Category: Social and Economic Justice

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

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

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

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

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

But there was also controversy about several other areas:

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

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

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

The Sky Won’t Fall

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

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

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

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

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

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Peace and War, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On a LinkedIn discussion board, someone asked, “So, why has bettering the world become a mantra for a new generation of entrepreneurs?”

This sparked a very lively discussion, mixing the cynics and the optimists.

You can view this discussion here (you might have to join the group first).

My first comment was quick and straightforward, discussing my new work at Business For a Better World:

I’m 57 years old, been in business since 1981, and my business has *always* been about fostering a better world. This year, I took it further, beginning a campaign to show business how solving hunger, poverty, war, climate catastrophe, etc. is not only the right thing to do, but can be highly profitable (and we actually already have a lot of the technology to make it possible).

But as others responded, I felt a need to go deeper, and I want to share my responses to two of them with you:

Tim asked, “…If these entrepreneurs are so hot on giving to humanity, why not put their technologies in the public domain? There’s a topic for debate: Which is the better outcome, the Gates Foundation or Wikipedia?…”

Tim  – great question! The Gates example has always interested me, in that it follows the pattern of 100-150 years ago, when predatory ubercapitalists like Carnegie and Rockefeller began to seek out a higher purpose later in life and became uberphilanthropists–yes, some of Microsoft’s practices were quite predatory under Gates’ leadership. I can’t think of an equally prominent example in the years between the “Robber Barons” and Gates. (I also think Melinda may have had a lot to do with Gates finding HIS higher purpose–but he has fully embraced it and discovered it provides meaning in his life.) Most towns in my area of New England are still using little public libraries built with Carnegie money.

Warren Buffett is another very interesting example, but his choices and motivations, I suspect, were very different. Buffett never seemed to care personally about accumulating wealth to “better” his own life. He still lives in the simple ranch house he bought in the 1950s. And as far as I know, Berkshire Hathaway under his leadership was not a predatory company. It didn’t shock me when he gave away most of is fortune–to the Gates Foundation (which kind of brings this discussion full-circle).

But I propose that it is possible to be socially conscious from the get-go AND do quite well financially, and that getting wealthy is not a sin. Prominent examples include ice cream superstars Ben Cohen and Jerry Silverman, Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, and many others. I suspect the Chicken Soup guys (Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen) are in this category; they do not shy away from the trappings of wealth–but they also find many ways to use their wealth to better the world. Jack I know for sure started from very humble beginnings; I have no clue about Mark’s early years, nor can I quickly find anything in public sources.

Jennifer commented, “…The world is in crisis – how do we milk it for all it has now people are focusing on the bad guys that have put the world in crisis. ‘We make the world seem like we care’ – new market. But hang on – ‘we kind of do care – well some of us anyway’ – but hang on ‘the global village concept doesn’t seem to be working’ – Ok; so now what?

Let’s make the world betterment program a thing for entrepreneurs – get rich while you increase people hopes even though those hopes are false…”

Jennifer  – Yours is one of several cynical posts in this discussion, but yours is ambivalent while the others are pretty much set in stone. So I choose to engage with you. I think we need to harness the cynicism and skepticism about business’ ulterior motives to create the action we want, despite our suspicion of their motives. For me, seeking personal wealth has never been as important as making the world better. My millionaire colleagues would laugh at my income. Let them laugh! As long as I can motivate them to make a difference.

I am personally very cynical about the ability to solve our biggest problems–hunger and poverty, war and violence, catastrophic climate change–based on the ways we’ve always done it. Too often, we’ve tried to motivate on guilt, fear, and shame–and it doesn’t work.

So I’m taking a leaf from the libertarians and ubercapitalists and attempting to motivate based on self-interest. If your goal is personal material wealth and I can show you how to realize that goal by seizing the opportunity to make money, and the work that governments and NGOs have failed to do gets done, then fine, take your fortune and go live in your big house. Think about a super-profit-driven company like Walmart: not exactly a tree-hugger hangout. But Walmart realized years ago that there was a lot of money to be made selling organic foods, low-watt lightbulbs and other green products–and a lot of money to be saved implementing green into its own operations, deeply. I have many issues with Walmart in other areas, but on the environment, I give them BIG props. Working from the profit motive, they have done more to spread green consciousness *and* green *practices* through society than I have in a lifetime of speaking and writing and consulting.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, language, media-general, Politics, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

A libertarian participant on a LinkedIn discussion group posted,

how does business do anything to make you miserable ??

dont like their products then dont buy them

without biz making those things you would [be] naked growing your own vegetables in the wilderness

My response:

William: I know you espouse libertarianism but I don’t think of you as naive. I was once a member of the Libertarian Party, and still see a great deal of merit in libertarian approach to foreign policy as well as civil liberties; I would love to see Ron Paul as US Secretary of Defense, because if HE were willing to go to war, the situation must be dire indeed. But when you write,

You come across as VERY naive. Or are you pulling our collective (yes, a loaded word in libertarian circles) chain?

Consider…there are many corporations that do great things, create reasonably enjoyable workplaces, and work to heal the planet. BUT, worldwide, there are others that 1) create utter misery for their employees (think about the sweatshop workers in the factory that burned in Bangladesh a year or two ago); 2) pollute and destroy the neighborhoods they’re located in, causing severe adverse health effects for their neighbors and others; 3) rape the earth for their raw materials and then dump the toxic leftovers back on the poor, beleaguered planet, taking no responsibility for their actions.

You will say to #1 that no one forces people to work in slave conditions; they could just go off and start their own business if they don’t want to work for “The Man.” I did that, and from your ID line, it looks like you did, too. But that’s disingenuous. Not everybody can think through that alternative, not everybody has access to even a sliver of capital. If you’re making barely enough to keep your family from starving and from being thrown out of your one-room shack, even a few bucks will be too much.

I started my own business with $200. I was pretty poor at the time, but I did have the $200 (and even a bit more) in the bank. And I had to survive during the very lean start-up phase. At the time (1981), I knew almost nothing about marketing and was in a community that had little use for the service I was offering. I made $300 the first 6 months—before we moved to a more supportive community—and lived on a mix of rapidly depleting savings, odd-job income, and what my wife-to-be brought in from her meager job at a restaurant. But I had that luxury! I had a couple of thousand in the bank that I could draw from. Many people in developing countries, or even in our own inner cities and poor rural areas, do not. If they have no job and they start a business that isn’t immediately viable, how do they eat?

I would have more respect for the libertarian position if it accepted responsibility for #s 2 and 3. But libertarians discredit themselves with me when they claim that it’s their right to plunder the earth because they got there first, and that it’s perfectly OK to extract the resources, pollute and dump wastes just because of that arbitrary fact.I don’t object to profit; I make a chunk of my living writing and speaking about how to be a better capitalist, after all. But I have no respect for businesses that claim they have every right to privatize their profit while externalizing—dare I say socializing—the harm. A true libertarian would see overharvesting and pollution/dumping as theft from others, forcing them to incur economic costs to clean up someone else’s mess. But somehow, the libertarians I know sound a theme more like “we got here first, too bad for the rest of you, and the mess is not our problem.”

Libertarians often cite economist Milton Friedman on the social responsibility of business to maximize profits. However, even Friedman saw a need to limit business. I went back to the source: his New York Times Magazine essay of September 13, 1970. And to my amazement, I found that Friedman added some major conditions to his remarks. Here’s what he actually said:

In a free-enterprise, private-property sys­tem, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct re­sponsibility to his employers. That responsi­bility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while con­forming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. (emphasis added)

At the very end of the essay, he quotes from his own textbook and repeats the qualifier, phrased a bit differently:

“there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use [its] resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” (emphasis added once more)

To put it another way, in this essay, Friedman was totally willing to concede that self-rule doesn’t always work in the business world. Government is needed to keep business from exercising its self-interest at the expense of others’ self-interest and the wide society’s interest. Whether it’s a retailer avoiding the cost of health insurance by paying its workers so little that they qualify for government assistance or a manufacturer spewing poisons into the air and water and land, expecting that the government—in other words, the taxpayers: we the people—to clean it up,  I would definitely count as “deception or fraud”: the externalizing of responsibility for the mess.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

When Bank of America bought Countrywide Bank for $2.5 billion in 2008, it inherited Countrywide’s infamous toxic mortgage policies.

By 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that the acquisition had already racked up $20.6 billion in charges related to Countrywide’s shady mortgage practices:$8.5 billion to investors, $5.5 billion into a defective-mortgage payback fund to cover future claims, and $6.6 billion in various other costs.

And now there’s more bad news for the company’s shareholders: a $16.65 billion settlement with the Justice Department over the Countrywide mortgages. And let’s not forget the legal bill, now around $70 billion, not to mention the possibility of criminal prosecutions.

In short, Countrywide’s disgusting practices have now cost Bank of America over $107 billion: more than 50 times the acquisition price.

Lessons to businesses:
1. Business ethics is a lot cheaper than predatory practices
2. Be very careful when you buy toxic “assets” that turn out to be big liabilities

I’ve been making the case since at least 2002 that green and ethical business practices are more profitable than crooked ones. If you’d like to know more, please pick up a copy of my . It’s been on the best-seller list at least 32 months, so I guess people find it pretty useful.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

A front-page story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that a court ordered a utility company to buy the organic grass-fed cattle farm it ruined by driving a powerline through it. Nice to see David beat Goliath every once in a while.

Hmmm. Maybe this strategy can be applied (at least in Minnesota) by organic farmers suffering the double indignity of losing their organic status because of contamination by GMO plants from nearby farms, and then getting sued by Monsanto for illegally using the seed they didn’t want in the first place.

But a far better solution, of course, is to develop projects in ways that don’t threaten organic farms. We need more of those, not less.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, censorship, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, language, Marketing Trends/News, poverty, privacy, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

Very interesting post on Business Week: “Can Small Businesses Start a Gay Rights Movement in Mississippi?”

I totally support nondiscrimination in any public accommodation or retail setting—and I’m delighted to see the “We don’t discriminate. If you’re buying, we’re selling” campaign in Mississippi. But at the risk of alienating some of my friends, l think service businesses–especially values-based ones—are a different case. Before you jump all over me—read the language I send to new prospects for my marketing and consulting services:

Please note that I reserve the right to reject a project if I feel I’m not the right person for it. This would include projects that in my opinion promote racism, homophobia, bigotry or violence–or that promote the tobacco, nuclear power, or weapons industries–or if I do not feel the product is of high enough quality that I can get enthusiastic about it.

Notice that this language doesn’t discriminate against a person or class of people–but it certainly does discriminate against a set of beliefs.

Now, if I reserve that privilege for myself, how can I possibly justify withholding it from someone else who runs a service business and has different values than mine?

Also, there’s a provider quality issue. If I were forced to write a piece of marketing copy for a product whose values I despised, I would do a terrible job. Even if I consciously tried to do my best, it would come out shoddy and insincere, because I wouldn’t believe in what I was promoting. By the same token, I can’t imagine why a same-sex couple would WANT to hire a homophobic wedding photographer (one of the examples cited in the article); the pictures will be terrible.

If you’re renting a room, buying a sandwich, riding a bus, patronizing a theme park…yes, you should have the right to be served. But if a service provider is being asked to use specialized skills to support a cause that service provider finds morally repugnant, I’m not at all sure we should coerce that behavior.

Please comment below. I’d love to get some good dialog going on this.

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By Posted on Posted in Events, General Commentary, localism/locavore, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

I choose not to participate in the always-crowded and frequently violent orgy of consumerism called Black Friday. I do my best to shop locally most of the time, I don’t like crowed craziness, and I know Black Friday is not really a help to local small businesses that can’t afford to deep-discount.

There’s an alternative celebration on the day after US Thanksgiving that resonates more with me: Buy Nothing Day: 24 hours without any purchasing activity. I can’t always do it; sometimes the gas tank is empty or I’m flying home from Thanksgiving in another part of the country. But this year, I see no reason to spend any money today.

Wikipedia has a nice page on the history of Buy Nothing Day and some creative incarnations of anti-consumerism.

Meanwhile, society at large is going in the opposite direction. I was really hoping that the big-box store openings would be a flop. Unfortunately, there were big crowds leaving their families to chase down bargains. This, I see as a blow against workers’ rights. I very much doubt that all the employees working yesterday were volunteering to work on a holiday. In fact, there are demonstrations at Walmarts all over the country today, protesting this encroachment on workers’ family time. In my area of Western Massachusetts, it’ll be 3 p.m. at the Walmart in Hadley.

 

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

Progressives can be a gloomy lot. Too often, we focus on all the things wrong with society, all the problems we need to fix. I say “we,” because I’ve certainly done my share of that global kvetch.

But every once in a while, we actually win a major victory. I’ve been actively involved in a few of them, and I have to tell you, they feel great.

One of my favorite members of Congress, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla) knows the importance of celebrating our victories. He sent out an e-mail with the headline, “Hey, We Progressives Won Something.”

I opened the e-mail and discovered what we won: we didn’t go to war against Syria. And Syria destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile, under international supervision. The massive outcry of opposition certainly helped us get there.

Grayson gives us a lot to celebrate:

Let’s celebrate the war that never happened.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to hold sad and somber funerals for young Americans who would have lost their lives fighting in Syria.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to nurse and care for the wounded veterans who would have returned from the U.S.-Syrian war.

Let’s celebrate Congress NOT having to appropriate billions of tax dollars in emergency spending to support U.S. military operations in Syria.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to attend bitter marches protesting the U.S. war in Syria.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to rebuild Syria’s roads and bridges and schools, so that we can have a shot at rebuilding our own.

Let’s celebrate peace.

We won the battle, and the military-industrial complex lost the war.

We should be proud of our victories, because our victories matter. I know that politics sometimes can seem discouraging right now. Progressive often seem to lose, and lose frequently. But, you know what? Sometimes we win. And when we win, we save lives. We promote equality. We serve the cause of justice. We improve people’s lives.

(You can read Alan Grayson’s whole essay at this blog.)

Indeed, we do! Our actions–as individuals, and especially when we band together–actually do make a difference. Think how much poorer the world would be if the likes of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walensa, Wangari Maathai (the tree-planting woman of Kenya, who won a Nobel Prize for her work establishing a greenbelt in her country), Gandhi, Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn, and Martin Luther King, Jr. had not walked it.

And you don’t need to be an activist. The world is richer for the presence of scientists like the brilliant energy strategist Amory Lovins, who is still very much alive–and Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, and George Washington Carver, who are not…writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alice Walker, and even Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield (his The Success Principles is the one self-help book I regularly recommend)…and ordinary people whose names you won’t recognize, who turned their lives into blessings for the world. I’m going to honor one of those unknown heroes by name: my late mother, Gloria Yoshida, who was a civil rights volunteer in the 1960s. If a black person was told an apartment had already been rented, my 5’3″ white, Jewish mom was one of the people who would go and try to rent it afterwards. I remember her yelling at our own landlord, who towered over her, and looked pretty ashamed as she lit into him because “you just don’t want to rent to them because they’re black.”

That family history made it easier for me to take on a long list of causes over the past 40 years–even organizing the movement that saved a threatened mountain while all the “experts” said “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.”

What are YOU doing to make the world better? Please share in the comments section, below.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Politics, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

I revisited a post I’d written on election reform, back in 2007. In that post, I listed seven specific steps the United States could take to make its elections more representative and relevant.

But I left out a huge one—did I think back then, that it was so obvious it didn’t need to be listed?

Getting. Money. Out. Of. Politics.

That means not only repealing the wretched anti-democratic Citizens United decision, but much more. It means making politicians once again responsible to the people, and not to well-funded lobbyists. It probably means public funding of candidates, and limits on the dollars that can be spent. Ideally, it would mean an end to TV advertising of smear ads, and replacing them with a list of candidate websites (not just the largest parties but any party that achieves an agreed threshold of support) where people could learn the candidate’s positions on actual issues—in more depth than attack sound bites.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

I hope Obama and the Democrats learn their lesson. when they refuse to comprise on things that should not be compromised on, when they stand up for their principles, they win.

What a great president he might have been (and perhaps still could be) if he had figured that out in 2009. There is a difference between conciliation and giving away the store, and every time he kowtowed, the other side saw him as weak, and took out their lances again to whittle things down even further.

Of course, it helped that progressives and liberals came out in force to tell him he was doing the right thing. One of the lessons Obama should have taken from the 2008 election campaign is that he can organize a large constituency that “has his back.” and we progressives can also organize to push him leftward when he dirfts like a rudderless boat in the face of pressure from the right.

We have to remember that Obamacare was a Heritage Foundation invention. The left wanted single-payer, which Obama refused to even discuss.

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