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Monday, December 24, 2012



Originally published in CommPRO.biz

The Good Old Days

by: W.T. “Bill” McKibben

On this day before Christmas one can not look about without seeing a louse. Here a banker too slick to jail, there a cliff of unprecedented scale. Tens of thousands are still struggling to recover from Super Storm Sandy. Then it was overshadowed by the unbearable loss of innocent life in Sandy Hook. Makes one wish for days of yore when all was well. Or was it?

The Amish, who mold their lives on the past, were stunned as was the world a little more than a half dozen years ago when a deranged man entered a one-room Amish school outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and took the lives of five young girls, leaving five more with horrible wounds. It was the third school shooting our nation endured in less than a week.

There is a lesson in the way the Amish reacted. A family member of the killer was quoted as saying that “An Amish neighbor comforted his family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness.” Amish community members visited and comforted his widow, children and parents. One Amish man held the killer’s sobbing father in his arms to comfort him. The Amish even created a charitable fund for the killer’s wife and children.

The past, however, was not filled with good hearted folk like the Amish. Quite the contrary in fact. Aside from the havoc mankind endured from diseases we no longer face, the workplace was not terribly friendly, as we are reminded at this season by performances of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Death and injury were endured as routine well into the 20th century.

In a 2011 NPR broadcast authors Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker laid out a compelling case that the last decade was the most peaceful in human history. That violence in all its ugly aspects from war to murder to rape is at an all time low. That as a matter of fact we are living in the most idyllic time in history. And when you look at the numbers it’s obvious that Goldstein and Pinker are right. Why then does the exact opposite seem to be the case? First and foremost because there remains so much room for improvement.

Our perception is based on the 24/7 news cycle that focuses on the worst of every aspect of life on this planet. A century ago our forbearers were not aware of went on much beyond their neighborhood. Yes, the telegraph and the railroad had opened up their horizons but only for happenings of major importance. Today the volume of minutia dumped on us by the media, the internet and all the other sources that pour into our lives right down to our smart phones is unending.

Good news does not make the news cycle. But it far overwhelms the bad. Most people, businesses and major corporations strive to do the right thing. In part because it’s a lot harder these days to get away with bad behavior, it will come out. That’s the upside of today’s world. Refocus on what’s good all about us: “These Are The Good Old Days.”

Friday, December 21, 2012



Walmart,,, Again?

Tazreen Fashions Ltd., that’s the company where a fire left scores injured and 112 dead. At first Walmart claimed they had no connection to the Bangladesh factory. Then they said they had cut their association before the fire. Then when it turned out that more than a third of the massive eight-story factory was producing goods for five Walmart suppliers, they claimed the suppliers acted on their own against instructions from the company. It may be true that Walmart told their suppliers that Tazreen was no longer to produce their goods. However, that message was likely lost under the pricing pressure the retail giant exerts on all their suppliers.

The details of this fire are horrific. When the fire alarm went off the stairwells that served as the sole exit from the upper floors were blocked by managers who told the workers that it was just a drill, to return to their sewing machines. In a few minutes screams from below and smoke filled the workspace, the managers had disappeared and a stampede of workers jammed the narrow stairwells. The windows were covered with iron grilles. Sixty-nine of the dead were found on one floor. Scores were saved by a worker who escaped. He then climbed a scaffolding, smashed a window grille and helped workers out and down the scaffold.

Bloomberg reporters Renee Dudley and Arun Devnath dug up information on a retailers’ meeting in the spring of 2011. Concerned with safety lapses and deaths from fires in Bangladesh, the group attempted to forge an agreement that would provide support for the factory owners to create safer working conditions. Only two brands, Tommy Hilfiger and German retailer Tchibo, were willing to sign on. Minutes from that meeting included this statement: “We are talking about 4,500 factories, and in most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories. It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.” 

According to published reports Walmart “most strongly advocated this position.” Walmart says their objections were taken out of context. Gap, however, has put forward a plan to, “Make Bangladesh garment factories safer. It includes hiring a chief fire safety inspector to inspect factories, giving suppliers as much as $20 million in capital to make safety improvements.” 

Walmart and the others feeling pushed on one hand for higher shareholder value and on the other to lower prices, have chosen the wrong path in Bangladesh. To put the lives of human beings at extreme risk to cut a buck or two off the cost of some piece of clothing, tool or toy is not an acceptable choice. Walmart and the others struggling to meet the demands of the marketplace as they see it ignore the evidence that an ethical business model makes you more competitive and more profitable.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012



My 2012 Top Ten 
Business Ethics Milestones

This year as every year almost everyone and almost every business strives and succeeds to maintain the highest ethical standards. It’s our nature and we know that our most precious asset is our reputation. After all, who wants to do business with a crook? It is, however, a struggle; and it’s too easy to take that first little step over the line onto the slippery slope. Of course there are those who seem ethically challenged. They spend a lot of time and treasure scheming and even more trying to cover their tracks. Ultimately they end up at the bottom of the slope, way past ethics into criminal territory. Most of this year’s milestones fall into the latter category, but there are some outstanding rays of sunshine.

#10 Let’s start out with some good news. A nationwide research study by Satmetrix, a West Coast provider of customer experience software, measured the attitudes of 30,000 consumers. Their findings reinforce the ethical business model’s value. It’s no surprise that companies boasting a long history of ethical standards top the list. Wegmans, Costco, Apple, Jet Blue, American Express, Virgin America, Amazon, Lowes, Google, all the usual suspects lead when it comes to doing the right thing. And guess what? They are leaders when you check their bottom line.

#9 There’s no such glow when you look at a few of our wealthiest Americans and biggest financial institutions; you get more of a Greasy Sleazy Feeling. They think nothing of turning our commodity markets into gambling halls, manipulating the price of food and fuel. Markets designed to support commodity producers have become a playpen for those with more money than morals. There’s a cure: limit commodity purchases to end users. Good for producers, good for end users, good for consumers, good for America.

#8 The ethical cesspool at the center of the media colossus Rupert Murdoch spawned on London’s Fleet Street, is beginning to suck him into its vortex. Unfortunately, it’s spread beyond his native Australia and Great Britain; it has spilled onto our shores. Murdoch became an American citizen so he could legally own broadcast properties here. He bought a couple smarmy newspapers like his British rags. He has also taken over and is twisting the once the once well-regarded Wall Street Journal. His big bucks come from broadcast holdings; satellite operations in Asia and Great Britain, cable outlets here. And then there’s his production arm producing television programs and motion pictures. Murdoch lunged over a line that most media tend to avoid, plunging into politics, even attempting to pick out his own presidential candidate. That kind of activity is common in Great Britain, not so much on this side of the pond. It’s especially disturbing when practiced by Scum-Lord Rupert Murdoch.

#7 Big Pharma's Big Con. The real cost of bringing a new drug to market averages $90 million a pop; a lot of money but a fraction of the$1.3 billion dollars they claim. Unless of course you include marketing, that’s where the big bucks go: flooding doctors’ offices with materials and samples, even hiring them to pitch other docs on the newest, latest, slightly updated drug. Add in the avalanche of print and television advertising urging patients to pressure their doc. It all adds up to sky high drug prices. Prices protected by a law prohibiting the government from negotiating lower prices– all courtesy of Big Pharma’s friends in the Congress. It’s enough to make you sick.

# 6 When the lobbyists pushed through “The Commodity Futures Modernization Act” opening up Wall Street to gambling, they unleashed a chain of events that resulted in the collapse of the world economy eight years later. Wall Street began leaping one ethical barrier after another and today everyone but the bankers is suffering. Dodd-Frank is designed to rein in some of the worst of this. The bankers are fighting these sensible controls. Our economic future depends on how it works out.

#5 Foxconn, a Taiwanese company with operations in China and around the world, makes many of the electronic toys that fill our lives. A British newspaper report described the life of a 21-year-old woman working ninety hours a week for less than fifty dollars a month. They calculated that allowing for inflation that fifty bucks comes to, “about half the wage weavers earned in Liverpool and Manchester in 1805.” Ponder that ethical issue the next time you finger the electronic toys in your pocket.

#4 Little did we know that the HSBC slogan, “Bank as easily around the world as you do at home” was to be taken literally. That this British “too-big-to-fail” bank was laundering cash for Mexican Drug Lords, hiding funds from the IRS in far off India for wealthy Americans, providing US currency to a Middle Eastern bank said to be a source of terrorist funding, and generally thumbing their nose at American laws and regulators. The bank has been hit with a record $1.9 billion fine in the US. The $27.5 million Mexico hit them with last summer along with the legal fees they have run up brings the total over $2 billion. That sounds like a lot of cash until you compare it to their 2011 profit, nearly $17 billion, or to a bonus pool of more than $4 billion that the HSBC executives split up. And surprise, it looks like none of those big-wigs are facing jail. The $2 billion amounts to pocket change for HSBC, just another minor cost of doing business.

#3 “Income Inequality” is a really big deal in the minds of Americans. A Pew study found it to be our greatest source of tension. Two thirds of the respondents see the divide between the super rich and those on down the food chain as our major concern. Reinforcing that view, in a Bloomberg Global Poll more than 1,200 investors, analysts and traders say it harms the economy and harms growth. Why is nobody willing to do anything about it?

#2 How can we turn our backs on sexual abuse? The Church, College Athletics, The Boy Scouts, who knows where it will be found next? The abuse of our children by institutions we trust is horrific, to cover it up is unforgivable.

#1 The Gift of Life - 4,800 people died last year waiting for a kidney. There were nearly 100,000 waiting for one a few months ago. The numbers are similar across organ donation programs. How could that happen? Consider that the latest available annual highway death toll (2010) totaled 32,885 individuals, a tragic number. But most with healthy organs, it’s disgraceful that so few remember that should something fatal befall us, our organs could help others live. Every business, everywhere we gather, organ donation should be a primary focus. We can think of no higher moral and ethical goal than assuring that if we give up our lives, we give life to others.

Friday, December 7, 2012



Who Pays the Piper?

While there are Global Warming deniers, there is no question that the cost of recent weather related disasters in life and treasure is staggering. Thousands dead, billions for Katrina, Sandy far surpassing that tragedy. Wildfires devour paradise and the homes within, farmers’ efforts come to naught, streams, rivers, lakes and reservoirs draining, and we are told this is but the beginning.

It is going to take billions to repair and get ready for what’s coming next. We need to think, however, about where the line between public and private responsibility lies. If you wish to live at the ocean’s edge, in the midst of a towering forest, or any other attractive location threatened by nature out of control, that is certainly up to you. The question of responsibility enters when your dream goes up in smoke, or is smashed by wind or waves. Should you wish to repair or replace, who pays?

In many cases the answer is the taxpayers. The federal government set up the National Flood Insurance Program for folks who live in flood prone areas like those devastated by Sandy. While the insurance is sold by private companies, the risk is carried by the taxpayers. We are looking at more than $500 billion just in our coastal flood plains and more than a trillion at risk nationwide. To put that in perspective, National Flood Insurance is second in size only to Social Security when it comes to our government’s potential liability.

We are in the flood insurance business because no commercial insurer in their right mind will touch it. There are multimillion-dollar homes on our beaches that we ordinary folk have rebuilt several times. That’s not what we pay taxes for. It makes no sense ethically to expect middle class and lower income Americans to insure homes that they can barely dream of owning.

Among the devastated communities in New York and New Jersey are several gated locales. Communities that prior to Sandy were protected by razor wire and checkpoints manned by heavily armed guards; communities that maintain their own streets, sewers, and other such necessities to justify excluding the common folk. Now some of them are lobbying to have their infrastructure replaced by the taxpayers. 

There is every reason to believe that the increasingly severe conditions of the last several years will continue to worsen. It’s past time for the taxpayers to get out of the flood insurance business. We must, of course, honor the commitments now on the books. If those folks choose to rebuild in the flood plains that’s up to them, but they should not plan on their fellow Americans underwriting their folly.

While they are not covered by the Federal Flood Insurance Program, those whose homes are at risk in wildfire prone areas should expect no help from those who could never afford to live in such exotic locales. The Federal Flood Insurance Program should be allowed to expire; those with policies should be advised that they will not be renewed. We have better things to do with our taxes.