By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

According to peace activist Tom Hayden, US deaths in Afghanistan are up 273 percent since two years ago; wounded are up 430 percent in a year. More than twice as many Americans died in the first five months of 2010 as in the same period in 2009—and that in turn was almost twice as many as the previous year.

In other words, the toll on Americans dying in Afghanistan under Obama is worse than it was under Bush. Hayden didn’t bother to enumerate the no-doubt horrific numbers of Afghani dead and wounded.

Yes, we elected him knowing that he had pledged to focus the war effort on Afghanistan instead of Iraq. We also elected him to reform Wall Street, push through meaningful healthcare, move the economy forward and convert it to renewable and clean energy sources. I voted for hm in spite of his Afghanistan pledge, not because of it.

Unfortunately, while breaking so many of his campaign promises or soaking them in so much compromise that they disintegrate, this is the one he has chosen to keep. OK, Barack—you made “good” on this campaign promise. Now it’s time to proclaim victory and get the hell out. The lives of Americans and Afghanis are too precious for this nightmare to continue.

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

It’s been quite a week for family milestone events.

The Reunion
By coincidence, my wife’s 35th high school reunion was the same evening as the day we crammed our new-college-graduate daughter’s gear in our little hatchback and delivered her to New York for the summer. Since we were in town anyway, we decided to splurge and head on over.

Although we didn’t know each other then, Dina and I actually attended the same high school, but I was two years ahead (in my yearbook, there’s actually a picture of the two of us next to each other Read more »

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

Recent stories in the New York Times make it clear that Attorney General Eric Holder should be “sharpening his saw” (as Abraham Lincoln said).

BP deliberately chose to use a high-risk sealing method in the days before the blast, and ignored warnings that things were going deeply awry, the paper reports.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics

So now we judge Supreme Court nominees by the way they sit? Come on! Robin Givhan was roundly and appropriately criticized in this article for criticizing not just Elena Kagan’s fashion sense but also that she likes to sit with both feet on the floor, rather than demurely crossing at the ankles. And from this, Ms. Givhan makes a series of
innuendos about her sexuality.

Well, I don’t find her wardrobe, her makeup, her haircut, or her sexual identity (which has nothing to do with any of the above anyway–if Ms. Givhan hasn’t ever met a short-haired straight woman who sits with her feet on the floor, I can introduce her to a bunch) to be the least bit relevant to her future performance on the Supreme Court. Let’s talk about her accomplishments in law, whether it matters that –like William Rhenquist and others–she has not been a judge in a lower court, and how she might be expected to shape future judicial decisions.

Let’s face it–if she’s on the court, she’ll be wearing the “fashion statement” of a long shapeless black robe anyway :-).

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

MarketWatch is not normally known as a hotbed of progressive thought. Yet that’s where this scathing critique of Obama from his left side appeared, under the title, “How Obama is Failing Investors” by Paul B. Farrell. It was published on the one-year anniversary of Obama’s inauguration, and still very much worth reading.

Here’s a little taste:

You are failing us. Many people now question voting for you, and your ‘fat-cat bankers’ are destroying capitalism and democracy.

A year ago, millions of Americans — investors, taxpayers, consumers, voters — came together, uplifted by the “audacity of hope,” inspired by a vision of “change we can believe in,” heartened by “bold and specific ideas about how to fix our ailing economy and strengthen the middle class, make health care affordable for all, achieve energy independence and keep America safe in a dangerous world.”

“Yes, we can” was the rallying cheer. You were the game-changer after the Bush-Cheney fiasco. What happened?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Trends/News, privacy, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Computer guru Tim O’Reilly makes a half-hearted attempt to justify (or at least explain) Facebook’s latest privacy grab. But I find the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bill of Rights for social media users (which O’Reilly quotes at length) much more compelling:

Users have the right to:

1. Honesty: Tell the truth. Don’t make our information public against our will and call it “giving users more control.” Call things what they are.

2. Accountability: Keep your word. Honor the deals you make and the expectations they create. If a network asks users to log in, users expect that it’s private. Don’t get us to populate your network based on one expectation of privacy, and then change the rules once we’ve connected with 600 friends.

3. Control: Let us decide what to do with our data. Get our permission before you make any changes that make our information less private. We should not have data cross-transmitted to other services without our knowledge. We should always be asked to opt in before a change, rather than being told we have the right to opt out after a change is unilaterally imposed.

4. Transparency: We deserve to know what information is being disclosed and to whom. When there has been a glitch or a leak that involves our information, make sure we know about it.

5. Freedom of movement: If we want to leave your network, let us. If we want to take our data with us, let us do that, too. This will encourage competition through innovation and service, instead of hostage-taking. If we want to delete our data, let us. It’s our data.

6. Simple settings: If we want to change something, let us. Use intuitive, standard language. Put settings in logical places. Give us a “maximize privacy settings” button, a and a “delete my account” button.

7. Be treated as a community, not a data set: We join communities because we like them, not “like” them. Advertise to your community if you want. But don’t sell our data out from under us.

[This last sentence is O’Reilly’s and not the Chronicle’s] Everyone is right to hold Facebook’s feet to the fire as long as they fail to meet those guidelines.

Yes, the Chronicle Bill of Rights seems like common sense ethics to me. The problem is that I am not convinced Facebook’s latest privacy grab is even close to meeting these guidelines. Zuckerberg and others can continue to push the frontiers, but they should do it in ways that respect their members.

Personally, I go into the online world with the expectation that there is no privacy. And therefore the specific changes don’t bother me over-much. But as someone who writes about ethics, I have a problem with obtaining consent for one restricted set of behaviors and then wildly expanding it while requiring opt-out (and difficult opt-out at that) rather than opt-in. It’s nothing more than an electronic form of bait-and-switch–something I find unethical and in fact argue against in my latest book on business ethics, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).

Yet in the video included in the blog, O’Reilly makes a compelling case that Facebook’s privacy failures and the resultant pushback are essential to pushing the frontier, and that a lot of the innovations that seemed to threaten privacy were actually welcomed once people got used to them. O’Reilly says he’s more worried about Apple than Facebook. I, however, worry more about Google (which he also mentions in the video), which owns an extreme amount of personal data and has a very cavalier attitude toward copyrighted material

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

An article on one of Newsweek’s blogs speculates that a movie scheduled for next October release will deeply hurt Facebook, and particularly the reputation of founder Mark Zuckerberg. the article also mentions Facebook’s much more immediate problems with various privacy and technical issues.

The movie, says the article’s writer, Nick Summers,

…portrays Zuckerberg as a borderline autistic, entirely ruthless conniver. Nothing sways public opinion like a movie—and this scorcher could counteract the entire body of good press Facebook has received till now.

But as a marketer, I’m fascinated that this writer sees the coming movie as having such a huge negative impact, months before it’s even released. Certainly the script does not appear very complementary toward Zuckerberg. But let’s face it: Bill Gates, Jr. was intensely disliked in his decades as Microsoft CEO. He was frequently described in similar terms.

Facebook, like Microsoft, has become far bigger and more important than the emotional health of its founder. And especially since users don’t pay to enjoy Facebook, I don’t see that kind of backlash coming. I believe the enormous utility of Facebook will easily survive blasts on Zuckerberg’s character, just as it has survived the many very valid privacy concerns. There is no such thing as privacy online. Anything you don’t want the world to know should not be posted–on Facebook, your own website, or anywhere else. You’ve been warned.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

It’s really hard to imagine that anyone could take seriously the nonsense—make that the total falsehoods—spewed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It would make for good humor, except that people believe these shameless harlots who have dedicated their lives to the service of corporate greed and gratuitous attacks on progressives (or even liberals).

Limbaugh has crammed his foot even farther down his mouth than usual a few times lately. Two examples: He blamed environmentalists for the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and he blamed the United Mine Workers of America for failing to head off the 29-fatality disaster at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia.

Let’s look at the Massey case. Talk about blaming the victim: Early in his career as CEO of Massey, Don Blankenship broke the back of the UMWA by refusing to honor the industry agreement and demanding that the union bargain individually with Massey’s 14 subsidiaries. This was 1984, during the notoriously anti-union presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Thus, Upper Big Branch, like many Massey mines, is non-union. The union has tried to organize there repeatedly. And the government has repeatedly cited the mine for safety violations, closing it 61 times in the 15 months preceding the explosion.

Now, the really interesting part: According to “How King Coal Killed the Union Man,” by Lauri Lebo, published in the May 15 issue of the Washington Spectator union mines are far, far safer than nonunion You need to be a subscriber to read the article, so let me summarize some of the findings:

  • 254 of the 284 miners killed in the US since 2002 were in non-union mines
  • 25 percent of American miners belong to the UMWA, but union members accounted for only 11 percent of fatalities
  • Safety inspectors at union mines have the power to shut down mines operating unsafely; in non-union mines, the inspectors are absent, and workers can be fired for calling for inspection
  • Even without an on-site inspector, Upper Big Branch was cited by the Mine safety and Health Administration for safety violations 639 times from january1 2009 to April1 2010, but Massey uses a funky procedural maneuver to block meaningful sanctions

    How does Limbaugh sleep at night? He is a propagandist, not a journalist

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    By Posted on Posted in censorship, Diversity, Ethics: General, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

    I am Jewish, and I can say this. Nazi-like behavior is unacceptable no matter who does it. Jews have no more right to be disgusting and criminal than anyone else.

    There’s a certain ultra-rightist segment of the American Jewish population that is completely intolerant of any criticism of Israel–just as there are certain ultra-rightist Americans that don’t accept legitimate criticism of the United States government (or at least they didn’t while Bush was in charge).

    Rabbi Michael Lerner is the founder of Tikkun magazine and a prominent Jewish progressive (and yes, a supporter of Israel, though not always of Israel’s policies). Apparently, these fascists thought it wasn’t Kosher that he extended an invitation to South Africa’s Judge Richard Goldstone to host his grandson’s Bar Mitzvah (and gave the judge an award), because the judge was persuaded by similar thugs not to attend the event in its original location. Click here to read Tikkun’s press release.

    Goldstone, you’ll remember, is the well-respected jurist and ardent Zionist who conducted an independent report on the Gaza invasion, and found that Israel’s conduct was deplorable.

    Both the US and Israel were founded on the premise of democracy. In a democracy, dissent is acceptable. Criticism of the government is acceptable, and in fact is necessary to keep the government honest. The terrorist thugs who attacked Rabbi Lerner’s house must be held accountable.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business-general, General Commentary, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

    Ever hear of the first-mover advantage? That’s a concept that Gravity Switch, a local web services firm here in Western Massachusetts, clearly understands. In three weeks, these guys came up with an idea (for a kiosk to frame an iPad, for touchscreen applications like museum displays), got the thing—called “iBracket”—prototyped and built, and started selling it.

    In a situation where speed to market is critical, they were right there. Not surprisingly, they started coming up #1 on Google for “iPad mounting bracket”—21 days after coming up with the idea, seven days after finishing the prototype, and three days after taking the first order (which happened one hour after it was first mentioned on a blog).

    By comparison, I have a publishing client who should have had his book out a year ago. This client is a walking testimonial to the need to understand that perfection is the enemy of good, and that good is good enough to move forward. The latest delay: I have been waiting for approval on a cover design since February. It would take ten minutes or less to look at the cover and tell us (me and the designer) if it’s good, or what changes need to be made. But no amount of prodding seems to get this person unstuck. Meanwhile, it’s already too late to have books ready for Book Expo America at the end of the month. Total missed opportunity because a false quest for perfection and lack of communication got in the way of good and moving forward and seizing the moment.

    I think Gravity Switch’s approach makes a whole lot more sense.

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