Social and Economic Justice – Page 27

Outsourcing Pollution, With No Thought for Ethics

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on February 23, 2009 Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Social and Economic Justice

Editor’s note: Holly McCarthy submitted this provocative guest post, and I’m running it in the hope of starting some dialogue. I share some of Holly’s concerns about outsourcing (particularly about using it to duck around environmental laws), but also believe there can be ethical ways to do it, and that when done properly, it can be an important leg up to the hardest-pressed communities at the bottom of the world’s pyramid. Curious as to what others think.
–Shel Horowitz

Guest post by Holly McCarthy When we talk of business ethics, we’re generally referring to the right way to do business, the moral way that leads to principled profit. But the advent of globalization has brought on a new kind of ethical value that we must bow to, but one which we tend to ignore because it doesn’t concern us directly. I’m talking about the process of outsourcing, a practice that’s pretty common these days because of the low cost of labor in countries like India, China and the Philippines.

Issue number one: The first unethical aspect of outsourcing is that we’re ignoring our own talent and paying people overseas just to cut costs. Our people are languishing without jobs and yet we’re shifting more and more jobs overseas. There are times when we even tend to hand over sensitive information to unknown faces who are connected to us through just a computer and an Internet connection, thus putting at risk our customers’ privacy and identity. Besides this, we are closing down offices in our country only to open new ones in other countries, thus effectively contributing to development on foreign lands and stagnation in our own.

Issue number two: We’ve also taken to shifting our manufacturing operations overseas, not only because of lower costs, but also because these countries do not have effective anti-pollution laws. We are luring them to ruin with huge amounts of money, and the sad part of this whole shady situation is that those who gain from this venture are not the ones who are affected by the effluents that result from the manufacturing process. It’s the poor and indigent people who live off the land who are hurt the most – they cannot afford bottled water like the rest of us and so must still drink from the stream that’s been polluted; they cannot afford to sit inside air-conditioned rooms and so must breathe in the polluted air; they cannot afford medication, and so they must suffer respiratory illnesses and other ailments in silence.

Outsourcing is and has always been a sore point with developed nations like the USA and the UK. The burgeoning of talent in developing countries, talent that is available at a fraction of the cost incurred in hiring local labor, had made organizations take the easy way out. Of course, when there’s money to be made, it’s understood that you want to be among the profits. But there’s an ethical line that cannot be crossed, and it’s up to you to decide where you want to draw it.

This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of online universities. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com

Free E-Book to Starving CEOs

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on February 5, 2009 Posted in Business Ethics, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Social and Economic Justice

Some random thoughts about the economy and ethics today.

1. President Obama took a small but welcome step toward curtailing corporate abuses yesterday, restricting CEO pay for those companies taking government bailouts to a “measly” half a million dollars. Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, endorsed the idea but said it didn’t go far enough, noting that the myth of the irreplaceable CEO was just that, a myth. He’d like to max out CEO pay at the same level a top general or admiral receives. Not a bad idea!

2. For those CEOs who can’t imagine living on that amount, I assure you that it’s possible to live comfortably, even luxuriously, on far less. I remember when $10,000 per year felt like an enormous sum of money to me. I actually had a job in New York City as recently as 1980 that paid $82 per week of hard work–that was part of the “research phase” for my e-book on having fun cheaply, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook. In fact, if you’re a CEO who finds this new “limited” income a hardship, contact me. I’ll give you a free copy of the e-book, and the $8.50 you save will be your first step toward frugality. ;-). It’ll save the typical reader between $500-$2000 per year. In your case, it might save you a million or so.

3. Talk about sleeping at the switch! Whistleblower Harry Markopolos not only claims (and, I understand, documented during his recent testimony) that he gave the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enough info to break up Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme as far back as 2000, but also laid it out for a Wall Street Journal reporter who was interested, but couldn’t get the go-ahead from brass, back in 2005. Markopolos had some pretty harsh words for the SEC:

I gift wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them and some how they couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority.

4. The left-of-center political action group MoveOn is jumping into the fray with a petition opposing the use of bailout dollars for executive bonuses. This is from the message you can send to friends after signing, which you can do at https://pol.moveon.org/bonus/?r_by=15503-5426570-ynLMRyx&rc=comment_paste:

Did you hear that Wall Street gave out $18.4 billion in bonuses in 2008? $18.4 billion to the people who crippled our economy with their recklessness and greed and then took $700 billion of our money. Outrageous, right?

Not only did I sign, but I feel any company that took our tax money and then paid even a dollar in bonuses should be made to pay it back. Just because the Bush administration was too incompetent to specify how this money was spent does not mean we have to tolerate this outrage. And forgive me for being out of touch, but I always thought bonuses were something you earn through stellar performance–not for running your company, and the economy, into the ground.

"Bailees" Alarmingly Lacking In Shame

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on February 1, 2009 Posted in Social and Economic Justice

Can’t say I’m surprised that the Bush bailout program lacked safeguards for ordinary people. It’s only the people’s money, after all. But I am a bit surprised at how blatantly the recipients are ripping us off. After the serious public relations fallout and public outrage around AIG’s lavish parties and the CEOs of the Big Three car companies begging from the cockpits of their individual private jets, you’d think they wouldn’t be so quick to rub it in We the People’s collective face.

Yet a big chunk of our money, supposedly designed to free up ultra-tight lending, found its way into huge executive bonuses–$18 billion worth–and to rolling up acquisitions of other banks. Credit doesn’t seem to be any looser. So when an institution is “too big to fail,” you let it swell even bigger so if it does collapse, it pulls down even more bricks of the economy? Dumb!

If I were Obama, I’d be issuing an executive order that demanded some accountability. Bailout money needs to be earmarked to bail out ordinary people trying to make it on 10 or 20 or 50K a year, not the fat cats with eight- and nine-figure compensation packages that got us into this mess in the first place through their bad management.

Surely there must be a way he can say, “look, the purpose of this bailout was clearly not executive bonuses and acquisitions. Money used for those purposes will be considered a temporary interest-free loan, and no payment will be forthcoming until that money has been repaid.” It doesn’t take any more chutzpah than it did to award those bonuses in the first place. (And whatever happened to the idea that bonuses are earned by high performance–and digging a ditch and pouring your company’s assets into it doesn’t qualify IMHO.)

Let’s see the bailout go to fund green jobs, antipoverty programs, and other ways to jumpstart the economy that bypass the greeditarians entirely, and put money in the hands of the people who’ve been hurt.

Howard Zinn's Advice to Obama

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on January 4, 2009 Posted in Peace and War, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with barack obama, howard zinn, peace, social justice, war

By Howard Zinn, with opening commentary by Shel Horowitz
Democracy Now ran a long speech by the legendary Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States (a book that is absolute must reading for any serious student of history, of the power of social change, of people’s movements, and yes, of how to get to the kind of future we all want).

I strongly advise: go to the DN website and listen, watch, or read this speech. And then go read his book. If you’ve read it already, it’s probably time to read it again. If you’ve never read it, prepare to have your eyes opened wide.

Here are a couple of fragments of the speech. Two of which I bolded. the first is maybe the best advice Obama could receive–and the second is advice for we, the people. For us.
-SH

So, the other factor that stands in the way of a real bold economic and social program is the war. The war, the thing that has, you know, a $600 billion military budget. Now, how can you call for the government to take over the healthcare system? How can you call for the government to give jobs to millions of people? How can you do all that? How can you offer free education, free higher education, which is what we should have really? We should have free higher education. Or how can you—you know. No, you know, how can you double teachers’ salaries? How can you do all these things, which will do away with poverty in the United States? It all costs money.

And so, where’s that money going to come from? Well, it can come from two sources. One is the tax structure…the top one percent of—the richest one percent of the country has gained several trillions of dollars in the last twenty, thirty years as a result of the tax system, which has favored them. And, you know, you have a tax system where 200 of the richest corporations pay no taxes. You know that? You can’t do that. You don’t have their accountants. You don’t have their legal teams, and so on and so forth. You don’t have their loopholes.

The war, $600 billion, we need that. We need that money…that money is needed to take care of little kids in pre-school, and there’s no money for pre-school. No, we need a radical change in the tax structure, which will immediately free huge amounts of money to do the things that need to be done, and then we have to get the money from the military budget. Well, how do you get money from the military budget? Don’t we need $600 billion for a military budget? Don’t we have to fight two wars? No. We don’t have to fight any wars. You know.

And this is where Obama and the Democratic Party have been hesitant, you know, to talk about. But we’re not hesitant to talk about it. The citizens should not be hesitant to talk about it. If the citizens are hesitant to talk about it, they would just reinforce the Democratic leadership and Obama in their hesitations. No, we have to speak what we believe is the truth. I think the truth is we should not be at war. We should not be at war at all. I mean, these wars are absurd. They’re horrible also. They’re horrible, and they’re absurd. You know, from a human, human point of view, they’re horrible. You know, the deaths and the mangled limbs and the blindness and the three million people in Iraq losing their homes, having to leave their homes, three million people—imagine?—having to look elsewhere to live because of our occupation, because of our war for democracy, our war for liberty, our war for whatever it is we’re supposed to be fighting for…

Obama could possibly listen, if we, all of us—and the thing to say is, we have to change our whole attitude as a nation towards war, militarism, violence. We have to declare that we are not going to engage in aggressive wars. We are going to renounce the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. “Oh, we have to go to”—you know, “We have to go to war on this little pitiful country, because this little pitiful country might someday”—do what? Attack us? I mean, Iraq might attack us? “Well, they’re developing a nuclear weapon”—one, which they may have in five or ten years. That’s what all the experts said, even the experts on the government side. You know, they may develop one nuclear weapon in five—wow! The United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons. Nobody says, “How about us?” you see. But, you know, well, you know all about that. Weapons of mass destruct, etc., etc. No reason for us to wage aggressive wars. We have to renounce war as an instrument of foreign policy….

A hundred different countries, we have military bases. That doesn’t look like a peace-loving country. And besides—I mean, first of all, of course, it’s very expensive. We save a lot of money. Do we really need those—what do we need those bases for? I can’t figure out what we need those bases for. And, you know, so we have to—yeah, we have to give that up, and we have to declare ourselves a peaceful nation. We will no longer be a military superpower. “Oh, that’s terrible!” There are people who think we must be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military superpower. We don’t have to be a military power at all, you see? We can be a humanitarian superpower. We can—yeah. We’ll still be powerful. We’ll still be rich. But we can use that power and that wealth to help people all over the world. I mean, instead of sending helicopters to bomb people, send helicopters when they face a hurricane or an earthquake and they desperately need helicopters. You know, you know. So, yeah, there’s a lot of money available once you seriously fundamentally change the foreign policy of the United States…

when you put together that don’t belong together, you see a “national security”—no—and “national interest.” No, there’s no one national interest. There’s the interest of the president of the United States, and then there’s the interest of the young person he sends to war. They’re different interests, you see? There is the interest of Exxon and Halliburton, and there’s the interest of the worker, the nurse’s aide, the teacher, the factory worker. Those are different interests. Once you recognize that you and the government have different interests, that’s a very important step forward in your thinking, because if you think you have a common interest with the government, well, then it means that if the government says you must do this and you must do that, and it’s a good idea to go to war here, well, the government is looking out for my interest. No, the government is not looking out for your interest. The government has its own interests, and they’re not the interests of the people…

We have checks and balances that balance one another out. If somebody does something bad, it will be checked by”—wow! What a neat system! Nothing can go wrong. Well, now, those structures are not democracy. Democracy is the people. Democracy is social movements. That’s what democracy is. And what history tells us is that when injustices have been remedied, they have not been remedied by the three branches of government. They’ve been remedied by great social movements, which then push and force and pressure and threaten the three branches of government until they finally do something. Really, that’s democracy.

And no, we mustn’t be pessimistic. We mustn’t be cynical. We mustn’t think we’re powerless. We’re not powerless. That’s where history comes in. If you look at history, you see people felt powerless and felt powerless and felt powerless, until they organized, and they got together, and they persisted, and they didn’t give up, and they built social movements. Whether it was the anti-slavery movement or the black movement of the 1960s or the antiwar movement in Vietnam or the women’s movement, they started small and apparently helpless; they became powerful enough to have an effect on the nation and on national policy. We’re not powerless. We just have to be persistent and patient…

In Spite of the Realities…I'm Still Optimistic

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on December 31, 2008 Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Peace and War, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with four freedoms, social change

The news is terrible again: Dreadful violence in Gaza and Iraq, charities bankrupted by the Madoff scam, military forces massing on the India-Pakistan border, an open homophobe giving the invocation at the Obama inauguration, tough times for industries from publishing to retail to manufacturing, rampant poverty around the world (of material goods, housing, medical care, educational opportunity, and more) and a finance and foreign policy team that sure doesn’t seem a lot like the “change” mantra we were promised before the election.

And yet, this lyric from “Tommy” keeps playing in my head: “I have no reason to be overoptimistic…but somehow when you smile, I can brave bad weather!”

Yes, I know–the next part of the Tomm7 story is no cause for optimism. Neither is the world around us today.

But as 2008 draws to a close, I am still optimistic. I think the generation that is living now will fix the climate change problem. I’m hoping the generation of my future grandchildren might be able to do something about war and poverty.

I think the potential exists to transform the world we live in into something beautiful and powerful, to stake the claim on the rightful heritage of all people. But it will take all of us working together.

Decades ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt claimed that all of us deserve four freedoms:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

It’s still a pretty good list. Freedom from want and fear includes freedom from environmental catastrophe, hunger/poverty, or war. What can each of us do to help the world achieve this?

Adoptive Mother Takes Personal Risk Over Ethics Practices

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on November 29, 2008 Posted in Ethics-International, Ethics: General, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with guatemala, guatemalan adoptions, international adoption ethics, stolen child

Apparently, a lot of players in the international adoption world have been a little too glib about where these babies are coming from, and some children have been stolen from their parents to be adopted by people in the Northern hemisphere.

Even though it delayed and may have prevented her adoption, one adoptive mom, Jennifer Hemsley, got too suspicious. Her courageous battle with the system and great personal/family/financial hardship in order to do the right thing are a model of how to behave in an ethically cloudy situation, even if the outcome is the opposite of what you’re striving for.

Medical reports seemed obvious forgeries, without letterhead or doctor’s signature. And during a critical hearing, Hemsley said, her Guatemalan advisers tried to pay a stranger to pose as Hazel’s foster mother.

“Todd and I felt a lot like, ‘Gee, is this really happening?’ Maybe we should just look the other way and keep plodding along, because every time I tried to tell someone, nobody cared,” Hemsley said. “I couldn’t look the other way. I just couldn’t turn my head.”

Ricardo Ordonez, the Hemsleys’ adoption attorney, denied any fraud and vowed to clear his name by producing the birth mother for new DNA tests. Another court hearing is pending.

If the Hemsleys had walked away, as hundreds of other Americans did after problems surfaced, Hazel would likely have been abandoned or reoffered for adoption under another false identity, Tecu said. Instead, Jennifer Hemsley stayed with Hazel for months, draining more than $70,000 from a second mortgage on their home and paying for a trusted nanny.

The RIGHT Reasons I'm Voting for Obama Today

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on November 4, 2008 Posted in Politics, Social and Economic Justice

Greg Palast is one of my favorite investigative journalists, especially when it comes to theft-of-vote issues. But as a political thinker, he can be muddy. Yesterday, he released a column essentially saying he was voting for Obama despite his political reservations in order to make up for years of racial injustice. He called the article “Vote for him – because he’s Black,” and talked movingly about a favorite teacher who was hounded out of the system because he was black.

So, I’m going to do something that Dr. Bruce would think little of. I’m going to vote for the Black man.

Because he’s Black.

The truth is, I’m wary of Barack Obama. His cozy relations with the sub-prime loan sharks who funded his early campaign; his vote, at the behest of his big donor ADM corporation, for the horrific Bush energy bill.

But there’s one thing that overshadows policy positions, one thing he cannot change once in office: the color of his skin. The same as Mr. Bruce’s.

By Palast’s logic, the black dictator Robert Mugabe is a better choice than a visionary like Mikhael Gorbachev or Lech Walesa (both white males). should we vote for Sarah Palin because she’s a woman? While if all other things were equal, I might vote for the candidate who came from the more disenfranchised background, that’s not even a factor for me in this race. Because the candidates are far from equal. I vote for the candidate who I feel will do the most good–and sometimes, like today, that is not the one I most agree with.

True, I share Palast’s reservations about Barack Obama, and could add a few of my own. I wish he were as liberal as McCain and Palin paint him out to be. And if all I wanted to do with my vote was overcome historic injustice, I could vote for the Green Party. Not only Cynthia McKinney but also her running mate are both black and female, and her politics–or Ralph Nader’s, for that matter–are a lot closer to mine than Obama’s are.

I spent a lot of time thinking about whether to vote for McKinney, Nader, or Obama. I’ve often voted 3rd party and I still regret voting for Kerry instead of the Green Party’s David Cobb in 2004 (a decision I didn’t make until I was actually in the voting booth, by the way). And though I don’t have any illusions about how much change an Obama presidency will mean, this year, I’m not only voting Dem but I’m actually went up to my neighboring swing state (New Hampshire) and volunteered.

And I feel good about it.

If the candidate had been Hillary or some of the others, I would have voted 3rd party this year. So…why am I voting for Obama anyhow?

I really do see the country needing a unifying force right now, and a complete and total repudiation in the largest possible numbers of the last eight years And to me that means Obama this time, even with my significant reservations. And I do think that Obama is seriously motivated by a desire for social change, and is far more ethical and smart than the typical candidate. I want to support the Democrats moving for once in a good direction, after a series of centrist, bland, uninspiring and cowardly candidates who gave me no reason to vote for them, starting in 1988 with Michael Dukakis. The only exception was Bill Clinton, who was centrist but far from bland, at times inspiring, and willing to be controversial. Not surprisingly, he’s been the only Democrat to win in the past 20 years.

I think we are presented with a rare window, and if there’s an overwhelming majority plus veto-proof Congress, Obama may move left in the crisis, much as FDR did. After all, even LBJ and (on certain issues) Nixon moved way to the left once they were in office. I also think that while his vision is limited and his thinking somewhat too conventional, he is sincere about social justice. He’s also amazingly smart, charismatic, ethical, compassionate, and quick on his feet. He understands the need to do something about energy policy and climate change. He understands, form personal experience, the peculiar cultural and philosophical stew that is the United States electorate. He understands the power of good marketing and will be an effective salesman for his policies on Capitol Hill and in the public squares of American opinion. And he is by disposition well to the left of the Clintons, though nowhere near as far as I’d like.

And Obama is the only figure on the national scene who could actually be, as George W. Bush so famously claimed to be and then did the opposite, “a uniter, not a divider.”

He may actually be in a position to accomplish more change than we expect. He may actually be that transformative leader. Dare I call this the audacity of my hope?

Wal-Mart Finally Moving Forward on China Labor Conditions

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on November 1, 2008 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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