Author Archive
Congress stokes religious flames of consumerism
In the wake of passage by Congress of a $152 billion economic stimulus plan, a guest columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asks:
Is it too much to suggest that consumerism has become a kind of alternative faith, a religion of sorts? Religions are characterized by some vision of a good life, by their rituals and by a particular language. Consumerism seems to be developing all three apace.
Writer Anthony B. Robinson will hear no objection from me. As he observes, Americans have gone from using citizen as our default designation to consumer. And we are taking on our consumer role with religious-like fervor, aided and abetted by a Congress and president that understand the very basis for our economy is consumerism.
So now, because mortgage and finance companies succeeded in gaining more consumers with loans they could neither afford nor sustain, creating the subprime crisis, we have a stimulus package, a kind of consumer Viagra, to get us up and buying again. Is something wrong with this picture?
Yes, Anthony, there is.
Tags: Anthony B. Robinson, Consumerism, religion
Posted in Business & Economics, Consumerism | No Comments »
Green innovations offer hope in an e-wasted world
I maintain an ongoing love-hate relationship with consumer electronics. I hate the constant promotional bombardment by electronics manufacturers for cellphones, flat-panel TVs, mp3 players, games and countless other digital distractions. I also hate the waste stream produced by household electronics. Last month, the New York Times Magazine published an excellent piece on this, “The Afterlife of Cellphones.”
While many of us try to recycle our phones, the reality is they too often eventually end up randomly disposed of in developing countries, exposing human and other life to dangerous materials. According to the Times:
In a study published last year, 34 recent-model cellphones were put through a standard E.P.A. test, simulating conditions inside a landfill. All of them leached hazardous amounts of lead — on average, more than 17 times the federal threshold for what constitutes hazardous waste. Under a stricter state of California test, they also leached four other metals above hazardous levels.
The E.P.A. says modern American landfills are designed to keep toxics stewing inside from leaking out, so they don’t contaminate surrounding soil or drinking water. But landfills do fail, says Oladele A. Ogunseitan, an environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of last year’s study. More important, he notes, such landfills don’t exist in the developing world. In many places, garbage is tossed into informal dumps or bodies of water or burned in the open air — all dangerous ways of liberating and spreading toxics.
The article doesn’t paint a completely hopeless picture. Industries are developing to reclaim precious metals from e-waste and to refurbish used cellphones and resell them to those who can’t afford new ones. The latter, in theory, reduces the need to make new phones and the energy and materials consumed to produce them.
Which brings me to what I love (I use the term very loosely) about consumer electronics: the innovation harnessed and applied in their design. The innovation I care about most is reducing the environmental impact of electronics. CNET gives coverage today to the Green Gadgets conference in New York. Check out some of the product innovations that promise to do less harm and in some cases improve the quality of life for some of the world’s poor.
My favorite is SunNight Solar’s solar flashlight. The company is also focusing on social issues by encouraging their customers to buy and give one of the flashlights to a person in a developing country for every one they buy for personal use. According to CNET, “The goal is to reduce the use of kerosene lamps, which are unhealthy and dangerous.”
Technical and social innovations like these from SunNight Solar are what give me hope.
Tags: consumer electronics, green, green gadgets, hazardous waste, innovation, The Afterlife of Cellphones
Posted in Business & Economics, Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »
Oregon media fails in covering economic development
State government officials across the US love to publicize their aggressive efforts to draw outside businesses to their states. And the news media rarely fails to serve up the publicity the government desires. Case in point, The Oregonian’s headline on the front of the business section yesterday: “Governor will woo Europe for eco-friendly industry.”
Being the green guy that I am, I suppose I should be at the airport on March 29 to shout my approval to the governor before he boards the plane to Amsterdam. Sorry, no can do. I long ago reached the fed-up point with economic development strategies that favor recruitment of out-of-state businesses over cultivation of in-state entrepreneurs and businesses.
My philosophy is let’s first take care of those already here. Only after public officials and programs have exhausted efforts to help our existing firms succeed should they turn their attention to business recruitment. Research I did a year ago for an Oregon economic development organization made clear to me that the state has only scratched the surface of what it could do for existing Oregon businesses and the Oregonians who want to start companies.
Author Michael Shuman says the reason for the government bias toward recruiting big investments from outside companies has much more to do with politics than economics:
Presenting the public with one deal providing one thousand jobs seems to have greater payoffs than presenting one hundred deals with ten jobs each. Politicians would rather be photographed cutting a ribbon on page A-1 than having to schlep around to a hundred places, on a hundred different days, always for page D-6 announcements in the business section.
Of course, if the media didn’t fawn all over these large recruitment coups, our politicians might change their behavior. Reporters tend to favor one factor above all when weighing the significance of business news: what’s the impact on jobs created or lost locally or statewide. Let’s say a local firm promises to add 10 jobs this year — without public subsidy. Now along comes an out-of-state corporation that is promising 500 jobs — with public subsidy. Which announcement do you think the media will pay more attention to?
The media rarely scrutinizes the ROI of public subsidies for the recruitment of out-of-state firms to Oregon. It’s considered the cost of competing in a global economy, as if there is no alternative. Instead, when an outsider chooses Oregon over other states (or countries) the media celebrates it as affirmation of Oregon’s quality of workforce and life. The promise of hundreds of jobs is all that matters; not whether those jobs actually are produced and at what cost to the taxpayer.
When Dell Computer without warning closed its call center in Roseburg (Douglas County) last August and laid off 220 employees, The Oregonian reported:
Douglas County’s economy went into steep decline along with the timber industry in the 1990s, so Dell’s call center was especially welcome when it opened in 2002. Economic development officials helped lure the computer retailer with state tax breaks worth $250,000, and with $2 million worth of employee training funds largely from private organizations.
Dell’s departure presented a perfect opportunity for the paper to investigate the wisdom of showering tax breaks on outside firms, especially mega-corporations like Dell. But no such report followed.
The media is failing the citizenry and the businesses that were started and grown in Oregon. At the very least, reporters need to examine closely what public officials are doing on behalf of Oregon-based businesses and entrepreneurs and weigh that against the investments in external recruitment. In other words, stop the puff pieces on the governor’s overseas junkets and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. And start asking whether any of it really makes a difference.
If not, we have thousands of homegrown businesses in Oregon that could use the governor’s attention and support. You know, the ones that don’t demand tax breaks to do business here.
Tags: Dell Computer, economic development, Oregon media, public subsidies, Roseburg
Posted in Business & Economics, Oregon | No Comments »
Dear John, you’ll be missed
John Edwards’ decision today to end his presidential campaign saddens me. But my respect for him has never been greater. I was a supporter of his in 2004. After he and Kerry lost that year, Edwards began devoting himself to ending poverty in America and making plans to run again this year. Here was a candidate for the highest office in the land willing to stake his candidacy on a cause — poverty, economic injustice — most politicians will at most give lip service to.
In announcing his decision to stop campaigning, Edwards said he doesn’t know how it is his party became so silent about the needs of the millions of Americans struggling to get by:
For decades, we stopped focusing on those struggles. They didn’t register in political polls, they didn’t get us votes and so we stopped talking about it. I don’t know how it started. I don’t know when our party began to turn away from the cause of working people, from the fathers who were working three jobs literally just to pay the rent, mothers sending their kids to bed wrapped up in their clothes and in coats because they couldn’t afford to pay for heat.
Edwards was not a perfect candidate. Like others, I was unhappy to see him building a multi-million dollar mansion in Chapel Hill, NC while championing the cause of the working class. Yes, Edwards is a very wealthy man. But I’m not cynical enough to believe his campaign themes were politically expedient or hypocritical. Does anyone think speaking out for the poor was his ticket to election? His announcement today, set in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, proves otherwise.
As Time magazine reports, his efforts have not been for naught:
Edwards leaves the race having made a big impact on the two remaining candidates. His populist rhetoric forced his rivals to compete for union support, and he was the first out of the gate with detailed plans for universal healthcare and education, putting pressure on the field to match him. “He led on just about every single issue: poverty, economic stimulus to universal healthcare,” said Joe Trippi, a senior adviser to Edwards’ campaign. “He pushed both of them further than they would’ve gone without him. When they wanted to blur the lines and not have real proposals, he came out with them and forced the others to move ahead.”
Edwards underscored this today:
Now, I’ve spoken to both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. They have both pledged to me and more importantly through me to America, that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency. And more importantly, they have pledged to me that as President of the United States they will make ending poverty and economic inequality central to their Presidency. This is the cause of my life and I now have their commitment to engage in this cause.
I’m sad John Edwards won’t be our next president. But I believe he made Clinton and Obama better candidates, and when one of them occupies the Oval Office a year from now, we will become a better country.
Doctor is timely reminder of New Orleans poor
A year ago this week I was in New Orleans gutting flooded homes with a volunteer team from Portland. I had forgotten about this personal anniversary until this afternoon when I met a physician. She told me she has been practicing for four years in Portland. Before Portland? New Orleans, she said. Pre-Katrina she had worked in the emergency room of Charity Hospital. For eight years. My eyes widened. “Wow, you were on the front lines, weren’t you,” I said.
Here’s how author Jed Horne describes Charity in “Breach of Faith,” his powerful recounting of New Orleans during the storm and its aftermath:
New Orleans had been doing its birthing and dying at Charity, its ailing and its mending, nonstop mostly on the government’s dime, for about as long as the older patient’s had been alive. The mayor had been born in Charity, though one could confidently assume that he would not now seek its services except in the direst of emergency. The violence in New Orleans’s back streets had made its trauma center and emergency rooms as skilled as any in the South, and a mecca for interns with the gumption to endure permanent battlefield conditions.
I can’t fathom how this doctor I met worked there for eight years. She actually spoke fondly of her experience.
Today, Charity is closed, a victim of the hurricane and bureaucrats’ decisions. In addition to serving the largest number of indigent patients in the city, Charity was a teaching hospital. Officials at Louisiana State University plan to keep it closed and build a new teaching clinic in the city, but it won’t be open until at least 2012. A group of former patients have filed a lawsuit to “in an attempt to force the state to reopen Charity Hospital or make other provisions for thousands of people whose health has deteriorated without ready access to free medical care.”
That Charity will not reopen probably surprises no one in New Orleans. This was the hospital that was falsely reported by CNN to have been evacuated completely by Wednesday, two days after the hurricane hit. According to Horne,
(T)he reality was that twelve hundred staff and patients were still trapped in Charity, with diminishing supplies of food, water, and medicine…As the army kept Charity waiting until Thursday, helicopters were evacuating critically ill patients from Tulane University Medical Center, the private hospital right across the street.
On the medical, housing and just about any other front you want to consider in New Orleans today, the poor remain in dire straits. There are about 12,000 homeless in the city, double the number before the storm.
Meanwhile, our president in tonight’s state of the union address is supposed to announce a conference to be held in New Orleans. He wants the meeting to show “how the ‘great American city’ is rebounding.”
This from the president who could muster not a single reference to the plight of New Orleans in his address a year ago. New Orleans may be rebounding — for some — but don’t think for a moment that a positive spin will help those without a home or health care in the Big Easy sleep better tonight.
UPDATE: The president’s remarks were applauded by business leaders in New Orleans.
Tags: Breach of Faith, Charity Hospital, Hurricane Katrina, Jed Horne, New Orleans, state of the union
Posted in Current Affairs, Hurricane Katrina | No Comments »
Hearing the message of a despised messenger
I spent more than 20 years in high tech marketing before recently moving my career in a different direction. I never thought I’d be in the position of defending Bill Gates, who for most of his years at Microsoft has been widely despised for his ruthlessly competitive leadership style.
I am quite certain many in and out of high tech are uttering something like “yeah, right” having learned of Gates’ speech before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland calling for “creative capitalism.” Gates has been creative all along — as in always finding ways to put his competitors out of business.
That’s the old Gates. The new Gates is the extraordinary, soon to be full-time philanthropist. And that’s who was speaking yesterday.
“We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well…I like to call this idea creative capitalism.”
Call it whatever you like, Bill, but it’s about time people of your stature use a platform such as the World Economic Forum to urge big business, in particular, to attend to the needs of the neediest.
We can kill the messenger, but his message must be heard:
“I am an optimist…But I am an impatient optimist. The world is getting better, but it’s not getting better fast enough, and it’s not getting better for everyone.”
Now consider for a moment how free market apologists construe the words of the world’s most successful capitalist of our time. Here’s Larry Kudlow, CNBC and National Review, spouting off:
Don’t you just love it? A guy without a college degree who invented a new technology process in his garage that literally changed the entire world, a guy who took advantage of all the great opportunities that a free and capitalist society has to offer and got filthy rich in the process, is now trashing capitalism and telling us it doesn’t work. What chutzpah…
So I just have to smile when billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros turn cold shoulders to the blessings capitalism bestows. Or when their buddy, Warren Buffett, broadcasts the importance of hiking tax rates on successful earners and investors.
Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn’t noticed, it was a miserable failure.
Is that what Bill was doing, trashing capitalism and urging Communist state-run economics? Is that what the putative richest man in the world meant yesterday when he said, as the AP reports, “business must work with governments and nonprofit groups to stem global poverty and spur more technological innovation for those left behind”?
Thanks for clearing everything up, Mr. Kudlow. I always suspected business leaders who join the struggle to eradicate poverty are nothing more than closeted Communists. I mean why take personal action when you can just let the free market fix everything.
Tags: Bill Gates, communists, creative capitalism, global poverty, Larry Kudlow, World Economic Forum
Posted in Business & Economics, Current Affairs, Politics | No Comments »