Category: Uncategorized

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

It must have been somewhere around 1986, in the early days of my business, that I first encountered the work of Paul and Sarah Edwards, gurus to the home-based business sector that was just beginning to take off back then. I’ve been home-based since I founded my company in 1981, so their message resonated.

I’ve been corresponding with Paul recently, and am very excited by something they’re into now: Offering the “Elm Street” economy as an alternative to both Wall Street and Main Street.

Elm Street, in most communities, is typically in a residential neighborhood. In Northampton, Massachusetts (the closest Elm Street to my house), it’s a graceful, tree-lined boulevard of large Victorian-era homes.

As Paul and Sarah Edwards describe it, an Elm Street economy is also firmly rooted in sustainability, at multiple levels:

It’s a local economy, composed of locally-owned and locally-financed enterprises, industries, and independent practitioners who are invested in bringing long-term well-being to all living there, including nature. It’s focus is on working together to create dependable, environmentally sustainable way of life that bring basic services, products, and resilience back to our local communities.

Local Economy
Be it in a city neighborhood, a suburban sub-division, a small town or rural community, the Elm Street Economy is coming to life. It may look a little different from locale to locale, with urban Elm Street communities growing food on rooftops instead of backyards, for example, but wherever they might be located, they can flourish due to values and characteristics symbolized in this logo.

• Local production of food, renewable energy and goods.

• Local development of commerce, government and culture.

• Reduction of consumption while improving environmental and social
concerns.

• Being an exemplary working model for other communities when the effects
of decline of the existing economy and our natural resources becomes more
intense.

In short, very much aligned with the values I’ve been espousing for years, in this blog, in my books, in my speeches, and elsewhere.
The Edwards’ vision of the Elm Street economy, and their analysis, go far deeper than what I’ve quoted here. Go and read it.

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By Posted on Posted in People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

1. Have you heard about the barbaric, fascistic anti-homosexuality law in Uganda? Yes, they’re calling for the death penalty for consensual sex. Read CNN’s article. Here’s the group to oppose it, please join.

2. Especially if you’re in Western Mass, but even if you’re not: a Facebook support group has sprung up for the Northampton, Massachusetts victims of arson. My old neighborhood in Northampton got hit with dozens of fires in a one-hour period Sunday night. Two people died, and two families including some friends of ours were left homeless. Several lost their cars or sustained severe damage.

Please distribute this message widely.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Peace and War, Uncategorized Tagged with , , ,

Woke up this morning to the startling news that US President Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Price–and a perceptive entry on Huffington Post wondering why.

After all, he has initiated a slow and limited timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, pretty much continuing the “progress” of his predecessor–and has made very clear his intent to expand the war in Afghanistan.

Now it’s true that these were wars he inherited, and that he’s had a very full plate even by presidential standards. It’s also true that he has moved us forward on climate change and the environment, on labor, and on the idea that foreign affairs should be primarily addressed through diplomacy And that last bit has certainly help the slow process of rebuilding the U.S.’s stature in the world, after eight years of a rogue coup d’etat regime that left the world negatively astounded and quite terrified. His speech in Cairo was a terrific example.

But the Nobel award does seem a bit, ummm, premature. I’d have rather they waited until he successfully extricated us from the Bush wars, or until he made a speech like this:

Ladies and gentlemen, both my fellow Americans, and my fellow citizens of the world–in the 21st century, war simply has no place in the arsenal of foreign policy. The last significant example of a war achieving policy ends was World War II, when the world responded to a series of power-mad totalitarian regimes with equal force, stopped the aggressors at a great cost in human lives, and installed democratic governments in West Germany, Italy, and Japan. That was 64 years ago, and took six bloody, difficult years to achieve. Korea was a stalemate, Vietnam was a failure, and both Iraq and Afghanistan are succeeding only in giving strength and comfort and eager recruits to the enemies of freedom. Therefore, I have ordered the immediate drawdown of troops. Over the next three months, all US military personnel in both Iraq and Afghanistan will be coming home, along with the private US military contractors that participate. In their place, we will devote significant resources toward hunger relief, education, rebuilding of bombed infrastructure, and eliminating corruption in those countries. There will be a small security presence whose mission is to protect the workers for social and economic justice that we will send over, but there will be no military mission beyond that. We can learn from the powerful example of countries like South Africa, Poland, and Northern Ireland, where peace and democracy were not imposed through the barrels of guns, but by the powerful leadership of indigenous residents who organized together to say, ‘enough of this.’ It’s long past time, in the words of John Lennon, to Give Peace a Chance.

The Nobel committee has made strange choices before (can you say Henry Kissinger?). I can only hope that they’re following the philosophy of rewarding the behavior they want to see in the hopes that the behavior will rise to meet the treatment. This is a great strategy in parenting, in conflict resolution between individuals, in customer service desks (I even write about it in my sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First). It would be great if it turns out to work in international politics too.

Oh, and President Obama, I give you free and full permission to use the above speech in full or in part, at any time—including your Nobel acceptance speech in Sweden!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Media Ethics, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

If you search on Google for the word Google plus the exact phrase “Don’t Be Evil”, you get 366,000 hits. The company’s motto has been used at least since 2001, according to Wikipedia.

As someone who has been writing and speaking about business ethics for seven years, I applaud this motto. But I question its authenticity as it applies to some of Google’s actions. In other words, I see Google occasionally violating the motto with at least three sets of policies that–intentionally or not–certainly do evil.Read more »

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

Remember that old bumper sticker, “Trees are America’s Renewable Resource”? It’s true. You can regenerate a harvestable forest in 20 years or so: a nanosecond compared to the millions of years necessary to create fossil fuels.

However, and it’s a BIG however—biofuels such as timber or scrap wood, or for that matter, corn-based ethanol, are for the most part not sustainable. They are far from carbon-neutral, and in fact generate large amounts of carbon and other pollutants. Think about it: coal and oil are fossilized carbon that originated from plants and animals; wood and corn haven’t fossilized the carbon, but they are very much carbon-based life forms, and we add a lot of carbon back into the air when we burn them.

So the effect of these fuels on climate change is negative: they push us more in the direction we DON’T want to go.

Add to that such effects as habitat destruction from clear-cutting, food shortages resulting from diversion of protein crops into energy that powers machines instead of humans and animals, and toxicity from burning chemically treated wood scraps, and it’s pretty clear that this path isn’t sustainable.

Are there biofuel technologies that actually are sustainable? Maybe. The Q microbe certainly seems to have promise. As a non-scientist, I leave that answer to those who know more than me.

In the meantime, let’s focus on those technologies that clearly ARE sustainable. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that we could easily save 70 to 80 percent of our energy by simply designing for maximum energy utilization and eliminating the considerable waste of our present systems. Beyond that, truly sustainable technologies such as small-scale solar, wind, and hydro generated at or very near the point of use hold out a lot more promise than either biomass plants or centralized coal, oil, and nuclear.

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By Posted on Posted in Networking, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

Inspired by a Tweet from Susan Harrow, I’ve decided to post my Twitter policy every once in a while.

Some of this may sound harsh. Please keep in mind that as a somewhat public figure, I am absolutely bombarded with messages not only on Twitter but through many other channels. I have to cope with about 300 emails on a typical day, plus a three-inch stack of postal mail, plus the 1454 people I’m following on Twitter. 2390 are following me, and I recognize the disparity—but I also do have a business to run, a family to be with, and a physical need to be off the computer for half an hour or so after I’ve been on for about an hour.

I did seven Tweets outlining my policy, and I think they’re worth repeating here (slightly modified with the benefit of “but I MEANT to say” hindsight and spelling out the contractions/not needing to cram it into 140 characters):

1. I don’t follow you just because you follow me (on Facebook and LInkedIn, BTW, I pretty much do). I check out a few each profiles from new followers day (somewhat randomly, but if your follow notice includes a keyword I pay attention to—see #5, below—it ups the odds substantially). If your feeds interest me, I follow. I don’t unfollow you for not following back, since I followed you in the first place because I found your profile interesting and not because I expected reciprocity. And I don’t track whether or not you unfollowed me; it doesn’t matter in the way I sue Twitter unless you’re someone I have an actual friendship with.

2. You can drastically increase odds that I follow back by sending me an @ (NOT a spam), naming me in #followfriday, or Retweeting me; this will get me to look at your profile .

3. Having watched with horror as spammers killed e-mail, I zealously protect Twitter as useful tool. Spam me and I make it public/block/report. (I will tolerate a clueless auto-DM when I follow, unless it links to something scummy. If your auto DM or an @ message sends me to a game-the-twitter-system-get-more-followers site, porn, dating or gambling site, I’m gone. If you did it as other than an auto-DM on follow, I report and block you too.

4. The first time your account gets hijacked and you involuntarily spam me with “join my mafia family,” I cut you slack and tell you I’m not interested. If it happens again, I assume you’re not smart enough to change your password and that spammers will bother me through you. At that point, I block you.

5. I tend to follow: Green/eco/ethical, soft-sell marketers, book publishers and authors, social media people, folks into progressive social change, quoters, people who post interesting links, people who tweet leads from reporters looking for sources. If you fall into one of these categories and you @ me telling me so, I’ll certainly click on over for a look.

6. I always like to say that I became a writer because I’m interested in almost everything, but don’t forget the almost part. If you have a great profile about stuff that I’m simply not interseted in, now matter how good it is, I won’t follow. A few subjects I find uninteresting: online gaming, hard-sell interruption marketing, get-rich-quick stuff, football, super-techie computer coding…and schemes to get more followers you haven’t earned.

7. I tend to follow people who offer a mix of glimpses into their personal lives, interesting tidbids they find online, dialogue with the community, and no more than 20% blatant promotion. And I try to keep my own Tweets in this pattern. I try to be helpful, friendly, useful in my Tweets. Follow me because you like my posts, not to game the system with one more well-connected follower.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics, poverty, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized

Talk about death panels! Physicians for a National Health Program is calling attention to a just releases–and very shocking–Harvard study that found…

Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance. That figure is about two and a half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2002.

The new study, “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults,” appears in today’s online edition of the American Journal of Public Health.

The Harvard-based researchers found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993.

In an e-mail blast, the doctors group calls for President Obama to “start from scratch”: to ditch the unpopular, badly thought out, solves-nothing proposals floating through Congress and bring the US into alignment with the rest of the developed world: a single-payer health care plan.

And the group’s leader, Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H. of Harvard University, gave a great interview on this on Democracy Now.

Retired Senator (and former presidential candidate) George McGovern notes in a recent op-ed that all it would take is a one sentence law, extending Medicare coverage to all Americans.

I think all these folks are correct. I’ve been saying for months that the time for single-payer (something I started supporting in 1979, when I was a community organizer for the Gray Panthers and this was their main plank) is NOW.

If you’re in the US, tell your Senators and Congressional representative. And tell your state government to push for it.

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By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

I may get smeared for this as Van Jones was, but let me say that I find it disgraceful that Van Jones was the target of a smear campaign and was forced out as Obama’s Green jobs person. He was one of the few genuine progressive voices in a sea of “moderate-centrists” who would have been considered quite far to the right a few decades back.

What were Jones’ “crimes”?

* He called for an investigation into possible government foreknowledge about 9/11. It’s pretty clear that elements within the U.S. government had advance knowledge that something was brewing (even George W. Bush was briefed on this the month before the attack, as Condoleezza Rice admitted in her May 19, 2004 testimony in front of the 9/11 investigation commission), and many respected scholars such as David Ray Griffin have widely circulated hypotheses of U.S. government involvement. My own view is that the U.S. saw the attack coming and decided for its own purposes to let the attack occur (our Reichstag fire, if you will)–but were not directly involved. Why is it unreasonable to ask for an investigation?

* He used an unfortunate metaphor to describe his radicalization in the aftermath of the acquittal verdict in the Rodney King beating case:

By August, I was a Communist,” he says in the article, describing his sense of radicalization at the time.

* He said that Republican strong-arm legislators who managed to force through legislation even when short of a super-majority in the Senate were “assholes.” How is this any worse than commentator Glenn Beck, who led the charge against Jones, calling Obama a racist, or
George W. Bush, when he was Governor of Texas, threatening a legislator with “I’m going to kick your butt if you don’t go along with me.”. And if you listen to it in context, the subtext was that Democrats are too gentlemanly to play this kind of hardball, and that’s why they can’t get their agenda enacted. This, unfortunately, is patently obvious to observers of the current political scene.

Glenn Beck, this is the latest in a long line of despicable things you’ve done. You may feel smug now, but you’re the one whose conscience will bother you–not Van Jones.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

Remember all the election irregularities with paperless voting machines? Now the two largest players (both with strong conservative ties) are planning a merger. This could be a real disaster for free and fair elections in the U.S.

Black Box Voting has been leading the charge for fair elections since at least the 2000 debacle. I’m not in the habit of doing this, but I’m posting the entire announcement (including the call for financial support).

—– Forwarded Message —-
From: Bev Harris
Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2009 11:41:42 AM
Subject: BlackBoxVoting to file AntiTrust complaint re: ES&S/Diebold(Premier) merger

Diebold/Premier Election Systems is being purchased by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). According to a Black Box Voting source within the companies, there will be a conference call among key people at the companies within the next couple hours. An ES&S/Diebold-Premier acquisition would consolidate most U.S. voting under one privately held manufacturer. And it’s not just the concealed vote-counting; these companies now also produce polling place check-in software (electronic pollbooks), voter registration software and vote-by-mail authentication software.

You can discuss this here:
https://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/80622.html
(If not registered or need to re-register because forgot your old login info, you can do that here:
https://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-profile.cgi?action=register )

ES&S attempted to consolidate the electronic voting industry in 1997 with a purchase of Business Records Corporation (BRC), but the purchase was blocked by the US Security and Exchange Commission on antitrust grounds, and the acquisition of BRC was split between ES&S and Sequoia Voting Systems.

Here is a press release from Diebold/Premier confirming the acquisition:
https://www.premierelections.com/news_room/press_releases/ESS%20Premier%20Release%20FINAL%20CLEAN%209.02.09%204%20PM.PDF

We will post the Black Box Voting complaint to the SEC at https://www.blackboxvoting.org later today.

If you believe Black Box Voting is doing important work, please consider generous support. We are going into what promises to be a brutal 2010 battle for control of the U.S. Congress, and pieces are being put in play RIGHT NOW to attempt to tip the scales.

You can become a patron with monthly subscription support in any amount you choose, or do a one-time donation, here:
https://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html
or mail to:
Black Box Voting
330 SW 43rd St Suite K
PMB 547
Renton WA 98057

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