By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, media-general, Peace and War

It’s all over the blogosphere–but not in the mainstream news: Cheney’s office considered sending in heavily armed Navy Seals on boats disguised as Iranian craft to create an artificial incident so the US could go to war against Iran, according to Seymour Hersh. The project was rejected, as Americans killing Americans didn’t sound appealing. But that they even considered it makes you wonder–this goes beyond even the deceptions used to get us into Iraq.

And why is the msm so silent on this?

Hersh is one of the most distinguished investigative journalists of our time–the person who broke the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam war, more than 30 years ago, and who has broken several stories about various nefarious deeds in the Bush administration.

If this allegation is true (as I suspect it is), it is without question grounds for impeachment and probably criminal prosecution. But where’s the investigation?

In the first five pages of Google results for hersh hormuz seals, there is exactly one bit of coverage of Hersh’s very serious allegation in the mainstream media, from WQXT, St. Augustine, Florida. There was a story on today’s Democracy Now, which is where I heard about it–but that’s not the mainstream media.

Today, my local paper had an article about Britney Spears’ father continuing legal oversight over her finances. Why is this news, while a plot to take an illegal action and disguise it as the work of a hostile government in order to enter a war goes unmentioned?

I don’t give a flying f about Brittney–but I sure do care about actions on the part of our government that lead to lives lost, decrease the effectiveness of our diplomacy, channel the resources of the US government into all the wrong places, etc.

Video clip and transcript of Hersh’s interview at the Campus Progress journalism conference. Here’s a quick bit:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Philly.com (online edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News) reports that the mayor of Atlantic City was sentenced to three years probation for veterans-benefits fraud.

What I find most interesting is that the city government as an overall entity seems to have a problem with ethics:

Levy resigned in October from the mayoralty of the beachside resort city, concluding a year in which three City Council members were convicted on corruption charges, another was arrested for driving drunk in a city vehicle and a fifth was indicted for his part in an attempt to blackmail a sixth councilman.

Hmmm…could it be that legalized gambling fosters a climate where money counts more than virtue? Gambling has been Atlantic City’s major industry for decades.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Media Ethics

Oy! This little squib from the Weekly Spin (as reprinted in the Las Vegas Sun) opens all sorts of ethics questions: product placement on newscasts = censorship of news? Maybe it would be better if we simply banned product placement on “objective” newscasts.

And look, the broadcaster is that champion of “fair and balanced” reporting, Fox News. Why am I not surprised?

“Two cups of McDonald’s iced coffee (BUY!) sit on the Fox 5 TV news desk” during Las Vegas station KVVU’s morning news show, writes Abigail Goldman. It’s a “punch-you-in-the-face product placement” that will last six months. KVVU’s news director says the “nontraditional revenue source” won’t impact his station’s reporting. But an executive with the marketing firm that negotiated the deal, Omnicom’s Karsh/Hagan, said “the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s,” reports the New York Times. McDonald’s has similar product placement arrangements with “WFLD in Chicago, which is owned and operated by Fox; on KCPQ in Seattle, a Fox affiliate owned by the Tribune Company; and on Univision 41 in New York City.” Other stations owned by KVVU parent Meredith Corporation, “including WFSB, the CBS affiliate in Hartford, Conn., and WGCL, the CBS affiliate in Atlanta — are also accepting product placements on their morning shows.” The Writers Guild of America West recently urged the Federal Communications Commission to require “real-time disclosure” of product placements and to ban video news releases, calling VNRs “an attempt to trick the viewer to think that a paid advertisement is actually news.”

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics-International, Shel's Personal Life

July 16, 2008, Guatemala City

I am sitting three rows behind the President of Guatemala, Álvaro Colom,
watching an interpretive performance of Mayan dance and music in a
courtyard in the national palace.

A few hours ago, I was in this same spot, getting a tour of the palace’s
public areas. I saw the chairs and instruments and wondered when the concert was going to take place, and what it would be–never dreaming that
I’d be sitting in one of those chairs, watching this wonderful spectacle
that night.

The president impresses me. He greets a few people, then sits in a reserved
seat in the front row, but not on the dais. Following the performance, he speaks humbly and from the heart, without either a script or a TelePromTer–and he speaks as one human
being to another, not as a polished speaker. He speaks of his personal
experience in the woods 30 years ago, and how this gave him a strong
appreciation of the need to conserve both nature and the Mayan culture, and
he keeps his remarks brief.

The event is a celebration (in Spanish) of land conservation and cultural tradition, and
I´m there because we happen to be staying with the Superintendent of
Guatemala’s 18 national parks. He and his family are new to Servas (the
international homestay network we’ve participated delightedly in for 25 years), and this was arranged with the local
coordinator without us knowing anything about him. We are this family’s
very first Servas travelers.

I like Luís immediately when he picks us up. He greets us warmly, cracks
jokes the whole time we stay with him, and gets into discussions of deep
political and environmental issues. And he’s totally patient with our
less-than-perfect Spanish (he doesn’t speak English).

The next day, we’ve come to have tea with him, his wife and daughter (both
named Edith) in his office, and he says, “I’m going to a meeting tonight at
the National Palace, and
the President will be there. Would you like to attend?”

“Yes, thank you. May I borrow a jacket from you?”

“You won’t need one. It will be informal.”

Of course, of the 400 or so people in attendance, the vast majority,
including Luís, wear suits. But there are 30 or 40 others in more casual
clothes, fortunately. By happenstance, I went out the door in the morning
wearing a button-down shirt and long pants, while Dina wore a longish
black skirt and a solid-color blouse–but it could just as easily been a
t-shirt and shorts. Luís actually tried to take us back to his house in the
afternoon to have dinner and change, but traffic was so bad he turned
around and went directly to the palace.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

Remember when Bush Ran in 2000, saying he’d be “a uniter, not a divider”? Hint: it was well before he started saying anyone who isn’t with us is against us.

Yet from Day One, this illegal administration has run the most partisan White House in my memory–and yes, I remember Johnson and Nixon. The latest partisan scandal (among too many to count, including the firing of US Attorneys, the persecution of Alabama’s Democratic governor, the packing of the supreme court and the entire federal judicial system with ideologues, the outing of Valerie Plame to get even with Joe Wilson, and about a hundred other examples) is the report that prospective hires at the Justice Department were screened for political conformity.

This made the mainstream news (I saw it in my local paper)–but I didn’t find a mainstream source quickly. Here’s the story as it appeared on Huffington Post.

Here’s a little excerpt:

As early as 2002, career Justice employees complained to department officials that Bush administration political appointees had largely taken over the hiring process for summer interns and so-called Honors Program jobs for newly graduated law students. For years, job applicants had been judged on their grades, the quality of their law schools, their legal clerkships and other experiences.

But in 2002, many applicants who identified themselves as Democrats or were members of liberal-leaning organizations were rejected while GOP loyalists with fewer legal skills were hired, the report found. Of 911 students who applied for full-time Honors jobs that year, 100 were identified as liberal–and 80 were rejected. By comparison, 46 were identified as conservative, and only four didn’t get a job offer.

The real mystery is why the Democrats haven’t been in open rebellion. Any Democrat who tried 1/10 of Bush’s shenanigans would have been impeached long ago.

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By Posted on 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.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life

One of my favorite marketers, the brilliant and unconventional Sean D’Souza in far-away Aukland, New Zealand, claims he built his entire Psychotactics business on strategic alliances.

And I believe him.

Strategic alliances are that powerful. Two world-class examples:

Apple, IBM and Motorola joined forces in the 1990s to design the PowerPC computer chip–which dominated at least Apple’s product line (and I think was used in various IBM models as well) for the next several years.

And a person in the audience of one of my speeches reminded me that until it formed a strategic alliance to supply operating systems, Microsoft was just another two-bit hole-in-the-wall computer business.

The comments on Sean’s blog page got into a discussion of the typical Internet-marketer JV, but Sean correctly responded,

The downsides to strategic alliances? I know of few. One is, that because they’re not motivated by money, there’s less momentum–that is they’re less likely to be motivated to help. But this hasn’t been true for me. Our alliances have literally built our business, and continue to do so. And the entire relationship is built on trust. And respect.

The downsides to Joint Ventures, I can list by the dozen. The essential problem with joint ventures is money. When the money dries up, so does the motivation. But it’s also an upside. I don’t know. Call me crazy. I prefer alliances over joint ventures.

I agree with Sean. In fact, I posted my own comment, “Most people can’t see beyond the typical JV arrangements to see the much greater power of strategic alliances (and the friendships that can come out of them)” to grow a business.

Strategic alliances have been an essential tool in building my business, and I haven’t yet structured one like the typical Internet-marketer JV (though I may, down the road). At the moment, thanks to a strategic alliance with Sean’s Aukland neighbor Mark Joyner of Simpleology (another fantastic marketer–what’s in the water down there?), I’m about to participate in what could be the most powerful strategic alliance of my career, a partnership that involves one of the most famous names in marketing as well as a large publishing corporation. I’ll tell you all about it once the papers are signed. 🙂

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about strategic alliances, I cover them in some detail in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. Incidentally, my alliance and friendship with Mark came about because he ordered this book, and I was brave enough to seize that opportunity to begin a correspondence with him.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

Talk about head-in-the-sand behavior! Apparently June 12 was Carbon Belch Day:

Proud of their antisocial behavior, these ninnies wanted to be as environmentally destructive as possible that day, asking people to

oppose U.S. participation in the Kyoto treaty or any such successor agreement, mandatory domestic limits on CO2, and any federal or state carbon “tax” or “cap-and-trade” system — including the current Lieberman-Warner bill.

One could make a good case for opposing Lieberman-Warner on the gorunds that its cap-and-trade system is essentially a giveaway to polluters–but that’snot the argument being made here.

What’s next: Celebrate Racism Day with the KKK?

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Publishing

Interview with Peter Bowerman, author of The Well-Fed Self-Publisher:
How to Turn One Book into a Full-Time Living (Fanove Publishing; 2007)

What’s the most important lesson in your book?
I’d have to say – and this is based on my own reflections as well as a LOT of feedback from readers – the biggest lesson of the book is the inherent viability of profitable self-publishing.

And the “profitable” part is key. Self-publishing itself, as a process, is obviously feasible. People do it all the time. And in most cases, they do it like clumsy, sloppy clueless amateurs. And as a result, they go nowhere, reach virtually no one, and make no money.

In my case, I started as an unknown author with one book, NO publisher (except the one looking at me from my bathroom mirror), NO publicist, NO big marketing budget and NO publishing experience whatsoever. I was in the black in 90 days, and subsequently turned that book into a full-time living for five-plus years (more like seven-plus now with two more books under my belt).

For those who say, “I just don’t have what it takes to be a successful book promoter,” I firmly assert that commercial success as a self-publishing author is far more about a process than an aptitude – far more about a lot of things you have to do than some way you have to be. I’ve done it and countless others have done it as well. It all starts with a plan, and that’s the whole point of TWFSP – a detailed blueprint authors can follow to write their own self-publishing success story.

What motivated you to write it?

Check out virtually any writer’s publication or web site, and chances are, you’ll come across one or more articles about the challenges of getting published – along with tips, strategies, tricks, etc. So many want it, but so few manage to get it.

Even those authors who are admitted to The Publishing Kingdom quickly discover that the emperor truly has no clothes: anemic royalties, 18-24 months to publication, loss of creative control, surrendered book rights and the unpleasant realization that even after giving up all that, authors are still expected to shoulder the lion’s share of the book promotion burden themselves! All to earn – in most cases – far less than a buck a book.

I felt that for most authors, self-publishing was truly viable, and given how much time and energy they’d have to invest even in a conventional publishing scenario if they wanted success – and all for a lousy return – didn’t it make more sense to do it yourself and keep control of the process, the timetable, the rights, and most of the money?

I felt my story was a good one, and one worth telling. Oh, and yes, I thought I could make money! Because my formula had worked twice, it could work again (and has). Yes, that success benefits me, but it also reaffirms the fundamental validity of the book’s premises.

How do you feel your books make a difference in people’s lives?

I have a 350-page file on my computer of letters I’ve received from people thanking me for writing my books, and sharing the difference they’ve made in their lives (especially my first one, The Well-Fed Writer, about lucrative “commercial freelancing”; www.wellfedwriter.com).

To be able to share my story, which then helps countless others take their inherent writing skills and turn them into a business that supports them and their families, while giving them a quality of life most would kill for, is monumentally gratifying.

Ditto with the ability to share how to take a book you believe in, and by your own wits, perseverance, and the sweat of your brow (and yes, a few bucks), make it the best it can be, bring it to market, and against all odds, turn it into a significant income stream.

I’m happy to say these things have happened countless times as a result of my books. Writing is often considered a career path of dubious financial prospects. I’ve earned a handsome living making a lie of that conventional wisdom.

What site should people visit if they want to know more?
The Well-Fed Self-Publisher: www.wellfedsp.com
The Well-Fed Writer: www.wellfedwriter.com

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

Pretty cool! If it turns out to be true, anyhow.

The world’s first zero-net-energy city is being planned for (of all places) the United Arab Emirates, just outside Abu Dhabi.

Solar power, in the form of photovoltaic panels, concentrated solar collectors, and solar thermal tubes will provide 82% of the citys energy needs.

An additional 17% of the citys power will come from burning composted food waste in a highly efficient method that developers say will emit greenhouse gases at a rate 10 times lower than if the food were allowed to decompose in a landfill.

The remaining 1% of the citys energy will come from wind turbines.

This is the same UAE that is on a massive, insane-looking skyscraper binge in Dubai, creating a beautiful modern city but one that is anything but carbon/energy-neutral.

Hmmm!

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