The litter tray is empty again...
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Thursday, October 27, 2011
Egyptians Support #OccupyOakland
@TheBigPharaohThe Big Pharaoh
This is epic. Protesters in Tahrir tomorrow will march to the US embassy to protest the violent crackdown of #occupyoaklandprotests.
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MARINES TO OAKLAND POLICE: 'You Did This To My Brother.'
MARINES TO OAKLAND POLICE: 'You Did This To My Brother.'
Marines around the world are outraged by the injuries inflicted by police on Scott Olsen at Tuesday's Occupy Oakland protests
When you enlarge this image, the pain in his eyes for his fellow Marine that he does not even personally know, is just heartbreaking.
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Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Occupy Victorious!
[LINK: Occupy Victorious! ]
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Tuesday, October 25, 2011
SPECIAL REPORT
SPECIAL REPORT: Out-of-State Corporate Money Floods Ohio Battle Over Anti-Collective Bargaining Bill
by: Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report
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.
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Worst Food Additive Ever?
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.
[LINK: Worst Food Additive Ever? More... ]
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Monday, October 24, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Friday, October 21, 2011
NPR continues its decline.
NPR continues its decline. It was different years ago when I was doing commentaries on Morning Edition.
NPR is ending its agreement with a North Carolina classical music station for distribution of the show World of Opera because its host helped organize a Washington protest.
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Thursday, October 20, 2011
Forgotten by both Washington and the American public.
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.Bergdahl, who was captured in Afghanistan 2009, and Altaie, missing in Iraq in 2006, are both thought to still be alive and in enemy captivity. The Haqqani Network, the militant group holding Bergdahl, regularly releases propaganda videos featuring the 25-year-old soldier, who looks increasingly haggard and frightened. Yet the missing soldiers are largely invisible here at home. The White House and Pentagon rarely mention the two men and have made clear that they won't consider paying ransoms or freeing prisoners in exchange for the men's release, as Israel has done.
[LINK: Why Do Americans Care So Much Less About Captured Troops Than Israelis? ]
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End the Religion of ROE
[W]e believe that corporations would do better for all their stakeholders and avoid the risks of runaways by focusing on Return on Innovation. An innovation-based measure would lead to an acceleration in investment with positive benefits for growth.
The value of an organization's innovation per person affected
The number of people affected by an innovation
The frequency with which the entity innovates Arithmetically, that's equivalent to saying:
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.
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The Kind Lawyer
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."
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Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Up the Revolution
This is the beginning. We will take the revolution to the banks in a manner that they can understand and feel.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/13/1025828/-San-Jose:-Millions-Withdrawn-from-Bank-of-America-and-Wells-Fargo!?detail=hide Join me on DIASPORA - a real alternative to Fazebook!
This summer I hear the drumming...
- 12:41 AM - Public
An epic photograph from 1970. This photograph of a sad event at Kent State University is what turned the tide of protest against the Vietnam war. My only hope is that it does not take such a sad event to make the public realize the significance of the protests regarding economic inequality that are going on worldwide.
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