resolution of all of those other issues rides on how they are depicted by the media—and if the facts are told to the American people so they can make a decision. You can’t get that from the starvation diet, the journalism lite that we get from the traditional newsrooms now.

We should bring back a licensing regimen where the public interest is actually included. Where the public interest controls. Where the localism, the news of our various communities, is actually covered. Where minorities are not caricatured but their real issues are covered. Where we can say, “if you’re not serving your community, we’ll take that license back and give it to someone who will.”

Citizen action can still work. Very few people hold outrageous amounts of power, and control what goes on in this country. But citizen action can still make a difference. Look at women’s rights, labor, minority rights, they all had uphill fight, but they all persevered. It never happens easily. We should rededicate and recommit ourselves, and we can make some real down payments on media democracy in the months ahead. And then we can get real progress in getting media that is of and by and for the people.

 

Mignon Clyburn (former South Carolina State Commissioner and activist)

You reaffirm to me how important it is to fight for parity when I put my head on the chopping block. Remember what people were doing 10 years ago while waiting for flights? Reading a book or staring at the ceiling? Now they’re playing a game with a friend in New Zealand, tweeting, texting, IMing. Count the number of wireless activities next time. I hear about the fast approaching mobile TV and mobile broadband. Wireless availability and ease of use is no longer a fun novelty. It’s an essential part of everyday routines. An overwhelming majority would say they couldn’t live without their cell phones. This is especially true in lower income communities. It may be far more economical to communicate in short text messages than taking up too many voice minutes. Wireless is becoming the choice for students, under 30, families with small discretionary incomes. They are relying on them to find bus arrival times and weather forecasts, and to mange  smoother ways of living. But this ease that many of us take for granted is at risk, for others.

1 in 4 households rely solely on wireless. They’re cutting costs and cutting the cord. Data apps on wireless are far more common in Afro-American and Latino communities, and they take advantage of a much wider array of the data than their white counterparts.

And we must be mindful of the effects of this on the ecosystem. If the costs become prohibitive, we have failed.

Small businesses pay significantly more per user (than big) for wireless.

I am an unlikely candidate for this job.  A non-lawyer from a small, poor, “interesting” state. But I am a person who saw the disconnects, the inequities from the day she was born that minimize the potential in her communities. I know that these technologies, the potential for unlocking the spirit and the hope and desires and the excellence in all of us—we have that potential as commissioners, and you have the potential to not let us get away with anything less than our best.

Response to government shutdown:
Copps: we’re wasting all this time on the high noon shootout when there are all these bigger issues.

Clyburn: A lessons we learned in our household that we can disagree without being disagreeable. We don’t see that in our public spaces and places, and because of that, we’re unable and unwilling to compromise.

Oversight of broadband

Clyburn: We are to ensure a robust telecommunications industry. People expect that when they sign up for a service, that they can access information. We established high-level rules to do just that. They’re not onerous rules. I am comfortable with that direction. At the end of the day, we talk about this consolidation. The majority of Americans have two or fewer Internet providers, and that does not stimulate competition. I’m a substitute for competition.

Copps: Internet users should be very worried, because the Net Neutrality we passed is a partial measure. It does not include wireless telecom and there’s the potential for companies to do mischief. Long-term, we should be more worried. Every new telecom technology starts out as the dawn of an era of openness and freedom, but control gets tighter and tighter. That’s the danger to the future of the Internet, probably the most liberating technology since the printing press, and it’s going down the same road as the rest. We’re talking about keeping this technology free, and not letting a few telecoms put up a toll booth. Of course we have authority to do this. The telecoms convinced previous FCCs to call it information services (not regulatable).

State regulators vs. municipal

Clyburn: There are significant donut holes in this nation. 95% has high-speed access, but that means 14-24 MILLION have no broadband access available. The companies say the economic case can’t be made. So cities and towns should have the flexibility to wire those communities.

Copps: We have a spectrum shortage, we need more for wireless. But that should not translate into taking it from broadcast. We have a democracy crisis in large pat due to the state of our media. Let’s look at how broadcasters are using the people’s spectrum. There’s room for both wireless and broadcast.

What would it take for ATT/TMobile merger to be in the public interest?

Copps: A hell of a lot more than I’ve seen before. We have to say, what about competition? What they’re looking for is deregulated monopoly and I hope that’s not the course of American history.

Clyburn: I look at broadband access as a human rights issue. This is the last opportunity—the TV airwaves are unaffordable and almost unreachable. Those traditional platforms are too expensive. If we let this go, what do we have left? It is the pathway forward.

Copps: I think you can justify access to broadband as a civil right very easily. You’re not going to be a young person who can’t get a job because you can’t apply online. You can’t monitor your kids’ learning, your health. We’re 15th or 20th in the world, and that means all these kids are growing up without that opportunity. You think we’ve got outsourcing now…

License renewals:

We used to have 14 guidelines. I don’t think we need to have that many, but you need an honest-to-god licensing system. I’d have the renewals every three years, and you make a judgment about whether the station is serving the public. And if not, you put them on probation for a year or two, and if not, plenty of other people would like to have access to bandwidth.

Diversity:

Copps: Diversity is one of our mandates, but station ownership doesn’t reflect that diversity. We’ve had a committee that has proposed 70-75 measures we could take. I’ve proposed that we take one of them up each month.

Free Expression:

Clyburn: We have to make space for viewpoints we disagree with. But if we diversify, people have more venues to get their voices across. They get drowned out and we cannot be satisfied with that. We have to push this agency and our lawmakers to be creative thinkers. And the advertisers will follow, and the voices we have problems with become less popular. Speak with your clickers and those voices will be gone.

Copps: I’d like to see the FCC require full disclosure on political advertisements. You hear, “brought to you by Citizens for Spacious Skies and Amber Waves of Grain,” and you don’t know it’s a chemical company.

The FCC is one of many agencies with a revolving door. We should say, for x number of years [former regulators can’t work as industry lobbyists]. It’s the crushing influence of money in Washington.

Clyburn: Reaffirmations that public-private partnerships are the way to go. I am not satisfied about our diversity initiatives. I don’t hear enough southern accents. [race, gender]. The revolving door works both ways. I’m the beneficiary of the expertise of my staffer on mergers, from the outside.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Politics Tagged with , , ,

What idiots in the GOP leadership decided to get their cafeteria out of the Greening the Capitol program, get rid of the biodegradables, stop composting, and switch to Styrofoam? Eeeeew!

The “party of no” reaches a new low–whose ONLY justification is say “nyah, nyah, nyah to the Democrats. This is not just childish, it’s downright stupid. So much for budget constraints, too—their path, if I could call it that, is going to be a lot more expensive, long-term, than reusable dishes going through a Hobart, composting the wastes, etc.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government Tagged with , , , , , ,

According to Democracy Now yesterday, big polluters including BP and Dow have been exempted from environmental oversight on more than 179,000 stimulus-funded projects. You can read the entire very short item here.

My first reaction is “say it ain’t so, Joe.” But a little Googling shows it’s actually worse. According to the Center for Public Integrity’s original statement, the Obama administration was so eager to get stimulus-funded projects into the pipeline that it even granted a waiver for BP’s notorious Texas City refinery (site of a horrible accident in 2005), and claims…

…the administration has devised a speedy review process that relies on voluntary disclosures by companies to determine whether stimulus projects pose environmental harm. Corporate polluters often omitted mention of health, safety, and environmental violations from their applications. In fact, administration officials told the Center they chose to ignore companies’ environmental compliance records in making grant decisions and issuing NEPA exemptions, saying they considered such information irrelevant. [emphasis added]

Surely, there are better ways to restore our economy.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Massachusetts Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker has gone over the edge. Rather than attacking incumbent governor Deval Patrick on his record, Charles Baker pulled a number out of a hat and claimed Patrick could raise the income tax from 5.3 to 7 percent. Patrick has never announced such a proposal.

According to the Boston Herald story,

During a press conference at Fenway Park [map], Baker said he felt comfortable with his conclusion, which he printed on a poster that was used as a prop, because of Patrick’s record of passing tax increases and the lack of specific plans from Patrick to solve next year’s $2 billion projected budget gap.

Here’s what Baker has done in my household: I have been weighing the merits of voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, whose politics are much closer to mine than Deval Patrick’s, or voting for Patrick, the Democrat, because he could win and would be far better than his two other rivals. Patrick has been a decent, but uninspiring and sometimes clumsy governor. Baker not only has views I find icky, but this latest faux pas has me questioning his core ethics (and where is the outrage from Fox News, dare I ask?) Cahill, the independent candidate, has made a series of remarks that make me extremely uncomfortable, including some that I and many others interpret as bigoted.

Thus, between hearing a recent Patrick speech and finding myself agreeing with almost everything he said, and my deep concerns about living under either a Baker or Cahill administration, I will be marking my ballot Tuesday for Democratic governor Deval Patrick. Charles Baker can take at least some of the credit for my vote.

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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Diversity, Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , , , ,

Came across this article, “Why Are The Feds Banning E-Readers?” by Pat Archbold, on National Catholic Register:

Sometimes the federal government does something so laughably moronic, that one has to stop and ask the question “Are they really that dumb or is something else going on?”

Here is the setup. Recently a number of universities around the country decided to take a look at using some modern technology in the classroom in an effort to save money. These universities took part in an experimental program to allow students to use the Amazon Kindle for textbooks. As you know, many people now use e-readers like the Kindle or the Nook as a replacement for traditional printed books. There are many reasons for this including cost, environmental impact, and convenience. Further, anyone who has gone to college understands the high cost of textbooks and would likely support any way to reduce this large expense.

Here is the pathetic punchline. For conducting this experiment with the Kindle, Obama’s Department of Justice threatened legal action against the universities. The ridiculous contention of the Obama administration is that the Kindle and e-readers violate the Americans With Disabilities Act. Why? Because the blind can’t easily use them.

Now the first thing that would pop into the minds of anybody with a third grade education and that does not work for the government is this simple question. If e-readers discriminate against the blind, do not traditional textbooks discriminate equally? The obvious answer is yes.

The obvious solution, in my mind, is to require the universities to offer a suitable alternative for blind and visually impaired users—NOT to prohibit the devices entirely. E-book texts are easily converted to voice, so the only issue is giving those who don’t see a way to navigate into the right e-book.

But his article, and the comments it drew, amazed me with their various “evil conspiracy” theories. Yes, there were some that argued rationally about the legitimate difficulties blind users have with these devices (and pointing out that they have much more difficulty with a printed book). But there were also a number of comments speculating that this is a way for the Obama administration to control dissent and silence conservative voices.

My question to them: what have you been smoking?

Here’s Archbold:

I posit another and perhaps more nefarious reason. I think that the federal government is adamantly opposed to the use of e-readers as an alternative to textbooks for fear of loss of control. This loss of control is not so much at the university level but at much younger levels. The universities just happened to be the first ones to try.

Here’s one of the comments, from “Frank”:

A great deal of control over curriculum nationwide is exerted through textbook control. Education is critical to progressives. Remember, those who control education, control the culture. (Now , think of Obama’s childhood development, i.e. Indonesian grade school;, contact with Frank Mitchell Davis during high school years;, professors at Occidental College and Columbia University;, Alinsky acolytes in Chicago; social/political training in Hyde Park, Chicago South Side; Chicago political cauldron. Put it all together, what else can you expect but what we have experienced since January 20, 2009?)

To me, the ruling that e-readers are out of compliance with ADA—and I speak as a disability advocate who served on my city’s official Disability Awareness committee for six years—is nothing more than the typical heavy-handed over-response of large government entities. No malfeasance, just bureaucratic inability to see past a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s the same mentality that, here in Massachusetts under Massachusetts General Law Chapter 40B, allows developers to ram through inappropriate and out-of-character housing projects that violate local zoning, in the name of increasing the ratio of affordable housing. Affordable housing is a worthy goal, and I spent about ten years doing a lot of volunteer work to address that issue—but 40B is a cannon shot fired against a mosquito: the wrong tool, with lots of unintended and undesirable consequences.

The same mentality that thinks every road improvement—even our local bikeway—has to include over-widening, over-straightening, and often removing trees, stone walls, and other vital features.

Big governments are slow and clumsy creatures with limited intelligence, even when they’re headed by very smart people. Over time, we as a society will realize that conditions vary in different locations, and one size really fits no one at all, only breeds resentment.

Progressives can make common cause with the Right on this issue: local control is the preferred alternative whenever practical.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Media Ethics, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , ,

Right-wing bloviators spewing bile and calling it “news” have been a fixture on the political scene for quite a few years now. And they’ve had influence far beyond the numbers of “true believers.”

While it’s hard to understand why anyone would pay attention to these mouthy masters of misrepresentation (take that, Spiro Agnew!), we see their influence in the raucous but marginal Tea Party gatherings, in the intransigence of the “Party of NO” in moving any policy agenda forward, and in such incidents as the forcing out of the amazing Van Jones as Obama’s Green Jobs advisor and the defunding of a national community organizing group based on the actions of a couple of idiots (even though most of those approached in the sting refused to go along)–by that logic, we could have defunded Congress centuries ago.

So it’s with gladness that I report that as soon as it became obvious that the widely circulated video of black official Shirley Sherrod making what sounded out of context to be racist remarks–and which forced her unwilling resignation–turned out to be just the opposite–a story of how she overcame her internal racism and did the right thing to help a white family–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack made a public apology and offered her a job again.

The hatemongers lose this round. Now…how aobut revisiting the Van Jones incident.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

Africa (South Africa, in particular) gave us the Sullivan Principles, which outlined investment strategies to move toward ending apartheid. At the time (1977), I thought it was way too little, way too late, but I came to appreciate that for its time, it was revolutionary: perhaps the first declaration by corporate America that they had a clear role to play in improving conditions around the world. And this was not so long after the US has been involved in such disgusting maneuvers as (to ame just two among dozens of equally awful examples) overthrowing the democratically elected governments of Mossadeq in Iran (1953, in the interests of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), on behalf of United Fruit)—actions that have had horrific consequences down to the present day in Iran and through at least 1996 in Guatemala.

Now, Ron Robins, of Investing for the Soul, postulates that Africa is on the brink of an explosion in socially responsible investing. It’s a very interesting article, and among his points are these:

Worldwide, SRI now accounts for 1 of every 9 dollars invested. However, even though Africa was a pioneer in this field (not just with the Sullivan Principles but also the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s first-in-the-world SRI index), it has lagged—but rapid growth appears to be imminent.

Go and read it.

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