Social and Economic Justice – Page 31

Obama's Speech: Style AND Substance

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on August 29, 2008 Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech tonight showed me why he is electable–and actually got me excited enough to stay up late and blog about it.

As rhetoric, it was superbly crafted:

Attacking the Bush/McCain policies (and their tendency to attack those who disagree) while honoring McCain’s patriotism and sincerity–never trashing the man, only his politics and policies; positioning him as out of touch and unqualified to lead, of having a vision of America’s greatness that was incompatible with the majority of Americans, and contrasting his own vision of America’s greatness, as a champion of the poor and oppressed, as a catalyst for improving the lives of others, and as a country ready to reclaim its fallen standing–and he said, once again, that the campign was “not about me. It’s about you.”

Unifying Democrats who did or didn’t vote for him, by paying tribute very early to the others who sought the nomination, and especially Hillary Clinton

Bringing in the ghosts of major Democratic Party heroes like Kennedy, Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Also honoring the working people of this country: teachers, soldiers, veterans, factory workers

Using some of the most effective rhetorical devices honed by oratorical sharpshooters from Ronald Reagan to Jesse Jackson (an area where McCain, a remarkably insipid speaker, can’t touch him)

Showing the failure of Bush’s policies around the war, foreign policy in general, and the dismal response to Katrina, among other areas, and linking McCain to these failures

Building on the months-long campaign talking points of hope and change and unity–but adding at least a few specifics, especially on energy, terrorism, and education

On those specifics–I endorsed Obama last winter (after Kucinich dropped out), and I found myself agreeing with about 80 percent. I have issues with his energy policy, which relies too heavily on big, scary technologies such as nuclear and coal–but I thoroughly applaud his commitment to get us off imported oil within ten years (something that should have started in the Carter administration, or even the Nixon). I have issues with his foreign policy, which strikes me as unnecessarily hawkish, though light-years ahead of McCain’s. But I commend him for consistently opposing the Iraq debacle at the beginning and putting forth a timetable, even a slow one, for withdrawal.

And the last time there was a major-party nominee who more-or-less agreed with me on 80 percent of his positions was George McGovern in 1972–when I wasn’t old enough to vote. The one before that was probably Henry Wallace in 1948, when I wasn’t even born. The one before that might have been Thomas Jefferson.

So Obama is real progress. Not anywhere near as far as I’d like, but that may actually be to his advantage–because I think when the American people listen, they will find a genuinely likable and sincere individual who is of the people, despite the GOP’s absurdist attempts to paint him as an elitist or as a dangerous radical. He’s not very radical at all, and he comes from a broken home, worked as a community organizer, and talked quite a bit tonight about the economic hardships he faced, and how they reinforce his commitment to make sure every American can afford a college education and decent health care. In language that the typical red state voter (if not blinded by racism) can see and hear.

CIA Openly Recruits Journalists at Journos of Color Conference

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on August 11, 2008 Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Social and Economic Justice

These people have no shame! The Central Intelligence Agency actually had a table on the exhibition floor of Unity ’08, the conference for journalists of color organized jointly by (in alphabetical order) the Asian-American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native-American Journalists Association!

As the article points out, this is not an appropriate place for journalists to work. Here are two of the people interviewed on the segment:

JOE DAVIDSON: I don’t think that the CIA should recruit at conventions for journalists. I think that CIA members have pretended to be journalists in years past. They might still be doing it, I don’t know, but they certainly have done it previously. And I think that the knowledge that CIA agents have used journalism as a cover puts legitimate journalists in danger.

It’s certainly known that in other countries, journalists will report to their governments. That certainly is not the case, or certainly generally has not been the case, for American journalists. But we don’t want that perception. I think there really has to be a long distance between the role of a spy, even someone who does research in Langley, Virginia, and a journalist.

and

DENNIS MOYNIHAN: You know, in a climate where journalists are being laid of en masse by the media corporations, I think it’s unfortunate that an agency like the CIA can prey upon people. I mean, what are they going to be doing? Of course, they’re talking about open source intelligence gathering.

Well, that’s exactly how they gather names of alleged socialists or labor sympathizers in Indonesia, by forming lists. They’re going to be reading other reporters’ work and identifying subjects of interest to the U.S. security apparatus. I don’t think it’s good work for a journalist. There’s just a massive abuse of data collection that’s happening by the United States, principally.

The ACLU released a press report, a press release about waterboarding and CIA’s involvement in authorizing and coaching waterboarding. You know, why isn’t this guy being asked about it? I think some journalists here actually have confronted this recruiter, but this is one of the most controversial agencies functioning on the planet today, and it’s shocking that here, with between five and ten thousand journalists, and the guy isn’t getting grilled continually.

Several other attenders also comment. Go read or listen to the whole segment.

Colby: Protect Writers Against Theft-Through-"Orphan Works" Legislation

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on June 24, 2008 Posted in media-general, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

Call for Action: Fight the “Orphaning” of
Writers’ Constitutional Right to Copyright Protection
By guest blogger Jerry Colby, President, National Writers Union

[Note from Shel: This was originally sent by Jerry as a letter to members of the NWU. I asked if I could post it here to share with non-NWU members.]

Librarians typically want to expand the public’s access to their
collections. It’s in their nature to help people grow in
knowledge. While getting a salary, they do not do this just for
money.

Online database companies and publishers, like librarians,
archive works in the arts and sciences. They, too, want to see
more people using the works they have stored in digital format.
Unlike librarians, however, they do this for profit by selling
digital copies of others’ works. For years they did this without
seeking permission from writers and artists who created these
works – until the Supreme Court in 2001 declared this illegal in
its Tasini v. New York Times et al. decision which affirmed that
usage of work must be paid for in electronic media.

The database companies and publishers have not given up their
efforts to seize control of the rights to copyrighted works they
want to sell through the Internet. Beside all-rights contracts,
they have also targeted a category of copyrighted works whose
authors are least likely to defend themselves because their
whereabouts are unknown. The media industry has taken to calling
these books, plays, articles, poems, photographs, illustrations,
and so on “orphan works.” Now the publishers want the legal right
to use these works without the rights-holders’ permission. All
they would have to do, as proposed in new legislation (S. 2913,
the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008), is make a “diligent
effort” to locate the rights-holder which is “reasonable and
appropriate” according to government standards for “best
practice” overseen by copyright experts hired by libraries. Such
searches would be beyond the budgets of all but the largest
publishers and database companies.

This would stand copyright law on its head. Since the 1976
Copyright Act went into effect in 1978, writers supposedly had to
do nothing to enjoy copyright protection of their works. Any work
not in the public domain cannot be used without permission of the
rights-holder. This “opt-in” requirement is in compliance with
the spirit of the copyright clause in Article 1, Section 8 of the
U.S. Constitution, which vested original and exclusive ownership
of works with their creators for a limited time (currently the
lifetime of the creator plus 70 years) in order to encourage
innovation in American society. Such a bill strikes at the very
heart of capitalism’s success and the source of innovation
crucial to any nation’s cultural and economic growth. What is
really being proposed is the orphaning of our constitutional
right to copyright protection.

Should this orphan works bill become law, infringement of
copyright of orphaned works, both domestic and foreign, would be
permitted after a vague “due diligence” search for the rights-
holder. The negative impact this could have is manifold. Our
foreign trade partners who take copyright very seriously would
fight American companies encouraged by this act to raid works
summarily declared orphan after computer and phone searches. It
takes little imagination to see where this might lead.
Retaliatory raids by competing foreign companies on American
orphan works could escalate into trade wars over orphaned
intellectual property. Given the enormous role intellectual
property plays in the global market, such trade wars could easily
expand and unravel carefully negotiated international trade
agreements. Ironically, this orphan works act could damage
international trade in such intellectual property as music and
movies where the U.S. still holds a favorable trade balance.

Congress should signal an end to the decades-long indulgence of
corporate greed and insist everyone play by same the rules. It
should table the onerous bill until a more thought-through
version that respects the property rights of creators can be
crafted.

Congresspeople are very sensitive to influence during national
election years. Writers would be wise to remind their
representatives to observe the constitutional covenant with
American writers and artists. I urge all NWU members to take the
lead here, look at the two letters on orphan works currently
posted on the nwu.org website for ideas, and write your own
letters to Congress. Be sure to also send a copy of your letters
to the National Office.

Gerard Colby, trade union activist, investigative journalist and author, is currently serving his second term as the President of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981. Colby is co-author (with Charlotte Dennett) of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperCollins, 1995), author of Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Lyle Stuart, 1984), and lead contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Prometheus, 2003), winner of the 2003 National Press Club award for press criticism.

He can be reached at GColby@nwu.org.

Corporate Spies, Good Advice Not Taken, A New Word–PR Roundup

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on April 22, 2008 Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

Miscellaneous items in the news of late:
1] The Weekly Spin, an always-provocative newsletter from PR Watch/Center for Media

and Democracy, reports that corporados and their hired PR guns have stepped up campaigns against citizen activists. Not only are they infiltrating these groups, but also going through activists’ trash, using their spies to release deliberate disinformation campaigns, undermine citizen actions, and generally abuse the public trust. Yeech!

This is not new–here’s an example from six years ago:

“Inside information gives companies a strategic advantage,” wrote Amsterdam-based investigative reporter Eveline Lubbers in the 2002 book “Battling Big Business.” Lubbers helped uncover an eight year-long scam by a Dutch security firm, where one of its employees posed as an activist. He collected discarded paperwork from at least 30 different activist groups, saying he would sell it to recycling plants and give the proceeds to charity. Instead, the documents were carefully reviewed and often used against the groups.

But apparently it’s still very much going on, in both the US and UK, probably elsewhere too.

CIW began being “vilified online and in e-mails that can be traced to the Miami headquarters of Burger King,” reports the Fort Myers News-Press. The emails and comments were posted under the names “activist2008” and “stopcorporategreed.”

2]MarketingProfs.com offers six don’ts for effective e-mail marketing. Item #1–don’t e-mail too frequently; you don’t want people unsubbing because you bother them too much.

But the first reader comment points out that MarketingProfs itself mailed three times within a week about a particular conference.

3] But PR isn’t just for influence; it can also be fun. My friend Ken McArthur is on a campaign to popularize the coined word “zingwacker,” which is in his new book “The Impact Factor.” As of early April, the word brought zero results in Google. As of before I hit the post button, it’s up to 393. Not bad, Ken–even if the Squidoo page misspells your new word in its URL.

Tibet: Is the Media Showing the Truth?

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on April 15, 2008 Posted in Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Media Ethics, Peace and War, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized

Here’s a website that shows falsely captioned photos as well as photos cropped in such a way as to completely change their meaning. The topic is the violence in Tibet–but according to this site, many of the pictures are actually from India or Nepal, or show things other than the Chinese anti-Tibet violence that they purport to.

Let me state my biases upfront:

I am a supporter of the Free Tibet movement, and have been so since 1978 when I learned about Chinese repression there

I have been increasingly aware of what appears to be a disinformation campaign by the Chinese government to discredit the Free Tibet movement–and I recognize the possibility that this website could be part of that disinformation campaign

I attended a speech by the Dalai Lama in 1982, and in 1993 my wife and I hosted a young Tibetan woman for over a year, as part of the Tibetan Refugee Resettlement Project

Still, even as a supporter of Tibetan freedom, I am appalled to see this apparent media distortion, even though it helps “my side.”

I’m no photo expert, and it’s possible that this site is offering Photoshopped doctoring of its own, or is mislabeling the pictures. But my gut tells me the captions on this website are accurate, and that the mainstream media in the US, Germany, France, Asia, and UK have run photos that claim to show one thing and actually show something completely different. It’s not the first time this has happened; one prominent example in the relatively recent past is the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad–made to look like a huge an enthusiastic, locally originated event that was actually staged by US Marines in front of a small crowd that may have been comprised primarily of supporters of the discredited Ahmed Chalabi.

Which does make me wonder whether the CIA or similar organizations have their fingers in this apparent distortion of the Tibet reportage, and wonder who has been feeding the media these islabeled or cropped-to-distortion images.

Martin Luther King's Deeper Legacy

By Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert Posted on April 7, 2008 Posted in Peace and War, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

Great tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. in an Op-Ed by Taylor Branch in today’s New York Times. The article goes waaaaay beyond the standard establishment tributes, and even the progressive pieces that recognize the unity of his call to end racial injustice and his call to end the Vietnam war.

I particularly love these two paragraphs–not in any way to trivialize the struggle of blacks, but to clearly show how many other social movements (including the environmental movement, which Branch doesn’t mention) drew strength, inspiration, and tactics from King and the Civil Rights movement generally:

Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but also the white South. Surely this is true. You never heard of the Sun Belt when the South was segregated. The movement spread prosperity in a region previously unfit even for professional sports teams. My mayor in Atlanta during the civil rights era, Ivan Allen Jr., said that as soon as the civil rights bill was signed in 1964, we built a baseball stadium on land we didn’t own, with money we didn’t have, for a team we hadn’t found, and quickly lured the Milwaukee Braves. Miami organized a football team called the Dolphins.

The movement also de-stigmatized white Southern politics, creating two-party competition. It opened doors for the disabled, and began to lift fear from homosexuals before the modern notion of “gay” was in use. Not for 2,000 years of rabbinic Judaism had there been much thought of female rabbis, but the first ordination took place soon after the movement shed its fresh light on the meaning of equal souls. Now we think nothing of female rabbis and cantors and, yes, female Episcopal priests and bishops, with their colleagues of every background. Parents now take for granted opportunities their children inherit from the Montgomery bus boycott.

King was still alive when I started, before I even reached my teens, exploring nonviolent social change. Over and over again, I found evidence that nonviolent mass movements are far more likely than armed struggle to create lasting, powerful social progress, and that the revolutions achieved nonviolently are much harder to corrupt (not impossible, as we saw under Indira Gandhi)–and yes, organized mass nonviolence can even work against brutal dictatorships. Some of the most effective resistance to the Nazis was through nonviolence, including (but far from limited to) the famous heroic defiance of the King of Denmark after he surrendered his country, riding his horse through the streets of Copenhagen with a yellow star pinned to his clothing in solidarity with the Jews–and inspiring his Danes to save thousands of Jewish lives with a clandestine boatlift to neutral Sweden. And of course there was the massive nonviolent revolt led my M.K. Gandhi against the brutal British colonial regime in India.

In our own time, we’ve seen nonviolence achieve miracles, not only in the US Civil Rights struggle, but also, to name a few examples,

Solidarity driving the Communists from power in Poland

Safe energy activists at Seabrook (I was there!) and around the country making it politically impossible to build more nuclear power plants for the next three decades (we might have to fight that one again, I’m afraid)

The end of apartheid in South Africa, in a struggle that was largely nonviolent (contrast that with Zimbabwe, where the “freedom fighter” Robert Mugabe turned out to be every bit as much a dictatorial thug as Ian Smith had been)

I totally agree with Branch that many of the social movements of the last four years would have been much harder to envision and carry out had it not been for the Civil Rights movement. That movement inspired us not to take injustice lying down, and showed us tools to fight for justice that maintained our dignity, that needed no weapons or weapons training, and that created long-lasting change. Labor, environmentalists, feminists, and poor people’s movements are just some of the many who have learned from Dr. King and his movement.

For more on effective nonviolent organizing, I strongly recommend the works of Gene Sharp. I read the three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action more than 25 years ago, and it still left an impresion on me. Not an easy read, but incredibly wrthwhile.

And meanwhile, I’ll have to put Taylor Branch’s 3-part history of the Civil Rights movement, Parting the Waters/Pillar of Fire/At Canaan’s Edge, on my reading list.

Category: Social and Economic Justice