By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Politics, propaganda

Last night I saw a video that shocked me: A spliced-together out-of-context montage from Barack Obama’s speeches and media appearances to create the illusion that he is a radical Muslim extremist (and disparaging Islam generally in terms that would be quite familiar to the Jews who were victimized by similar descriptions throughout history.

I will not dignify this filth with a link. Nor will I call, as some of my liberal friends might, for it to be taken down, all copies destroyed, etc. In the marketplace of ideas, I like to think the good ideas will win, eventually. It may take 100 years, as the abolition of slavery did. But you don’t convince people by telling them they can’t talk. Telling them you’re not going to listen and not going to provide a forum where others can listen, that’s your prerogative.

It was sent to me by one of my uncles, who happens to be extremely right wing and very active in Israel- and Jewish-oriented causes. I want to share my response to him:

As a Jew, as a member of a culture that has been discriminated against throughout history, that has been demonized by bigots from the Pharaohs to the Nazis, I am deeply distressed to see you sending around something that demonizes other people because of their culture and their faith–and that mixes together quotes out of context to try to create something that isn’t there: Obama’s supposed Muslim faith.

You and I disagree deeply on politics, but we’ve always treated each other’s views with respect. Watching this video, I don’t feel respected. I feel threatened, I feel that the psychological warfare it trains on Muslims could just as easily be turned against Jews.

It feels like a leaf from the Goebbels playbook. It is the Big Lie Technique to the second power: once, the lie that Obama is Muslim, and second, the lie that all Muslims want the destruction of our culture. And quite frankly, it makes me ill.

Obama, as we all know, is a Christian who happens to be well-versed in Islamic culture. I have seen or heard many of the speeches snipped into this video, and in context they are very different. And let’s be clear: this is not “an actual video of the President speaking” but rather a composite of tiny sound bites cut into tiny pieces, isolated from the surrounding words that illuminate their meaning, to make Obama look like a threat.

Believe me, I have plenty of disagreements with Obama. But one area where I think he’s been good is in reaching out around the world who want to end violence, expressing our unity as human beings.

And the mainstream Islamic culture he is praising is not the culture of terrorist extremists, any more than the anti-Semitic bigot Father Coughlin represented today’s mainstream Christianity.

I have heard many other Christians (yes, he is a Christian) praising Judaism for its contributions to civilization, including presidents. I don’t see his acknowledgment of Islam’s contributions to be any different from that.

I do not buy that the big tent is a problem. Fanaticism and fundamentalism, of every religion, is a problem–anything that fosters hatred of those who are different. I see this video montage as hateful, racist propaganda that tries to depict both Obama and Muslims as other, as demons, as intolerable–a path that ultimately leads to genocide, as we saw in Hitler’s Germany when it was applied to us. As unacceptable as Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ deep distortion of Judaism. Have you never visited a church or a mosque while traveling? I have visited both. What is the problem with Obama visiting a mosque?

I am sure you’re familiar with the famous quote by Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me–
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I am speaking out, with all due respect, not only because I want someone to speak out if they come for me, but also because my conscience would not treat me well if I remained silent. And because I care about you.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, did not have access to Youtube. He didn’t have Twitter and Facebook. He didn’t have blogs. All he had were radio, newspapers, and posters.

With our modern tools, the power to spread a message, for good or evil, is unparalleled. Every one of us can disseminate information across many channels, propelling English housewife Susan Boyle to international superstardom, helping elect Obama President, or spreading hatred and divisiveness as reprehensible as messages spread by the Nazis 70 years ago. A few clicks, and the message is on its way to a few dozen friends…or tens of thousands of associates on social media.

The media-savvy, politically sophisticated hatemongers who put this video together must have Goebbels beaming up from his particular circle of Hell, or at least jealous that he didn’t have these media.

We can use these tools to spread a joke. We can use them to organize for peace and justice. And we can use them to resist attempts to spread hate, as I hope I’m doing here. Love is stronger than hate. Let’s empower others and use these amazing tools the make the world a better place.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

This just in: Proponents of single-payer health care, a/k/a Medicare for All–the system used by almost every developed country in the world–will not get our promised floor vote after all.

If I were in Congress right now, I’d vote no. The bill has gotten weaker, more complicated, and more expensive with every turn. As I understand it, it is a giveaway to big insurers and might actually leave fewer people insured than we have now. A travesty!

President Obama–WHERE is the “change” you promised so loudly one year ago? As The Who sang in my very favorite song, “We Don’t Get Fooled Again,” “Meet the new boss…same as the old boss.”

Below is the public statement from Physicians for a National Health Program

November 6, 2009

Dear PNHP colleagues and friends,

We are disappointed to report that there will not be a vote on the Weiner amendment for single payer today in advance of the vote on the House bill tomorrow.

Two reasons were given by Rep. Weiner for withdrawing his amendment:

1. Speaker Pelosi said if she allowed debate on the single-payer amendment, she would have to allow debate on an expansion of the Hyde anti-abortion amendment, which the Democrats do not wish to do, and

2. There are at least 8 members who would vote against the House bill if they were given a chance to vote for Weiner’s single-payer amendment. At this point the Democratic leadership is desperately counting votes; they can only afford to lose 15 votes total, and according to the Washington Post, they are currently down by 25 votes.

Next steps and interpretation –

1. The fact that single payer got so far along in the House is a testament to the strength of our single-payer movement. The huge number of calls by single-payer advocates in support of single payer and the Weiner amendment in recent weeks have been noted by several members of Congress. Increasingly the public is learning what Harvard health economist William Hsiao told the New York Times, that “< #taiwan>[y]ou can have universal coverage and good quality health care while still managing to control costs. But you have to have a single-payer system to do it.”

2. It appears that nobody, particularly President Obama, expected our single-payer option to be alive in the Congress for so long. As you know, they attempted to keep it “off the table” from the very beginning.

3. The president was directly involved in the decision to not hold a vote on the Weiner single-payer amendment, and Weiner will be meeting with him later today. Stay tuned.

4. We need to increase pressure on the Congress and White House for Medicare for All through lobbying, speaking engagements, media outreach, grassroots organizing and civil disobedience. Senator Bernie Sanders will call for a vote on single payer in the Senate – this could come up anytime in the next month. Encourage your senator to support the Sanders bill (S. 703) and also an amendment he will offer for a state single-payer option. Our friends in the California Nurses Association/NNOC have already started lobbying visits to the Senate in D.C. Lobbying materials, slides, and other materials from our spectacular Annual Meeting in Cambridge are now on-line at www.pnhp.org/annual-meeting-2009

5. In the national office we are working on press outreach regarding uninsured veterans (we’ll have a release for you early next week on this) and civil disobedience by physicians in support of Medicare for All (see press release, below). Members are encouraged to continue to publish op-eds, letters to the editor, and articles in support of single payer (see articles in today’s Asheville, (N.C) Citizen-Times and the Palm Beach Post, below).

6. We have been asked how to tell members to vote on the House bill. Our response is that the bill “is like aspirin for breast cancer”. As noted by PNHP Past President Dr. John Geyman in his latest blog post “No bill is better than a bad bill,” even the public option in the House bill is a sham.

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

What motivated you to organize this conference?

You could say this was an alignment of some stars that had been orbiting for quite awhile. First, social responsibility (or sustainability, corporate citizenship and green) is a topic I’m very interested in, going back to when I was Manager of Environmental & Safety Communication at John Deere about 10 years ago. Next, I credit Rick Sauter, Communitelligence Vice President, who had initiated talks with Cisco about partnering on a conference. When the topic of social responsibility came up, there was an mutual a ha moment. Six months of planning later, we’re on the eve of New Models of Social Responsibility: A Virtual Global Summit with Cisco as our technology partner.


What do you hope people will come away with?

This may sound idealistic, but I would like this summit toRead more »

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Thirty-one years ago, the housemate with whom I’d found an apartment moved out, and I invited a poet friend of mine to take his place. We shared that apartment for several months, until he, too, moved on, and another friend moved in.

Today, I went to see that poet friend for the first time since around 1980. We’d been completely out of touch–but about a year ago, a mutual friend tracked my wife down on Facebook. Turns out that mutual friend also convinced my old housemate to join Facebook, where we found each other a month or so ago.

The friend who moved in after him stayed in that apartment after I left, but later moved to Vesey Street, two blocks from the World Trade Center. It was a primitive form of social media that let me know, finally, that she was OK, two weeks after 9/11.

And there are a number of others.

I remember very clearly the first time something like this happened: AOL was still my Internet portal, so that fixes it somewhere in 1994-95. All of a sudden I got an e-mail from a high school friend. Tom and his wife Liz came up to visit (we live four hours apart), attended my wife’s book party in New York, and have generally reentered our lives. As have Lew and Katherine, the friends who connected us with my old housemate. A few months ago, they moved up from New Jersey to two towns away from us in Massachusetts; we hadn’t seen them since a falling-out somewhere around 1989. Now, we’ve seen them several times. In fact, we’re seeing them tomorrow.

Oddly enough, when I’ve searched for old friends, I haven’t had much luck finding them. But quite a few have found me.

I’ve forged or deepened many connections via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other communities with people I hadn’t known before–but those reconnections from 20 or 30 years in the past are particularly special.

(A slightly different version of this article was published on Technorati under the title Technology Helps Me Cross Time Tunnels to the Distant Past.)

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

Horace Mann, founding President of Antioch College, famously said “Be ashamed to die until you have won one victory for humanity.” Neither Nicholas Negroponte nor Iqbal Quadir will ever have to worry about shaming themselves in front of Horace Mann’s ghost.

These two M.I.T. professors have both made substantial contributions in developing countries, bringing life-changing technology to villages that don’t even have electricity or running water.

Negroponte is the key mover behind One Laptop Per Child, an initiative to develop and distribute rugged but cheap (like $100 per unit) laptops to school children, in 18 countries so far. Quadir convinced Bangladeshi microlending pioneer Grameen Bank (founded by Mohammad Yunnis, who received the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts) to underwrite Grameenphone, a business providing cell phone services to villages with no telephone at all.

Both men spoke at a panel during the Boston Book Fair, coincidentally on Climate Action Day, October 24, 2009. And both have had a major impact.

Negroponte’s rugged, lightweight laptops can be thrown or dropped with no bad consequence, use only three watts of power (he’s aiming for just one watt on a forthcoming redesign), and both the battery and the computer are designed to last at least five years—about double the typical laptop lifespan—and to minimize waste impact when they are finally past their useful life and life extensions such as use as a TV. With no electricity grid, they’re recharged with hand-cranks, solar photovoltaics, or car batteries.

Each laptop comes preloaded with not only productivity software, but also 100 books whose creators have agreed to make their content available. That means that if a village receives 100 laptops, it suddenly has a library of 10,000 titles (a larger collection than many small-town physical libraries in the United States).

These computers are designed directly to foster social change: newly literate school children use satellite wi-fi to access the Internet, learn literacy as well as research skills, and even teach their parents to read. For many of these kids, their first English word is “Google.”

In October, 2009, Uruguay became the first country to get these laptops into the hands of every single school child; Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Peru are among the other countries with a program. Negroponte would love to “take one day of [the cost of war in] Iraq and Afghanistan and do the children in those countries.” In Afghanistan, where many girls are prevented from going to school, the plan he has worked out with the Afghani Minister of Education is to seed the laptops first to girls, so they can learn outside of the classrooms they’re not allowed to attend.

But his vision is much grander: “It would take $30 billion to do every kid in the world. We gave away more than twice that much to AIG.”

Grameen Phone uses a very different business model: funding new small businesses through microlending, and then changing the society as that business rewrites the entire village culture. “Connectivity is productivity,” says Quadir.

In 1993, there was one (land-line) telephone for every 500 Bangladeshis, and 73 percent for the phones were in Dhaka, the capital. Grameen came in and began lending small amounts of capital to entrepreneurs, who provided and operated a village telephone, where residents could rent time whenever they needed to make a call, and paid back the loans out of profits.

The benefits are “inclusive, egalitarian, and immediate,” and the results are astounding. Each 10 percent increase in cell phone penetration corresponds with a .8 percent increase in the country’s Gross Domestic Product. By 2005, the company had 250,000 retailers, 22 million subscribers, and 50 million cell phones (many of them smart phones that bring computing power to these remote villages). It expects to have 5 billion phones in place by 2015, which will be near-total penetration of the population.

Yet the magnitude of change from this initiative may not even be apparent for some time. Rural electrification in the U.S., says Quadir, didn’t happen immediately after the development of electrical utilities. It went to rural areas decades later, when refrigeration made it possible for farmers to store food much longer, and therefore shift perishable food production and distribution from regionally to nationally based.

Telephone service, he says, is “the low-hanging fruit. From the juice of the low-hanging fruit, you get the energy you need to climb the tree and take the higher fruit.”

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

Great article, “100% Renewables by 2030 for Less Than Fossil Power: A Case is Made,” by Stacy Feldman on SolveClimate.com (a site new to me). Go read it, then come back here!

Stacy is absolutely correct that we have the keys to solving both the carbon and energy crises, with safe, sustainable renewable technology–and that neither renewable but unsustainable and highly polluting biomass, nor non-renewable, highly dangerous, highly centralized nuclear are NOT viable long-term solutions.

One key is decentralizing energy generation. When power is generated at or near the place where it’s used, transmission costs and transmission losses are minimized or even eliminated. Another key is to design systemically, holistically, to slash energy needs–for instance, if you eliminate the need for a furnace or air conditioner, you eliminate that capital cost, and the building is economically competitive with traditional designs (Amory Lovins is a master at this). When conservation is incorporated at that kind of deep, structural level, the savings are enormous.

Shel Horowitz, co-author of the forthcoming book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet
Blogging on the intersections of sustainability, ethics, marketing, media, and politics: https://www.principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Transparency vs. Secrecy

Guest post by Elizabeth Johnson

I was very proud of the notebook computer I had purchased a year ago; in my mind, I felt I had secured a good deal and that it was value for money. The only flaw (if you could call it that) was that it came with the Norton Antivirus security solution. Now I know that there are many people who prefer Norton as their antivirus solution, but it is just too complicated and bloated for my liking. I feel that it slows down my system and enters every nook and corner and leaves bits of it behind even after you’ve uninstalled it.

But hey, no harm done – it was a free subscription for a year (included in the price of the notebook), so I could enjoy the benefits for 12 months after which I was free to choose my own security package. Or so I thought, but Norton decided otherwise. Once I had it uninstalled and a new antivirus solution installed in its place, I found that I could no longer use Firefox to browse the web. I didn’t think too much of it – maybe there was some bug that Mozilla hadn’t yet addressed. So I switched over to Internet Explorer. But in a few days, IE too began giving me problems.

My system would read the network, it could even connect to Yahoo Messenger, but it just would not open any page in Firefox, IE or any other browser. I was at my wits’ end, until a friend who is also a software expert tried reinstalling Norton again. And voila, what do you know, the pages open as if by magic. So I was forced to renew my Norton license, or should I say my computer was held to ransom by Norton?

No, I don’t like the way things are, but I have to swallow my anger and lump it, because I cannot afford to buy a new OS or a new laptop just because my antivirus provider follows completely unethical business practices. This is typically what is known as anti-competitive behavior – you force your product onto the customer who literally has no choice in deciding for themselves. Companies have been criticized for engaging customers in opt-out marketing tactics where they are signed up for some service or product and must opt out of it explicitly if they do not want it. Very often, the customer does not know of this service until the hefty bill arrives at the end of the month.

But this behavior beats even opt-out strategies, because it has forced me to stay with Norton, something I find an extremely unpleasant experience. I know that I could get someone who is skilled in cleaning the registry to rid my system of these files, but with time being a major constraint, I decided to just let it go, but not without a letter to their customer service department complaining of their anti-competitive strategy. Is this the only way Norton can hold on to its customers?

This guest article was written by Elizabeth Johnson, who regularly writes on the topic of construction management degrees . She welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: elizabeth.johnson1 (at) rediffmail.com

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

Respect your prospect’s intelligence! It’s one of the points I make repeatedly in Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First–and with good reason. To succeed in business, you need long-term relationships. And you don’t get them by insulting people.

I could list bad-practice examples from now until the end of time. Every once in a while, I find one that just pisses me off because it seems to shout, “Hey, Stupid! Send us money!” The one that landed in my postal mailbox today was one of them.

It was a plain, typed envelope–with a sprayed barcode and a nonprofit bulkrate stamp. No return address.Yeah, I opened it–after all, Google’s AdSense checks can’t be identified from the outside.

Inside, a post-it with this text in a very UNconvincing handwriting font:

Shel,
have you
seen this?
Brian

Yes, three lines of text all lined up, and the name about under the question mark.

The sticky note was attached to (and amazingly precisely lined up with) a piece of newsprint. The front had an ad for a charity I’ve heard of but don’t contribute to. The back was a fake news story about the same charity.

No clue about who Brian might be, except that the fake article mentions the CEO’s first name happens to be Brian.

So just how stupid does this charity think I am? Am I supposed to be fooled into thinking this is from someone I actually know? That despite the bulk stamp and barcode, I was individually selected? Does a “news story” with no byline, no identifier about the paper it might have ran in? Or that the article and the ad just happened to be back-to-back and fit perfectly with no wasted space? Puh-leeze! Stopping only to be humiliated in this blog post, this mailing goes straight to the recycle bin.

Why, after all these years, do marketers continue to write, design, and distribute this crap? Do they really think we’re going to be fooled? Do they actually want dumb-as-a-slug contributors or customers who won’t ask embarrassing questions?

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Organizers of Blog Action Day are pleased indeed, calling it “one of largest social action events ever held on the web.”

32,000 posts, including three world leaders: UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who got the very first UK post in just as the clock turned midnight–and staffers from President Obama and the ruling party of Spain.

CNN covered it here.

What’s fascinating to me is that organizer Robin Beck thinks 99% of the participating blogs have never written about climate change. I suspect that figure is high. I know that I cover climate change frequently in this space, although it’s certainly not the main focus.

Anyway, a rip-roaring success and hats off to the organizers. I’m glad to have participated. Now the real question is…while those 32,000 bloggers an their hundreds of thousands of readers put some actions into place in their daily lives?

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, People Helping People Tagged with , , ,

Today is Blog Action Day, and this year, the international day of action focuses on climate change.

I could write about climate change for days, but I’ll keep it simple. Here are some quick, easy, painless things you can do to lower your carbon footprint, and some of them will save you a nice pile of money this coming winter, too.

  • Buy foam outlet insulator pads and plastic baby-fingers-out-of-electrical-outlet protectors, and install them in all the outlets on the outside walls of your house. You’ll be amazed and how much cold air you keep outside.
  • Eat for a day, or at least a meal, only foods grown within 100 miles (organically grown, if possible), and stop supporting the carbon-intensive culture of shipping foods all around the world instead of supporting local economies. You can get local produce, breads, dairy, and meat in most parts of the world.
  • Leave your car at home and go by bike, public transit, or on foot. In congested cities, it’s actually often faster to take a bike for distances up to about five miles; in more rural areas, it’s more like two miles. If that’s impractical, park your car in one central location and do all your errands without moving the car. I sometimes throw my bike on a bike rack, drive to one place, and then bike to all the stores I need to visit.
  • Saturday, October 24, is an international day of climate action. Click on the link. to locate (and participate in) an event near you.
  • Sign the Blog Action Day climate change petition, which has the support of Al Gore and others.
  • Do one thing to demonstrate a positive and easy change to someone in your life who’s skeptical that we can be Green without suffering.

    Need more tips? Spend a princely $9.95 on my e-book, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle.

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