By Posted on Posted in Publishing

Tomorrow through Thursday, for the 16th time, I’ll be attending (and for the 15th time, writing about) Book Expo America, the largest book-industry trade show in the US. This year might be the first time I’m not attending a pre-event publishing conference (I’m attending a blogging conference instead)—in part because Independent Book Publishers Association, for the first time since I started attending, is not doing their University (they did it in the winter, in San Francisco). They are still doing the Ben Franklin Awards, at least—so I’ll get to see a lot of my friends.

I’ve found this event tremendously useful over the years, even got a book contract in negotiations that started on the show floor. It’s the best way I know to take the pulse of the book world, and a terrific place to network.

If you’d like to read my coverage of other BEAs since 1997, please visit https://frugalmarketing.com/dtb/dtb-publishing.shtml (Note: the safety alert you may see from Google or Norton is because of a link to one of my other sites, where we believe we’ve tracked down the offender but Google hasn’t updated itself yet—go ahead and click).

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

Two astounding pieces of news related to the nuclear industry crossed my desk this week.

First, a rundown by Harvey Wasserman, who’s been fighting nukes all the way back to the 1970s (at least two of his many books are on energy issues), on the current very sorry state of the nuclear power industry, worldwide. And only China and Russia have an aggressive construction program at the moment.

Wasserman notes that this is an industry on its knees.

The three most nuclear-embracing societies in the world are the US, France, and Japan, which together have built 217 of the world’s 441 nukes (104), 58, and 55, respectively).

In Wasserman’s article, he notes that:

  • None of Japan’s reactors are currently operating
  • France just elected President Francois Hollande, who campaigned as a pro-safe-energy, anti-nuclear candidate
  • In the US, the few nukes currently under construction are saddled with costs that make them completely uncompetitive, even without all the other negative factors, and with a loan guarantee program (a/k/a “bailout”) that looks increasingly tenuous—and meanwhile, the safe energy/no nukes movement, largely quiet since our victories 30+ years ago, is waking up (I even went to a safe energy demonstration recently whose speakers included Vermont’s governor, one of its senators, and its attorney general)
  • Even China, a country not known to pay much attention to the safety and well-being of its citizens—and one that has been expanding its energy capacity through every technology it can harness—is reevaluating its nuclear program, and may halt construction or shut down some or all of its reactors

And Wasserman didn’t even discuss the several countries (among them Germany and Italy) that have pledged to phase out or shut down their nukes.

The second story is a reminder of one more reason why we should never have harnessed this technology: it’s a genie that won’t stay in the bottle. Every nuclear power generation or fuel processing plant increases the chances of global terrorism, and of rogue governments getting their hands on nuclear weapons.

It turns out that Kodak had its own mini-nuclear reactor and a store of weapons-grade uranium, according to the Los Angeles Times.

As the reporter, Matt Pearce, wryly noted, “Good thing Kodak isn’t in Iran; that’s the kind of thing Israel’s been threatening to go to war over.”

But rest assured that we are out of danger from Kodak’s uranium, he notes:

Lest this story conjure up memories of the anxiety over “loose nukes” after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kodak ditched the uranium in 2007 with the coordination of the U.S. government, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Safety, cost, and atomic proliferation are just three of many reasons to oppose nuclear power. Here’s a PDF you can download (from Germany) called “100 Good Reasons Against Nuclear Power.”

The good news: we totally don’t need it. Amory Lovins and others have shown how the most energy-hogging of societies, such as the US (which uses about twice as much energy per capita as Germany, with about the same standard of living) can cut energy use by 60 or 80 percent, and even the more conservation-minded societies still can find plenty of savings. Combine that with the rapid advances in clean energy technology (solar, wind, small hydro, tidal, magnetic, etc.) and you have a recipe for safe, clean living, high quality of life, and reduced threat of catastrophic climate change.

You might want to send a link to this post to your elected representatives, with a letter about why you favor clean-energy alternatives to nukes and fossil fuels.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , ,

It is less than six months until the US elections for President, House of Representatives,and one-third of the Senate.

A year ago, seeing the level of hate and vitriol against Obama from the ultra-right, and the paralysis of government, I was pretty convinced that the Republicans would win easily. Now, however, I think Obama will prevail, at least if the votes are counted accurately and the voters are allowed to vote (both of them BIG ifs, in the wake of anti-vote legislation and the near-unanimous adoption of vote-counting techniques that are entirely too easy to rig, as we saw in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004).

What’s changed?

  • The other candidates have been making very cogent arguments against Romney; the Republicans have given Obama plenty of ammunition.
  • Romney himself is the most clueless major-party US presidential candidate I can remember, constantly putting his foot in his mouth, constantly shifting positions, and failing to convince pretty much anybody of his sincerity, his integrity, his ability to relate to common people, or even his basic competence. It’s almost as if he were coached by Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin.
  • The Occupy (a/k/a 99%) movement has focused long-overdue attention on class issues, while Romney has cheerfully embraced his fellow one-percenters.
  • The Republican Party as a whole, with Romney’s open support, has made it clear that their tent is not big enough to hold unemployed people, Latinos, women’s reproductive rights supporters, gays and lesbians, or students—or even moderate Republicans (just ask Senator Richard Lugar). Obama has opened his arms to these constituencies. If the Democrats can get all those folks to show up and vote, they win.
  • It is painfully obvious that Washington’s political gridlock is the Republican Party’s doing. They’ve been dubbed “the party of no” for good reason. People are sick and tired of the constant obstructionism and of the specifically stated goal of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: “Our top political priority is to deny President Obama a second term.” Not exactly an appropriate priority for a country still struggling with a deep recession, two major and several minor wars, crises in healthcare and education, and all the rest.
  • Nobody likes a bunch of name-calling whining bullies. Instead of proposing actual solutions to our country’s problems, the Republicans have race-baited, religion-baited, called him a socialist (for goodness sake—Richard Nixon has a more progressive record!) and a Muslim, and all the rest of the ridiculous Big Lie nonsense.
  • While Obama’s accomplishments are smaller in number and far more centrist than they need to be, he can point to some real strides: The economy is better, Osama Bin Laden is neutralized, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell s justifiably buried, two terrific Supreme Court Justices have been appointed (we need one more to replace one of the four on the extreme right), and something vaguely resembling healthcare reform actually got passed, where every other president since FDR failed.
  • The right cannot attack Obama on the places he’s most vulnerable: personal liberty, an absurd faith in nuclear power, failure to keep his promises on renewable energy, and an inability to get us out of all these wars—because Obama’s positions on all these issues pretty much are the Republican positions.
  • And finally, even if they totally forgot to do the necessary organizing to pass his agenda, Obama’s campaign knows a whole lot about social media and community organizing. This provided the edge in 2008, and could do so again if the Dems can convince young voters especially that they haven’t sold them out, and that the kind of change they voted for in ’08 may be difficult to achieve, but it would be impossible under Romney.

Still, the Democrats cannot and should not take victory for granted, and they have to make sure to pick up seats in Congress as well.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

This article, “Do You Recycle? The Go Green Guy – 19 items you may not know that you can recycle!” opened my eyes on a few things. Shoes, for example.

I’d be cautious on composting dryer lint, however. It’s little bits of clothing, and unless you wash nothing but organic cotton, you probably don’t want a mix of heavily pesticided and/or synthetic chemical crap in your compost.

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

After more than a week of traveling in Ireland and Northern Ireland, here’s some of what I notice:

  • Fairly high public awareness in general terms, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to behavior.
  • Wind power plays a significant role. It’s common to see large wind turbines (as in much of the rest of Europe), thouh for the most part in small clusters of one to five, rather than in the vast wind farms of say, Spain—and also to see older, smaller  private installations on individual farms, of the sort that were common on US farms in the late 1970s.
  • Solar’s role is minimal. I have seen exactly one rooftop solar hot water installation, and the only places I’ve seen photovoltaic have been on self-powered electronic highway signs. Of course, it’s not the sunniest place in the world; an Italian immigrant told us, “in Ireland, they call this a beautiful day. In Italy, we would call it a disaster.”  But there must be more than is obvious, because we passed quite a number of solar businesses, even in some pretty rural areas.
  • Fair trade has a lot of currency here, and you can find a fair number of fair trade items not only in specialty stores and supermarkets, but even at gas station convenience stores.
  • Big cities have some limited public recycling in the major commercial and tourist areas. I imagine there are recycling programs for households, too.
  • On the campus of the technical college we visited, environmental awareness was quite high. This school is also about to launch a degree program in sustainability and one in agriculture, yet they haven’t explored the obvious linkages between those two program offerings—in part because they’re slotted for different campus, 50 miles apart.
  • To my shock, the small conference center we stayed at in rural Donegal was still using energy-hogging incandescent light bulbs.
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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability

Or so they claim, according to this article on Green Biz: “A Window into Microsoft’s Quest to Become Carbon Neutral.”

It’s a big, audacious, and probably difficult goal. Let’s hope they make it.

And if they do, it gives them bragging rights, big-time. I hope they see the amazing marketing advantages and act accordingly (I’ll even give their marketing department a copy of my book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, if they request one.)

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Politics, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

I haven’t had as many chances as I’d hoped to be proud of President Barack Obama in his 3+ years in office. But yesterday was a day I could be very proud of him; as you certainly know by now, he is the first US president to acknowledge that same-sex couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples, including the right to marry. Obama has been ambivalent on the issue (and quite a few others) for many years, so a clear, unequivocal, uncompromising position is rare. Perhaps is voice is stronger because of his own history; the union of his parents would have been illegal in many parts of the country for years after his birth.

This should not be rocket science. Same-sex marriage has been legal in several other parts of the world (and even a few US states, including my own home of Massachusetts) for several years, and the sky has not fallen.

Still, when I attended my first few same-sex weddings back in the late 1970s, I didn’t think I’d live to see such unions acknowledged by any government. In less than 30 years, it’s become an inevitability. I remember President Bush reluctantly endorsing civil unions, even as he condemned gay marriage, and thinking that this was enormous progress. But a full endorsement is much better. And while it still seems odd to read or hear phrases like “her wife” or “his husband,” it’s a good kind of strange.

And yet, just a day earlier, the Neanderthals soundly thrashed same-sex marriage in North Carolina.

Here’s the bit I don’t understand from the so-called “family values” crowd: how is the ability of two people to marry—and with it, to visit each other in the hospital, to file a joint tax return, to attend parent-teacher conferences—in any way an attack on the institutions of marriage and family? As far as I can determine, these rights make the idea of marriage and family stronger. Marriage, whether heterosexual or homosexual, should be a partnership of equals that strengthens the family unit and builds family values. Living just outside the town that the National Enquirer dubbed “Lesbianville, USA,” I’ve seen this strength in the many same-sex couples I know with children, who were parents alongside my wife and me as our kids went through day care and then school. I can’t wrap myself around the argument that it destroys families.

I’ve tried to understand the position, but I just can’t grasp it. When two people of the same sex declare their love and commitment, they build a family just as real as any straight couple. And when a heterosexual or same-sex marriage falls apart, it’s tough on both partners as well as on children and friends. I just can’t grasp how allowing two men or two women to mary has any impact on relationships between a man and a woman.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics Tagged with , , ,

Editor’s Note: I’ve long been a fan of Van Jones and was really upset when he was forced out of the White House. This is such a good analysis that I asked him permission to post it on my site and blog. —Shel Horowitz, primary author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green

Van Jones reflects on his time in—and out of—the White House.

by Van Jones posted Mar 29, 2012 at https://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/the-age-of-obama-what-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it  — used with permission.

This article is adapted from Rebuild the Dream, Van Jones’ new book.

The 2008 campaign was a campfire around which millions gathered. But after the election, it was nobody’s job or role to tend that campfire. The White House was focused on the minutiae of passing legislation, not on the magic of leading a movement. Obama For America did the best that it could, but the mass gatherings, the idealism, the expanded notions of American identity, the growing sense of a new national community, all of that disappeared.

It goes without saying that clear thinking and imaginative problem solving are easier in hindsight, away from the battlefield. I was in the White House for six months of 2009, and I was outside of it afterward. I had some of the above insights at the time, but many did not come to me in the middle of the drama and action. Most are the product of deeper reflection, which I was able to do only from a distance.

Nonetheless, the exercise of trying to sort out what might have been and trying to understand why nobody was able to make those things happen in real time has informed this book and shaped my arguments going forward.

I say Obama relied on the people too little, and we tried to rely on him too much.

Let me speak personally: looking back, I do not think those of us who believed in the agenda of change had to get beaten as badly as we were, after Obama was sworn in. We did not have to leave millions of once-inspired people feeling lost, deceived, and abandoned. We did not have to let our movement die down to the level that it did.

The simple truth is this: we overestimated our achievement in 2008, and we underestimated our opponents in 2009.

We did not lose because the backlashers got so loud. We lost because the rest of us got so quiet. Too many of us treated Obama’s inauguration as some kind of finish line, when we should have seen it as just the starting line. Too many of us sat down at the very moment when we should have stood up.

Among those who stayed active, too many of us (myself included) were in the suites when we should have been in the streets. Many “repositioned” our grassroots organizations to be “at the table” in order to “work with the administration.” Some of us (like me) took roles in the government. For a while at least, many were so enthralled with the idea of being a part of history that we forgot the courage, sacrifices, and risks that are sometimes required to make history.

That is hard, scary, and thankless work. It requires a willingness to walk with a White House when possible-and to walk boldly ahead of that same White House, when necessary. A few leaders were willing to play that role from the very beginning, but many more were not. Too many activists reverted to acting like either die-hard or disappointed fans of the president, not fighters for the people.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama went too far to the left to accommodate his liberal base. In my view, the liberal base went too far to the center to accommodate Obama. The conventional wisdom says that Obama relied on Congress too much. I say Obama relied on the people too little, and we tried to rely on him too much. Once it became obvious that he was committed to bipartisanship at all costs, even if it meant chasing an opposition party that was moving further to the right every day, progressives needed to reassess our strategies, defend our own interests, and go our own way. It took us way too long to internalize this lesson- and act upon it.

The independent movement for hope and change, which had been growing since 2003, was a goose that was laying golden eggs. But the bird could not be bossed. Caging it killed it. It died around conference tables in Washington, DC, long before the Tea Party got big enough to kick its carcass down the street.

The administration was naive and hubristic enough to try to absorb and even direct the popular movement that had helped to elect the president. That was part of the problem. But the main problem was that the movement itself was na?Øve and enamored enough that it wanted to be absorbed and directed. Instead of marching on Washington, many of us longed to get marching orders from Washington. We so much wanted to be a part of something beautiful that we forgot how ugly and difficult political change can be. Somewhere along the line, a bottom-up, largely decentralized phenomenon found itself trying to function as a subcomponent of a national party apparatus. Despite the best intentions of practically everyone involved, the whole process wound up sucking the soul out of the movement.

As a result, when the backlash came, the hope-and- changers had no independent ground on which to stand and fight back. Grassroots activists had little independent ability to challenge the White House when it was wrong and, therefore, a dwindling capacity to defend it when it was right.

The Obama administration had the wrong theory of the movement, and the movement had the wrong theory of the presidency. In America, change comes when we have two kinds of leaders, not just one. We need a president who is willing to be pushed into doing the right thing, and we need independent leaders and movements that are willing to do the pushing. For a few years, Obama’s supporters expected the president to act like a movement leader, rather than a head of state.

The confusion was understandable: As a candidate, Obama performed many of the functions of a movement leader. He gave inspiring speeches, held massive rallies, and stirred our hearts. But when he became president, he could no longer play that role.

The expectation that he would or could arose from a fundamental misreading of U.S. history. After all, as head of state, President Lyndon Johnson did not lead the civil rights movement. That was the job of independent movement leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer. There were moments of conflict and cooperation between Johnson and leaders in the freedom struggle, but the alchemy of political power and people power is what resulted in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As head of state, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not lead the labor movement. That was the job of independent union leaders. Again, the alchemy of political power and people power resulted in the New Deal. As head of state, Woodrow Wilson did not lead the fight to enfranchise women. That was the role of independent movement leaders, such as suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells. The alchemy of political power and people power resulted in women’s right to vote. As head of state, Abraham Lincoln did not lead the abolitionists. That was the job of independent movement leaders Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. The alchemy of political power and people power resulted in the emancipation of enslaved Africans. As head of state, Richard Nixon did not lead the environmental movement. That was the job of various environmental organizations, such as the Sierra Club, and other leaders, like those whom writer Rachel Carson inspired. Once again it was the alchemy of political power and people power that resulted in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency

The biggest reason for our frustrations and failures is that we have not yet understood that both of these are necessary-and they are distinct. We already have our head of state who arguably is willing to be pushed. We do not yet have a strong enough independent movement to do the pushing. The bulk of this book makes the case for how and why we should build one.

Van Jones adapted this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions, from his new book, Rebuild the Dream. Van Jones, a former contributing editor to YES! Magazine and a former adviser to President Obama, is the co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, a platform for bottom-up, people-powered innovations to help fix the U.S. economy. He is also the co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change, and Green for All.

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