Category: General Commentary

By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Media Ethics

Paul Demko writes in the Twin Cites alternative paper, City Pages, about one Tim Mahoney, a part-time copy editor who attended the big September peace rally in Washington with other members of his church.

Mahoney got a stern talking-to, a three-day suspension without pay, and was removing from editing any stories about Iraq. He was told he’d be fired for a repeat offense.

The paper claimed, as it has claimed previously in another case now making its way through the grievance system–two reporters attended a rock concert that raised funds for the Kerry campaign–that Mahoney’s actions were a violation of the paper’s ethics policies.

Now, you know that I can be pretty loud when I see ethics violations. As the author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, a columnist for Business Ethics magazine, and the originator of an international pledge campaign around ethics, I think I’ve got some credentials in this area. And while I certainly see the ethics issues if a reporter gets involved with partisan political activity that he or she is actively covering (did someone say “Judith Miller”?), I fail to find the justification here. Journalists are allowed to have personal politics, last time I checked. And a copy editor isn’t even creating the story, merely making sure that it’s internally consistent with its own logic and the rules of English.

This strikes me as a punitive action on the part of a newspaper that doesn’t happen to agree with the stand the reporter took, and is trying to pre-emptively prevent other staffers form expressing their opinions. It reminds me of the time an employee of one of the two major soda companies was fired for drinking the competitor’s product, outside of work if I remember correctly.

No one should have to leave their soul outside on the way to work.

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By Posted on Posted in Events, General Commentary

Sigh. Why is it that so often after there’s a natural disaster, if you dig deeply into the cause of the death toll, you find humans taking unconscionable shortcuts in construction…and other humans in charge of safety oversight looking the other way?

Last week, I happened to sit next to a very intelligent and politically aware Pakistani gentleman at a Bruce Springsteen concert. In the hour before the music started, we had a long talk. My new friend just sent me a link to the work of a Pakistani ethics writer, Ardeshir Cowasjee. His latest weekly column is all about the direct responsibility for fatalities in the recent earthquake…on the shoulders of those crooked builders and didn’t-see-nuthin’ officials.

Read it and weep!

But then turn to another of Cowasjee’s columns, and see an example of the triumph of the human spirit.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, General Commentary

https://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/fema.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/politics/10policy.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/national special/10contracts.html

These three articles together paint a deeply disturbing picture. I see a very chilling future, in which the poor are shipped off to gulags, the tattered remains of the once-vaunted safety net go up in smoke, and war profiteers get richer on the backs of those in the camps.

It sounds alarmingly similar to some of the events during the
German occupation of much of Europe in the 1940s.

The first link is apparently the journal (with photos) of a member of a conservative Southern church who tried to bring supplies in to a refugee camp in Oklahoma–a camp that she knew, because her church had a cabin there. Not only were her supplies refused, but she saw and documented evidence that detainees will not be allowed to leave. And there have been wide reports of help and supplies refused; as one example, our local paper yesterday ran an interview with a local doctor who flew down and had to cool his heels in Baton Rouge while exactly one doctor was trying to handle the entire medical needs of the New Orleans Convention Center evacuees. (To view the story, you’ll have to register)

As a journalist, I’m trained to be skeptical, and that this detainee camp journal is posted on a conspiracy site makes me suspicious. But as far as I can tell (I’m no Photoshop expert), the pictures and the narrative are genuine.

If this is really true, it would appear the government is setting up prison camps for the poor and homeless people who were unlucky enough to live in Katrina’s path.

This is simply unacceptable. Those who lived near the Soviet Gulags and the Nazi extermination camps claimed they did not protest because they did not know. If this turns out to be true, we must protest loudly and consistently.

The second and third links are stories from the New York Times. First, that some people in the GOP have seen the storm as an opportunity to advance their social policy: tuition vouchers for evacuees attending private schools, an attack on “prevailing wage” laws, and a fast-track green light for industry. Given that we have made no informed decision as a country on how and where to rebuild New Orleans, the other overdeveloped coastal areas, and the wetlands between the city and the Gulf of Mexico, the fast track for new construction is a concern.

Don’t get me wrong. Like everyone else, I want to see jobs created, infrastructure rebuilt, and some sense of normalcy restored. But I want to make sure we treat these delicate and storm-prone coastlines and wetlands with respect, and that we think long and hard about how and where to build without just rushing blindly forward to destroy more of the barrier islands and wetlands and places where no sane person would build.

Coming on the heels of what we now know about how first, the Bush administration repeatedly slashed budgets for shoring up the levees, second, stood idly by as the hurricane swept in, and third, completely mismanaged the disaster response (where they do share the blame with local officials), it’s particularly scary. Did you know that while the government was doing essentially nothing to get ready, Wal-Mart mobilized a fleet of trucks, filled them with relief supplies, and positioned them close by but outside storm range so they could respond instantly? I am, to put it mildly, not generally a fan of Wal-Mart–but in this case they were terrific. And if they could be so organized, surely the federal, state, and local governments could have done a lot to minimize the catastrophe.

Finally, the article about high-powered well-connected lobbyists lining up to make sure their clients have a place at the trough. The story, by John Broder, says,

Hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts have already been let
and billions more are to flow to the private sector in the weeks and months
to come. Congress has already appropriated more than $62 billion for an
effort that is projected to cost well over $100 billion.

Some experts warn that the crisis atmosphere and the open federal purse are
a bonanza for lobbyists and private companies and are likely to lead to the
contract abuses, cronyism and waste that numerous investigations have
uncovered in post-war Iraq.

Not surprisingly, Halliburton has already pushed to the front of the line; its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary landed a $500 million contract. Yes, these companies are capable of doing the work. But the ethics questions are, to say the least, troubling given the sordid history of these companies in Iraq and elsewhere, and their close ties to the Bush administration.

All in all, the whole thing–the situation that these three articles each reveal one slice of–is very troubling: a triple attack on America’s core values of decency, democracy, and charity.

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By Posted on Posted in Events, General Commentary

Like everyone else, I am horrified by the devastation in New Orleans and Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast. Frugal, I would point out, does not mean stingy. I made a generous donation to the Red Cross and notified someone who was offering to match the gift (he has reached his maximum–this was a friend, not a company). Even if you feel tapped out after whatever you gave after last winter’s tsunami, I hope you find room in your heart to open up and give again.

I have been to New Orleans and experienced its grace and charm–but also its grinding poverty and the big disparity between the successful and the have-nots, more glaring than anywhere else I’ve been in this country. It is the poor who were left behind during the evacuation, and who were met by the pathetic and inadequate response of a government that had several days to prepare, and didn’t make it a priority–in fact, a government that had systematically cut funding for repairing the levees, months ago, even as the city has been sinking for decades and even before Katrina, was well below sea-level. This is nothing short of a crime against the American people.

My hope is that A New New Orleans can be created, but not in the same spot. There must be some higher ground nearby where a new city can be built. And wouldn’t it be great if that city was created by planners who really understand the challenges of the 21st century: who design in such a way that not only does the city have the grace and charm of the (still miraculously surviving) French Quarter, but that it’s built to be sustainable environmentally, socially, and economically: that it’s designed from the ground up to create neighborhoods that people *want* to live in, that it’s set up with shopping and traffic patterns that minimize the need to use cars, that’s it’s built on a human scale and using the latest renewable energy techniques to have the whole city live lightly on the land and be as food and energy self-sufficient as possible.

That would be the best memorial to those who were swept away in the rising tides.
.
If any of you have newsletters aimed at writers, there’s an incentive immediately following from my colleague, Dee Power–please go ahead and reprint it.

As you may know we have started a fund raiser for the Red Cross, so far it’s raised
over $1000. If you publish a newsletter, belong to a discussion group or bulletin
board, would you consider including this announcement.

******************************
Help Us Help The Red Cross

Make a donation of any size to the American Red Cross and we will give you our list
of 300 literary agents with names, addresses, and email addresses, a list of nearly 200
newspaper and freelance book editors and reviewers, the email addresses over 500
independent bookstores, and a format for a press kit and news release. Make your
donation at the Red Cross Website https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.aspbews

by credit card or send your check to American Red Cross P.O. Box 37243
Washington, D.C. 20013 or call (1-800-435-7669).

After you’ve made your donation, email offer@brianhillanddeepower.com Please
include your first name and it would be nice if you would tell us the amount of your
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Please pass this message on.
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Thanks Dee

https://www.BrianHillAndDeePower.com Dee Power (Ms.) is co-author with Brian Hill of “The Making of a Bestseller: Success Stories from Authors and the Editors, Agents, and Booksellers Behind Them” March 2005, Dearborn Trade, ISBN 0793193087 Coming October 2005, “Over Time,” the novel, ISBN 0974075418

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Media Ethics

https://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/18/Floridian/Media_s_quest_for_div.shtml

Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times (who happens to be black) wrote this thought-provoking article about the dearth of people of color in positions of high visibility within the news industry, and how that plays out.

Among other effects, he finds the massive coverage of various white women’s disappearances hard to justify in light of the acute lack of coverage when a black woman goes missing.

And one can speculate (he doesn’t, in this article) about the often-negative portrayal of communities of color, especially inner-city ones–where the news coverage often focuses on crime and rarely talks about all the good community building going on.

Theses issues were expressed somewhat during the recent National Conference on Media Reform, which I covered extensively.

But Deggans also rightly points out that the major networks have had a massive defection of their most visible talent: “And despite an astonishing changing of the guard in network news that has seen Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel all leaving their high-profile jobs this year, no black person has surfaced as a realistic candidate to replace any of them.”

Sometimes, 1960 doesn’t seem so long ago. surely, as a society, we can do better.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary

World Business Council for Sustainable Development just released the highlights of its 2005 global sustainability study. And what jumped out to me is the sharp decline in ratings for Scandinavia, the European Union, the US, and Canada for successful management of the transition to sustainability (broadly defined along the “triple bottom line” criteria of environmental, social responsibility, and economic performance). Scandinavia still leads the pack, at 59 percent, but in 2002, the rating was 83 percent. EU: 23 percent this year, 37 percent in 2002; Canada from 25 percent down to 12 percent; and the US, from an already measly 4 percent down to just 1 percent. Japan, on the other hand, boosted its performance form 20 percent up to 25 percent. Brazil, China, and India were rated for the first time this year, all of them in the single digits.

In the government-supported US climate of Money Uber Alles, it’s not surprising that the US has fallen off. And the EU has just absorbed a lot of former East Bloc countries that are still recovering from the traditional neglect of human factors under their old authoritarian regimes. But what, I wonder, happened to socially progressive Scandinavia, with its strong safety net and seeming immunity from major business scandals? Have these counties backslid, or are their populations simply judging them by tougher standards?

Of course, in my book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I show how a concern for the triple bottom line builds the economic success of a company in the long run. And isn’t that what sustainability is really about?

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By Posted on Posted in Events, General Commentary

Happy Independence Day to all readers in the US. Happy Interdependence Day to all citizens of the world, including those in the US

Yesterday, just in time for the 4th of July, I was amazed and astounded to see this comment on a discussion list where I participate actively:

“Too bad the Libs of this list will always turn a blind eye to truth and historical perspective, glaze over facts, and continue on with their anti-Bush, anti-military and anti-American agenda.”

As one of those so-called Libs, I responded thusly:

I’m not going to let that little bit of foolish namecalling go by. I will let the other lefties on this list speak for themselves–and speaking for myself, I am very definitely motivated by patriotism. I want to make this great country the best it can be–even as every government of my conscious lifetime has been a deep disappointment. You have no business assailing the patriotism of those who disagree with you; that’s a trick out of the fascist and totalitarian-Marxist playbooks. In fact, the compulsive need to attack dissent as unpatriotic is one of the deep concerns I have about the Bush administration. This country developed the best system of government that had been tried at that time, 229 years ago.

I have made choices to spent a significant portion of my time–of my life–trying to keep this country on a mission of social justice, environmental stewardship, and peace. I act out of love for my country. I could have used that time instead to pursue endless material wealth and the hell with anyone in my way, or to tear down our entire social structure and replace it with something nastier. But I am a patriot. I am motivated by my love of this country and my sincere desire to see it live up to its potential.

I do not see the following actions as patriotic, but as destroying the very fabric of our system, and also destroying our positive perception by the rest of the world. It is Bush and his henchmen/puppeteers who have created a “rogue state,” and as a Patriotic American, I consider it my duty to do what I can to reverse the damage:

  • Violating international law in order to fight the oil-and-testosterone war in Iraq (and in the process create the terror network they claimed was there to begin with, but wasn’t
  • Lying to the American people, and the world, repeatedly
  • Blowing a CIA agent’s cover because her husband, a US Ambassador, turned in an honest report debunking the whole thing when he was asked to investigate whether Saddam was buying uranium from Niger
  • Attacking the First Amendment with a ferocity not even seen in the dark days of the Nixon administration
  • Tearing up the environmental and financial checks on big business that were carefully negotiated over a period of many years, and damn the consequences
  • Letting crooked and greedy people with vested interests like Enron’s Ken Lay create policy (he was on Cheney’s energy task force, you’ll recall)–and in turn, creating policy that directly and corruptly benefits their cronies in the private sector (one need only look at Dick Cheney’s own company, Halliburton, and its amazing ability to win no-bid and highly lucrative contracts, even after it was shown that the company was mismanaging the contracts it already had, at substantial cost to the American taxpayer
  • Refusing to accept intelligence reports if they ran counter to the hoped-for findings–not letting truth get in the way
  • Condoning torture at the highest levels

I submit that true patriots are opposing the hostile takeover and destruction of our system of government by the radical-right fringe now in power. And BTW, I still do not grant that either the 2000 or the 2004 election was actually conducted honestly. Bush’s presidency will always be under a cloud. Compare what happened in Florida in 00 and in Ohio in 04–both situations in which the senior official in charge of the election, the Secretary of State, happened to be a senior leader in that state’s Bush campaign (something that shocks my European friends) with what happened in the Ukraine this past winter, when extremely similar voting irregularities brought hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets and forced the government to do the election over. It is a sad commentary on the American people that we allowed our presidential election to be stolen not once but twice.

[I quoted the original poster, who claimed that the torturers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were acting alone and were already being disciplined, and that the Newsweek article “fuel the fire for anti-Americanism around the world,” and that we should not blame Bush or Rumsfeld for the bad behavior of a handful of soldiers.”]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but there’s substantial evidence that the highest levels of this administration deliberately developed policies based on torture. I am talking about Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and by implication, Bush. Under the Nuremberg and Serbia precedents, among others, these men are war criminals.

As for the Newsweek article; they were merely reporting what had been widely known–in fact, the story of Koran abuse surfaced at least as far back as March, 2004. I don’t condone the riots in Afghanistan, but it was not Newsweek that caused it–it was the desecration of another religion’s holy books. I’ve blogged on this at some length at and

And on that note, I again wish you all a very happy 4th–one that is informed by the same principles of struggle for justice that imbued the Founding Fathers with such spirit, and left us a vital legacy of democracy. Let’s reclaim that proud heritage.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Other

Nuclear power is a dirty and dangerous way to generate electricity, and no amount of PR-industry hype is going to change that. But they’re sure trying!

https://www.prwatch.org/node/3679

Back in 1974–31 years ago–as a student at Antioch College, I had a class assignment to do an independent research project on the plusses and minuses of nuclear power generation. I came into this with a relatively open mind–and I came away scared. Keep in mind, this was before Seabrook, before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and before there was any kind of world-wide anti-nuclear movement.

But there was plenty of research out there. The more I read, the more I became convinced that nuclear power is dangerous, unhealthful, and even uneconomical, out of all proportion to the supposed “benefits.” In 1979, I even wrote my first book on the subject (a long-out-of-print volume called Nuclear Lessons, co-authored with Richard Curtis and Elizabeth Hogan, who had written Perils of the Peaceful Atom back in 1969).

A few among many issues:

  • Accidents. We didn’t hear about them, probably because the national movement for safe energy had not yet coalesced–but there were serious accidents at the Enrico Fermi reactor in Michigan in 1966, and Browns Ferry, Alabama, in 1975–and a deeply disturbing record of thousands of minor incidents at plants all over the country, many of which could have become severe had one or two factors gone differently.
  • Insurance. The only reason there is a nuclear power industry in the US is because of a heavily subsidized limited-liability insurance program called the Price-Anderson Act. When the utilities would have been held responsible for full damage in the event of an accident, they simply refused to build, even when the government threatened to get into the power business and do it without industry cooperation.
  • Health and Environment. The radioactivity associated with nuclear power generation is known to cause cancer. Workers in the industry have had much higher incidences of problems. And it’s not even true that there are no global warming issues associated with nukes. The plants use bodies of water for cooling, and that water is re-released into the environment at a much hotter temperature, disrupting fish lifecycles and warming the water.
  • Waste Disposal. Highly toxic, carcinogenic nuclear wastes have to be kept safe and isolated from the environment–and from terrorists–for up to 250,000 years. To put that in perspective, there was essentially zero human civilization until about 30,000 years ago, and no urban culture until about 10,000 years ago.
  • Economics. Believe it or not, looking at the entire mining-milling-transportation-consumption-disposal cycle, nuclear energy consumes more power than it produces! So all this risk is for no benefit. And because it’s extremely capital-intensive, nuclear power produces relatively few jobs. How stupid can we be?

This societal stupidity is even more bizarre in light of the easy, environmentally benign alternatives: solar, small-scale wind and hydro, etc. We’ve had these technologies for years. We could be entirely energy self-sufficient without using any nuclear or fossil fuels, had we made a society-wide commitment to that goal back in 1974 when I was doing my research. And oh yes, I don’t think we’d be at war in Iraq now if oil were a non-issue.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary

On the surface, a flamboyant pop star has little to do with an accounting firm: the epitome of corporate conservatism.

But the accounting firm we’re talking about is Arthur Andersen, and the way its auditors let Enron’s top execs bring down both companies hardly fits my standard of fiscal conservatism.

Anyway, the comparison isn’t about lifestyle or philosophy. It’s about the notion that being cleared in a court of law doesn’t necessarily mean you’re actually innocent.

Michael Jackson was not found guilty. He may or may not have molested children–I don’t have the knowledge to say, one way or the other. He certainly used bad judgment to share his bed with them–but the jury’s decision rested not on whether or not he committed the act, but whether the government had proven its case beyond reasonable doubt. Given the lack of credibility of one of the prosecution’s chief witnesses, the jury found that the government had not put forth an ironclad case.

And the Supreme Court, late last month, found not that Arthur Andersen wasn’t culpable for its destruction of documents, but that the judge had given faulty instructions to the jury, and thus the guilty verdict was thrown out.

Lawyers for both Michael Jackson and Arthur Andersen were quick to hail the court decisions as clearing their clients’ names, and Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling’s lawyer quickly made the claim that his client’s case was strengthened. But the Andersen jury foreman, Oscar Criner, called the Supreme Court’s ruling “a grave error” (as reported in Enron’s hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle:
https://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/3204884 )

But in fact, neither decision addressed the defendant’s guilt or innocence. All that has happened is that a jury in one case and a panel of judges in the other found that the government did not make a strong enough case for wrongful intent.

Arthur Andersen first allowed Enron’s highly questionable accounting practices and then, as the SEC was preparing to investigate, destroyed the documents about the case. Michael Jackson shared his bed with teenage boys. While they were not guilty in the eyes of the law, the ethical questions remain in both cases. Failing to find that an action is criminal is not the same thing as finding that a defendant acted with ethics, with honor, and with good intent. It merely shows that the standard of proof was not met.

Legality and ethics are not always the same. Let’s keep that in mind as the Enron trials proceed.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Other

https://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21878/

This author gives the credit for the Dems’ sudden discovery of backbone (over Social Security, Terry Shiavo, and even some of Bush’s particularly over-the-edge nominations) to independent media, and particularly liberal AM talk radio, e.g., Al Franken.

Well, I listened to Air America, and read Alternet and Truthout and Greg Palast and a lot of others, all the way through GWB’s first term (well, OK, Air America was a late arrival–but well before the election, during which the Dems continued to show a complete lack of spine). The stuff was out there all along.

My feeling is that it may actually have more to do with a lot of the mainstream news bigwigs, including the New York Times and Washington Post, admitting that they were hornswaggled in the run-up to the war, and finally beginning to *function again as a proper press does*: questioning everything and investigating until the truth can be discovered.

But I’d like to know your thoughts: Readers–why have the Democrats finally begun to turn into an actual opposition party? And why did they give GWB a free ride in his first term, despite his radical-right actions that are far out of the social mainstream? And why did the media so seldom question any of it until recently?

And why, for heaven’s sake, is there not a mass movement in the streets to protest both the stolen elections and the imposition of this very undemocratic government?

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