Workers' State of the State Response Rally, protesting against Senate Bill 5 on March 8, 2011 in Columbus, OH. (Photo: netzanette)
About 60 people gathered at the AFL-CIO office in downtown Columbus, Ohio, to rally and volunteer their time on a sunny Friday evening in early October. They came from a variety of backgrounds: white and black, urban and rural, young and old. Armed with a phone bank and canvassing clipboards, they participated in a campaign to rally Ohio voters to repeal legislation known as Senate Bill 5. If passed, the law would limit collective bargaining rights on issues like staffing levels for Ohio's 360,000 public workers and require some public workers to pay more in pension and health care costs. The volunteers, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, are labor's foot soldiers in a political battle attracting national attention and political spending. It is a bitter clash of class, ideology and political tactics, pitting the public sector against the private sector, and Ohio's labor movement against a web of Republican front groups that refuse to disclose their campaign finances.
On August 10, police and security for the massive palm oil corporation Wilmar International (of which Archer Daniels Midland owns a majority share) stormed a small, indigenous village on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. They came with bulldozers and guns, destroying up to 70 homes, evicting 82 families, and arresting 18 people. Then they blockaded the village, keeping the villagers in -- and journalists out. (Wilmar claims it has done no wrong.)
The village, Suku Anak Dalam, was home to an indigenous group that observes their own traditional system of land rights on their ancestral land and, thus, lacks official legal titles to the land. This is common among indigenous peoples around the world -- so common, in fact, that it is protected by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Indonesia, for the record, voted in favor of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Yet the government routinely sells indigenous peoples' ancestral land to corporations. Often the land sold is Indonesia's lowland rainforest, a biologically rich area home to endangered species like the orangutan, Asian elephant, Sumatran rhinoceros, Sumatran tiger, and the plantRafflesia arnoldii, which produces the world's largest flower.
So why all this destruction? Chances are you'll find the answer in your pantry. Or your refrigerator, your bathroom, or even under your sink. The palm oil industry is one of the largest drivers of deforestation in Indonesia. Palm oil and palm kernel oil, almost unheard of a decade or two ago, are now unbelievably found in half of all packaged foods in the grocery store (as well as body care and cleaning supplies). These oils, traditional in West Africa, now come overwhelmingly from Indonesia and Malaysia. They cause jawdropping amounts of deforestation (and with it, carbon emissions) and human rights abuses.
U.S. Army Private Bergdahl, missing in Afghanistan since June 2009, watches as one of his captors displays his identity tag at an unknown location / Reuters
In the years since their capture in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and Army Staff Sgt. Ahmed Altaie have been largely forgotten by both Washington and the American public. There have been no protests demanding the government make whatever concessions necessary to win their release. Most Americans don't even know their names. A new DuPont equation would measure the growth in value created by innovation (and again, that is value defined broadly). And like the original, NuDu would decompose this measure into three components:
How does this guide decisions and actions in a different way? First, by stressing that the point is innovation. A dynamic economy requires growing companies—those that increase their value-added contribution over time. To maximize this, a company should prioritize the innovation that leads to the greatest value. That value must be measured across all stakeholders.
Second, an innovation should have the widest possible market. As the late C. K. Prahalad pointed out, the "bottom of the pyramid" is a market and not a social problem. In a recent talk at MIT, Infosys founder Narayana Murthy put it this way: "Technological innovation is all about reducing cost, reducing cycle time, making life more comfortable. Therefore: who needs new technology more than the poor?
And third, the battleground of competitiveness now goes beyond time to market, to include the frequency with which a firm brings valuable innovations to market. GE, by creating independent local development teams, is adding to the diversity of ideas and the opportunity to recombine them, and hence the likelihood of having innovations to bring to market more often. "More products at more pricepoints" is their name for this strategy.
Looking at Apple, you'd conclude it had been using this equation for a long time. It has focused on building an ecology, earning its fair share of the rewards but leaving plenty for others who can earn them (at the expense of those who have historically extracted margin from market power by restricting the market). Apple's offers are more highly valued than its competitors '— largely for intangible reasons ranging from design to sustainable disposability — and have extremely broad appeal globally. And it has brought true innovation to market more frequently than perhaps any other consumer products company ever.
If our new feedback loop were put in place, managers would take seriously the objectives it targeted and start trying to make themselves as good by that standard. Enterprises — and this formula applies equally to businesses, government agencies, and NGOs — would find ways to organize around its components.
It's impossible to imagine all the ramifications when even superficial incentives are changed, and therefore even as we propose this change we don't pretend to know what unintended consequences it might cause for companies and society. After all, ROE was a good thing for decades, until it wasn't. Measurement systems first educate people on what's valuable, then enlist them in figuring out unanticipated ways of creating that value, and finally degenerate into mindless games played for artificial advantage. Could this happen to measurement system based on growth of value for all stakeholders through innovation? Absolutely. But it will buy capitalism a lot of time to figure those out in the meantime.
The Kind Lawyer
One afternoon a lawyer was riding in his limousine when he saw two men
along the road-side eating grass.
Disturbed, he ordered his driver to stop and got out to investigate.
He asked one man,"Why are you eating grass?"
"We don't have any money for food," the poor man replied. "We have to
eat grass."
"Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you," the
lawyer said.
"But sir, I have a wife and two children with me. They are over there,
under that tree."
"Bring them along," the lawyer replied.
Turning to the other poor man he stated,"You may come with us, also."
The second man, in a pitiful voice, then said, "But sir, I also have a
wife and SIX children with me!"
"Bring them all as well," the lawyer answered.
They all entered the car, which was no easy task,even or a car
as large as the limousine was.
Once under way, one of the poor fellows turned to the lawyer and said,
"Sir, you are too kind."
"Thank you for taking all of us with you
The lawyer replied, "Glad to do it."
"You'll really love my place."
"The grass is almost a foot high."
"What They did not want you to ever find out is that your generation, the generation born between 1980-1995, actually outnumbers the Baby Boomers. They knew that if you ever turned your eye towards political reform, you could change the world.
They tried to keep you sated on vapid television shows and vapid music. They cut off your education and fed you brain candy. They took away your music and gave you Top Ten pop stations. They cut off your art and replaced it with endless reality shows for you to plug into, hoping you would sit quietly by as They ran the world. I think They thought you were too dumb to notice.
Indeed, I thought They had won.
But I watched you occupy the capital of Wisconsin. I see you today as you occupy Wall Street. And I see a spark, a glimmer of the glorious new age that is yours. A changing of the guard, a guard that has stood for entirely too long and needs your young legs to take his place.
I watch you turn away from what is easy and stand up for what is right. I see you understand we as a society are only as strong as our weakest link. I see you wise beyond your years. And I am proud. Give ‘em hell, kids. You are beautiful."
Together we are strong.
| Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of Unix and C, has died |
| Written by Historian |
| Thursday, 13 October 2011 07:39 |
Dennis Ritchie the designer and original developer of both the C programming language, and co-creator of Unix has died at age 71 after a prolonged illness. It seems incredible from today's perspective that two people, motivated mainly by enthusiasm, should develop both an operating system and a programming language but that's exactly what Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson achieved. They met and started working together at Bell Laboratories around 1968. At the time the Bell Labs (now Alcatel-Lucent) were famous as the home of the transistor and many other basic research projects. Ritchie and Thompson were given the brief to "investigate interesting problems in computer science". |
Journalists Funded By GOP 'Vulture Capitalist'
New York Times has documented, Paul Singer, a Republican activist and hedge fund manager worth over $900 million, has emerged as one of the most important power brokers within the GOP. Now, it appears that the reporters financed by Singer are at the forefront of efforts to tarnish the reputation of 99 Percent Movement demonstrators:
Journalist Who Admitted To Infiltrating Protests To ‘Mock And Undermine’ The Movement Works For A Singer-Supported Right-Wing Magazine. In a column posted last night, reporter Patrick Howley admitted that he had surreptitiously joined an anti-war spin-off group from the OccupyDC protests that planned to demonstrate at a military drone exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space museum. Howley wrote that he “infiltrated” the action and sprinted into the police along with a few protesters in order to “mock and undermine” the movement. Singer is a major donor to the Spectator, a right-wing magazine known for its role in the “Arkansas Project,” a well-funded effort to invent stories with the goal of eventually impeaching President Clinton.
Journalist Pushing To Discredit Occupy Wall Street Is Funded By Singer’s Think Tank. Josh Barro, a journalist who has attacked the 99 Percent Movement in the National Review and the New York Daily News, draws a salary from the Wriston Fellowship at the Manhattan Institute, a big business advocacy think tank in New York. Barro makes the same tired arguments, that anti-Wall Street protesters are too inarticulate and “extreme” to be taken seriously. Singer is the chairman of the Manhattan Institute, and even oversees the Wriston annual fundraiser.
You'd think we would be more careful than this:
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.[...]
"We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back," says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. "We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know."
Rep. Jan Schakowsky's (D-Illinois) $227 billion jobs bill was more or less dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House. And while she's proud to say it left its mark on the president's American Jobs Act, that bill is stalled out in Congress. But in a wide-ranging interview last month, Schakowsky insisted that a jobs bill must pass. In a rhetorical landscape overrun with hyperbole, she claims that today's political battles really are "epic," and she remains ambitious on every front, from auditing the military to experiencing firsthand what it means to rely on food stamps. In this conversation with Truthout, Schakowsky envisions a not-so-distant future where food banks set up shop on Capitol Hill, foreclosed homeowners trade their sadness for anger like bankers trading credit default swaps, and the public comes forward "with their hair on fire that ordinary people deserve better."
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesOne of the works shown during “No Comment,” a politically themed art show located across from the New York Stock Exchange.
Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesTwo unidentified men hang a piece during the “No Comment” art exhibit in the former JP Morgan & Co. headquarters.For weeks, a growing collection of protesters have tried to get their grievances heard on Wall Street — even if the police have prevented them from establishing a physical presence on the fabled street.
An activist from the Occupy Wall Street movement is shown being arrested by police in New York on September 24, 2011. (Photo:Brennan Cavanaugh / Flickr)
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.
| QUOTE OF THE WEEK |
“You run into sergeant majors and lieutenant colonels who did 26 years in the military and have college educations, but yet you see them at a job fair looking for work.”
- Jeff Holmstrom, 33-year-old staff sergeant in the Minnesota National Guard who spent months job hunting after returning from his second deployment, on the 23 percent of unemployed Minnesota vets.(Source:Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
[LINK: 
The revolution continues...
The Huffington Post | Alana Horowitz | October 12, 2011 at 04:19 PM