Category: Uncategorized

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Uncategorized

They still don’t get it! No matter how many times the courts and Congress tell them that torture is not OK, the Bush “do-it-my-way” Executive branch continues to duck, to twist, and to cause shame for thinking Americans.

The latest, as reported in the Washington Post, is a scheme to retroactively immunize CIA and other government torturers by making their crimes no longer crimes.

Disgusting!

Meanwhile the Bushies yap about how taking away the “right” to spy on American citizens will mess up their war on terror, which they’ve messed up quite well enough without outside help. Fortunately, yet another judge disagreed with them.

Sooner or later, it will have to dawn on these people that they are, in fact, bound by the laws they are charged with upholding. Meanwhile, there’s always the voting booth–IF we can be assured that those who count the ballots aren’t trying to throw the election again.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Frugality/Frugal Fun, General Commentary, Uncategorized

I have been writing about abundance for many years–and particularly the idea that you can have an abundance-filled life even if your wallet is approaching empty. This is the focus of my first website, Frugal Fun, which I set up back in 1996–and of my fourth book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook, from back in 1995.

So when my friend Bob Burg wrote in his wonderful Winning Without Intimidation newsletter about Kyle MacDonald, a young Internet- and media-savvy Montrealer who traded a single paperclip, and then traded the resulting trades, until he ended up–in only 14 steps–the proud owner of a house, I went off to view the TV segment.

ABC’s 20/20 did an eight-minute profile on Kyle’s journey–and eight minutes on network TV is kind of like the amount of coverage when a major head of state dies. Many news segments are under two minutes.

He started by posting his paperclip, and his dream, on Craig’s List, and it spiraled out from there to inclue encounters with rock star Alice Cooper, among others.

It took him exactly a year. Oh yes, and he clearly had a great deal of fun along the way!

Each trade was carefully documented–though the TV segment doesn’t answer the question of who flew whom around the US and Canada to connect, and at what cost. The recent trades, obviously had a lot of media attention, and probably a lot of media footing the bill. But I wonder how it worked out in the beginning. If the goal is to create abundance, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to interject plane fare.

Kyle’s own site is called, not surprisingly, One Red Paperclip–and perhaps also not surprisingly, it’s actually a Blogger blog–which means it’s free.

You go, guy!

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

The most famous Native American musician of my generation and a bit older is Buffy Sainte-Marie, singer and songwriter who was never afraid to be political. She had numerous songs about peace and about Indian rights. In the early 80s, I actually got to interview her at some length for a long profile that was published in a computer magazine (the focus of the story was the many unique ways she used her Macintosh.)

Now an article posted on the Indian Country website alleges that she was the target of a campaign of deliberate suppression by the US government. That in fact, there was a widespread campaign to suppress political rock music during the years of Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s presidency–and this campaign went so far as to at least consider assassination attempts.

Sainte-Marie says she was blacklisted and, along with other American Indians in the Red Power movements, was put out of business in the 1970s.

”I found out 10 years later, in the 1980s, that [President] Lyndon Johnson had been writing letters on White House stationary praising radio stations for suppressing my music,” Sainte-Marie said in a 1999 interview with Indian Country Today at Dine’ College…

In the United States, her records were disappearing. Thousands of people at concerts wanted records. Although the distributor said the records had been shipped, no one seemed to know where they were. One thing was for sure: They were not on record store shelves.

”I was put out of business in the United States.”

Sainte-Marie is someone who I don’t believe would make this accusation unless she truly believed it–she has always struck me as a person of great integrity. But she’s got her dates wrong. “Universal Soldier” was first recorded in 1964; Johnson, known as a strong-arm kind of a guy from his days as a leader in the Senate, was President from 1964 to 1969–a time when protest music and counterculture music filled the airwaves. While it wouldn’t be entirely out of character for him, this kind of action seems a bit of a stretch. Richard Nixon (of whom these accusations could more easily be believed) was president from 1969-74.

The Indian Country article focuses on a court suit by one Charles August Schlund III, who

…stated he is a covert operative and supports Sainte-Marie’s assertions that the United States took action to suppress rock music because of its role in rallying opposition to the Vietnam War.

However, Schlund has not established credibility in my mind, and comes across in this article as pretty flaky. He sees a vast conspiracy to replace rock with the (often politically conservative) country music genre, orchestrated by the Rockefellers in order to control the natural resources of Vietnam.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Uncategorized

Sigh. I should have known it was probably too good to be true. For the last few years, I’ve been praising oil giant British Petroleum’s many environmental initiatives, and suggesting to my friends that BP, or Venezuelan-sourced Citgo, are better choices for gas purchasing than, say, Exxon-Mobil or Chevron-Texaco.

But now, I’m not so sure. Investigative reporter Greg Palast, who’s broken some of the top stories of the last decade, including the scrubbing of thousands of black (and likely Democratic) voters from the Florida voter rolls prior to the 2000 election, accuses BP of dastardly deeds, including

  • Ignoring a well-reported corrosion problem in Alaska until fixing it could be timed to include a shutdown of critical facilities during the summer heat season and an Enron-style squeeze of customers and price-jacking.
  • Engaging in a pattern of intimidation and retribution against internal critics, whether or not they go public
  • Failing to clean up the Exxon Valdez spill for which they had taken responsibility

    • Of course I haven’t verified these accusations–but Palast has a very good track record. Fortunately, there are a couple of Citgo stations near me.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Events, General Commentary, Uncategorized

    For several years, I’ve wondered about the failure to scramble fighter planes on 9/11 to intercept the hijacked jets. I’ve ready all the conspiracy theories, and agree that the series of coincidences is not plausible, and probably not random. However, now that the transcripts of NORAD’s Northeast control center (NEADS) have been released, it seems very clear to me that whatever conspiracies might have been in play, NORAD’s controllers weren’t a part of it.

    Michael Bronner, writing in Vanity Fair, uses the actual transcripts of NORAD/NEADS control room operations on that fateful day, with his explanation and commentary. Bronner, an associate producer on the movie United 93, has the background to interpret what the cryptic military language actually means–and most of his commentary is simply explaining what we hear (yes, you can actually listen to several brief clips).

    The article is long, and includes large sections of actual transcripts. I recommend printing it out and reading carefully (and listening to some of the clips).

    What I come away with…

  • NORAD did absolutely the best job they could, given the lateness and dearth of information that should have been pouring into them from the first moment it was known that one plane had been hijacked
  • The government was completely unprepared for the possibility that planes would be hijacked by trained pilots who would know to turn off the transponder beacons that establish aircraft location for air traffic controllers
  • They only had four fighter jets to scramble, and they did scramble them, as well as call in additional resources so that by day’s end, 300 jets were patrolling American cities–but because of the late notice and the equipment’s failure to track planes with transponders disabled, they couldn’t intercept–and misinformation such as the belief that American flight 11 was still airborne and headed for Washington (not to mention that there were reports of over a dozen possible hijackings) didn’t help
  • There may have been a cover-up in NORAD’s testimony to the 9/11 Commission–but the incorrect testimony just as easily could have been faulty memory or misunderstanding rather than malice
  • Any order to shoot down civilian aircraft could only come from the President–and as we all know, GWB was reading children’s stories in Florida at the time
  • Dick Cheney lied about agonizing over the decision whether to shoot down Flight 93, which crashed in the Pennsylvania farm field within seconds of his first being notified that it was off course

    • What this article establishes in my mind is that NORAD’s people behaved phenomenally well under conditions more stressful than any in history–but they had antiquated and inadequate equipment, antiquated and inadequate and in some cases completely false information, and no chance to preemptively block the hijackers from reaching their targets.

    I commend their courage, and I thank Vanity Fair for running the article. Now…was there a conspiracy involving other aspects of 9/11?

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Uncategorized

    Marketplace Radio reports that a company called Brocade Communications is the first to be charged in the latest business ethics scandal wave–back-dating stock options to inflate their gain. The first of many, I suspect. The backdating of stock options is apparently rampant, as I’ve written in the past. You pass a Sarbanes-Oxley and the crooks figure out something new.

    Still, I continue to be optimistic, sometimes in spite of much evidence to the contrary, that human beings are basically wired to do the right thing, and will rise to those expectations eventually. If it weren’t for my optimism, I never would have written an award-winning book on how ethics can drive business success.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

    Remember the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from high school physics? It’s the idea that the act of observing something can alter the organisms or events being observed.

    A fascinating article by Thomas Kostigen on Dow Jones MarketWatch looks at how media coverage changes the behavior of governments and corporations, specifically dealing with ethical concerns. The article cites the work of Luigi Zingales, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business–who found that businesses will often improve their behavior when the media spotlight shines on them.

    As an example, when the media jumped on the excessive-compensation reportage regarding the salary of former New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso, he lost his job.

    However, government is a different matter, at least these days. Kostigan sees the media, in its coverage of both corporate and government issues, as irresponsibly unwilling to go deep, late in its reportage, and too eager to sail in the perceived political wind:

    Too often the media plays patsy and is meek in the face of challenge, as was the case with the reporting on the events leading up to the war in Iraq. Or it trails intrepid government inquisitors such as Elliott Spitzer. Or it gets the story wrong — weapons of mass destruction, President Bush’s National Guard record. Or lies about it — Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley

    On the business front, the media lagged inquiry on just about every corporate scandal in recent memory; its business is to break news, not merely report it.

    As someone who writes regularly about ethics and media, I have to agree with him, at least as far as the mainstream press goes. Most important stories these days are broken by the underground press, or by people like Greg Palast who is an American working for British journalism companies that are less afraid to go after the truth.

    I’m still hoping that the Business Ethics Pledge will help change that unwillingness to question. Questioning–questioning everything, and digging deeper–is what journalism should be about.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

    Yeech! I just signed on to approve one comment and found 65 in my box. 63 were spam and two were legit. I marked them all as spam and hopefully won’t ever see another subject line of “buy Valium.” What do these people think they’re going to accomplish by spamming a blog that moderates posts?

    If you suddenly find that I’m no longer accepting comments, it’ll be because I’ll have lost patience with these cretins. I wish I could force them to read the section of my book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World called “Spam: The Newbies’ Natural Mistake.”

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