By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability

Apparently, 59% of the market isn’t enough for Scotts Miracle-Gro. The company is suing its tiny competitor, TerraCycle–a maker of compost made from worm poo, on trademark infringement grounds.

Well, I looked at TerraCycle’s logo and trade dress, and then I looked at MiracleGro’s. Yes, they both use greens and yellows–but different shades, and in very different ways. The only similarity I can see is that they both use a circle to hold their logos. It’s one thing to trademark a truly distinctive shape, such as the McDonald’s arches. But a circle? Come on!

In fact, TerraCycle makes a very clear distinction on its website. Its whole brand identity is as a no-artificial-chemicals alternative to products like MiracleGro, packed exclusively in reused soda bottles and other packaging that would have otherwise ended up in landfill.

Hmm–sounds like a company I should feature in my monthly Positive Power of Principled Profit spotlight article.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Ethics: General, Publishing

Both as someone who loves a good yarn and someone who writes regularly about ethics both in my blog and in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, I want to talk for a minute about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

There’s so much I could say about this latest (and final) Harry Potter book–but it’s a challenge to find things to say that won’t mess it up for those who haven’t read it yet. I think I’ve succeeded.

Let me put my bias on the table first: I enjoy the HP books so much that we’ve given copies of Book #1 to several of our childless friends. I believe all of them have gone on to read the others, in order (and for these books, in chronological order is the only sensible way to read them). Also, I’m extremely grateful to J.K. Rowling for creating an entire generation of book readers in an era where that didn’t seem at all likely. Yet, there are places in some of the other books where I felt 50 or 100 pages could have easily been cut.

In spite of its length, I don’t feel that way about #7. In fact, the drama is so intense, so early, and continues with so little down time that I almost wish for a bit more filler. It’s a very fast read.

As a writer about ethics, I’ve long been fascinated with Rowling’s take on the nature of good and evil (and that of other writers in the genre, particularly Phillip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials series is every bit as masterful). In this book, she goes much, much deeper on that front, with lots of surprises. Several characters turn out to have a lot more depth than we thought, and Harry himself has to make a choice unlike any he has faced before. And the events following that choice just feel so right!

One flaw, though, is the number of gratuitous characters she’s introducing. It’s a lot to keep track of, and several have only cameo roles. Another flaw is that the trail of corpses leaves some of the deaths without justification or even description, and no time to grieve and remember them before plunging into the next round.

Still, these are minor. Rowling, not only a master storyteller but incredibly well-informed about mythology from many cultures, has long ago earned a special place in literature, and this book proves her mastery. She deserves every good thing that has happened in her life.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics

Why wasn’t this all over the media?

George W Bush has signed an Executive Order giving broad powers to seize property and block financial transactions from anyone who even donates money to any person or group that the government feels is opposing an orderly reconstruction in Iraq.

How Big Brother can you get? This is a serious threat to the liberty of activists nationwide. George Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

Go and read the order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070717-3.html

And then tell people about it.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics

Apparently the phenomenon of a corporate executive posting anonymously in ways that he/she thinks will help his/her company/hurt the competition is called “sock puppeting.”

I hadn’t heard this term until I stumbled on a New York Times article this morning, published Monday.

The article cites not only John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, whose disgraceful and illegal behavior I covered here, but also…

Conrad Black, CEO of Hollinger International–found guilty last week of mail fraud and obstruction of justice, and facing up to 35 years in the slammer.

Says the Times:

At the criminal fraud trial of Hollinger International’s chief executive, Conrad M. Black, prosecutors introduced evidence that the former press baron had once proposed joining a Yahoo Finance chat room to blame short sellers for his company’s stock performance.

Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com (who claims that his real name was attached to his anonymous handle on every post–which, if true, makes it a very different situation, in my opinion).

And it’s not just the business world, but also politics and media.

Tad Furtado, at the time, policy director for New Hampshire Congressman Charles Bass (who lost his re-election bid in a perhaps-related development).

Journalists are not immune either:

In April 2006, The Los Angeles Times pulled Michael A. Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, off of his blog because he had posted comments on blogs under an assumed name while feuding with readers. In November, New Republic magazine suspended its culture critic Lee Siegel after it determined that he had been energetically defending himself in the discussion forums of his New Republic blog, under the name “sprezzatura” (Italian for “making the difficult look easy”).

Of course, there’s the related phenomenon of journalists writing under their own identity, but not disclosing that they are also acting as paid PR flacks, such as Armstrong Williams shilling for the Bush administration. I’ve written about that one, too.

Meanwhile, there are those of us still out there fighting the good fight. If you haven’t signed the Business Ethics Pledge yet, I urge you to do so.

I plan to write an essay, “When Even Whole Foods Cheats.” Rest assured, it will be published under my own name, and whatever plugs it may make for my book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, it will make them honestly.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

35 years ago this month, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers–embarrassing documents showing how successive administrations from both parties lies us into Vietnam and kept us there.

Democracy Now had three of the players: Ellsberg himself, Senator (and current Presidential candidate) Mike Gravel, and the publisher of Beacon Press, which was sued by the government for doing the book version.

It reads like a spy novel, with all sorts of unbelievable intrigues and secrecies and plot twists. Someone could make a great movie out of it.

And of course, there are very relevant lessons for today’s society, as the Iraq war drags on and the pressure mounts to open yet another front against Iran.

Read, listen, or watch at democracynow.org–both for the drama and the history/current events lesson.

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, Uncategorized

Kristol thinks GWB is a successful president and that we’re on track to win the war in Iraq. Hmmm–could’ve fooled me!

Can you say “hubris”? Gawd, what chutzpah. Arianna Huffington calls him “delusional”–and I think she is right!

Kristol writes in the original article:

What about terrorism? Apart from Iraq, there has been less of it, here and abroad, than many experts predicted on Sept. 12, 2001. So Bush and Vice President Cheney probably are doing some important things right. The war in Afghanistan has gone reasonably well.

What planet is he ON? Let’s see: subway bombings in London, commuter rail murder in Madrid, kidnappings and warlordism in Afghanistan (and Karzi hanging on for dear life), the most recent attempts in Glasgow…and let’s not even count Israel in the equation.

It’s this kind of very dangerous thinking that got us into a war we had no business being in, and made a complete shambles of things once we went in.

One place I agree with Kristol–this burden will be laid on the shoulders of the next president. Hopefully someone with the vision and strength of character to get us the heck out of there.

tags: Bill Kristol, William Kristol, Iraq, Afghanistan, Terrorism, George W. Bush, Arianna Huffington, Washington Post, Huffington Post

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability

An amazing juxtaposition of two stories in the Organic Consumers Association’s latest newsletter:

A Reuters report, “Organic Farming Can Feed the World“:

“Model estimates indicate that organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base,” they wrote in their report, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems.

Wow! We can have the much higher food quality, eliminate a major pollution source, and increase yields. Sounds good to me!

The other story examines research that examines specific effects pesticides have, interfering with plants’ natural ability to fix nitrogen. It’s rather technical but I found a paragraph in ordinary English:

Drawing on their recent work and other published studies, the team projected that pesticides and other contaminants are reducing plant yield by one-third as a result of impaired SNF. This remarkable conclusion suggests one mechanism, or explanation of the yield-enhancing benefits of well-managed, long-term organic farming systems.

In fact, yields can be as much as three times higher than conventional agriculture.

Isn’t it time to reclaim our organic heritage and stop farming the old, destructive ways?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

And both of them less-than-easy to link to!

Chris Bauer’s e-newsletter posed the scenario of a disconnect between a company’s ethics policies and its other behavior.

If you are in an organization with a CSR program that seems out of synch with the rest of its actions, you may have a great opportunity to lobby for a better alignment between your organization’s stated values and its actual actions. The strategy to use? Simply point out the CSR program as a great example of fulfilling the company’s stated values and contrast that with its other policies and actions. If the contrast is glaring enough, you may have a shot at driving your point home, assuming you know how to pick the right audience and style for your remarks.

I can’t find it on his blog. But I bet if you contact him and ask for a copy of “Corporate Math: A Right + A Wrong = ?”, he’ll be happy to send you one.

Meanwhile, in a June 15 post, Chris MacDonald applauds cereal giant Kellogg’s agreement to stop spoonfeeding its sugar- and chemical-laden stuff to kids watching TV, even while acknowledging that the company is probably dong this for less-than-altruistic reasons. There seems to be no way to capture the permalink and link to it, but you can find it on the June 2007 archives page.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

Can you believe it? John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, has been often cited in the press as a model of ethical, compassionate leadership. Now it turns out that he’s been writing anonymous postings online aimed at lowering the stock price of competitor Wild Oats–which his company has been trying to buy!

This was a shocker–I’d always thought of Whole Foods as a pretty ethical company, even as I watched it swallow several competitors (including our local equivalent, Bread & Circus).

As someone who has written an award-winning book about why ethical companies are more likely to succeed (Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First) and who founded a movement called the Business Ethics Pledge https://www.business-ethics-pledge.org , I’m of the opinion–based on research–that strong ethics helps a company succeed.

Anonymous attempts to drive down the stock price of a company you’re considering buying down the road is the antithesis of ethical behavior. And worse,the radio story where I first learned about this claimed Mackey did it because it was “fun.”

If this is an America that values honesty, the FTC should deny the merger based solely on Mackey’s sneak attack.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Arts & Entertainment, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice

We have close friends who moved last year from California to New Zealand, because they were concerned about the growing rightward drift in the US–even though they lived in one of the most liberal cities in the whole country.

Well, my wife and I saw “Sicko,” the other night: Michael Moore’s movie about the healthcare crisis in the US–and indepedently, both of us thought, ‘hmmm, New Zealand doesn’t seem so outrageous right now.’

Moore exposes the human cost of the USA’s failed healthcare system: doctors who are paid to deny necessary procedures, 9/11 volunteers who fell between the very large cracks, a cancer patient who had to sell her home and move into a spare room in her daughter’s house, thousands of miles away…and in true Moore fashion he bundles a few of these folks off on small boats to Guantanamo Bay–to demand the same free, state-of-the-art healthcare that the Bush-Cheney government repeatedly brags is offered to the prisoners there.

Of course, he’s turned away there–but finds a very receptive audience within the Cuban medical system, which treats the 9/11 volunteers as true heroes. In a very moving moment, a doctor in Cuba tells Moore that Cuba is a very poor country with few resources, but it has made healthcare a priority for all its citizens–and she pretty much tells him, if we can do it, you can too.

Cuba is not the only place that has made healthcare a priority–just about every First World country except the US offers high-quality free or minimal-cost universal healthcare, and Moore documents this with interviews in Canada, France, and England.

Less strident and more poignant than in some of his earlier films, Moore has made a film that I think could reach mainstream American audiences and show them it doesn’t have to be that way. And why, Moore asks, is “socialized medicine” such a demonized concept in the US? After all, we have socialized police and fire protection, public education, and plenty more. Why isn’t healthcare likewise considered a basic service?

In 1979 and 1980, I worked as a paid organizer for the Gray Panthers. Their biggest platform was the need for single-payer healthcare. Back then, we used to say that the United States and South Africa were the only two industrialized countries to lack this basic right–and South Africa, of course, embraced universal healthcare when it voted out the old apartheid government. So the US is all alone in its insistence that healthcare should be for profit, and not for health. Almost 30 years later, the Gray Panthers’ call is more important than ever.

And will I leave the country just to get affordable healthcare? At the moment, no. Our parents are here, our children are here, we live in Paradise in our antique farmhouse next to the mountain…and at the resent, we’re both in fine health. But certainly, this movie made us consider the option.

The website for the movie is https://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/

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