By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Other

I went to a bookstore the other day and noticed two books prominently displayed on the same front table:

Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, by none other than former President Jimmy Carter, and a Beacon Press anthology, Global Values 101, featuring such well-known progressive thinkers as Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman, Robert Reich, and Lani Guinier, among many others.

For more than two decades, the ultra-right has staked a claim around “values.” Unfortunately, the values they claim are not my values or the values of most people I know. Just as one example among many, the term “family values” has been far too often used to create a climate of acute homophobia–of bigotry. These people claim they’re in favor of family values, but their definition of family only includes one among various possible models: a dominant husband, a stay-home wife (or one focused far more on home than career, if she does work outside the home), and zero tolerance for divergence from the model.

Well, I see a whole lot of families that don’t look like that, but that are loving, secure places for the partners and their children. And I see plenty that do fit the “traditional family values” model where abuse, infidelity, and/or alcoholism seem to rule the day.

Let me be clear: there are, of course, plenty of loving, supportive families with a husband and wife in a heterosexual marriage; I am blessed to live in one. But our family is founded on tolerance, on freedom of self-exploration, and on the firm value of making the world a better place than we found it by helping to break down barriers of bigotry.

So I find it very refreshing, as the author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, a book with a strong values message within a progressive context, to see major publishing houses beginning to publish books like these.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News

​​​​I have a lot of respect for media coach/PR queen Susan Harrow,
author of one of my favorite PR books (Sell Yourself Without Selling
Your Soul) and the go-to person if you want your author on Oprah. I’ve
subscribed to her newsletter for years and it’s one I actually do read.

Susan’s launched a new project: celebrity makeovers by nomination (e.g., these are not really her clients). She starts with advice to Malcolm Gladwell.
I’ve read Blink and a chunk of The Tipping Point but have not heard him
speak. I think I have heard him on radio but it didn’t leave much
impression.

Susan goes after him to improve his speaking
delivery in a big way, and all the points she makes sound valid.
Speaking is a vital communication tool for authors. But she also tells
him to shave his hair. Looking at his picture on her blog, I think it’s
kind of cute. I’d vote for a little trim maybe, but not a radical new
look.

But I sure do hope we haven’t reached the point on the
glitz-scale where someone with as important a message as Gladwell is
judged on his or her hairstyle!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Shel's Personal Life

Nice remark from another copywriter colelague, Mordechai “Morty” Schiler, in his blog:

While I’m still grappling with integrating marketing and principles, Shel Horowitz has made a career of balancing the two.

I’m hoping his “grappling” will lead him to sign the Business Ethics Pledge; I know from past interaction that he’s a highly ethical person, just too humble to take credit for that position.

And how about you?

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

The New York Times reports that China
pressured Microsoft to take down a blog that mentioned a journalist
strike at a Chinese paper following the firing of a journalist. The blog was hosted on a server in the U.S.

Mr.
Zhao said in an interview Thursday that Microsoft chose to delete his
blog on Dec. 30 with no warning. “I didn’t even say I supported the
strike,” he said. “This action by Microsoft infringed upon my freedom
of speech. They even deleted my blog and gave me no chance to back up
my files without any warning.”

Tacky, to be sure.
But some bloggers speculate this could lead to much worse: Gridskipper
claims the Chinese threatened to convert the whole country to Linux and
Movable Type, e.g., non-Microsoft. That site won’t let me copy and
quote, but here’s the link.

And
I’ve just spent ten minutes trying unsuccessfully to locate the comment
I saw that wondered if MS would be equally cowardly in the face of
illegal requests from our own US government–which, considering all the
stuff coming out about illegal White House-authorized spying, etc., is
not such a big leap.

One of Microsoft’s own most public bloggers, Scobleizer, the “Microsoft Geek Blogger”, had this to say:

OK,
this one is depressing to me. It’s one thing to pull a list of words
out of blogs using an algorithm. It’s another thing to become an agent
of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work. Yes, I know the
consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of
dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right.

He
goes on to talk about moral courage, his grandmother who stood up to
the Nazis in Germany, and his own action contacting higher-ups at
Microsoft about this issue. Good for him!

Meanwhile, a message to all bloggers, and all who rely on any outside hosting for your data: Keep backups on your own system!

I maintain this blog on two different servers–but maybe I should keep a file on my hard drive, as well.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

One could almost feel sorry for Wal-Mart. For all its vaunted IT structure, a theft as easy to spot as this, and so high up the ladder. Read the CNN story about former vice-chair Thomas Coughlin’s guilty plea. For falsely obtaining and using half a million bucks’ worth of store gift cards!

Just got to wonder what’s going on.

But
then again, this is the same company that routinely hires contractors
who use illegal aliens in near-slave-labor conditions…has a long
history of generating environmental lawsuits…exports jobs from the US
to China by demanding its suppliers cut prices substantially every
year…uses the US government to subsidize its employees’ healthcare,
and even then tries to get rid of workers who are most likely to submit
health claims. Oh yes, and runs roughshod over the local populace that
doesn’t want them. In my own town, we’re engaged in a battle to block a
Super-Wal-Mart that by the company’s own studies will completely
gridlock the main artery between the two college towns on either side
of us. There are already three Wal-Marts within ten miles of my house,
including one half a mile from this new project (that they will close
https://www.blogger.com/img/gl.spell.gifand likely abandon) and an
existing Super Wal-Mart two towns south. The proposal is to pave over
50+ acres of farmland and wetland with the largest building ever
constructed in our town (that’s a town with several shopping malls and
a large sports/concert venue). And did I mention that our town, Hadley,
Massachusetts, is considered to have the absolute best farmland in the
entire country?

The list of what’s wrong with Wal-Mart could go on much longer; there are several books on the subject.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll praise Wal-Mart when praise is due. It’s happened once so far, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina.

But I do find it very enlightening to compare its business practices with Costco’s. Not surprisingly, Costco’s bottom line is more attractive, too.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

Some historical perspective on spying, as recorded in the New York times obit for Frank Wilkinson, McCarthyite scapegoat and First Amendment activist who went to jail to defend his principles

But
Mr. Wilkinson was not finished with the federal government. When he
discovered, in 1986, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been
compiling files on him, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request
for their release.

He was sent 4,500 documents. But he sued for
more, and the next year the F.B.I. released an additional 30,000
documents, and then 70,000 two years later. Eventually, there were
132,000 documents covering 38 years of surveillance, including detailed
reports of Mr. Wilkinson’s travel arrangements and speaking schedules,
and vague and mysterious accusations of an assassination attempt
against Mr. Wilkinson in 1964.

Meanwhile, yet
another right-wing extremist, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has entered a
plea bargain and promised to implicate a number of his buddies in
Congress. He admits to influence peddling–and former Republican
Senator Ben Knighthorse Campbell accuses him of trying to rig elections
on Indian reservations, as well. Abramoff has close ties to former
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, current House Speaker Dennis Hastert,
Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and other ultra-right honchos. The Wall
Street Journal has said the number of US Representatives implicated
could be as high as 60, most of them on the Republican side, but so
far, only Robert Ney of Ohio has been specifically named. (Sorry, WSJ’s
website structure doesn’t allow me to copy the link)

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By Posted on Posted in Events, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life

​​​​This blog was launched on December 29, 2004, which means it just
turned one year old. So allow me to wallow in a bit of reflection,
please.

I’d delayed blogging for a long time, because I’d
thought that to be taken seriously, a blogger needed to post daily. I
even tried to organize a group of non-blogging marketing pundits to
each take a day of the week in a communal blog. That effort went
nowhere, but I think at least three of us now blog regularly. Once I
realized that many bloggers post once a week or less, I knew I could
handle it.

I started the blog with a few agendas. I wanted to:

  • Create a platform for my ideas and rants, of course
  • Open a doorway to a syndicated op-ed newspaper column (a dream I’ve had for decades) Support the Business Ethics Pledge campaign
  • Become more widely known in the worlds of business ethics and progressive politics
  • Develop new readers who would then buy my books, subscribe to my newsletter, etc.

    And
    in fact, in the spring, I went through my blog entries, selected seven
    or so, polished them, and submitted them to four different newspaper
    syndicates–all of whom turned me down. But I’ll keep trying.

    The
    blog has veered away more often than I’d have expected from what I’d
    originally thought of as its core topic: business ethics. But I already
    have a platform to talk about that: my newsletter, Positive Power of Principled Profit.

    It’s
    also hard to tell what impact it has, or where people are learning
    about it. I get very few comments, and many of them are from people
    I’ve steered to the blog via a post to a discussion list or one of my
    newsletters.

    So, this year, one of my goals is to build more traffic to the blog, which will be mirrored both at blogger.com and on my own PrincipledProfit.com site.

    There
    have been a few signers of the Pledge that I believe found me via the
    blog, and a few useful contacts. Hopefully, over the next 12 months,
    I’ll be able to know for certain that the blog is helping to shape the
    discourse.

    And meanwhile, there’s revamping the PrinProfit site,
    hosting my radio show (which I hope to syndicate as well), getting
    publicity for the Pledge, selling more foreign rights, and tons of
    other stuff. somehow, I find time to do at least some of it, between
    client copywriting and consulting projects.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    Ken Lay has always had chutzpah; now he’s trying to paint himself as a victim.

    The St. Petersburg Times rightly says that won’t wash:

    Lay
    said the villains in the Enron case are federal prosecutors, who have
    hidden the truth in a “wave of terror.” Lay apparently equates the
    deaths of innocent people at the hands of suicide bombers with his
    indictment in the corporate scandal. Such hubris takes a lot of nerve,
    but then Ken has plenty of that.

    To which all I can
    add is they are absolutely right. This man caused financial harship for
    his loyal employees. I hope they make him pay back every penny of his
    ill-gotten gains.

    If the actions of Ken Lay disgust you, consider signing the Business Ethics Pledge to make a public (and marketable) stand for business ethics.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

    ​​​​The big dustup over GWB’s admission that he broke the law in having
    the NSA spy on American citizens has gotten even a lot of prominent
    Republicans upset. Columnist George Will, about as conservative as they come, called it a “mistake” the other day. And several GOP Senators (Spector, McCain, Hagel, and Snowe, among them) are saying, “hey, wait a minute!”

    Oh
    yes, and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) quotes no less an authority on
    presidential misconduct than John Dean, Nixon’s counsel during the
    Watergate affair, as saying GWB is the first president to actually admit to an impeachable offense.

    And
    yes, I think it’s appalling that Bush not only condones illegal spying,
    but does so enthusiastically and repeatedly. To show just how much they
    don’t get it:

    At the White House, spokesman Scott
    McClellan was asked to explain why Bush last year said, “Any time you
    hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires —
    a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When
    we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about
    getting a court order before we do so.” McClellan said the quote
    referred only to the USA Patriot Act.

    (The above quote is from a Washington Post story by Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer, dated Wednesday, December 21)

    But…I think there are far more serious high crimes and misdemeanors that are worth going after.

    Congressman John Conyers points some of them out in his just-released report, “The
    Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception,
    Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War    .”
    With over 2000 US soldiers dead, by some estimates much more than
    100,000 Iraqis in fresh graves, and countless wounded, that’s where I’d
    start the impeachment proceedings, if it were up to me. And continue
    through corporate corruption, election rigging, shredding the
    environmental and economic safety nets, and a bunch of other stuff. In
    the context of all this, the spying scandal is the least of it.

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