Daniel Lubetzky

A few weeks back I attended a play hosted by Stanford Law School, a one-man-show by Lawrence Fishburne about Thurgood Marshall.  At the end, retiring Justice Marshall quotes a poem from his classmate Langston Hughes:

Oh, let America be America again

The land that never has been yet —

And yet must be — the land where

every man is free.

The land that’s mine

— the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME —

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Oh yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me.

And yet, I swear this oath —

America will be!

The full poem is here.

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A recent study with pregnant female rats indicated that the pups of those rats who were offered junk food ended up opting for junk food at far higher rates than the pups of moms that were under a regular chow regime. 

…pups whose mothers ate junk food while pregnant and lactating had a greater taste for food high in fat and sugar than those whose mothers did not. The junk-food pups ate more calories and were more prone to gaining weight.

And:

For most of our evolutionary past, the problem has been avoiding starvation. An environment awash with sugars and fats is, therefore, an evolutionary novelty: in hundreds of millions of years of evolution, this is the first time such foods have been abundant. Giant quantities of fats and sugars have not, historically, been available to a developing fetus, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they do have a harmful impact.

If this is right, it raises the alarming possibility that the obesity epidemic has a built-in snowball effect. If children born to obese mothers are, owing to the environment in the womb, predisposed to obesity, they may find staying thin especially hard. Reversing the epidemic may thus rest on helping women to lose weight before they conceive and helping them to eat a balanced, non-junk-food diet while they are pregnant. The well-being of the next generation may depend on it.

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From the ever-incisive and amusing Michael Kinsley, trying to decode the Democratic Party’s "platform":

Translating the document is no simple task. First, an alarmist note. Democrats favor “tough, practical and humane immigration reform.” And, “We will provide immediate relief to working people who have lost their jobs, families who have lost their homes and people who have lost their way.” It’s not clear what that third item refers to. Tax credits for G.P.S. devices? Presumably, “people who have lost their way” doesn’t mean illegal immigrants trying to find the border.

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Underscoring the depth of the challenge to freedom as we know it, no less than NYT Editor Bill Keller led the Week In Review with an analysis of China and Russia’s rise:

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

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"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

- Alan Kay

Mike Edwards questions whether the trendy concept of philantrocapitalism exemplified by Bill Gates is as effective as the uncritical buzz it is generating.  And he raises questions worthy of consideration, including this one in his q&a:

…what are the actual effects of business involvement in activities that are intended to promote social change? Where is business involvement useful, where might it be damaging, and do we have the evidence to separate one from the other? Here’s a list of things that business could usefully do:

• pay your taxes
• don’t produce goods that harm people
• pay decent wages and benefits
• stop subverting politics
• obey regulations in the public interest

The problem is, philanthrocapitalism does none of these things.

Well, business actually has a pivotal role to play beyond the basic code of decency Mike Edwards lists above.  As the primary force in the 21st century, the private sector can make enormous positive contributions into our lives. 

I am a strong advocate of engineering market forces to achieve positive change, marrying the business model to the social mission, as we’ve endeavored to do for the last fifteen years at PeaceWorks. 

And I am similarly an advocate of using entrepreneurial and creative practices commonly found in the private sector to maximize impact in civil society, as we try to do at OneVoice.

But beyond critical appraisal of "philantrocapitalism’s" effectiveness advocated in Mike’s article, what most resonates and troubles me about the unexamined noise with this and the broader concept of "corporate social responsibility" is that often it is used to mask dishonest or noxious behavior from corporations, to create bland appearances about business contributions to society while hiding under the carpet abhorrent behaviors that may be the primary driver of a business. 

Certainly, a company cannot justify or sugarcoat ruthless practices, or an underlying business model that harms people just by affixing the "csr" motto to its ads.  Unlike when people purchased indulgences from the medieval Church to swiftly absolve them for abominable sins, you cannot (or should not be able to) donate your way into brand heaven in the 21st century.

In sharp contrast to Mike’s provocative article, take a look at this piece in TIME Magazine where Bill Gates discovers the field of social entrepreneurship for humanity, dubbing it "creative capitalism."  Gates first announced this discovery in Davos back in January, where he was given 45 minutes to share how he conceived a utilitarian servile version of social responsibility.  It struck me he had just discovered and repackaged a field long in existence, just as he appropriated the netscape browser and apple’s operating system.

Social contributions should have a soul, a sentiment, and a sincerity of purpose.  Corporations are driven by human beings, so hopefully they will be driven to make our world better because this too is their world.  I have yet to meet a business person (or a human being) that does not care about the world.  But the trouble is that sometimes some corporate business models or junctures present people with concentrated profit-maximizing opportunities that cause harm to society overall.  And no amount of "CSR" should exculpate taking the wrong path – whether by lobbying the government to help a specific industry at the expense of the community or the environment, or by undermining competition, or any of the items in Mike’s list.

In the end, consumers will see through corporate efforts to manipulate causes just to make them look hip and responsible.  Alas, along with the unscrupulous corporation so too will fall the credibility of this important space – the sincere intersection between doing well and doing good.

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Aluf Benn provided an insightful report on what Olmert "offered’ Abbas as a way to at least insert a proposal that may give him a legacy.

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Interesting:

A new study from the RAND Corporation examined how 648 terror groups around the world ended between 1968 and 2006. It found that by far the most common way for them to disappear was to be absorbed by the political process. The second most common way was to be defeated by police work. In contrast, in only 7 percent of cases did military force destroy the terrorist group.

“There is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” the report declares. “Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended.”

From Nicholas Kristof’s NY Times column, Make Diplomacy, Not War.

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Thomas Friedman contrasts US energy policy and US behavior to the way Danes live and have structured their lives to be energy-efficient, and almost energy-independent.

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Russia’s authoritarian dictator-in-building Vladimir Putin has been getting high on the fumes of oil revenues that Russia is reaping from the West (US consumers are propping him and others like Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez up). The oil boom has helped Russia’s economy thrive for the last few years. This, plus weak leadership from the US and Western Europe, has combined with Putin’s ruthless KGB past to make him into a formidably arrogant threat to democracy and freedom.

His so-far unchecked invasion of Georgia is a threat to the world, with consequences potentially as grave as any development our globe has witnessed since the walls of the Soviet empire crumbled down.

Is the West going to rise to the challenge? Are leadership and principle going to stand? Is civil society going to mobilize? Is media going to do a better job at awakening the world to these dangerous developments?

At a minimum if Russia does not reverse its aggression, it needs to be ousted from the Group of 8.  No nation that behaves the way Russia has over the last few years – like a bully – deserves such newly anointed role.

Georgia’s President Saakashvili is not blameless. But nothing Georgia has done merits Russia’s aggression. And if the world does not react forcefully, Russia’s imperialist instincts will only grow stronger and eventually catch up with those who stand by today.

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