Category: General Commentary

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

You might have missed this story in the mainstream news; on the first two pages of Google results for Wal-Mart spy, AOL, MSN, and CNN were the only U.S. mainstream sources listed; they picked up the story from the Reuters wire, which means it was accessible to every news outlet in the world.

You can read the original WSJ piece, as reproduced on MSN, here.

But most of the returns were from places like Huffington Post, Consumerist.com, and wakeupwalmart.com–the “usual suspects” on the Left.

Nothing wrong with those news sources; after all, I found the story by listening to Democracy Now yesterday. And DN’s interviewee was one of two Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the story, so this one actually started in the mainstream media.

Personally, I think that when the world’s largest retailer, a force considerably larger and more powerful than many national governments, illegally wiretaps phone calls with a New York Times reporter, intercepts employee e-mail sent over networks other than its own corporate system and records their correspondents’ addresses (e.g., Hotmail and Yahoo), infiltrates opposition grassroots groups, digs up a private unlinked archive of an activist’s vacation photos in order to identify him if he tries to go to a shareholder meeting–the list of shockingly inappropriate activities goes on and on–it should be a huge story in every print and electronic medium that calls itself a news organization–and government agencies should be investigating NOW.

I even searched the New York Times site to see if that august paper had deemed that such a story–its own reporter’s telephone was tapped when he called the company–was worth a line or two in print. But a search for wal-mart spy and another for wal-mart spying brought up nothing relevant or recent (this story began to reveal itself within the last few weeks, with the most important revelations coming just this week).

Oh yes, and Wal-Mart’s wimpy statement about future behavior:

This group [the spy unit] is no longer operating in the same manner that it did prior to the discovery of the unauthorized recording of telephone conversations.

Not “we have disbanded this group.” Not “we shouldn’t have spied on people.” Just a statement that the group is reorganized (the whole letter is included in the DN article). For shame!

But don’t you think when a story like this breaks across a major newswire and originates from one of the most respected media in the world, that other media would sit up and take notice? Papers in Taiwan and Belfast thought so, but not most of the US press.

Shame on Wal-Mart, yes–but shame as well on the major media outlets who ignored this story.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized

In which Shel gets to laugh at himself. I’ve written five books on marketing, and I make my living as a marketing copywriter and consultant. So of course I posted to my blog in advance of my book signing last week for the launch of my just-released Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers.

Except that I never realized I clicked on “save” instead of post. So the event came and went, and there was my nice little announcement still waiting for me to release it to the world. I just noticed it today under saved drafts.

Duh! (Sound of hand slapping forehead).

Oh well–there’s always New York in May. I’m trying to work out an event at Book Expo America, and hopefully I’ll hit the correct button when I have the details.

PS–Am I really a marketing guru? See what other gurus think about my services and about my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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

The always-thought-provoking Washington Spectator has a very good article in the January 15 issue, explaining exactly why it’s not enough to provide paper-based audit trails to electronic voting machines–that instead we need actual paper ballots.

Among the reasons:

  • If the ballot is initially generated electronically, it is still hackable. If the ballot is generated by the voter marking a durable paper and then electronically counted (the system that has been used in my own town of Hadley MA for years), it is not.
  • Electronic machines that generate a paper receipt have various problems with paper jams, difficulty of data retrieval from a huge spool, etc.
  • Many of the receipt systems use thermal printing–that same icky unstable technology that becomes unreadable after a week in your wallet!
  • Electronic ballot systems with paper backup have caused numerous problems in actual elections, where voters reported that their choice didn’t show up on the screen, where tens of thousands of ballots didn’t register a vote (as in Sarasota County, Florida, or simply where the system is not well designed to enable voters to easily check their wishes against the receipt (and what happens when a voter wants to report problems anyway?). None of these issues even occur if we start with a marked paper ballot.
  • Most importantly, the physical paper ballots can always be recounted by hand if there is suspicion of problems. If they were generated electronically, however, and there’s fraud or error in the set-up, we have much less of a guarantee that the ballots represent actual voter intent.

    • Of course, scanners and tabulators can be hacked as well. Thus, I would hope for nationwide legislation not only specifying paper ballots on durable stock with durable ink, but also mandating a hand-count before certification; electronic scanners, counters, and tabulators should be considered nothing more than a preliminary, unverified, indication of the results–good for generating news reports but not to be relied on to actually elect people.
    Oh yes, and I think the cost of switching to these much more reliable systems should be borne by the companies that brought us these unreliable machines in the first place. It should not fall on the taxpayer to pay for the clean up of this very preventable mess.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, General Commentary, Uncategorized

    I’m writing this from Guanajuato, Mexico; we’ve been traveling and studying Spanish since December 26. My wife and I were also here 22 years ago for an extended trip, and I notice differences in the business world since then.

    The most obvious is how much more advanced the infrastructure has become. A few examples:

    Making a long-distance call within Mexico had been rather an ordeal. In 1984 and 1985, a person would contact the operator, you’d get a call back in an hour or two when the line became available, and the sound quality was iffy. These days, just buy a phone card, slide it in, and dial, and usually get a good clear signal. However, you may have to try two or three phones before you find one that likes your card. And everybody that we met had a cell phone; many also have land lines. In the old days, most people had no phone at all.

    Intercity bus travel has become a joy (other than the constant barrage of poorly chosen TV and movies). Luxurious seats, immaculate restrooms, even a snack.

    Banking has been computerized, and transactions such as changing travelers checks that used to take half an hour or more now take only a few minutes.

    Purified water is common, and a healthfood consciousness has begun to be felt in the culture. A few examples–even Wonder offers packaged whole wheat tortillas…natural foods stores, though small, are easy to find…a few restaurants and cafes proclaim that they use organic ingredients.

    However, there are some less attractive changes as well.

    It seems that the strong local traditional culture is harder to find. Norteamericano fashion boutiques have replaced many of the traditional clothing vendors, and we saw almost no one wearing Mexican styles. And, like so many other parts of the world, some of the U.S.’s worst cultural exports have begun to crowd out local stores. We saw several Wal-Marts, McDonald’s, and–in picturesque downtown Guanajuato–even a Domino Pizza. And despite the wonderful varieties of Mexican soda and beer, Coke is enormously popular.

    Worse, Coke owns at least a few of the brands of bottled water, and that could be a dangerous trend. I believe firmly that water rights and water privatization will be major focal points for the struggle for economic justice, increasing in intensity to the point that water may be the oil of 2020 and beyond. And it should not be yanked out from under the local populace by multinational corporations.

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    By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized

    It’s 5 p.m. on December 23, which means I have only 7 hours left in my 40s.

    It’s been a magnificent decade. I feel very, very blessed.

    In fact, since I was about 15, life continues to get better and better. 15-20 was better than what had come before, my 20s were very nice–getting married, and moving together to Western Massachusetts.

    My 30s were even better, as I got to know my two amazing kids, born in 1987 and 1992, and as my writing and publishing career began to take really shape with the 1993 publication of Marketing Without Megabucks: How to Sell Anything on a Shoestring by Simon & Schuster, and then with my decision to buy back the remaining inventory two years later.

    And my 40s? This was the decade where I began to make my mark on a wider world, not just my local community. I built strong communities in Cyberspace, transformed my home-based business into a global presence–and also had an impact in my own town, with the formation of Save the Mountain.

    I founded STM to protect our much-loved local mountain from a very poorly conceived development plan. In all my years of organizing, this was the most amazing experience. I started the group when the first story in the local paper quoted a bunch of experts who said “this is terrible but there’s nothing we can do.”

    I knew they were wrong. I figured we could gather a small group of activists and stop the project within five years or so. It astonished even me when we got hundreds of people to turn out at hearings, thousands to passively support us with petitions, bumper stickers, and so forth, a very diverse active core of 35, including scientists, legal liaisons, organizers, students, farmers, local landowners…it was the closest thing to a true consensus movement I’ve ever been involved with, bringing together people from all political views and even gaining support from town officials who had a reputation for opposing progressive change.

    And we won…in just 13 months.

    That experience was one of the forces that shaped my decision to make change on a more global level, and to institute the Business Ethics Pledge campaign. I’ve given that campaign 10 years to see if it can make a fundamental change in the world.

    Meanwhile, I expect my 50s to be full of new books to write, new people to influence, new initiatives on sustainability and ethics, new countries to visit, plenty of fascinating client projects, land to preserve, speeches to give, and maybe even getting my office dug out of its clutter.

    In short, I fully expect to have an awesome time and even surpass my amazing 40s.

    I wish you, as well, an amazing 2007, and an amazing next ten years.

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    By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized

    For the past 15 months, I’ve been doing “Principled Profit: The Good Business Radio Show” on a local community radio station.

    I am a very experienced radio guest as well as a host, and I also have done a fair bit of public speaking to live audiences. But last night’s show was the first without a guest, and let me tell you–it was hard!

    With a guest, I can easily fill my hour. and in front of a live audience, I can talk and talk. But last night, with no one in front of me, I realized how much I rely on audience feedback when I’m speaking.

    15 minutes into the show, I started to panic and worry that I’d run out of things to say. I put on my first song to give myself some thinking time (and the audience a break from my voice) and when the song was over, I was fine. I normally play three songs during my show, and did so last night as well.

    The show actually went very well–but I was completely drained afterwards. And my throat was tired.

    And I have a lot more respect for radio personalities who are their entire show. It’s tough! I grew up listening to people like Lynn Samuels and Steve Post on Pacifica’s WBAI-FM (New York). They could carry a solo monologue for two or three hours, with just a few music breaks. All I can do is tip my hat and say, Wow!

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized

    As it happens, tonight is the final run of a play that I’m in, about the courage of one Christian scholar, Johannes Reuchlin, who defends Jewish holy books from the German Catholic church’s attempt–with the aid of a converted former Jew, Johannes Pfefferkorn–to confiscate and destroy them.

    The play is called “Burning Words,” by Peter Wortsman. It’s based on real events, and the main characters show up in a Google search.

    The author has been present for the entire three-show run, doing talkbacks after the show.

    Last night, he spoke movingly of the play’s relevance for our time. He cited fundamentalist zealots of several major religions who have gotten into positions of power, and who have tried to foist equally crazy schemes on the rest of us, including the destruction of ancient and irreplaceable iconic art (such as the Taliban’s wanton despoliation of an ancient Buddhist monument in Afghanistan).

    I’m proud to be a little part of this small effort to bring free speech and freedom of worship issues to the foreground.

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

    Two brief excerpts from this New York Times story:

    RedState.com, the conservative journal, heralded a “massive meltdown in Pennsylvania” early in the day, citing “widespread reports of an electoral nightmare shaping up in Pennsylvania with certain types of electronic voting machines.”

    Among the litany of issues cited at Talking Points: computer problems that caused long lines in Denver; polling stations that stayed open later in Indiana after voting problems and delays; votes for Claire C. McCaskill in the Missouri Senate race that somehow registered for her opponent, Jim Talent; complaints that crashed an Ohio county phone system.

    In short, our work is not over even with most of the votes counted.

    I think the time has come for a mass movement around electoral fairness. We have the right to now that

  • Eligible voters are able to vote
  • Once they’ve voted, their votes are counted accurately using systems that cannot be hacked

    Watch this space. I will be contacting voting rights experts to help draft legislation, and then asking them to help contact mass-advocacy groups such as MoveOn and yes, its conservative counterpart RightMarch to create a massive bipartisan push for fair elections.

    The goal: Passed in 2007 and implemented in time for the 2008 elections.

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

    Yesterday’s big gain for the Democrats was a vote for peace, for ethics, for election process reform (most visibly in Ohio and Florida, where Ken Blackwell and Katherine Harris, architects of Bush’s questionable victories in 2004 and 2000, were soundly defeated) and for competence.

    It was also, in many places, a vote for positive campaigning, Voters repudiated at least some of the candidates who put out the most vicious attack ads, including Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey, who lost the governorship of Massachusetts after 16 years of continuous Republican rule, and Rep. Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, who lost her seat.

    I actually had two personal friends running for Congress this time: Tony Trupiano in Michigan and Jeeni Criscenzo in California, both endorsed by Progressive Democrats of America. Both lost, unfortunately. But it was exciting to see them go this far.

    Now, it’s up to the Democrats to actually put forth an agenda of peace, ethics, elections that can be trusted, competence, and positive focus. We will be watching!

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

    The four big issues I name in this post’s headline–Ford Motor Company’s massive earnings losses of $5.8 billion in the third quarter of 2006, Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling sentenced to 24 years, Democratic hopes raised with some 48 House seats in play and at least four of the six Senate seats needed to shift control expected to go Democratic, and the no-confidence vote President George W. Bush has been getting in recent polls–may seem on the surface to have nothing in common–but actually, there’s a strong thread running through all of them.

    This is the common thread: The American people are totally sick of being lied to, manipulated, and stepped on by powerful interests who care only about a narrow agenda of partisanship and greed. To say it another way, the real issue in the psyche of America right now is ethics.

    And as someone who has started an international movement to tilt business toward higher ethics and written an award-winning book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, about how ethics is one of the strongest drivers for business success, I see this as a positive trend.

    And it’s clearly time for a change, in both business and politics. In my opinion, the last ethical Presidents–both of them had a strong sense of personal integrity, even as their politics were vastly different–were Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Now, as regular readers of this blog know, I have no love for the policies of Reagan, or for some of the very creepy people he surrounded himself with (some of whom have prominent places in the GWB administration)–but the man himself always impressed me as someone who honestly believed in the things he was saying, and the numerous ethics scandals of his administration never seemed to enmesh him personally, and seemed far more a matter of a hands-off governance style. As for Carter…could anyone imagine that the man who freely admitted to “lust in my heart” but knew how to control that lust going through the shameful charade that Bill Clinton engaged in? And Carter as an ex-president has been a world statesman for social and economic justice around the world. I daresay he has made more of a difference in the last 26 years than in his four in the Oval Office.

    So how does Ford fit into all of this? It’s simple. Not once but twice, Ford has been caught with its ethical pants down, putting short-term profit above human safety, failing to rework known design flaws that cause fatal accidents, because its actuaries decided that paying the wrongful death lawsuits would be cheaper than fixing the problem. You’d think the company would have learned from the mess it made with the Pinto’s exploding gas tanks in the 1970s, but they were back with the same attitude about the Explorer’s little problem staying upright in hot weather–a problem the company apparently was well aware of before the car even began production. Compare that short-sighted and dangerous attitude with the amazing response of Johnson & Johnson to the Tylenol poisoning scare–and it’s not at all surprising to me that J&J rebounded very quickly after spending a vast sum to warn everybody about the problem and institute a massive recall of all Tylenol products.

    I can tell you that when I went car shopping two years ago, I didn’t even bother checking into Ford. I figured any company that would rather pay death benefits than spend a couple of bucks to fix a known cause of fatal accidents was not a company that I wanted to entrust with my family’s safety for the next five or ten years. And I suspect a lot of other people have done the same. The safety blowback may have even been a factor in Ford’s quiet decision a few years ago to purchase Volvo, a car manufacturer known for its concern with safety.

    I would absolutely love to see Ford start practicing all the groovy, concerned, and earth-friendly messages that Bill Ford says the company stands for–but I have to laugh when we get all these Green talking points from the company that unleashed the massive, gas-hogging Expedition. Sure, Escape hybrids are a step in the right direction, but a small one. My non-hybrid gas-powered small sedans get better mileage than an Escape even with the hybrid boost. So I don’t expect that a lot of people buy Escapes because they want to save gas.

    Skilling, of course, got hit hard in part because he was unlucky enough to have his literal partner in crime Ken Lay drop dead before the sentencing. But as the New York Times points out, the sentence was as strong as it was because people got hurt by his lies:

    The higher sentence, the judge said, was because he found that Mr. Skilling had lied to the Securities and Exchange Commission about the real reasons for his sales of Enron stock before the company’s collapse in December 2001. Mr. Skilling said he sold the stock only because of the impact on the market of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

    And one very positive aspect of this case is that the government is going after his–and Lay’s–ill-gotten gains. Of course, the lawyers will get a huge chunk, but they are actually discussing restitution to those who were badly burned as the company’s failure sucked the life out of their retirement savings.

    * * *

    Before I close…a quick thank-you for several recent articles encouraging people to help stop future Enron and Ford scandals by joining the Business Ethics Pledge…and especially to blogger Jill Draperand e-zine editor John Forde (sorry, I can’t find a link, but you can subscribe to his newsletter at jackforde.com) for their rousing endorsements.

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