Category: General Commentary

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Politics

Is it possible for Sarah Palin to get any more distasteful?

Here’s another example of her viper-like turning on old allies when they cross her, as Geoffrey Dunn writes in Huffington Post:

But perhaps the nastiest and most duplicitous passages of all in Going Rogue are those directed at Andree McLeod, the longtime Republican watchdog out of Anchorage who filed many of the Alaska Ethics Act complaints that, by Palin’s own admission, hounded her from office.

Because McLeod has some Lebanese heritage, Palin dubbed her “the falafel lady.” And claimed she’s some sort of left-wing nutcase, because she had the chutzpah to call Palin to account for numerous ethics violations.

Dunn proceeds to quote from several gushing e-mails of praise that Palin wrote to McLeod, back when she was in Palin’s good graces. Here’s one of them:

That was a great letter to the ed. this week Andree. I haven’t had time to call but wanted to tell you it was, again, insightful & educational & good writing. I’m still disenchanted with the whole issue of RR and state politics and am not even very optimistic about the call for an independent investigation. We’ll see. I guess I’ll believe it when I see it. Hope you’re doing well, staying warm & staying on top of all these state issues I’m hearing about on the news! Love, SP

Dunn, whose book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power will be published next year by St. Martin’s Press, is a frequent critic of the colorful ex -governor. Here, for instance, is his look at the first ten lies in Palin’s ghostwritten-but-not-credited memoir, which has no index and apparently doesn’t mention the ghostwriter on the cover, title page, or copyright page (great ethics, there, Sarah–all you needed was the usual “as told to” line in small print).

Meanwhile, Palin continues to cram her foot into her mouth. Even on the friendly turf of Sean Hannity’s TV how, Sarah Palin can’t tell the difference between Iran and Iraq. Though she scores a point for her excellent pronunciation of “Ahmadinejad.”

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , ,

Whole Foods’ standing is less than it was before CEO John Mackey wrote a well-publicized op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, attempting to put the brakes on health care reform. According to Mashable.com, which covers social media, positive perceptions of Whole Foods dropped 10 points in a week, and a 13 point drop in the perception that respondents would be proud to work there. Mashable also notes that the boycott group launched on Facebook is up to 27,000 members.

I’ve been very vocal over the years, saying that strong values can add business value and profitability–most loudly in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. Does this mean that CEOs shouldn’t be vocal in expressing their opinions on issues of the day?

Not at all. To me, it indicates that CEOs should choose businesses where their key demographic is in alignment with their values. Whole Foods’ constituency is overwhelmingly liberal-to-progressive. If management is shown to be ultra-conservative, their stand may “play in Peoria”–but not necessarily in Cambridge, Berkeley, Austin, Ann Arbor, and the other progressive communities that have welcomed a full-service organic and natural supermarket.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Who knew? The tomato blight that’s been ravaging organic farms and gardens in my area of Western Massachusetts has been traced to starter plants apparently grown originally at one location in the South, and shipped to some of the big-box suppliers like Wal-Mart.

I know at least three local farms growing tomatoes in commercial quantities that have no crop this year. Thousands of infected plants had to be destroyed. At least one of those started their own plants from seed, and yet was done in by blight spreading from infected plants grown far away form the local ecosystem. And of course, organic farms can’t, by definition, use chemical fungicides.

Just tearing out our half-dozen rotten, smelly, toxic plants and doing our best to dispose of them properly was a job and a half. I can’t imagine dealing with a whole field’s worth.

In 2007 and 2008, we averaged about 1600 tomatoes, with a taste that simply cannot be equaled with commercial methods. This year, we managed to harvest *one* San Marzano before the blight set in. We still have a few from the hundreds that I dried last year, but not having fresh tomatoes is a huge disappointment. Still, I count my blessings. Compared to those who farm for a living and/or supply CSA members, we had a lot less to lose. Farms are faces losses of thousands and thousands of dollars.

The sad thing is, the farms hardest hit are those with a commitment to local, sustainable agriculture–tainted by other companies’ reliance on non-local, centralized systems that allowed this nasty disease to blanket the Northeast all the way out to Ohio.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

Pope Benedict XVI’s third encyclical is a sweeping, 144-page document addressing and interlocking a wide range of social issues. He calls on the financial industry to tame its greed and turn to ethics, asks the United Nations and individual governments to address deep-rooted poverty issues–not only from economic development perspectives but also making sure these countries have a voice and a seat at the table of power–a political shift, in other words.

Good coverage in the Washington Post (see above link). And a shoutout to Allan Holender of the World Wide Association of Zentrepreneurs, for bringing this important document to my attention.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary Tagged with , ,

Some of the comments regarding abortion doctor George Tiller, who was brutally murdered in his church yesterday are just disgusting. Bill O’Reilly, who has been attacking Tiller for years, called him a Nazi and a baby-killer, and made this crack:

And if I could get my hands on Tiller — well, you know. Can’t be vigilantes.

Randall Terry of Operation Rescue called him a mass-murderer.

From what I’ve heard about Tiller, he was a sensitive, caring man who believed in a woman’s ethical right to control her own body.

I can respect the truly pro-life, such as Catholic Worker pacifists who oppose both abortion and war. But I have always found it odd that so many of the people who scream loudest that they’re pro-life, at least as far as unborn fetuses are concerned, suddenly lose their righteous stance when it comes to

  • Sending kids off to die in wars
  • The death penalty
  • Vigilante “justice”
  • Sometimes-fatal torture in prison
  • Bombing civilians

    • If you’re really pro-life, then BE pro-life! Even after birth.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Been spending some time on Huffington Post this morning, always a fascinating place. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading:

    Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley on Republican strategist Frank Luntz’s plan to derail health reform. What he doesn’t talk about is single-payer, which I believe could engage the strong support of the American people and roll right over all the roadblocks put there by industry lobbyists–while piecemeal “reform” would gain no such support. I do not understand why mainstream Democrats aren’t pushing this issue. It’s key to a raft of economic boosts that would help, for instance, both US automakers and labor. It’s little-talked-about that because most governments around the world, at least in developed nations, provide a real health care service, foreign competitors to GM, Ford, and Chrysler aren’t stuck with that enormous cost.

    Robert Borosage on the general climate of business corruption in Washington. And on how that corruption has caused us to fail in such areas as mandatory sick leave, which then in turn makes the “stay home” response to swine flu impractical for those at the bottom of the ladder, who might lose their jobs and would certainly lose their pay.

    Apparently some right-wing pundits have nothing better to do than attack Obama as elitist because–are you sitting down?–he likes Grey Poupon or Dijon mustard on his burgers! Give me a break! You can buy the stuff for two dollars a bottle at a discount store, and it sure does taste a lot better than the yellow glop that’s largely turmeric. I say unto them: get a life!

    Stephen Colbert’s very funny video spoofing the big too-big-to-fail bailouts; no commentary necessary from me

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    By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

    If you’re under 35 and you watch the video of Steve Jobs introducing the first Macintosh, in January 1984, you might wonder: what’s with all the cheering, it doesn’t do much. But it was revolutionary for its time.

    Before that, you talked to computers by typing arcane commands. Text was displayed all in one font, and if you were lucky, the font had descenders (the stalks on the g, p, and q actually went below the bottom of the other letters)–so you could even read it. If you weren’t lucky, it was a squiggly mess. My first laptop was like that (a Radio Shack Model 100, which I bought in 1986). Graphics? You want graphics? They were sooo primitive, and not easy for the casual user to generate. To do that detailed MacPaint picture of a Japanese woman that Jobs shows on an early IBM PC or an Apple II would have been pretty much impossible.

    The Mac, from day 1, allowed multiple fonts, bold and italic (and other less useful effects) with a simple click, included a graphics program that anyone could use, and even had sound.

    I had one of those early Macs: my first computer, which I bought in April, 1984. It had 124K (not meg, and certainly not gig) of RAM, 64K of ROM, and a single 400K floppy drive. The startup disk included the operating system, a word processor, paint program, and a bit of room for data files. There was no hard drive, and backing up those data files was a major PITA involving multiple disk swaps. Oh yes, and a 9-inch monochrome monitor; color Macs didn’t come along for quite a while. I bought a second floppy drive for $400, and about a year later, a 20 MB hard drive for $700. Now you can get several gigabytes on a thumb drive and pay $40.

    And before personal computers, computing was reserved for the specially trained, who talked to their machines by laboriously keypunching a line of code at a time, starting over if they made an error. Processors were in a central location, and you used a terminal to talk to them–a terminal with almost no computing power of its own.

    So first, PCs swung the culture away from those centralized computers, to having power on your own desk. But then the Internet reversed the trend. Once again, a lot of our processing is done someplace else. Which means everyone’s personal comptuers have access to enormous resources: the world’s knowledge available in seconds.

    And the Internet as a commerce platform means we can shop, pay bills, raise and contribute funds for causes, manage databases far away from the comfort of our own home, or from any far-flung corner of the world

    And among the many other things the Internet changed is our definition of community. We’ve completely separated community from geography.

    For social change and environmental justice activists, the possibilities are enormous. Especially considering we’re probably at the Model T stage. The Internet as a commercial venture is only 13 years old; the Mac, 25 years old; personal computing, about 30 years old. The practical gas-powered automobile was created in 1886; Ford introduced the Model T (not his first car, by the way; he had at least three earlier models, starting in 1903) 22 years later. Just as no one could have predicted the enormous impact the automobile has had on society, so, no one can predict just how far the Internet will stretch.

    Building on the Howard Dean campaign of 2004 (the first to make a serious attempt at harnessing the Internet), Obama’s presidential campaign was greatly helped by his use not only of e-mail and the Web, but of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. And by groups like MoveOn and True Majority, that were able to organize their members to support and fund the campaign, while focusing attention on a progressive agenda.

    And of course, the countless blogs, e-zines, websites, and radio programs on the Net, from around the world, are an easy alternative to mainstream corporate-owned media that can no longer tightly control the news–at least not for those willing to be a bit adventurous with their web searches. That, too, is revolutionary.

    The future promises to be quite exciting.

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, travel

    Just back from a week aboard a cruise ship, with almost no Internet access (Yeah, I could have bought access at 75 cents a minute, but I saw no reason to grab my email at highway robbery prices. I did manage to use an Internet cafe on shore, twice, just to check if my Virtual Assistant forwarded anything urgent. But it wouldn’t be a vacation if I were still dealing with 300 incoming messages a day.

    Anyway, some totally random thoughts from the trip:

    Transportation Safety Administration has spiffy new bright blue uniforms (my last flight was several months ago). They look gorgeous–but aren’t we supposed to be in a budget crisis? There was nothing wrong with the old white ones.

    Cruise ships completely distort not only the local economy but also visitors’ perceptions. The feel we got for Guatemala in our three-week trip last summer was almost completely different from the artificial world of a cruise port that waits only for boats to dock. It’s even different from the land-based tourist towns and attractions that deal with a continuous (but much smaller) flow of tourists but also have a vibrant non-tourist life, integrated into the fabric of the nation.

    The cooperative movement and indigenous self-help organizations have even penetrated the restricted corridors of cruise terminals–Good!

    If you turn off email and Internet, it’s not that hard to completely ignore the outside world.

    Our flight to the boat was canceled, so we arranged with the boat to meet it at the next stop, arranged with the airlines to reroute us to the closest point, arranged for a one-way car rental, and drove four very scenic hours to meet the boat. This astounded many of our fellow passengers–but we’re used to making our own travel arrangements and it didn’t faze us at all. It didn’t even seem like one of our more difficult travel adventures, compared with some of what we’ve done over the last 30 years together, but cruises for the most part don’t attract intrepid travelers. Of course, it helped that we followed the Principled Profit philosophy and were so nice as we explained our situation that people went out of their way to bend the rules for us. And it also helped that we had access to a cell phone and a laptop.

    Environmental consciousness has penetrated even to the cruise industry. I went to a lecture from the ship’s environmental officer and was pleasantly amazed at the sophistication of waste treatment, etc. Still a ways to go. But they’re even considering having one nonsmoking ship as an experiment.

    Rainforests are very special places, and some of the landowners know this. In Belize, we visited a 3rd or 4th generation landholder, a young man in his mid-20s, who has organized his neighbors to provide many acres of unbroken habitat for howler monkeys, and has done quite a bit of research on them.

    Weather can always impact a trip. In addition to having our flight canceled, we had to skip our call in Mexico, because it was too windy to dock the boat. Bummer!

    It’s always better to have a reservation for car rentals. We didn’t when we docked in Tampa, and the cruise terminals had no cars. So we had to buy tickets to an airport shuttle, hunt around the airport for a car to rent, and then go off to see Tampa.

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    By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Ethics: General, General Commentary

    Lauren Bloom has a sweet new book, “The Art of Apology,” which I really enjoyed. She’s sending me a guest blog for posting on Wednesday–just in time for Yom Kippur (starts Wednesday night)–the Jewish day of asking forgiveness.

    Meantime, if you want a preview, she’s giving away a chapter at https://www.ArtOfTheApology.com/preview

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    By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, media-general, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

    We *have* made progress! A Utah newspaper, the Herald Journal, ran its first announcement of a same-sex marriage–and only four people canceled their subscriptions!

    The paper ran a very clear announcement of its rationale here    .

    Bravo to the paper–and its readers, who I guess have noticed that the world is changing.

    I live in Massachusetts. We’ve had gay marriage for I think three years now. And guess what–the sky hasn’t fallen! I think a lot of the people who supported some of the homophobic responses in the past have realized, now that they see openly gay married couples raising families, having jobs, and enjoying such taken-for-granted-by-heterosexuals privileges as visiting their partner in the hospital, that it is no threat to heterosexual marriage.

    I have never understood why they felt threatened in the first place. My wife and I will be celebrating our 25th anniversary in October. We’ve been to several gay and lesbian weddings. I think it makes a family stronger when a couple can express their love and commitment and take on the responsibilities and benefits.

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