Category: Social and Economic Justice

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics-International, Social and Economic Justice

The company that so many of us love to hate has started addressing some of the reasons why I won’t do business with them. This short article by Mallen Baker shows progress on both labor standards and energy. Reprinted in full with Mallen’s generous permission.

This is big news, as my understanding is a major part of why so much of the US economy picked up and moved to Asia is Wal-Mart’s constant demand that suppliers reduce the price 10% every year. About time it started adding some social responsibility to its demands.

Wal-Mart has told a meeting of its Chinese suppliers that social and environmental standards will need to be raised to help the company meet its goals and to move forward in the wake of the milk poisoning scandal that has left many Chinese children still in hospital.

The company’s requirements will aim to improve energy efficiency, with a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency required of the top 200 suppliers, full disclosure of locations of factories including sub-contractors, and product improvements in terms of energy ratings.

Wal-Mart said that many of the measures would be good for suppliers, helping them to save money by reducing waste. But in any case, it made a direct link between the quality of products and whether or not a supplier cheated on overtime or used child labour, or dumped polluting waste.

In return, the company has said it will change the nature of its relationship with Asian suppliers, aiming to develop deeper long-term relationships to mutual benefit, rather than focusing simply on the price of each transaction.

Overall, I continue to be highly critical of Wal-Mart, but glad to see the company moving forward. I think this is only the third time I had anything good to say about Wal-Mart in this space. The first was after Katrina, when the company stepped in to do what the federal government should have done. And the second was almost two years ago, regarding one of the company’s other energy saving initiatives.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Social and Economic Justice

Am I the only one outraged by this total misuse of taxpayer dollars? The companies that just got that $700 billion bailout are supposed to use this money to revitalize the stagnant loan market and kickstart the economy. Hello! This is OUR money you’re squandering!

  • Shareholders are lining up at the trough to capture dividends–and AIG doesn’t even know how it blew through its tax-funded payday. How can these companies take taxpayer money, claim it’s an emergency, and then pay dividends? Where is the shared risk?
  • CEOs and high executives at these companies are still expecting to take home mammoth compensation packages, after running their companies into the ground. Is it so unreasonable to expect these crooks to live on, say, three times the pay of a teacher, rather than 300 times?
  • Oh yes, and then there are the lavish parties and sales events that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn’t this a place to cut back when you have your hand in the public’s pocket?

    • And meanwhile, thousands of honest, hardworking people without financial savvy are losing their homes to foreclosure, often related to actions like balloon payments built into mortgages they didn’t comprehend, drawn up by these same companies. Can you say “taxpayer revolt”?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media

    Does your skin crawl every time you hear Ann Coulter, William Bennett or some other radical-right wingnut savor the pleasure of saying “Barack HUSSEIN Obama”

    Did you take pleasure in learning the famous story of World War II Denmark, when the Nazis ordered all the Jews to wear yellow stars–and the King of Denmark proudly pinned one on, as did many of his countryfolk?

    Well, we’re not alone. Mark Hussein Gordon, of sonomacreative.com, has set up a Facebook group called Hussein is my name too! All you have to do is join, change your middle name in your profile, and remember to change it back after the election, and you can show solidarity both with Barack and with the Arab and Muslim communities by being Hussein for a couple of weeks.

    I think this is brilliant. And I thank Robin Hussein Blum for drawing it to my attention.
    Shel Hussein Horowitz

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice

    By Shel Horowitz
    This post is in three parts:

  • My Personal Poverty Story
  • What’s Wrong Right Now
  • Prescription to End Poverty

    • 7000 bloggers are joining together today to talk about one issue: poverty. I’m proud to be one of those 7000.

    My Personal Poverty Story
    Poverty is something I know something about, first-hand. In the 1970s and early 1980s, I was desperately poor, and for a portion of that time, on food stamps. I jokingly refer to those years as the “research phase” for my e-book, “The Penny-Pinching Hedonist.” But I didn’t just pinch those pennies. I squeezed them so hard it might have drawn blood, if pennies could bleed.

    When I got a job as a VISTA Volunteer community organizer, with the princely salary of $82 per week (and they let me keep getting food stamps), it was a major step UP the economic ladder for me; before that, I’d been working a single day a week in a neighborhood fruit store. I seem to remember that I earned $15 for those shifts, but that would have been below minimum wage even then, so it must have been more like $26.

    I do know that I thought long and hard about every discretionary purchase other than food; with the food stamps, I didn’t have to worry about that, at least. But if I could get around New York City by bike instead of subway, I did–all over Brooklyn, where I was living and where I was charged to build the local Gray Panther chapter, and lower Manhattan, where my community organizing office was. If I could find clothing at a thrift shop, I did–even if it didn’t fit quite right. I found entertainment like poetry readings, that didn’t cost anything. I read the books and listened to the records I already had, on a stereo I’d bought used while a college student.

    Even then, I knew I was lucky. All around me, I saw people who were trying to support a family; I had no dependents. I saw people being forced out of rent-controlled apartments so that landlords could quadruple the price under vacancy decontrol; I had found a small apartment in a warehouse district that I shared with a friend; my half was only $150, which meant that once I got the organizing job, I was able to earn back the cost of housing in less than two weeks and have the other two weeks’ pay to live on for the month. Before that, I’d been paying the rent out of small and precariously dropping savings since losing the entry-level corporate job that had brought me to New York. And even during that time of unemployment, I scraped by enough that I didn’t have to deal with the intimidating and humiliating welfare bureaucracy; the food stamp office was far more humane, according to my friends who’d been through the welfare system.

    Gradually, in the 1980s, I moved out of the city, started the business I still run, and eventually got to a living wage, and then out of poverty.

    What’s Wrong Right Now
    But I still get very angry when I hear politicians and toxic talk show hosts who have no first-hand knowledge of poverty ranting about welfare cheats while passing out massive subsidies to their friends and funders at the very top of the economic ladder.

    And it shocks me that we’ve allowed the disparity between the poorest and the richest to go totally haywire, much like the Latin American dictatorships we always heard about in the 1970s and 80s. CEOs take home nine-figure compensation packages, while poor and middle-class people lose their homes. This is not fair or just, and I’m hoping the current world-wide financial crisis will lead us to change those percentages. What would life be like if no CEO got more than 25 times the wages of a full-time employee making minimum wage, or for that matter, 25 times as much as the check that a welfare mom is supposed to live on while she supports her kids?

    Some companies manage to get by paying their CEOs much less than that! There are companies where the CEO makes only eight or ten times the lowest paid employee, and others, collectively owned, where every worker makes the same salary. Somehow, they survive and thrive and attract great talent. Because they have a mission they can believe in that’s not just about lining their own pockets.

    Okay, so I’m the one ranting now.

    Prescription to End Poverty
    But this is Blog Action Day. I’d like to finish with some action steps that we can take as a society, steps that address some (by no means all) of the systemic causes of poverty, and whose adoption will lift up the bottom. Changing these could take whole communities from poverty to abundance.

  • Switch to sustainable, renewable, nonpolluting energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, and small-scale (non-invasive) hydro. Surely, if we can find $700 billion to pump into the financial system, we can find a few billion for a Marshall Plan-style initiative that would eliminate dependence on foreign oil, slash carbon emissions, create thousands of jobs, and put money in the pockets of rich and poor alike.
  • Retrofit all buildings with proper insulation, water-saving plumbing, and other sustainabiity measures. Again, this lowers costs, creates jobs, and reduces carbon as well as dependence on oil imports (and thus global warming).
  • Decriminalize the petty offenses that fill up our prisons, taking away income-earners, making it harder for them to get jobs again when they get out, and leaving their families with a huge financial burden. We have no business throwing people in prison for using drugs or feeling forced into prostitution. Dealing is one thing; it harms society. But using harms only the users and their families, as long as they don’t get behind the wheel or operate dangerous machinery.
  • Revitalize mass transit. Poor people get to work on buses and trains, and the more places transit systems reach, the more job opportunities for poor folks. Added benefits once again: reduced carbon, reduced foreign oil imports, reduced traffic congestion.
  • Urban community food self-sufficiency: an organic garden on every flat roof and in every vacant lot! Lowers food costs, boosts nutrition, freshness, and flavor, builds community, reduces carbon and more.
  • Adopt, finally, the sensible system of government-salaried doctors not beholden to insurance companies that has allowed almost every other industrialized country in the world to make health care a right, not a privilege. This is something we advocated for when I had the community organizing job with the Gray Panthers almost 30 years ago, and it’s still a good idea–and long-overdue.
  • Oh yes, and save poor and middle-class lives as well as vast boatloads of dollars by getting out of the illegal and unconscionable war the Bush administration lied its way into in Iraq. the $700 billion per year saved could provide seed capital to fund all the rest of it.

    • So there you have at least part of my prescription to create jobs, reduce costs, lower pollution, and shift our country’s trade and overall deficits. What are your ideas? Please post them, and let’s get started!

    While this post is copyright 2008 by Shel Horowitz of https://www.principledprofit.com, I hereby grant permission to reproduce the post in its entirety in any medium as long as attriubtion is included, and to link to the post without restriction.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Social and Economic Justice

    When I found out the other day that no sooner had insurance giant AIG accepted a huge bailout from the taxpayers–that’s us–that they had spent $400,000 on a posh weeklong retreat at the St. Regis Monarch Beach, a very expensive resort, including a $10,000 tab at the bar, and $24,400 on spa and salon services, I was too steamed to even blog about it. I knew that if I let my fingers loose on this one, I’d probably say something I’d regret. So I kept my mouth shut.

    Today, I found out that they’d planned to have a similar retreat a week later, at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California, but this one they canceled–not because they’ve come to their senses, but because of the very understandable public backlash about the first retreat. Meanwhile, they’ve got their hand at the public trough, asking for another $37.8 billion. And they have the nerve to complain about cancellation fees!

    “We’ll certainly lose some money in cancellation fees, but it’s just beyond the point of trying to conduct these meetings given the uncertainty that’s taking place.”

    Yes, there are usually cancellation fees when you cancel a large event at the last minute. These things are booked months in advance and the hotels can’t resell all that space on that kind of timeframe. But still–you pay the fees, grit your teeth, and at least pretend that you care enough about the taxpayers who are bailing you out that you don’t go on expensive and totally unnecessary junkets. And you sure as anything don’t stick the public with your bills at the bars and spas; those should be borne by the individuals consuming the services.

    Rooms at these hotels range from $400 to $1200 per night. The government should demand repayment of every penny spent at the St. Regis on this pig-in-a-poke. Can you imagine what Limbaugh and the rest would say if they found a “welfare queen” enjoying this kind of high life at government expense? Well, when corporate executives are the ones getting welfare, the standards should be similar.

    You want to run up big bills to reward your high performers? Fine–but don’t ask us to pay for it.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Social and Economic Justice

    Michael Moore’s 10-point bailout plan is better than anything I’ve seen from an economist. Is it perfect? Of course not. Is it far, far better than anything being talked about in the halls of Congress (except by people like Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Dennis Kucinich)? I certainly think so.

    Here’s a piece I especially like:

    4. IF YOUR BANK OR COMPANY GETS ANY OF OUR MONEY IN A “BAILOUT,” THEN WE OWN
    YOU. Sorry, that’s how it’s done. If the bank gives me money so I can buy a
    house, the bank “owns” that house until I pay it all back — with interest.
    Same deal for Wall Street. Whatever money you need to stay afloat, if our
    government considers you a safe risk — and necessary for the good of the
    country — then you can get a loan, but we will own you. If you default, we
    will sell you. This is how the Swedish government did it and it worked

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Social and Economic Justice

    Yikes! Seven hundred billion of our tax dollars to bail out Wall Street–and that’s on top of what’s already been spent on Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG.

    That’s $700,000,000,000. Now, I might support a bailout if we got our money’s worth out of it–but not this bailout–not only doesn’t it give us what we want, it includes one of the most dangerous and far-reaching clauses ever included in any legislation in this country:

    “Decisions by the Secretary [of the Treasury] pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

    That’s worse than a mere blank check. It’s complete and total immunity from oversight.

    What on earth is the rush to pass such a bill? No one should have that kind of power.

    Then let’s look at the rest of the bill. As I understand it, it…

  • Passes bad debts and other liabilities to the taxpayers, but not good assets–or control
  • Sets no limits on CEO compensation, so the same people who wrecked the economy get to take home annual compensation packages in the tens of millions
  • Allows the government to subcontract out the management of these firms…probably to the same bunch of ethical midgets that broke them in the first place
  • Doesn’t do much to help homeowners facing (or already in) foreclosure

    In short, this is a free gift: break our economy and bring home a prize. Can you say, “corporate welfare”? And rather than paying for it out of general revenues, forcing those who never benefited to cough up the dough, let’s look at the bailout funding plan proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, taking the revnue from a surtax on those who made their killing and now want to get off with no consequences–yeah, it was OUR economy that they killed.

    If it were up to me, I’d say the public should gain equity in the rescued companies, and any CEO compensation package should not exceed a percentage of the net profits to the company, and layoffs or bankruptcies mean automatic forfeiture of all bonuses. And salary, as opposed to bonuses, could be set at something realistic, say, $200,000-$500,000 (or as a reasonable multiple, say, 10-20x, of the lowest-paid full-time worker’s income). That’s still far more than most Americans have to live on. Bonuses beyond that should be based on performance: creating profitable companies, jobs, investments in renewable energy, etc. This system of rewarding the worst behavior and the worst performance is just plain crazy.

    I’ve already told my Congressional representatives. Have you?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Social and Economic Justice

    Apparently there’s a serious proposal on the table to limit public access to Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, and sell space to the highest bidders as corporate sponsors. This is what I wrote on the comment page:

    The First Amendment is part of what makes America great. Taking away the right to assemble at the Presidential inauguration is a bad idea, and selling off to the highest bidder is just plain un-American. This is part of our heritage–to watch, and perhaps to p0eacefully protest.

    As a business owner, a writer, and a concerned citizen, I urge you to maintain Pennsylvania Avenue for all citizens who wish to see the inaugural.

    Deadline for comments is Monday. Make yourself heard.

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics, Social and Economic Justice

    The week of attacks on First Amendment freedom in the streets of St Paul is finally over–a shameful episode in American history. But the legal struggles have only just begun. I’ve already referred to the riot charges brought up against legitimate journalists for Democracy Now, the AP, and elsewhere who were just trying to do their very important job: covering what was really going on at the RNC.

    Those cases, if not dismissed, will drag on for years, and suck away resources that should be used for reporting.

    Now comes word that eight activists have been charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism”–for nothing worse than planning to block some streets, as county officials were well aware–they had infiltrated the organizing groups for up to a year (a crime in itself).

    Sound like Chicago in 1968? These activists are facing serious time, even as no one seems to be holding accountable the police who ran rampant and created a climate of fear before and during the convention week.

    Let’s listen to the father of one of the eight, interviewed on Democracy Now (you can read the entire interview at the above link:

    AMY GOODMAN: David Bicking, your daughter Monica is one of the eight. First, can you talk about her, talk about her activities?

    DAVID BICKING: Yeah. My daughter Monica is a wonderful person, very concerned—

    AMY GOODMAN: How old is she?

    DAVID BICKING: —very committed. She’s twenty-three. And she and all the people—I mean, the people they have charged here are not criminals. They’re some of the best people in our society. She’s really dedicated to her activism. She’s experienced activist already. She’s come about this through her own experience in her life over a long time. She is always concerned about the feelings of others.

    She has done some travel abroad. And when she was eight, we were in Ecuador for four weeks, and she saw the poverty and the children begging, but also humanized it by playing with the children, the maids in the, you know, inexpensive hotels there. She has—went to Honduras for eight weeks after her junior year to work in a very remote village, humanitarian work.

    After high school, she took off a year before college and worked as an intern with the American Friends Service Committee, which is a Quaker peace group. She was based in Chicago and helped in their organizing and their peace work and liaison with other groups.

    So she has a lot of experience, and she’s really seen what it means when—you know, the United States’ actions through war, through injustice at home, through poverty and how that’s affected people’s lives. And it’s affected her very deeply. And so, she’s strong. She’ll get through this one way or the other.

    AMY GOODMAN: Is she still in jail?

    DAVID BICKING: She is still in jail right now.

    AMY GOODMAN: When was she picked up? How was she picked up?

    DAVID BICKING: She was picked up on Saturday morning at 8:00 in the morning. She was staying in her house, which she had just bought a month before. And there were several roommates there and a whole bunch of people who had come in for the week. And at 8:00 in the morning, they were woken out of a sound sleep. The police came banging through the back door, held everyone at gunpoint. They had automatic weapons, assault rifles, forced everybody—ordered them to the floor, face down, handcuffed them behind their backs and then proceeded to search the entire house, just ransack everything.

    When I got there forty-five minutes later, she and her boyfriend Eryn and a housemate, Garrett, were already in one of these big black SUVs they have, you know, and were taken off to jail just after that. And then, for the next hour or so, they released the other people in the house one by one, after photographing them, checking ID and searching them.

    Then the search of the house went on for another like six hours probably, as they carted all sort of stuff out of the house. I watched, you know, as they took things out of the garage. There were old tires. I suppose those could be burned someplace. You know, there were just the sort of things homeowners would have, especially people fixing up a house. Many cans of paint, each which was patiently labeled and loaded onto the truck. It was just an absurd, absurd overreaction.

    Are they going to try to tell us that Quaker peace activists are considered terrorists now? For shame!

    You can be part of the movement to demand that charges against both the 8 and the journalists be dropped immediately, as outlined in this email from Democracy Now (note that you have to replace the spaces at written out word “at” with the @ sign:

    Here’s the letter I sent in response to this appeal:

    I am totally appalled that working journalists were arrested arbitrarily during the RNC. I have watched the video of Amy Goodman’s arrest and do not see how the simple act of asking to speak to the officer in charge in order to help her just-arrested colleagues was in any way arrest-worthy. I find the unnecessary force used by the police objectionable. And I find the act of ripping a journalist’s credentials off her neck and telling her she won’t be needing it to be straight out of Kafka.

    I am even more appalled that the terrorism conspiracy statute was dredged up for the first time against Quaker peace activists who were in no way terrorists. Blocking a street is not akin to bombing a building. And the right to dissent is fundamental.

    Tens of thousands of young Americans have died to protect our freedom. When the government tries to suppress peaceful protest and censor/arrest journalists covering that protest, I have to wonder if those brave young men and women died in vain. As a business owner, an author, and an American, I urge you to remember the Bill of rights, the Constitution as a whole, and the importance of safeguarding our democracy.

    The U.S. is not supposed to act like some two-bit totalitarian country where freedom doesn’t exist. Drop the charges.

    CONTACT THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE – DEMAND THAT ALL CHARGES OR POTENTIAL
    CHARGES BE IMMEDIATELY DROPPED:
    Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner
    janet.hafner@co.ramsey.mn.us and
    susan.gaertner@co.ramsey.mn.us
    (cc: dropthecharges at democracynow.org)
    651-266-3079

    Susan Gaertner for Governor
    info at susangaertner.com (cc: dropthecharges at democracynow.org)
    (612) 978-8625
    (612)804-6156

    St. Paul Mayor Christopher B. Coleman
    chris.coleman@ci.stpaul.mn.us
    Bob.Hume@ci.stpaul.mn.us
    sara.grewing@ci.stpaul.mn.us
    (cc: dropthecharges at democracynow.org)

    Make your voice heard in the Ramsey County Attorney and St. Paul Mayor’s
    offices. Demand that they drop all pending and current charges against
    journalists arrested while reporting on protests outside the Republican
    National Conventions.

    The Ramsey County Attorney’s office is in the process of deciding
    whether or not to press felony P.C. (probable cause) riot charges
    against Democracy Now! Producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole
    Salazar. Please contact Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner by all
    means possible to demand that her office not press charges against
    Kouddous and Salazar.

    The St. Paul City Attorney’s office has already charged Amy Goodman with
    misdemeanor obstruction of a legal process and interference with a peace
    officer. Contact St. Paul Mayor Christopher Coleman by all means
    possible to demand that the charges against Goodman be dropped immediately.

    Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful
    detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried
    out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the
    Republican National Convention.

    During the demonstration in which the Democracy Now! team was arrested,
    law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion
    grenades and excessive force against protesters and journalists. Several
    dozen demonstrators were also arrested during this action, as was a
    photographer for the Associated Press.

    IMPORTANT
    Be sure to cc: dropthecharges@democracynow.org on all emails so that our
    team can deliver print outs of your messages to the St. Paul City
    Attorney, the Mayor and Ramsey County Attorney offices.

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics, Social and Economic Justice

    Things continue to be ugly in Saint Paul at the Republican National Convention. Watch this video of police seizing the living/working permaculture demonstration bus from activists, not allowing them to remove any of their possessions except for their chickens and dogs–which were left with the bus residents on the side of a highway as cops hauled the bus away–and not giving anything resembling a valid reason for their action.

    And not much prettier on the convention floor, where Sarah Palin made an absolutely despicable speech attacking Obama last night. Among other things, she said, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer’ except that you have actual responsibilities.” Obama, of course, got his start as a community organizer. As did I, and I don’t appreciate the jab.

    And I see they’re trotting out the L-Word again–here’s former presidential candidate Fred Thompson at the RNC:

    the Democrats present a history-making nominee for president, history-making in that he’s the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee to ever run for president.

    Now it’s time for Obama–who has been remarkably classy in attacking the McCain-Bush policies while commending McCain’s personal commitment and his patriotism to say what Dukakis should have said in 1988.

    “Liberals gave us the 8-hour day and workplace protection safeguards instead of 12 or 14 hours in near-slave conditions. Liberals passed historic legislation to protect the air and water of our nation. Liberals actually belief that government should serve the people–all of the people, and not just the $5 million a year and more club. Yes, I’m a liberal and I’m proud.. Why aren’t YOU?”

    That would have turned around the 1988 election and changed the discourse for decades. It can do the same today.

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