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Millions of Americans barely scraped by this holiday season, stuck in poverty-wage jobs or mired in unemployment. But the latest retail sector reports show that we did manage to shop a little more, perhaps because people are resorting to the material comforts of consumption to make up for the misery they’ve suffered as workers. And it’s that appetite for consumer goods that has shaped the holiday wishlist of struggling workers on the other side of the world, who are growing increasingly impatient in their demands for a decent standard of living.In China, local minimum-wage standards are rising incrementally as factory workers are increasingly eager to get a piece of the modified-capitalist pie. Beijing just announced a 21-percent boost starting in 2011, following a similar pay hike last summer, and several other provinces, like the trade hub Guangdong, have followed this trend in their recent wage reforms (though this doesn’t necessarily mean that the laws will be followed).
Raising the wage floor is partially an effort to stimulate economic growth via consumption. But perhaps more importantly, it reflects the governent’s concerns about escalating labor unrest, along with the private sector’s anxieties about retaining workers and staving off rebellion.The spontaneous strikes that rippled through China’s auto industry last year alarmed both officials and employers, and resulted in modest gains for workers at multinational companies like Toyota and Honda, which openly capitalize on the country’s absurdly low labor costs.
Employers, not surprisingly, claim that pushing up wages would impose an undue burden on their bottom line. And there are legitimate fears that rising labor costs, combined with arbitrary tax policies, could drive factories to simply move to cheaper regions, according to the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin. That’s not to let employers off the hook, though. The main obstacle to achieving wage equity, CLB argues, is the lack of a truly democratic collective-bargaining system, which neither employers nor party officials have much interest in establishing:
In an analysis of the impact of the wildcat auto strikes–a dramatic surge of activism in the booming southern industrial heartland–Boy Lüthje wonders whether workers, with the backing of the local media and even some state-run trade unions, now have enough clout to sustain pressure on their bosses:
That’s a tall order for the world’s most paradoxical proletariat. The rabble of China’s migrant workers, many of whom are children of peasant farmers with little education and sometimes not even a stable address, might seem an unlikely model for grassroots labor organizing.
Yet recent violence in Bangladesh over wages highlights how labor tensions in the Global South are trending toward a mass movement. Earlier this month, thousands of workers demonstrated and blocked traffic at two factories outside Dhaka, outraged at the delayed implementation of a new minimum wage (which fell far short of union demands to begin with). In the aftermath of a bloody clash with police, the political volatility surrounding wage pressures appears to be reaching a breaking point across the region, and business interests are wising up to newly emboldened workers’ willingness to hold both employers and government officials accountable.
And what about here in the U.S.? Seven states will kick off 2011 by raising their minimum wages by about nine to twelve cents per hour, primarily to keep pace with the rising cost of living. The National Employment Law Project notes that “Strengthening the buying power of low-wage workers is especially critical in the current economic climate… because the majority of new jobs created in the wake of the recession are in low- and mid-wage industries.”
Still, current minimum wage rates, whether it’s the federal baseline of $7.25 an hour (roughly $15,000 annually, if you can survive till the end of the year on that) or slightly higher state mandates, are often far too low to lift a typical family out of poverty, and not even close to a living wage in many cities. Not to mention the people who gone months or years without a job and face little hope of earning even the bare minimum in the coming year.
So those toys and gadgets that we wishfully spent our savings on may have made the holidays a little more bearable. But remember that that they’re symbols of other aspirations, too: the fruits of a parallel labor force toiling away at Santa’s workshop in Shenzhen. This season, from Detroit to Dhaka, working people are connected not just through global trade routes, but through an unrelenting struggle to earn a dignified living.
Cross-posted from In These Times.

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When I read about the tragic death of Isabelle Caro I felt deeply saddened. Along with many of my colleagues in Australia, UK and USA, I work hard to raise awareness of the dangers of dieting in an effort to reduce the incidence of eating disorders – and as someone who has recovered from anorexia and has intimate knowledge of what it takes to recover, my personal crusade has evolved to mentoring people through recovery and empowering them to move forward and rediscover purpose and passion as they rebuild their lives.
According to one article Caro herself spoke out about her efforts to recover, and the menace of eating disorders on the fashion industry. However eating disorders are not limited to the fashion industry and the incidence continues to climb.
In Australia, 68% of 15 year old females are on a diet(i). Of these females, some will engage in dangerous dieting behaviour resulting in the onset of eating issues. Some will even self harm and binge drink.
Justine, an ex-bulimia sufferer, says “on my 18th birthday, my heart stopped beating. It was a few days before I was to be admitted to hospital, and my last chance at freedom. So I went out with friends, drank too much and collapsed. I was rushed to hospital.”
A Sydney study of adolescents aged 11 to 15 reported that 16% of the girls and 7% of the boys had already employed at least one potentially dangerous method of weight reduction, including starvation, vomiting and laxative abuse(ii).
And according to The Butterfly Foundation, more recent statistics indicate an increase in males suffering from eating disorders, with Australia having some of the worst levels of male anorexia in the world; one in four children with anorexia in Australia are boys and almost a third of year-nine boys use dangerous methods to try and keep thin, including popping diet pills and smoking cigarettes.
In addition, the incidence of binge eating disorder in males and females is almost equal (iii) .
Unlike bulimia, those with binge eating disorder do not purge, starve themselves or engage in strenuous activity after a binge, and are on average overweight, which makes it harder to identify that there is a serious problem.
When I first met Mitchell Doyle, a senior student, I was moved by his story. “In primary school the ‘cool kids’ ruthlessly bullied me. I changed schools but felt I didn’t fit in,” he said. “Then my parents separatedand my brothers moved out. I felt that everyone had left me and this made me feel hopeless and abandoned.”
Mitchell resorted to restricting his food intake to the point where is weight plummeted to a dangerous low, but then bulimia took hold. Fighting feelings of inadequacy, Mitchell struggled to accept that he was a male with an eating disorder. “This struggle was manifested by what society perceives as being ‘male’: masculine, courageous, unbreakable. These traits were hammered into me by images in my teenage world.”
Exhausted from the battle within, Mitchell made the conscious decision to recover. “To stop the desire to purge, I’d stare at myself in the mirror and yell ‘I am not doing this’”. It was hard but with persistence and belief in himself, Mitchell turned his life around. “I feel that people who bully others are insecure themselves. I don’t buy in to what others say about me anymore. I trust myself first and foremost.”
Mitchell says that recovery brought him inner peace and happiness because he has a greater understanding of who he is. “If you feel you should change to be accepted, don’t, because you are who you are for a reason and you should embrace that.”
Justine’s turning point came when she realised she was the only one who could make the decision. “I felt I couldn’t talk to people about how I was feeling because it was wrong to inflict my negative feelings on others. This became a core belief so my secretive behaviour stemmed from this. I now realise had I asked for help sooner, a lot of heartache could have been avoided. I recognised my illness had become a conscious choice – and I chose to fight it.”
Emily, on the other hand, endured over fifty admissions to hospital. “I fought so hard to hold onto my eating disorder, to the point of needing sedation. I was pulled out of school because I had no cognitive function – I couldn’t even put a sentence together. I lived by self imposed rules and rituals. I was in the most incredible pain but the only way I could communicate this was through self destruction.”
After breaking several bones due to severe malnourishment, including her feet six times (one time multiple fractures in both feet), hips four times and ribs multiple times, Emily was told she had osteoporosis and her bone density was the same as someone aged 110. Terrified, she felt compelled to recover. Although her recovery has been littered with relapses, Emily has progressively improved and her determination is paying off. “The medication for my osteoporosis has regenerated cells in my bones and as a result they have improved tremendously. To be able to run, jump and play is such a gift.”
Having recovered from anorexia I know the value of recovery. It is important that those affected by Isabelle Caro’s death who are afflicted by eating issues, and those who love them, know that recovery is possible. It takes hard work and commitment, but it is possible. In my book Why Can’t I Look the Way I Want I’ve profiled seventeen people who have recovered, including how they used their newfound strength and self awareness to go on and do amazing things. Living proof that it is possible not only to recover, but to move forward and create a wonderful life.
(i) Onset of adolescent eating disorders: population based cohort study over 3 years. British Medical Journal, 318, 765-768. Source: Patton, G.C., Selzer, R., Coffey, C., Carlin, J.B., & R Wolfe, R. (1999)
(ii) Source: O’Dea JS, Abraham S, Heard R. (1996) Food habits, body image and weight control practises of young male and female adolescents. Aust J Nutr Diet, 53:32-38
(iii) Source: Paxton, S. (1998). Do men get eating disorders? In Everybody Newsletter of Body Image and Health Inc. vol2, August 1998.

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On a personal level, I want to say “thank God” that the year 2010 is coming to an end, but artistically speaking it was definitely a year to remember. Los Angeles museums as well as galleries did us proud by organizing some truly remarkable exhibitions, though unfortunately on a few occasions their efforts misfired. So let’s start with the winners and end with the clunkers. Am I seeing your ears perk up?
My absolutely favorite was the traveling retrospective of Arshile Gorky, which was hosted by MOCA. The artist lived his entire life with the painful memory of his childhood in Armenia and the ghost of his dead mother. The story of Gorky’s life made you want to cry but his paintings-at this beautifully installed exhibition-made your spirits soar.
At the Getty, we had the rare chance to get up close and personal with Rembrandt by staring at numerous drawings done by him and his students. Visitors were encouraged to participate in an ongoing scholarly dispute about the attribution of these drawings. The lingering question remains: which of them were done by the Master himself and which by his students?
LACMA had a number of important exhibitions but the one that made me return three times was Fashioning Fashion. Its mouth-watering presentation of European costumes-with their shimmering fabric and exquisite embroidery-was so seductive…one could barely resist the temptation of touching the beautiful garments.
The Hammer Museum surprised and delighted us with a small, focused exhibition of paintings by Eva Hesse, known primarily as an excellent sculptor, but this smartly installed exhibition persuasively made a case for her as a painter of considerable talent.
The nearby Fowler Museum hosted an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Nick Cave that gave visitors a happy Halloween-like mood with his Soundsuits sculptures. Part haute couture, part African ceremonial costumes, the Soundsuits are meant to be worn by dancers. If you were not seduced by the carnival energy of these costumes it meant you were only half alive.
The small and feisty Santa Monica Museum of Art excelled with the provocative exhibition of Italian artist Alberto Burri, whose name was unknown to most Angelenos before that. Trained as a doctor, he volunteered during WWII to serve in the Italian army and subsequently was captured by the Allies and sent to a POW camp in Texas. As strange as this sounds, all this turned him into a surprisingly original artist who miraculously transformed decidedly humble materials to the most dramatic effect.
Some of the exhibitions at commercial art galleries also must be mentioned among the best of 2010. I would start with highly idiosyncratic portraits by Alice Neel at LA Louver Gallery. Standing in front of her paintings, one couldn’t help but feel unnerved by the raw sensuality and erotic energy of most of these portraits.
The late majestic paintings by Joan Mitchell at the Gagosian Gallery with their youthful audacious energy and sparkling bright color, made you believe you could fly.
In Chinatown at Jancar Gallery, French-born, LA based artist Pierre Picot, in his fantastical landscapes, fused traditions of Asian scroll paintings with the art of the European Avant-garde.
Uta Barth, another LA based European expatriate and photographer of rare refinement, had an exhibition at 1301 PE on the Miracle Mile, where her luminous images gave visitors a moment of respite and meditation.
But what about the worst exhibitions, the real clunkers of 2010? Well, I’m not going to bother with the commercial gallery flops… there were simply too many to mention. So that leaves us with museums’ embarrassing missteps. The “Razzie” goes to MOCA’s unfortunate attempt to present late actor and director Dennis Hopper as a multi-talented artist, equally accomplished as a photographer, painter, and sculptor. Hopper, early in his career, definitely made a splash as a photographer, but assessing his achievement as a painter and a sculptor one wants to borrow a quote from Gertrude Stein: “There was no there there.” Another exhibition that made me feel sorry for the artist was the repetitious and seemingly endless display at LACMA of late, and far from the best, paintings by Renoir.
But being an eternal optimist, I am looking forward to all the wonderful surprises that Grandpa Frost, who is the Russian version of Santa Claus, will deliver to all of us art lovers in the upcoming year. And with that, let’s toast 2011 with a good shot of chilled Russian vodka. Happy New Year!
Edward Goldman is an art critic and the host of Art Talk, a program on art and culture for NPR affiliate KCRW 89.9 FM.
Banner image: Composite of three portraits by Arshille Gorky, Alice Neel and Rembrandt

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“There is something about too much prosperity that ruins the fiber of the people.”
– Diplomat Dwight Morrow
In 1933, the president awoke to the news that the United States banking system had collapsed. Unemployment had reached 25 percent. Hourly wages nose-dived 60 percent. Distraught dairy farmers blockaded highways in order to dump hundreds of gallons of milk in a vain effort to drive up milk prices.
“They say blockading the highway’s illegal,” said one Iowa farmer. “I say, ‘Seems to me there was a Tea Party in Boston that was illegal too.’ ”
2010 endured Tea Party rage, road rage, air rage, cell phone rage, even McNugget rage when a woman in Ohio attacked a worker at McDonald’s after being told that the chicken chunks were not on the breakfast menu.
During the ’30s, our grandparents and great-grandparents suffered lost jobs, houses, farms, and incredible poverty without the benefit of credit cards, bailouts and stimulus, and they managed to live through a Great Depression with grit and resolve.
Many of today’s citizenry however, have become a whiny group of rage-a-holics.
It took six long years for the gross national product to climb to 60 percent over the dark days of 1933. When Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office on March 4 of that year, the country was in a death grip of fear. People wanted their jobs back, their farms back. They just wanted their lives back.
“I’d like my life back,” said former CEO Tony Hayward regarding BP’s efforts to stop the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Little did Hayward realize that he was crystallizing exactly what many Americans felt. They just want their lives to return to the unrestrained prosperity of the 80s and 90s.
“As bad as it is today,” said Treasury official Neel Kashkari, “it could have been so much worse.” At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Kashkari served under Secretary Hank Paulson and was given the unenviable task of delivering the bad news as well as a plan to fix it to President George W. Bush.
“If the financial system had collapsed,” Kashkari said in a New York Times interview, “businesses on Wall Street and Main Street alike “wouldn’t have been able to access funds to pay their employees, who then wouldn’t have money to pay their bills. It would have cascaded through our economy.”
2010 has taken a shellacking in poor judgment and bad behavior. CNN anchor Rick Sanchez calls comedian Jon Stewart a bigot, then digs the hole deeper by announcing that all network heads are like Stewart. Blogging “journalist” Andrew Breitbart’s wildly misleading viral video takes Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod’s speech out of context and wrongly paints her as a bigot. Worse still, Ag. Secretary Tom Vilsack fires Sherrod before checking the facts.
Then there was Florida Pastor Terry Jones who advertised Burn a Koran Day. Thankfully, he was talked out of it but only after intervention by White House, Pentagon and Vatican officials. JetBlue attendant Steven Slater who, after an incredible lapse of bad behavior becomes, of all things, a hero for stressed out employees. WikiLeaks Founder and Firestarter Julian Assange became another kind of “hero” by dumping hundreds of thousands of classified documents on his website without any thought to who might be harmed. And Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre was fined a mere $50,000 “for not cooperating” in an investigation looking into allegations of sending lewd photos to a young woman. Anyone else would have been fired.
Then there was — is — that vuvuzela of populist rage known as (depending on where you live) Tea Party Nation, Express, Patriots, or The 1776 Tea Party, supported and/or co-opted by the likes of Sharron Angle, Michele Bachmann, Christine O’Donnell, Sarah Palin and my favorite demagogue of the year, Glenn Beck, who says thing like, “I haven’t seen Jesus and what he would do on a talk show on Fox, but I’m going to try.” (April 21)
Aren’t you glad you have cable?
I’m not suggesting that all of what the Tea Party has wrought has been bad for the country. They’ve effectively put Washington on notice: Shape up or we’ll ship you out!
However, during the past year, the country has been in a death grip of deep cynicism. On Christmas Eve no less, the political cartoon Pepper and Salt showed Santa on the couch with his analyst: “The question is not whether people believe in you,” the shrink tells the morose icon, “but rather, do you believe in yourself?”
Maybe we need is a big dose of Tony Robbins. “Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.”
We know how to build, how to innovate, how to pull ourselves up and start over again. Our grandparents did it in the face of a Great Depression. Our mothers and fathers did it during World War II. Sadly, many Boomers today lack the right stuff. We have become A.D.D. texting-FaceBook-Twitter and medication addicted. We have Cialis for E.D., ergo we want, we expect the same with our economy, jobs, housing… you fill in the blank.
However, the reality is this: It took years for us to get into the current economic mess and it will take years to find our way out plus determination and a whole lot of hard choices.
“Even though I knew locating us would be like finding a needle in a haystack,” trapped Chilean miner Luis Urzua said, “I never lost hope that help would arrive.”
It took 17 days just to find them, and 53 more to finally rescue all 32 trapped miners. What made the difference for the trapped men – faith and leadership.
“We made sure it was one for all and all for one down there,” Urzua said.
That’s the attitude more of us need to embrace if we’re ever going to pull ourselves up and start over.
One example comes in a message from vascular surgeon and Viet Nam vet John Baldwin. After checking in to see how he was doing after back surgery, he wrote back, “I’m just lovin’ being semi-pain free and alive in a beautiful world. I have found that divorcing myself from things I cannot control like Democrats, Republicans, TSA searches, deficits and murders of children, and just focusing on Jeannie [his wife and nurse extraordinaire], grandkids and my six-month old kitten has made me a fun person again. It took this illness and pain to appreciate the blue sky and my wife, more than ever!”
Results from a Gallup Student Poll taken last August in grades 5-12 found that “53 percent of students are hopeful, 63 percent are engaged and 70 percent are thriving.”
It’s that kind of hope and engagement that the rest of us need to embody.
“If we hope to reestablish our strength, confidence, and balance as a nation,” Mario Cuomo writes in Reason to Believe, “we need to help one another see that our self-interest is not identical with our selfish interests, that self-interest is inextricably linked to the common good. We need to understand that apart from the morality of recognizing an obligation to our brothers and sisters, common sense by itself should teach us that we are all in this thing together, interconnected and interdependent.”
Can I have an Amen?
Jim Lichtman has been writing and speaking on ethics since 1995. His commentaries can be found at www.ethicsStupid.com.

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Many have noted that when the new congress convenes it will be the first in sixty-four years without a Kennedy.
I preach to my screenwriting students that fantasy is for their movies. For their lives: reality. No political name in the last half century has been more romanticized and idealized than Kennedy.
In October of 1960, when I was a student at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, I happened upon a Kennedy election rally at Union Square. The gray, dreary, overcast day found thousands upon thousands of people gathered to hear the candidate. From a block away, among the overcoats and hats I could see clearly and brightly the president-to-be, his neon carrot-top a fiery contrast to the weather and national gloom. I was hugely excited. Kennedy delivered a brilliant speech brilliantly. Here was a mainstream political leader I could support with vigor and fervor.
A sober look at the record, however, argues that both JFK and RFK left legacies that were essentially sorry.
Under Kennedy the nation saw the largest peacetime expansion of the military budget until Reagan. The revenues were used among other purposes massively to expand the United States military presence in Vietnam.
Kennedy notoriously betrayed anti-Castro forces in the debacle called Bay of Pigs.
Does he not at least deserve credit for his handling of the Cuban missile crisis?
Respectfully, the Cuban missile crisis is a hoax, perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of public relations. Internationally, Khrushchev won the day, appearing conciliatory and peaceable, averting perceived American threats at the same time as he compelled Kennedy to withdraw our own missiles from the Soviet border in Turkey and Iran.
Civil rights?
The Kennedy White House may have served coffee to the leaders of the civil rights march on Washington, but the president opposed Martin Luther King and other black leaders for organizing the freedom bus rides and for a broad array of other civil rights activities. Nowhere did he show backbone that Eisenhower did, sending federal troops to protect black school children attempting to attend class in Arkansas. Instead of standing firm against bigots and bigotry, the Kennedy administration complained that the freedom riders brought unwelcome worldwide attention to the wretched state of civil rights. Kennedy called for ‘both sides’ to show restraint.
Both sides?
Here are the sides: 1) law abiding citizens seeking their constitutional rights; 2) racist arsonist criminals.
It was on brother Bobby’s watch as Attorney General that Martin Luther King was illegally wiretapped. King’s surreptitiously recorded personal indiscretions were offered up as entertainment for the in-crowd at Department of Justice parties.
It’s all too well known that Bobby got his start in politics as lapdog to right wing hysterics Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy.
Clear into January of 1968 Robert Kennedy was an outspoken supporter of Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam. When another McCarthy, Eugene, demonstrated in New Hampshire that LBJ was vulnerable, however, Bobby promptly pulled a one-eighty. Had his interest in ending the war been sincere, Bobby could have supported McCarthy. Instead, in service to his own narcissism and lust for power he derailed the McCarthy campaign, dooming thereby tens of thousands of additional American troops to perish in this most misguided and dubious adventure.
Bobby’s support of Caesar Chavez and the California farm workers may well be commendable on the surface, but was it in any manner connected to principle? Was it not based solely upon narrow self service and political calculation?
That the Kennedy administration was a failure is, of course, merely an opinion. It is not opinion but fact, however, that during his abbreviated presidency John Kennedy was singularly disliked. His approval ratings were dismal; indeed he barely won the election at all. Perhaps the only truth Richard Nixon ever spoke is that then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daly cooked the Cook County ballots, and in doing so delivered Illinois and the election to Kennedy.
Indeed, JFK’s visit to Dallas on that fateful November day had been arranged in no small part because Texas Democrats LBJ and Governor John Connally had told him the only chance for winning the state in ’64 required his visiting there in order to mend fences.
Some suggest that at the time of his murder he had finally found himself and was about to turn the corner and create a record that may have eventually proved affirmative. We can only guess about that. My own guess is that, had he lived, he may very well have found his footing and gone on to construct a legacy that was exemplary.
History shows, however, that the Kennedy administration was a supreme disappointment. If not for the assassination, John Fitzgerald Kennedy would look today a whole lot like James Earl Carter.
Richard Walter is a professor at UCLA where he chairs the graduate program in film and television writing. His latest book, Essentials of Screenwriting, was published last summer. He is a pop culture commentator throughout the media, and a court authorized expert in intellectual property law.

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I’m not usually a big believer in New Year’s resolutions. I’m all for vowing to live a better life whenever possible, but I rarely succumb to the big, fatalistic year-end pronouncement.
I’m making an exception this year.
2010 has been a very good year for me, professionally. There’s every indication that 2011 will be just as good, if not better. Yet despite this success, I still sometimes feel depressed about my future as an author. It’s as if I’m always scanning the sky looking for that one dark cloud, knowing it’s just beyond the horizon.
And I think I know why. It’s because I read too many articles about the publishing industry. And most of those articles do nothing but predict its imminent demise.
So this is my New Year’s resolution: I refuse to read any article proclaiming the death of publishing, the end of the printed book, the rise of eReaders combined with the prediction that editors, publishing professionals, cover designers, etc., will no longer be necessary, that the author will become one lean, mean writing/editing/marketing/designing/publicizing machine, cutting out all so-called middle men and sticking it to the man (i.e., Big Bad Publishing).
Because, really, what am I supposed to do with all these predictions? I’m a writer. Period.
It’s not as if I’m going to drop everything and enroll in an MBA program so that I, single-handedly, can save publishing. It’s not as if I’m suddenly going to acquire the ability to be a publicity-hound or a marketing strategist. It’s not as if I’m suddenly going to be able to compartmentalize my brain so that I can edit my own work with the dispassionate precision that the necessary third eye brings.
And there’s no way I’m suddenly going to be able to design my own cover art (considering that the only items I can draw that are in any way recognizable are horsies and kitties).
I’ve been in this business awhile, and I’ve learned a few things in general, and a few things about myself in particular. One of those things is that not every author is going to have the same kind of career. There are authors happy with small presses, authors content with writing for hire, authors who like to micro-manage every facet of publication.
I don’t fall into that last category, I’ve learned.
A few years ago, between writing careers, I dabbled with a self-published eBook, garnering thousands of downloads. (This was before the publish-to-Kindle option was available.) I spent a lot of time thinking up marketing opportunities, pitching ideas to one huge conglomerate, even getting them to sponsor a kind of tour for one of my previously-published books.
None of this mattered when I started submitting my next novel to publishing houses. I can show you the rejection letters, if you want.
Most significantly, though, was the discovery that I didn’t like doing any of that other — stuff. It wasn’t the career I envisioned when I first dreamed of being an author. I found myself knowing a lot about spreadsheets and learning some cool marketing terms. I found myself thinking like a business person instead of an artist, for the vast majority of my day — and I hated it.
So I went back to doing the one thing I really loved, which was immersing myself in words and thoughts and other worlds. I went back to being the author I really wanted to be.
And it worked out for me. I’ve found my greatest success since then; since concentrating only on the writing.
As I said, there are different careers for different writers. Some authors are happy selling books out of their trunks, or becoming the go-to expert whenever anyone writes an article about self-publishing. Good for them,
Funny, though. Whenever I go to literary conferences or meet with readers, nobody ever asks me about my marketing plan. No one ever wants to know how I plan to stick it to the man. Readers don’t care about that part of sausage making.
What I am asked is how I come up with my ideas. How I research the history. Why I choose certain words or images. In other words — readers do want to know how and why I write.
And it all comes back to that, for me. I’m a writer. That’s it.
So my New Year’s resolution is to stop reading those “death of publishing as we know it” articles, because they don’t affect me. Not really. I’m going to keep writing, for as long as I can. And if the day comes when the only future for me as a writer is one in which I have to be my own editor, marketer, publicist and designer, then I will fade away into the sunset. Grateful for the time I had doing what I loved.
Until then, I’m going to enjoy my time in the sun. And only continue to make New Year’s Resolutions that I think I can keep.

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Welcome to the 2010 Climate B.S. of the Year Award.
2010 saw widespread and growing evidence of rapidly warming global climate and strengthening scientific understanding of how humans are contributing to climate change. Yet on the policy front, little happened to stem the growing emissions of greenhouse gases or to help societies prepare for increasingly severe negative climate impacts, including now unavoidable changes in temperature, rainfall patterns, sea-level rise, snowpack, glacial extent, Arctic sea ice, and more. These physical impacts will lead to sharply increased disease, military and economic instabilities, food and water shortages, and extreme weather events, among other things. Without appropriate risk management action, the United States will be hit hard. There is no safe haven. Yet confusion and uncertainty about climate change remain high in the minds of too many members of the public and Congress.
Why? In large part because of a concerted, coordinated, aggressive campaign by a small group of well-funded climate change deniers and contrarians focused on intentionally misleading the public and policymakers with bad science about climate change. Much of this effort is based on intentional falsehoods, misrepresentations, inflated uncertainties, and pure and utter B.S. about climate science. These efforts have been successful in sowing confusion and delaying action – just as the same tactics were successful in delaying efforts to tackle tobacco’s health risks.
To counter this campaign of disinformation, we are issuing the first in what may become a series of awards for the most egregious Climate B.S.* of the Year. In preparing the list of nominees, suggestions were received from around the world and a panel of reviewers – all scientists or climate communicators – waded through them. We present here the top five nominees and the winner of the 2010 Climate B.S.* of the Year Award.
Fifth Place. Climate B.S. and misrepresentations presented by Fox “News.”
There are many examples of bad science, misrepresentations, omissions of facts, and distortions of climate reality coming from Fox “News” (far too many to list here, but we note that Joe Romm just gave Fox his 2010 Citizen Kane Award for “non-excellence in journalism” for their misrepresentations of climate science). It seems that Fox has now made it their policy to deny the reality of climate change and has told its reporters to misreport or cast doubt on the science. This policy of disinformation was implemented by Fox News executive Bill Sammon, who ordered staff to cast doubt on climate data in a memo revealed this month. Fox’s political commentators have long used this tactic in their one-sided and biased discussions on climate change but Sammon’s memo seems to direct News staff to slant reporting in direct contradiction to what the scientific facts and scientists actually say.
Fourth Place. Misleading or false testimony to Congress and policymakers about climate change.
While Congress held more hearings in 2010 on climate change than in other recent years, these hearings elicited some astounding testimonies submitted by climate deniers and skeptics filled with false and misleading statements about climate science and total B.S. Examples?
Long-time climate change skeptic Patrick Michaels testified before the House Science and Technology Committee and misrepresented the scientific understanding of the human role in climate change and the well-understood effects of fundamental climatic factors, such as the effects of visible air pollution. Including these effects (as climate scientists have done for many years) would have completely changed his results. Michaels has misrepresented mainstream climate science for decades, as has been noted here, here, and elsewhere, yet he remains a darling of the skeptics in Congress who like his message.
A newer darling of Congressional climate change deniers is Christopher Monckton, who claims to be a member of the British House of Lords (a claim rejected by the House of Lords). Monckton testified before a Senate committee in May and presented such outlandish B.S. about climate that experts (such as John Mashey, Tim Lambert, John Abraham, and Barry Bickmore, to name a few) spent uncounted hours and pages and pages refuting just a subset of his errors.
Third Place. The false claim that a single weather event, such as a huge snowstorm in Washington, D.C., proves there is no global warming.
In February 2010 a big winter storm dumped record piles of snow on the mid-Atlantic U.S., including Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, prompting climate change deniers to use bad weather to try to discredit the reality of global warming. Limbaugh said, “It’s one more nail in the coffin for the global warming thing.” Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe got attention with an igloo on the national mall and labeled it “Al Gore’s new home” (combining bad science with a personal attack). Senator Jim DeMint said, “It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle.’”
Record snowfall is not an indicator of a lack of global warming, as has been pointed out in the scientific literature and many, many rounds of Congressional testimony. It merely means that there was a storm and temperatures were close to or below freezing. Indeed global warming can contribute to greater snowfalls by providing extra moisture. Many scientists testifying before the Senate and House of Representatives have explained the difference between a steadily warming planet and occasional extreme cold events in particular spots. But we can expect to see more examples of this kind of B.S. when it gets cold and snowy somewhere, sometime, this winter.
Second Place. The claim that the “Climategate” emails meant that global warming was a hoax, or was criminal, as Senator Inhofe tried to argue. In fact, it was none of these things (though the British police are still investigating the illegal hacking of a British university’s computer system and the theft of the emails).
Global warming deniers used out-of-context texts from the stolen emails to claim that global warming was a hoax or that scientists had manipulated data or were hiding evidence that climate change wasn’t happening. These claims are all B.S. A series of independent scientific and academic investigations in the U.S. and the U.K. unanimously concluded that nothing in the stolen emails made any difference to the remarkable strength of climate science (see, for example, the Penn State vindication, the Independent Muir Russell and Lord Oxburgh reviews, a British Parliamentary Panel review, and other assessments). Unfortunately, the media gave far more attention to the accusations than to the resounding vindications, and climate deniers continue to spread B.S. about this case.
The bottom line of “Climategate?” As a letter in Science magazine signed by 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences said in May 2010: “there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change.”
AND THE WINNER OF THE 2010 CLIMATE B.S.* OF THE YEAR AWARD
First Place goes to the following set of B.S.: “There has been no warming since 1998″ [or 2000, or...], “the earth is cooling,” “global warming is natural,” and “humans are too insignificant to affect the climate.” Such statements are all nonsense and important for the general public to understand properly.
The reality is that the Earth’s climate is changing significantly, changing fast, and changing due to human factors. The reality of climatic change can no longer be disputed on scientific grounds – the U.S. National Academy of Sciences calls the human-induced warming of the Earth a “settled fact.” The evidence for a “warming” planet includes not just rising temperatures, but also rising sea levels, melting Arctic sea ice, disappearing glaciers, increasing intense rainfalls, and many other changes that matter to society and the environment. The recent and ongoing warming of the Earth is unprecedented in magnitude, speed, and cause.
This winning set of B.S. appears almost daily in the conservative blogosphere, like here and here and here, consistently in the statements of climate change deniers, and far too often in real media outlets. Actual science and observations from around globe have long shown the opposite (for example, here and here are nice rebuttals with real science). The planet continues to warm rapidly largely due to human activities, and average global temperatures continue to rise. The most recent decade has been the warmest decade on record and 2010 will likely go down as either the warmest or second warmest year in recorded history.
Associated B.S. argues that the famous “hockey stick” graph has been disproved. This graph shows the extraordinarily rapid warming of the twentieth century compared to the previous 1000 years. The graph and analysis have been upheld by subsequent researchers and numerous scientific assessments, including one from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
To the winners: congratulations, it is long past time your B.S. is recognized for what it is – bad science.
And to the public and the media: be forewarned: all of these and similar bad arguments will certainly be repeated in 2011. It is long past time that this bad science is identified, challenged, and shown to be the B.S. that it is.
The 2010 Climate Bad Science (B.S.) Detection and Correction Team
Peter Gleick, Kevin Trenberth, Tenney Naumer, Michael Ashley, Lou Grinzo, Gareth Renowden, Paul Douglas, Jan W. Dash, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Brian Angliss, Joe Romm, Peter Sinclair, Michael Tobis, Gavin Schmidt, plus several anonymous nominators, reviewers, and voters.
[* "B.S." means "Bad Science" doesn't it?]

This Blogger’s Books from
Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water
by Peter H. Gleick

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Amr Moussa, Secretary General of the Arab League (AL), has made a surprising statement regarding his intentions to run as a candidate in Egypt’s presidential race. “Every qualified Egyptian has the right to run for the presidency”, said Moussa at an AL conference in Cairo on Monday. “As for my candidacy, I shall address it in due time,” Moussa added. Moussa’s short announcement, seemingly meant to keep his options open, may indeed be carrying a coded message for Mubarak himself; “I am here if you need me. I can provide a safe exit scenario for you and the regime. A safe exit from an unsustainable situation that can turn ugly.”
In 2005, Mubarak explained that “existing” power was not an easy thing to do. Several analysts speculated what he had meant. But the now 82-year old man may have meant every word. He must have feared of what could happen to him, his family and “heads of the other families” which run the show in Egypt; politicians, security officials or business tycoons who are accused of profiteering from monopolies, illegal land appropriations and other corruption charges. Mubarak is unlikely to live forever, but there is no one else, by design, who could take his seat. Mubarak, and the regime, have become hostages of the very machine they had designed and operated.
A few months ago, Amr Adeeb, a popular Talk Show host, experienced a dangerous slip of the tongue when he talked about the need to explore a safe exit for the President. All hell broke loose in Adeeb’s face and eventually his show was discontinued, although it was aired by a satellite channel owned by a foreign media group. Emad Eddin Adeeb, Amr’s brother and a media mogul, re-opened the topic of the regime’s safe exit in an interview on Dream TV a few days ago, saying that chances of a safe exit for the regime were now diminishing. State-owned media launched a vicious campaign of attacks against Emad, who had hosted Mubarak back in May 2005 in a special documentary designed to show the human side of Egypt’s top man as a part of Mubarak’s first ever Presidential Campaign. Mubarak has been President of Egypt since 1981.
The results of the Parliamentary Elections of November 2010 proved disastrous in further pushing Mubarak and his regime into a path with a dead end. After the first round of the Elections, the ruling Party, NDP, acquired 96% of the seats which came with massive claims, reports, photos and videos of wide irregularities. The Muslim Brothers and El Wafd withdrew from the second round, joining the Democratic Front Party, El Ghad Party and the National Assembly for Change which had called for boycotting the elections from the start.
Amr Moussa, 74, has been with the regime since his early days. He joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1958, successfully advancing through the ranks till he became Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1991, a position which he held for 10 years. Moussa became popular for his strong rhetoric on issues close to Egyptians’ hearts, such as Palestine and the invasion of Iraq. When Shaaban Abdel Rehim, a popular local singer lovingly mentioned him in a song, a sign that he had become too popular for his own good, the regime kicked him to the Arab League, where he was appointed as Secretary General. None of the foreign ministers who succeeded him managed to fill his shoes, at least in the public eye. In 2007, a number of informal opinion polls demonstrated that Amr Moussa scored highly in the minds of Egyptians as a potential successor to Mubarak. Moussa was careful to choose his timing. Now, Moussa probably realizes that his time is drawing near. He knows that he has valuable political capital, and he may be willing to cash it in. But only in one condition, it seems. If he is asked by the President himself.
Why would Mubarak be willing to consider Moussa and not his own son, Gamal, who has been groomed for almost a decade for the position? Mubarak is a smart man. He realizes that despite the massive campaigns for his son, there is a wide public dissent against the idea. The military does not seem supportive either because Egyptians believe that “Egypt is not like Syria”, where succession seemed to work for Al Asads. No one else has been prepared in the public eye for the position. It may be of little consequence to rig Parliamentary Elections because Mubarak himself is there providing legitimacy. But once Mubarak is out of the picture, the regime may collapse like a house of cards. Rigging elections for a presidential candidate who has no public support can spark unrests, instability and eventually mark the end of the regime. The regime it seems, is stuck and out of options. Moussa would not be the regime’s favorite alternative. But he is now the only one who relates to the regime and in the same time commands sufficient public support to provide necessary stability.
Technically, the ruling party cannot nominate Moussa because he is not a member of the Party’s Leading Council. But that obstacle could be overcome either by changing the constitution or by getting signatures from 250 parliamentary members, something only the NDP could do. The ironic twist is that ElBaradei, another potential candidate for the Presidency, is Moussa’s cousin. In 2010, ElBaradei led a campaign which managed to collect one million signatures on a petition with seven demands of political reform including amendment of the constitution. When ElBaradei returned to Egypt beginning of 2010, he visited Moussa and no one knows the sort of discussion that went on that day. Anyone who comes after Mubarak will be bound to introduce a reform package to rebuild the regime’s legitimacy and unite Egyptians with a national consensus around key political, social and economic issues. The extent and seriousness of these reforms will depend on how Egypt’s opposition can stand united around basic reform demands. This is why initiatives like the “Alternative Parliament” or “Parallel Parliament” Parliament and the National Assembly for Change are important vehicles in the critical weeks and months to come in Egypt.

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You have 2011 staring you right in the face. A fresh new year. So many things to do. So many people to meet. So many New Year’s resolutions.
So what do I think about New Year’s resolutions? I think that the only thing that New Year’s resolutions generally accomplish is to get in your way.
How many times have you laid out the most amazing, well thought out resolutions? You make a list of twenty or thirty things you are going to accomplish during the new year, only to have each and every one of those resolutions broken by January 15th.
So instead of making a big list of resolutions, most (if not all) of which you will break, allow me to suggest one resolution you can successfully put into effect every single day of 2011: Forgive and forget about everybody you dated in the past.
Say you’re divorced or have been in a long-term relationship that ended. You’re free now. You’re single. You’ve got a whole new you and a whole bunch of new people you can meet today.
I want you to erase your memory and forget about everyone you dated in the past. If anything is really bugging you about anybody you’ve dated in the past, or if you’re still thinking about your past relationship that ended, I want you to write down all of those thoughts and feelings then I want you to forgive.
So what if your ex-boyfriend/girlfriend cheated on you? There is nothing to be gained from dwelling on it. It doesn’t change anything about where you are now.
Realize that right now you have a totally clean slate. You don’t have a clean slate just because is it is new year (2011), but also because you are completely free from that old relationship or marriage. Divorce or breakup means that you can go out and find amazing people to date everywhere you go to date.
So if you’re angry about anything that happened in the past when it comes down to dating or relationships or the ex anybody, here is what I want you to do. I want you to take time to write a letter (or an email) . . . to yourself.
Write it as if you are writing it to the person at whom you are angry (or the person who hurt you), but send it to yourself. In that letter, tell that person who angers or who hurt you most that you forgive them for everything that happened in the past in your relationship.
The biggest problem that people who are divorced or out of long-term relationships have, is that they carry with them the hurt and anger they feel into their next relationships. They carry forward the mistrust into their next relationship. They carry over all the hope that was dashed in the last relationship into the next relationship.
They carry all of this with them into their next relationship, and end up entering that relationship waiting for that next partner to fail them and for the relationship to fall apart. Of course, with that kind of energy being introduced into the relationship, this is precisely what ends up usually manifesting.
It’s a new year. It’s a new you. Embrace everything that happened to you in 2010. Embrace everything that happened to you in your last relationship. Embrace your divorce.
Forgive your ex. Maybe they weren’t the best husband, the best partner, the best father, the best wife, or the best mother. Forgive them and accept them for who they are, and realize by forgiving and accepting them for who they are that you can now go out and meet great people wherever you are.
It’s a new year. It’s a new you. It doesn’t matter if one of your other resolutions is to lose 10 or 20 pounds or whatever it might be. It doesn’t matter what the physical goals are this year – whether it’s to lose weight, gain weight, or add muscle.
What is most important is your mindset. Having a clear powerful strong mindset to start the year, and having a clear and definitive mindset every single day throughout the year, will allow you to enjoy and to accept everything that’s going on in your life.
It is a brand new year and a brand new you. This is the post-divorce or post-relationship you. This is the you who deserves to meet somebody amazing, somebody spectacular, and somebody with whom you can grow.
Enjoy 2011 and the new you that you can be in 2011. Forgive and accept everything that happened before now. That’s the best resolution you can have for yourself this new year.

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The first Chevrolet Volts, Nissan Leafs, and Smart EDs were delivered in December, but in the annals of history, 2011 will be remembered as the year that electric vehicles (EVs) arrived. EVs for sale to consumers will dominate the headlines throughout the year as average Americans begin to recognize EVs as they roll down the road.
Because of the stalled start in the 1990s, when consumers were tempted by and then denied access to GM’s EV1 and other EVs, every milestone during the year will be magnified in the media. By year’s end nearly new 50,000 EVs will be plugging in at garages and lots across America. The arrival of new models from automakers Think, Coda, Mitsubishi, Mini, Toyota, and Chevrolet (a few of which were delayed from 2010) will give consumers more options.
Any missteps — and there will be some — will be cause clbre for the EV doubters who don’t believe in or desire a move away fossil fuels. Humans have always been fallible in designing and operating vehicles, and replacing liquid fuel with electrons won’t change that. While considerable safeguards have been put in place to prevent accidents when charging a vehicle, somewhere someone will find a creative way for failure, and we can expect considerable fanfare by the naysayers when this inevitably occurs.
One of the important trends of 2011 we’ve identified at Pike Research will be the slow subsiding of the catch phrase “range anxiety.” Range anxiety is the supposed fear that both prevents consumers from wanting to buy an EV with a 80-100 mile driving range or from driving said car very far for fear that the batteries will run out, leaving the driver stranded. Range anxiety has been overblown, underestimating drivers’ ability to monitor their battery charge level through the various dashboard displays and auditory prompts.
Like the arrival of EVs, the rollout of charging infrastructure has been slower than expected off the line. However, installations of public charging infrastructure such as the government-subsidized EV Project and Charge Point America will see hundreds of charging stations installed across many of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. The availability of public charging equipment will actually outpace the need for vehicles to plug-in, which will result in many charge spots idled for most of the day, or even days at a time. While this will be the subject of derision as a waste of taxpayer money, if EVs instead outpaced charging infrastructure, it could result in a serious setback as the minority of drivers who plan to regularly charge their vehicles away from home might otherwise wait to make a purchase.
The electric vehicles’ second act will be a top media story throughout the year, even at the box office with the mid-year release of Revenge of the Electric Car. Many consumers will get their first direct exposure to EVs by renting a car from one of the many rental agencies that will make emissions-free driving a premium service. Fleets including delivery vehicles and taxis will be critical for collecting data about EV performance and to build confidence that this time around, EVs are here to stay.

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Around the world different cultures have their special traditions for welcoming the New Year and to ensure good luck. According to Jessica B. Harris in Wednesday’s New York Times, “In Spain, grapes eaten as the clock turns midnight — one for each chime — foretell whether the year will be sweet or sour. In Austria, the New Year’s table is decorated with marzipan pigs to celebrate wealth, progress and prosperity. Germans savor carp and place a few fish scales in their wallets for luck. And for African-Americans and in the Southern United States, it’s all about black-eyed peas.”
The regional beans of the US
Beans are an important part of American culinary heritage. For recipes covering the canon of American bean dishes, follow these links.
The Zen of Beans. Begin by reading this article to learn about how to handle dried beans and canned beans.
Boston Baked Beans. They don’t call it Beantown for naught. For it was in Boston that the notion of mixing dried beans with molasses was concieved and still reaches the peak of perfection.
Grannies Texas Beans. During hard times, beans have kept many Texans alive. For more than a few, the bean pot contained simply beans, salt, pepper, and maybe a little pork fat or bacon. You can go crazy with additions, but this is the classic, simple, home style recipe. When you visit classic Texas pitstops, beans are almost always on the menu, and outsiders, particularly Yankees, are often surprised to discover that they are simple and not sweet.
New Orleans Red Beans & Rice. In New Orleans, Sunday is traditionally ham night, and on Monday, wash day, the leftover ham and the ham bone are used to make Red Beans and Rice, a traditional Creole classic main dish that can be prepped quickly and needs several hours to simmer. It has been thus forever.
Kentucky Bourbon BBQ Baked Beans. Meathead’s twist on the theme makes Baked Beans soooo much better than the stuff from the can. Bourbon is the secret.
Get More Meathead
Read more recipes, techniques, tips, product reviews, and reports from Meathead’s kitchen and grill deck at AmazingRibs.com
Black-eyed peas’ most popular expression is Hoppin’ John, a steaming bowl of beans, rice, and pork especially popular in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. It probably originated with black slaves from the Caribbean brought in through Charleston around which there were large rice plantations. It is still very popular among the Gullah on the Carolina coastal islands where Hoppin’ John is widely served on New Year’s Day for good luck. It is believed that eating beans on New Year’s Day will bring better eats in the year to come. According to one tradition, a coin is added to the pot and whoever gets the coin will get rich.
There are several poetic explanations for how the dish got its name. One claims that it got its name in the early 1800s when it was peddled on Charleston streets by a one-legged black man named John. Likewise there are a number of explanations for why beans symbolize good luck. Some ascribe their magical properties to fables like Jack And the Beanstalk, others call it a symbol of fertility, others say the black-eye saved the South from starvation during the Civil War.
I’ve kept this recipe simple and traditional, but there are numerous variations, so feel free to riff on it. I’ve been known to add red pepper and thyme. To modernize it, hold the green peppers until you add the rice to retain their brightness and crunch. In the original recipe the peppers kind of disintegrate. If you hold them until the end they add life.
Makes. 10 bowls
Preparation time. 3 hours
Ingredients
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 smoked ham hocks
1 green bell pepper, coarsely chopped
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, pressed or coarsely chopped
2 teaspoons hot pepper flakes
3 bay leaves
4 cups chicken broth
1 can (15 ounces) black-eyed peas, drained and rinsed or 1/4 pound dried beans
1 cup white rice
1/4 teaspoon table salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
About the ham hocks. Many grocers sell smoked ham hocks. They add flavor and a rich tactile sensation from the skin and connective tissue and the marrow which dissolve while it cooks. Some of them have very little meat. Select two with meat. If you can’t find hocks, you can substitute 1/2 pound smoked ham, bacon, or leftover pulled pork.
Do this
1) Click here to read my article, The Zen of Beans, for tips on working with beans and equivalents for dry, canned, and cooked beans. Decide which you will use. If you plan to use dried beans, follow the instructions there for soaking them. If you plan to use canned beans, move on to the next step.
2) Get a large pot hot and add the oil. Add the ham hock, onion, green pepper, garlic, pepper flakes, and the bay leaf. If you can’t find a ham hock, you can use bacon, just skip the vegetable oil and start by cooking the bacon in the bottom of the pot and pour off all the bacon grease except 2 tablespoons.
3) When the onions are limp, add the chicken broth and bring to a boil. Add the beans, bring back to a boil and dial it back to a simmer quickly. Do not boil for more than a minute or two. Simmer for at least an hour.
4) Remove the bay leaf and if you use ham hocks, cut off the meat, add it to the pot, and discard the bones and skin.
5) Add the rice and simmer with the cover on for about 25 minutes or until the rice is tender and most of the liquid is absorbed. Serve with salt and pepper at table. Hoppin’ John gets a lift from fresh ground pepper at the table.
All text and photos are Copyright (c) 2010 By Meathead, and all rights are reserved
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What is your name, title and the name of your business?
Marty Stevens-Heebner. I’m the Founder & President of Rebagz Handbags.
What service does your business provide or what does it sell?
We design and sell beautiful bags, made the way things should be — the eco- & human-friendly way.
What is it that makes your product/service green, eco-, or just plain better for us?
All of our handbags are made using recycled materials, including recycled paper, rice sacks, plastic and juice packs. They’re also made using fair labor — I’ve personally visited the Philippines several times to ensure that the workers are paid and treated fairly.
We even carry Green America’s Seal of Approval! And, if that’s not enough, we donate $1 per order to Global Exchange (www.GlobalExchange.org), an organization I did humanitarian work with in Chiapas, Mexico during the aftermath of the Zapatista Rebellion.
What were you doing for work prior to starting this business?
I had my own handcrafted jewelry business (that would be me doing all of the handcrafting). I was having success at various events and festivals around Southern California, and even got some magazine attention. Then, I decided it was time to create a bigger, more serious business… hence Rebagz.
When did you start your business?
I began in July 2007.
What was the impetus for starting your eco-business?
My mother raised me to recycle, and when I was doing human rights work, I was amazed at the resourcefulness of the people in the indigenous villages I visited. Because they couldn’t afford to buy new things all the time, everything had a second life, and often a third and fourth one after that. Very inspiring!
Who are your target customers?
Fashion-conscious and socially-conscious women, ages 25 to 49, urban or urban/suburban.
Where are you located and/or what areas do you service?
Our offices are located in Van Nuys, CA and our bags are sold in hundreds of boutiques across the country. Everything’s available online as well at www.Rebagz.com.
What would help you grow your business (if this is moolah, how much)?
Spread the word! We’re working on building our Internet sales and on getting us into department stores. We were just on the cover of WWD/Women’s Wear Daily, so it’s time!
What is your biggest challenge with your business?
Keeping up with demand and making people realize that our bags fall into the “eco-superior” category — i.e. superior style, superior quality as compared to other bags, particularly those made in China.
If you could meet any entrepreneur, who would it be?
Sir Richard Branson would be a hoot to meet. I’d ask him who does his hair.
What is your public contact info?
Marty@Rebagz.com
877-905-9359
www.Rebagz.com
What’s your favorite donut, and why?
Just give me a glazed donut and I’m happy happy happy. All that sugar just takes so good!

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

A new year is upon us! What better time to initiate positive change? To find a “new you” in some significant way?
I’m no longer one for resolutions with explicit goals, though they work well for some. I know my tendency to set overly ambitious objectives, then wither under my own scrutiny when I don’t measure up.
Instead, for the past 15 years, I’ve exercised a different approach: I identify a watchword or phrase to remind me of behaviors or attitudes that could do with a little spit and polish.
One year, my watchword was “focus.” I was fully aware that I over-schedule, over-commit, and allow conflicting needs to split my attention to the point of folly. Another year “perspective” was the word that guided me through rough days, enabling me to count my blessings.
Heading into the new decade, I can’t deny that empty nest is nearly upon me. It’s more disconcerting than I thought it would be, and I see that I need to broaden my circle of friends and be more sociable.
And that means my phrase for 2011 is get back out there.
Fortunately, years of public speaking and professional schmoozing taught me how to work a room. But I’m woefully out of practice. So I’m digging out my top 10 tips for successful socializing, dusting them off, and hoping to put them to good use.
Care to see?
1. Self-confidence
Of course, confidence works wonders in every situation, but self-esteem takes a hit post-divorce, post-layoff, and post plenty of other life altering events. So remind yourself what makes you interesting, exciting, appealing, or unusual. Not sure what that is? Ask a friend. Ask someone who knows you and loves you. And believe it.
2. Preparation
One sure-fire way to reduce anxiety before attending a gathering is preparation, and that includes the following:
* Know something about who will be there
* Arm yourself with non-controversial discussion topics
* Practice protective answers to personal questions
* Remember that open-ended questions encourage people to talk
* Learn to read the crowd
* Practice the art of listening
3. Perspective
Yes, perspective is one of my tried-and-true new year’s watchwords that I still fall back on. With half our marriages ending in divorce, realize that in any social setting, you’re in good company. You will encounter common experiences, common discomfort, and at times, uncommon compassion. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable.
4. Icebreakers!
There are many resources on the web that offer great icebreakers – in social settings, romantic encounters, professional environments, and more. Check some of them out. Games are often recommended in a training context (I’ve personally found them to work). So why not casually as well?
5. Fielding tough questions
Concerned over something as innocuous (and emotionally charged) as “Are you married?” If you don’t want to say yes or no, try “I’m in transition.” If you’re feeling flirtatious, flash your sauciest smile and offer: “Not any longer.” But don’t trot out the details of your latest court proceeding or your preferred anti-depressant. Keep in mind the purpose of the social event, the impression you want to make, and whether or not your kids are within earshot.
6. Sample icebreakers
Focus on a handful of openers to get others talking. Lead with your first name, don’t ask questions that result in yes or no answers, and don’t be afraid to practice with a friend or for that matter, by talking to yourself in the mirror.
Here are a few suggestions:
* I find these crowds overwhelming, but you seem at ease. How do you manage?
* What did you think of the speaker?
* How do you know our host?
7. Liquid courage
Some of us go for liquid courage to lubricate and fortify, heading straight to the bar when confronted with a room full of strangers. Should this be your go-to solution? Ideally, no. Handled in moderation (solo at a wedding, for instance), it can be just the ticket. But if lining up the martinis risks embarrassment, you’d better have a few other ideas in store – especially if alcohol isn’t an option, you have kids in tow, you’re driving, or you simply don’t care to drink.
8. Socializing after life change
Divorce isn’t the only event that takes us out of circulation. Maybe you’ve been widowed, and it’s been decades since you’ve ventured out as a single. Maybe you’re a stay-at-home parent, and headed into the workforce after a long hiatus. Or you face the opposite challenge, in the midst of a period of unemployment, wondering how to handle conversations that typically begin with “what do you do” or “who do you work for.”
Having been hit with the double whammy of divorce and layoff at the same time, I lived my share of unsettling social gatherings. If not for persistence, protective responses, and a handy set of icebreakers, it would’ve been much worse.
9. Be yourself
Be yourself. If you’re naturally funny, go for it! If you can come up with something surprising or thoughtful – all the better. Comment on an entertaining bow-tie or a distinctive tattoo. Ask for an opinion or a recommendation. Observe and engage. Remember that an attentive listener is rare and will be a welcome change for many.
10. Get out there!
Meanwhile, I’ll be updating my icebreakers and giving them a workout. It’s a new year, and I’m resolved to meet new people and create new opportunities.

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West chides Russia over ex-tycoon Khodorkovsky trial

In the film A Good Year (based on a Peter Mayle novel), a London investment broker discovers that he has inherited a chateau and vineyard in France from his late uncle. After arriving in Provence to arrange for the sale of the property, fateful events convene to alter the course of his life and residence.
In a similar vein, in Under the Tuscan Sun (based on Frances Mayes’ memoir) a recently divorced writer takes a trip to Tuscany and by pure serendipity finds herself confronted with the villa-fixer of her dreams, which she ultimately buys and renovates.
If one is to believe what one reads in books and sees in films, moving abroad is often the product of one or more happy accidents — from blissful temp-to-perm holidays and unexpected vacation romances to inherited properties, and short-term work projects that turn into geographical happily ever afters.
My own history of travel and moves supports the aforementioned theory. I had no plans to make Amsterdam my home when I took off for my winter holidays there with a friend one year, en-route from Paris. But I fell in love… with the city that is. And love makes you do crazy things, like move to a country in which you know no one.
The temp-to-perm move is in fact a lot like love in that it happens when you least expect it, takes you by surprise. It is almost as if that level of life-altering activity can only be orchestrated when you’re operating from your gut and in an “intoxicated state.”
On another occasion, I conversely made a strategic decision that I was going to move to London. It was purely based on logic and reason: I have dual British/U.S. citizenship, London is an English-speaking publishing capital, and I know many family friends there as my parents and I used to live in London when I was little.
This sort of choice — using my aforementioned amorous analogy — is similar to when a person decides it’s time to get married and settles for a convenient and “good enough” partner instead of waiting for the proverbial soulmate.
So I made the loud proclamation to my LA friends that London was good enough, and I was moving there. I packed up my stuff in boxes, gathered my contacts, and set up meetings. I found a short-term residence in a smart neighborhood. My landlady was an uptight, Chanel-suit wearing grand dame whose charm was only surpassed by the experience of sucking on a lemon.
Fast forward a month later and I found myself sobbing on the phone, typical unrelenting London rain pounding in the background. I was telling one of my Yank friends that I’d made a terrible decision and that London and I were not a match (not in such polite terms though).
I have since toyed with the idea of moving back to Europe. I know friends who talk of moving to South America and Asia. We all seem to find ourselves in a similar “neither flight nor fight” state. On the one hand, there’s a reluctance to over-plan such things — and that difficult-to-shake fear of making such a bold and decisive move. On the other, waiting for that unexpected thunderbolt moment that parts the seas seems reactive.
In 2010′s anticipated-but-flopped film Eat Pray Love (based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir), the main character travels to Italy, India and then Bali on a quest for wholeness. She falls in love in the latter. So her partner proposes an unusual (but more and more common these days) arrangement in which they spend part of their year in New York and part of it in Indonesia — a plan for the unplanned, a meeting halfway. Cosmopolitan living is of course the easy answer for the wealthy.
But perhaps it is the right answer for those of us brave and innovative enough to turn a holiday into a multi-faceted and rewarding real life.

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Marx’s observation, proffered in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce, has been regurgitated so often that one feels a sheep-like silliness in reciting it again. But that’s the thing about transcendent quotes: there are times when no other words capture the nature of the moment as arrestingly.
This dog-eared insight of Highgate Cemetery’s most famous resident came to mind while I was reading about Al Akhbar, a Lebanese newspaper that was the subject of a New York Times report this week. Al Akhbar’s editorial line is unabashedly leftist. Its editor sits under a framed portrait of Marx himself. The paper’s support of gay rights and women’s rights makes it, in the words of the Times headline, “a rarity” in a media environment dominated by Saudi-funded platforms that slavishly follow the imperatives of the conservative Arab regimes.
At the same time, Al Akhbar enthusiastically bills Hezbollah as a resistance movement. Its editors laud the late Hezbollah operative Imad Mughniyeh as “Our Che.” If there is a Lebanese address for the red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists, it seems that Al Akhbar is it.
Any competent dialectician knows that a thing is best understood in times of crisis. In Europe, the glaring contradictions incubated by the fusion of militant socialism (red) with militant Islamism (green) have resulted in bitter, vengeful breakdowns: witness the implosion of the Respect Party in Britain, or the signal failure of France’s various leftist grouplets to build a base among the dyspeptic youth of the sprawling banlieues. However, compared to the epic misfortunes of similar alliances in the Middle East, these European examples seem almost banal.
Which is why that Eighteenth Brumaire quote is so apt. When Middle Eastern leftists have gotten into bed with Islamists or radical nationalists, they have invariably ended up dead. The first time this happened – as it did in Iraq in the late 1970s, when the Ba’ath Party butchered its erstwhile communist partners, and not long after in Iran, when Khomeini’s enforcers set upon communists with zealous fury — we witnessed unbearably gruesome tragedy. But should Al Akhbar one day undergo the same fate — and I have no qualms in venturing that this is exactly what will happen if Hezbollah becomes the unrivalled source of power in Lebanon – how else, other than as farce, could such a conclusion be described?
Is Al Akhbar, then, staffed by amnesiacs, or can its journalists make the case that things will be different the next time around? We are not told. What does come through in Worth’s dispatch is the cocksure certainty which Al Akhbar has in its mission, summarized with elevator pitch brevity as “anti-imperialism.”
No doubt, such branding will appeal to western radicals enamored with the Cairo Declaration’s iteration of leftish, third-worldish, politics. Equally, one must assume that part of Al Akhbar’s rationale in adopting more progressive positions on matters of sexuality and gender is to increase its appeal to this constituency; according to Worth, the paper is launching an English-language site in 2011. If this is a marketing strategy, then it resembles the campaign of the execrable Iranian mouthpiece known as Press TV to strike a chord with disaffected opinion in Europe.
Inevitably, the anti-capitalist mutation of antisemitism is central here. Just as Press TV has promoted antisemitism, in the form of Holocaust denial, so does Al Akhbar, in the form of a program to ethnically cleanse the Jewish population of the territory currently known as Israel. Worth cites Al Akhbar’s editor, Ibrahim al-Amine, waxing lyrical about Israel’s coming elimination, and the subsequent deportation of the Jews “back to Europe,” where, as the “hucksters” and “hagglers” dismissed by Marx in his On the Jewish Question, they will feel much more at home in its brazenly capitalist environment.
Socialism this may be, albeit of a particularly vulgar sort. A better descriptor is Strasserism, a political current named for the anti-corporate Nazi agitator who — Al Akhbar please note — ended up dead when Hitler purged internal opposition during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
Nevertheless, there is, in Worth’s piece, an aspiration only the churlish would dismiss: that outfits like Al Akhbar, whatever their flaws, might herald the emergence of a critical, independent media in a region which desperately needs one. In that spirit, therefore, and despite my profound misgivings, I won’t write off Al Akhbar just yet. Instead, I would urge the paper to break the mold of the Arab press by providing reportage and analysis of the following three stories:
Story One. An Italian human rights group has just a released a report concerning the detention, in the Egyptian border town of Rafah, of 250 Israel-bound migrants from various African countries. Their captors are Hamas-linked traffickers. Follow the money.
Story Two. The Iraqi city of Kirkuk is once more a flashpoint between the Kurdish regional government and the central government in Baghdad. The situation is all the more fragile because Kurdish memories of the ethnic cleansing carried out by Saddam’s regime are still fresh. Revisit those events.
Story Three. South Sudan is readying itself for a January 9, 2011 independence referendum. Given the area’s vast untapped wealth, what threat would the government in the north, led by the indicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir, pose to a newly-independent republic? Go and investigate.
Incisive coverage of these stories, which, just by acknowledging the humanity of non-Arab minorities in the region, puncture the widespread Arab narrative of noble victimhood, have enormous potential to liberate the minds of young and inquisitive Arab readers. There are, as well, encouraging precendents in all parts of the world — one thinks, for example, of the courageous exposes of the weekly Serbian magazine Vreme during the darkest days of the Milosevic regime. The conditions in the Middle East are ripe for a similar initiative.
So step up, Al Akhbar. For if history is indeed shaped by the struggles of ordinary people, then no outcome, farcical or otherwise, is preordained.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

By Carmen Nigro
Librarian, New York Public Library, Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy
On New Year’s Eve all clocks are synchronized for the epitome of countdowns. The clinking of champagne glasses and the first kiss of the New Year will all be coordinated to the descent of a twelve-foot-wide glowing geodesic sphere stationed on top of One Times Square. When all of its 11,875 pounds reach the bottom of its pole, we will know that the New Year has officially begun.
It wasn’t always that way. But thanks to a time-honored tradition involving a lowered ball, a one-shot opening celebration has morphed into a spectacle that attracts 1 million revelers to Times Square each year.
One Times Square, formerly the headquarters of the New York Times, stands on an isolated triangle of land at Broadway, 7th Avenue, and 42nd Street. It has been the site of a major New Year’s Eve party every year since the building opened in 1904, the same year the first subway line opened in Manhattan. The inaugural celebration was to fete the opening of the brand-new Times Building, which at the time was the second tallest skyscraper in Manhattan. However, the New Year of 1905 was kicked off with a display of more traditional fireworks set off from the top of the imposing building.
The great success was the party itself. Times Square instantly replaced downtown’s Trinity Church as the new go-to place for New Year’s jubilation. But shooting fireworks off the building ended only two years later when the city banned them, forcing the Times to find a different symbol for starting the New Year.
In an era of wind-up time keeping, a daily adjustment was needed to keep your clock in harmony with real time. The Western Union Company on Lower Broadway dropped a metallic ball from a spire atop their building every day at noon so that people on the street and in ships in the harbor could synchronize their watches. Similarly, a ball drop happened every day at England’s Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
Therefore, in 1907, the association of a dropped ball with time-keeping was commonplace. The Times adopted the custom and even took it a step further by adorning their ball with 100 20-watt bulbs so that it could be seen at night from the ground far below.
Since 1907, the ball drop has signified the start of the New Year in all but two years, 1942 and 1943. During those war years, New York was subject to a “dimout” of lights intended to protect the city from Axis bombings. But even in wartime, enormous crowds still gathered in Times Square to usher in the New Year.
The New York Times no longer occupies the building at One Times Square, but the tradition they started now extends far beyond the geographic boundaries of the square or even the Eastern time zone. It is estimated that over one billion people around the globe watch the ball drop each year.
Sources:
Lee, Nancy, ed. The Century in Times Square. 1999.
Nevius, Michelle & Nevius, James. Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City. 2009.
Tell, Darcy. Times Square Spectacular: Lighting Up Broadway. 2007.
Times Square Alliance. “New Year’s Eve – All About the Ball.” http://www.timessquarenyc/nye/nye_ball.html. Retrieved on 15 December, 2010.
Times Square Alliance. “New Year’s Eve – History.” http://www.timessquarenyc/nye/nye_history.html. Retrieved on 15 December, 2010.

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I have a front row seat to the awards show race since I produce The WIN Awards for Women’s Image Network (WIN). So it’s no surprise that every season, award shows completely overlook deserving actors, films or shows, and these glaring omissions don’t simply startle fans who want their favorite actors, films and shows to be embraced. In fact, the missing nominations crush and dishearten even the most seasoned film and show publicists and executives, who truly earn their pay nearly killing themselves during the awards show season.
Yet even if a show that studios want to push is not nominated, many studios and networks attempt to prevail in light of their new dark-horse status. This awards show season the Golden Globes, SAG Awards and (yes, even our little-engine-that-could awards show), The WIN Awards, all have made glaring nomination oversights. While I don’t know the Globes’ and SAG Awards’ specific submission guidelines, The WIN Awards’ policies don’t allow us to reach into the world to nominate work that our WIN jury favors. The WIN Awards’ entry guidelines dictate that only films and shows which are submitted to our show become eligible for nominations. In fact, while 2010 marks our twelfth WIN Awards show, for the first time we scheduled our show in the crowded January calendar so that The WIN Awards could serve as media platform for Oscars, Globes and SAG Awards races.
Calling ourselves to task our show’s missing nominations this year include The Kids Are Alright, I Am Love and The Fighter. And because these films simply were not submitted they missed out on our promotional support to applaud the outstanding performances by Annette Bening, Tilda Swinton, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams, among others.
That said, even the big boys missed a few exceptional and deserving actresses who were nominated at The WIN Awards 2010, but were overlooked by the Golden Globes and SAG Awards. For instance we invite audiences to see Helena Bonham Carter play a delicious Red Queen in Alice In Wonderland. (Sure Johnny Depp had more screen time in this film, and maybe the Globes jurors overlooked her kill as the queen because jurors want to spread the awards around since Helena received a nomination for her role in The King’s Speech). We also favored Secretariat with Diane Lane whose 1960s gal role shows how a woman, despite prevailing social restrictions and expectations, made brave decisions that changed the course of history.
Don’t count out this year’s dark horse contenders for the Oscars yet. In fact, one of the most outstanding award show season omissions is a little jewel from England, Made In Dagenham, starring the very plucky Golden Globe winner, Sally Hawkins, (Happy-Go-Lucky). Consider that Nigel Cole’s film, Made In Dagenham, tells the tale of one very reluctant heroine, who changed not only the corporate culture of a behemoth like Ford Motor corporation, but whose fight for equal pay for equal work altered the laws across Great Britain and in much of the world. For a historical perspective, by 1939 Ginger Rogers had performed nine musicals with Fred Astaire, and never won an Oscar for her many in-reverse, in-high-heels performances. But she refused to stop dancing, until this much-maligned, dark horse ultimately did garner a win an Oscar (her sole career nomination), for being Kitty in Kitty Foyle.
While it is glamorous to walk a red carpet, The WIN Awards are less about awards and more about media advocacy. That said, our diverse 2010 nominee list shows that women are able to express richness and depth at any age and that their value transcends their “beauty” or the number of candles on their birthday cake. This year, The WIN Awards uniquely demonstrate that Girls Are Great From Nine To Ninety as our youngest nominee, Joey King was nine-years-old when filming Ramona And Beezus, and as our most senior female, our Lifetime Achievement Honoree, Suzanne Roberts, is nearly 90-years-old.
Everybody knows that a film’s promotional budget helps secure awards and the studios that buy more trade paper ads, hold more screenings and/or place more DVD screeners in voter’s hands, usually do win awards more often than do their better funded and/or more ambitious rivals. But naive as this may sound I invite voters to focus on a show’s impact, depth and execution. And if some serious error and/or omission was commuted and you were overlooked this awards season, be like Ginger Rogers, strap on a pair, and I don’t mean pumps.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

As Weber Shandwick’s chief reputation strategist, I have decided to join the ranks of the end of the year palm readers and offer my predictions for the next year. Time and time again during the past twelve months, I have been asked to hold my finger up in the air and divine from whence come the changing winds of reputation. My head has filled with reputation-related ahahs and hunches. Now is my chance to let it all out. So here is my list of what to look for in 2011.
1.Hijacked Reputations: As increasingly more information gets leaked, mismanaged and corrupted via the Internet and otherwise, more and more companies will suffer as a result. Repairing such reputational damage will not be easy — what used to be 15 minutes of shame may now last forever on the Internet. The best antidote will be, as it always has been, being prepared beforehand to act quickly, decisively and transparently.
2.Reputation Recoverers Anonymous: The prevailing trend for 2011 will be reputation recovery. As the “stumble rate” increases (Weber Shandwick regularly measures this), so does the rate at which many companies will pick themselves up and rejoin the race. Trophies will increasingly be handed out to CEOs who lead their companies back from worse to first. In 2005, there were 455,000 search mentions of reputation recovery. Five years later, that number has soared to nearly 2, 500,000 mentions. Reputation rehab is a new industry to watch.
3.Reputation Warfare. Reputation warfare will expand and intensify. Enabled by the Internet and social media, individuals and small groups will continue to rise up and take greater control of reputations by slinging criticism, some valid, against companies and other entities. Adopting strategies on how to better leverage and counter these reputation insurgents will be essential (See my article on Reputation Warfare in Harvard Business Review for more insights). The release of confidential U.S. embassy cables via WikiLeaks is only the most conspicuous of these attacks. It will become apparent in the year to come that WikiLeaks was only the tip of the iceberg.
4.Online Reputation Revisionism. Further advances will be made in establishing a workable system of erasing or amending unfairly disparaged online reputations. One such particularly promising idea is likely to be at the forefront: a one-time only policy that grants social amnesty to young adults turning 21 who are about to enter the workforce. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt hinted at the wisdom of this kind of social amnesia: “every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.” The day will come, maybe not next year but soon, when a communally agreeable system of “social amnesia” will arise. We can expect increasing discussion in 2011 on what form that system will take, since the need for one is critical.
5.Ascendancy of Social CEOs: Chief executives will increasingly join the 21st century, expanding their use of various online channels to burnish their company reputations, including writing or participating in internal blogs, telling the company story at conferences and on corporate YouTube channels and being interviewed by journalists on online media channels. The socialization of CEOs has begun and will continue in 2011.
6.Reputation Blacklisting: List mania will continue to expand. Every day new rankings and league tables are born: best companies to work for, best companies to launch a career, best companies for hourly workers, best companies for C-level executives. These rankings help companies build and differentiate their reputations through third-party endorsements. In the year ahead, however, we can also expect the long overdue but inevitable reaction to such “best of” lists. Look for more reputation “blacklists” to sprout and then propagate – for example, worst companies for women to work for, worst companies for training and least socially responsible companies.
7.Reputation Risk Insurance: After a year of reputation scandals and downfalls, now would be the time for reputation risk insurance to firmly take hold. Several large insurance brokers already cover reputational damage as part of their directors’ and officers’ liability insurance (D&O) designed to shield board members from shareholder law suits. A more expansive reputation-based product is due that would compensate companies whose reputations have taken a hit whether offline or online and caused them to suffer declining sales, additional marketing and public relations expense and other reputational fallout.
8.The Corporate Brand Rises: In the next year, companies which own a portfolio of individual brands will focus more intensely on developing the reputation of the parent corporation, not just the individual brands. Consumers have access to a dizzying array of information. Even the most unsophisticated consumer can now easily identify the company standing behind any brand. If the parent company’s reputation is strong, known for treating its employees well, being transparent and sustainable, and having good leadership, consumers are more likely to make a purchase and then tell their friends about it.
We will revisit these trends as next year closes and 2012 awaits us.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Every divorce is uniquely unhappy, to paraphrase Tolstoy. Some people enter into marriages with little foresight, and leave the marriage with vision still clouded. Sooner or later, though, most who go through divorce discover something about themselves. They become able to answer the question: “What was I thinking?”, or better, “What knowledge was I resisting?”
As a counselor, with the extraordinary privilege of being brought into the life journeys of reflective people, I find myself somewhat in awe of those who make the discovery sooner.
A word about sooner. Going into therapy with the right person can accelerate knowledge. I have a very biased view about the “right person” — I mean a person who can pull you into a light that years of living in the dark will resist. This idea is anathema to some therapists. Some approaches to therapy have us work for the gentle discovery of self knowledge. People come to know things in their own time. I believe this to be true to some extent. I also believe that some people procrastinate and some even perendinate when the truth that will change their past can be known. We resist change, especially when we are feeling wounded and self righteous. The acuteness of the suffering requires a strong guide.
I think especially of the pretenders. We all learn to lie to survive our childhoods and adolescent years. A person comes to consciousness when they begin to see through their own Big Lie, the story they tell about themselves that keeps them in a regressive state. One finally sees: “I am not really all that kind; I use kindness to manipulate people.” “I am not really at heart a good listener; I just like to avoid contention.” “I am terrified of failure.” “I will never get over my first love, and no one will ever live up that first love.”
A good guide can help us break through the Big Lie sooner than later. When the wounds of divorce are still open, the anger, shame, sense of betrayal and misery still throbbing, the breakthrough to the Big Lie or one of its corollaries can reframe every hurt and accelerate our healing.
A person yearns for normalcy, because their life has also been chaotic. They meet a person who is redolent of that normalcy, subjectively defined, of course, and sex invades psyche. They fall in love. They don’t see that the object of their attachment has become something of a fetish, an object that has some power over our psyche, and which can grant us a status that redeems us from our despair. The boy with the car, the girl with the boy with the car. The boy with the pretty girl. The girl with the wealthy man. We can’t see the fetishizing because we are pretending so hard that we are in love.
I counseled a woman some years ago with the usual but nonetheless heartbreaking tale of misspent years and emotions. As she went deeper into her own motivations, she saw that she had never really seen him, she just saw what having him meant to her. She didn’t even particularly like him the length of the marriage. And she could see that he had gone through the same thing. There was something about her that would roll off onto him if he had her as his wife. For each of them, the other person was more of a stage prop than a soul mate.
Upon seeing this, the woman was gripped with a profound sadness and grief, and her anger at her estranged husband disappeared. It had been one big sordid mess, and she had played her role. Perhaps he, indeed, had acted more badly, perhaps driven up the wall by his instinctive knowledge that she did not really love him. She forgave him, and had to work on forgiving herself. She had to face this void within that she filled up by marrying him, a void she had to address now that she left him.
I and others led her to a” sooner than later” knowledge, and the transformation was astounding. Beneath the tortured psyche that was beneath the facade of well being, was a deep soul waiting to emerge. Consciousness on a mission from God, making up for years of slumber.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Parents walk a slippery slope when their child gets divorced. Even if they couldn’t find a single good thing to say about the marriage, even if they were long distance parents, they are expected to wave the family banner and support their child.
There are, of course,those parents who play possum and others who straddle the fence to avoid taking sides. The reality is:
Parents cannot be in two camps at the same time.
In divorce, neutrality is treason.
Whether it is said directly or not, your child is counting on your loyalty. Never mind he or she might be responsible for the breakup. The assumption is blood is thicker than water. Or to put it more bluntly, your child is your child forever and the ex will move on. Needless to say, the last thing any self respecting parent wants is to alienate his or her child by, horrors, going to the other side.
But what if you’ve had a close relationship with that “other” child during the marriage? What if you find yourself mourning the loss? What if you are afraid you will lose contact with your grandchildren if you lose contact with the ex?
Child psychologist Dr. Arthur Kornhaber in his Grandparenting Guide (2002) emphasizes the importance of grandparents maintaining emotional ties with both parents when the marriage dissolves for the sake of the grandkids. (This assumes the relationships were healthy to begin with.)
Granted it is a balancing act. Sounds good in theory, but can it be done? In response to my earlier blog “A Grandmother Struggles with Divorce,” one poster commented she was one of the lucky ones. There is no reason to surrender meaningful relationships as long as the parents-in-law are well-behaved.
How do we describe a well-behaved parent-in-law? He or she:
1. Accepts the decision and communicate sympathy in the early stages of the separation.
2.Recognizes the separated partner is hurting. Represses negative feelings. Overlooks things he or she says or does in the heat of the moment. Explains the parent does not want to take part in the battle.

3.Doesn’t overstep boundaries, however. Takes cues from his or her own child. Discusses the amount of help to provide and respects those boundaries.
4.Shows concern for the grandchildren. Understands that visitation is a privilege not a right (unless court ordered). Greets the parent with a smile; expresses appreciation for having this time together even if it’s for a few hours.
5.Never uses the grandkids as pawns. Respects confidences. Does not disparage either parent. Provides safety, security, a sense of belonging and relief from stress.
6.Does not assume he or she is not wanted. A separated spouse will welcome an extra set of hands if the offer is genuine.
7. Keeps the lines of communication open without trying to mediate.
The most difficult role is to show support for your own child while modifying the relationship you had with his or her partner. While it is true that many former spouses manage to maintain a respectful, even loving, relationship with the ex-laws, there are all those parents who, unfortunately, are shut out. Often it’s a question of letting the dust settle.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Bankers. The red carpet’s still being rolled out for them in Washington, but if there’s a stain on it they’ll pout for days. Jason Linkins documents the latest set of cheap white whines from very wealthy white men. This time they’re upset because nobody from the six largest banks in America was invited to the President’s CEO Roundtable.
They’re offended because they didn’t meet with the President? From the looks of things they’re lucky not to be meeting with the warden. Let’s review the record for these corporate malefactors, and then decide:
Which of these six banks was “America’s Most Shameless Corporate Outlaw” in 2010?
#1. Bank of America
Here are some recent headlines for the country’s largest bank:
“Bank of America Ends Year With Flurry of Lawsuits”
“Arizona Sues Bank of America”
“Arizona Wants Bank of America Held in Contempt”
“Nevada, Arizona sue Bank of America over failed mortgage aid”
“Allstate Sues Bank Of America For Selling ‘Toxic’ MBS”
“Bank of America Hit With Missouri Class Action Over Loan Modifications”
Here are the details:
Associated Press: “Attorneys general in Arizona and Nevada filed civil lawsuits Friday against Bank of America Corp., alleging that the lender is misleading and deceiving homeowners who have tried to modify mortgages in two of the nation’s most foreclosure-damaged states.”
Courthouse News Service: “Bank of America violated a consent judgment it signed almost 2 years ago to provide loan modifications and help relocate borrowers, the Arizona attorney general claims … Bank of America has continued to misrepresent ‘to Arizona consumers whether they were eligible for modifications of their mortgage loans, when Bank of America would make a decision on their modification requests, whether Bank of America had approved their modification requests, why Bank of America declined their modification requests, and whether and when Bank of America would foreclose upon their homes.’”
Consumer Affairs: “The bank is also facing at least three suits claiming that it reneged on duties it undertook by accepting $25 billion under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).”
In total, Bank of America’s last annual report lists 29 pending lawsuits against the company. Lawsuits are not proof of guilt, of course. But the bank has already paid a fine for illegally concealing $6 billion in payouts to employees, and another fine for concealing major losses at its Merrill Lynch subsidiary. (Both fines were low – not much more than a slap on the wrist – because Bank of America was on taxpayer-funded life support at the time.) BofA also confessed to committing fraud as part of a settlement this month, which the Justice Department noted was restitution “for its participation in a conspiracy to rig bids in the municipal bond derivatives market.” The Bank was also ordered to pay Lehman $590 million for illegally seizing its deposits, in violation of bankruptcy law.
Bank of America has been one of the worst offenders during the foreclosure crisis, with documented case of widespread abuse and legal violations. From the Associated Press:
“A document obtained last week by the Associated Press showed a Bank of America official acknowledging in a legal proceeding that she signed thousands of foreclosure documents a month and typically didn’t read them. The official, Renee Hertzler, said in a February deposition that she signed 7,000 to 8,000 foreclosure documents a month.”
How generous has the taxpayer been to Bank of America? There was the TARP money, of course. And BofA, like other banks, has been suckling at the teat of Federal Reserve’s discount money window throughout the crisis. And, as Zach Carter noted, the bank was also one of two institutions that were the main beneficiaries of a special Fed program called the Primary Reserve Credit Facility. There were those cushy settlements with the SEC.
BofA stock was trading at $53 at the end of 2006. As of this writing the stock is trading for $13.30. But its executives have been wasting corporate money and resources buying up 419 web URLs with insulting phrases and the names of their senior executives – most of whom nobody’s ever heard of – to protect their personal reputations. No company’s ever done that before. Bob Scully “blows” (bobscullyblows.com) and Bill Boardman “sucks” (billboardmansucks.com)? Who knew?
Last year two senior executives received $9.9 million and two others received $6 million in total compensation. If they’re really worried about their reputations they should stop running their company in a way that sucks and blows. The guy who robbed a Bank of America branch in West Palm Beach is going to prison. The bank’s senior executives are hurt that they didn’t get invited to the Rose Garden for tea.
Rap Sheet: BofA has probably committed the greatest number of foreclosure offenses. It deceived stockholders, and the public, about the $6 million in bonuses it paid out (during the rescue process). It was equally deceptive about Merrill Lynch’s financial status. And it admitted to rigging bids for municipal bond derivatives.
Shameless Quotes: CEO Brian Moynihan’s response toward demands that his bank comply with HAMP’s legal requirements? “Sure,” he sneered,” we’ll go back and check our homework again.” And he says he won’t accept anything but “constructive criticism.”
#2. JPMorgan Chase
“We don’t think there are cases where people were evicted out of homes when they shouldn’t have been.” JPM Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. From the Washington Post: “J.P. Morgan Chase, one of the nation’s leading banks, announced Wednesday that it will freeze foreclosures in about half the country because of flawed paperwork.”
As we learned recently, Jamie Dimon doesn’t feel loved or admired enough. Small wonder, given the way his bank treats customers. Even as he was making arrogant statements like this one, papers like the New York Times were telling the truth about the sleazy operation he’s running at JPMorgan Chase:
Failure to accurately document home foreclosures is illegal. I’s lousy management, too. Chief Executive Dimon oversaw a sloppy operation that’s going to cost his shareholders a lot of money: “JPMorgan set aside $2.3 billion of reserves to cover mortgage repurchases or litigation expenses, including some for ‘mortgage-related matters,’ the lender said Oct. 13.”
A whistleblower complaint alleges that the bank “sold to third party debt buyers hundreds of millions of dollars worth of credit card accounts. . .when in fact Chase Bank executives that many of those accounts had incorrect and overstated balances.” According to the complaint, “Chase Bank executives routinely destroyed information and communications from consumers rather than incorporate that information into the consumer’s credit card file … mass-executed thousands of affidavits in support of Chase Banks collection efforts … (and) did not have personal knowledge of the facts set forth in the affidavits.” It also claims that “when senior Chase Bank executives were made aware of these systemic problems, senior Chase Bank executives — rather than remedy the problems — immediately fired the whistleblower and attempted to cover up these problems.”
There are also multiple lawsuits against Chase for allegedly manipulating the price of silver, and there is at least one report that the bank is being probed by several Federal agencies (including the Justice Department) over its trading activities in precious metals. JPMorgan Chase is also one of several banks that are being sued over the handling of Bernie Madoff funds.
JPMorgan Chase “agreed to pay $25 million to settle allegations it sold unregistered securities, many of which defaulted, to the state of Florida,” as the Orlando Sentinel reported. That’s a crime. Chase was also one of several banks that paid to settle charges that it illegally propped up a failed mortgage lender. (These settlements have typically allowed the banks to “admit no wrongdoing” – a practice which should be stopped. These are crimes.)
JPMorgan Chase’s behavior in Jefferson County, Alabama made Huey Long look like a piker. The bank spread more than $8 million around the county through local interediaries to secure highly lucrative deals on municipal derivatives. As Bloomberg News put it, ” JPMorgan, the second-largest U.S. bank by assets, used fees on the unregulated derivative contracts — and a trip to a New York spa for one elected official — to curry political favor, a decade after the SEC adopted rules to drive out pay-to-play from the $2.8 trillion municipal bond market.”
The bank conducted this criminal behavior under Dimon’s watch. And while it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing,” as usual, it had to pay a three-quarters-of-a-billion dollar settlement to wrangle its way out of this snakepit of illegality.
Rap Sheet: Corruption in Alabama; widespread violation of foreclosure laws; sale of unregistered securities. Also under investigation for illegal manipulation of the precious metals market; mishandling of Madoff funds; deliberate lawbreaking in credit card processing, concealment of criminality.
Shameless quotes: “Judy Dimon says the crisis took a toll on him. He used to stand up to bullies who threatened his smaller twin; now he felt as if he, and bankers in general, were being bullied.” (from a New York Times profile of Dimon)
3. Citigroup
Citi’s being sued for gender discrimination by its own employees. Citi settled a class action lawsuit after illegally raising rates for credit card customers. The bank’s being sued by an independent trustee for allegedly “aiding and abetting” a Ponzi schemer.
Citi executives were given slap-on-the-wrist fines for lying to investors about $40 billion in subprime exposures, which is a criminal act. It should also be remembered that Citigroup paid $2.65 billion in 2004 to settle class action lawsuits over its alleged illegal actions in propping up WorldCom stocks in return for enormous fees.
As Citi’s annual report notes, “Citigroup and Related Parties have been named as defendants in numerous legal actions and other proceedings asserting claims for damages and related relief for losses arising from the global financial credit and subprime-mortgage crisis that began in 2007.”
Citi is still being investigated by Italian courts for possible criminal behavior in the Parmalat case, and it’s being sued by a Norwegian bank for misrepresenting its financial condition and failing to disclose material information. It’s being sued by investors for misrepresenting its underwriting of mortgage backed securities.
Rap Sheet: Violation of SEC law regarding corporate disclosures; illegal rate activity toward credit card customers. Under investigation for aiding and abetting a Ponzi scheme.
Shameless quotes: “Almost all of us … missed the powerful combination of forces at work and the serious possibility of a massive crisis.” (Robert Rubin) “On November 3, 2007, I sent an email to Mr. Robert Rubin and three other members of Corporate Management. In this email I outlined the business practices that I had witnessed and attempted to address. I specifically warned about the extreme risks that existed within the Consumer Lending Group.” (Former Citi exec Richard Bowen)
4. Wells Fargo
They illegally laundered drug money for the Mexican cartels – and nobody went to jail.
Here’s a suggestion: Read stories “War Torn Mexico: A Population in Terror,” which begins: “Massacres, beheadings, YouTube videos featuring cartel torture sessions and even car bombs are becoming commonplace in Juarez.” Study the statistics on the violent murders – which include Federal agents, children, and “penniless immigrants” – and then remind yourself: These are Wells Fargo’s business partners.
Rap Sheet: What can anyone add to that?
Shameless quotes:”We’re more of a Main Street bank than a Wall Street bank.” “”Of all the decisions I’ve had to make, few have been as difficult as cutting the dividend.” (Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf)
5. Goldman Sachs
Goldman is Goldman. The SEC charged them with fraud, and they settled the suit by admitting their marketing materials contained lies – they called them “mistakes.” They were fined by Great Britain for illegally concealing US fraud investigations. Goldman has a gender discrimination lawsuit, too, and theirs comes complete with strippers and racist emails.
Goldman’s being sucked for deceiving its clients over an offering its own people privately (and thanks to Sen. Levin, famously) bragged was “a shitty deal.” Goldman paid $60 million in Massachusetts to settle charges of predatory loan practices.
After mismanagement drove Goldman into impending doom, the firm was saved by TARP funds and Federal Reserve’s Emergency Liquidity Programs. Total taxpayer lending to Goldman exceeded three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Goldman also received $13 billion in backdoor payouts through the AIG liquidation (under Tim Geithner’s supervision).
Rap Sheet: Fraudulent misrepresentation; predatory loan practices; illegal concealment of an investigation. And God know what else. They’re Goldman, man!
Shameless Quotes: “”We’re very important … We do God’s work.” (Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein) “If I whet My glittering sword, and Mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to Mine enemies.” (God)
6. Morgan Stanley
Earlier this year the Wall Street Journal reported that “U.S. prosecutors are investigating whether Morgan Stanley misled investors about mortgage-derivatives deals it helped design and sometimes bet against.” The firm’s also being sued by US Bank for fraudulently misleading it and other investors over a structured residential investment called “Tourmaline.” A group of investors in Singapore is suing the firm for designing CDOs to fail and then selling them as “conservative investments.”
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined Morgan Stanley this year for failing to disclose material conflicts of interest to investors. The same agency hit the firm with a $12.5 million fine in 2007 for illegally concealing emails during customer arbitration hearings. In a particularly sleazy move, Morgan Stanley claimed that the emails had been lost on 9/11, when they were all safely stored in backup copies elsewhere.
MS was also sued by the EEOC for gender discrimination.
The firm was able to beat back an investors’ lawsuit over bloated executive pay – it set aside 62% of net revenue for employee compensation – so its executives get to keep fat bonuses for driving the company into the ground. Greed and stupidity aren’t illegal, after all.
On the other hand, their portfolio of lawsuits including one that says they defrauded nuns in Europe.
Rap Sheet: Despite numerous violations and charges, Morgan Stanley is a relatively minor player compared to its bigger colleagues. On the other hand, it illegally concealed evidence from arbitrators by using the World Trade Center attack as an excuse, and six of its own employees died in that attack. That’s simply vile. On top of that, they’re being sued by nuns.
Shameless Quotes: “When we think back on 2001, we are filled with deep sorrow and outrage over the events of September 11. Who among us will ever forget the shock and horror of that day?” (Morgan Stanley Annual Report, 2001) “When you come that close to really going out of business, call it near death, death experience, the end of the line, whatever you want to call it, your only focus is to make sure your company survives.” (former CEO John Mack)
__________________
We rescued these six banks. They’ve all broken the law, and they’re all under a cloud of suspicion regarding even more possible illegalities. And yet they’re all pouting because they weren’t invited to the White House.
Which is our most shameless corporate lawbreaker? Bank of America’s the biggest, and it has probably committed the most widespread foreclosure fraud. JPMorgan Chase has played fast and loose with the law, and Dimon’s unwarranted arrogance raises their shamelessness quotient dramatically. It’s hard to top Wells Fargo and the drug cartels (although getting sued by nuns comes pretty close). Citi had Chuck Prince and Robert Rubin, two pretty shameless individuals. And Goldman … well, as we were saying, they’re Goldman.
In any normal period of history all of these organizations would be recognized as corrupt institutions, and their leaders would be ashamed to show their faces among respectable people. But these aren’t normal times, are they?
Frankly I’m stumped. You guys decide. They all deserve the title as far as I’m concerned.

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The Best Buddhist Writing 2008

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It’s hard to respond to something that hasn’t happened. And yet, if I make decisions based on expectations, that’s what I’m doing.
When separation and then divorce changed my life, I sometimes found myself making decisions and taking action based on what I thought should happen or what had happened in the past. Big mistake. Here’s what I learned:
I prefer dealing with what is. The truth — or reality — feels cleaner, less stressful. And though it can be hard to find and painful to face, the truth still feels like a friend. Something reliable. No bullshit.
Expectation, on the other hand, is a product of logic, fear, imagination, past experience and several dozen other things. I think of it as a weather forecast for my life — something that can make me aware of possibilities, but not something dependable.
Expectation is only my best guess at the future. And the future is life’s lottery — nobody knows for sure how it will unfold. When I live by my expectations, I usually react more according to my worries than reality. But in the present, life is tangible. I can hear it, see it, touch it, feel it. It’s where I live right now, and if I open up to what is actually happening, I see more options.
On August 11, 1996, I wrote this in my journal:
A television documentary about Elvis Presley reported that the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll was so fat in his last years that when he entered an Elvis look-a-like contest, he only finished third. His fans’ expectation was that Elvis would be the way they remembered him. They left no room for change. And without room for change, life is limited and sometimes even suffocating.
This is part of a Huffpost series — in words and video. I call it For Men Who Have Everything, Including Separation — Thoughts on Surviving Separation. There are 12 segments in all, and the next eight will be arriving over the coming weeks. If you want to read the first three installments, there are links at the bottom of this post.
My goals are straight-forward:
Offer hope and humor to men who are disconsolate after a relationship has hit the rocks
Offer a resource to women — sisters, mothers, friends — who care about such men
I wrote For Men Who Have Everything, Including a Broken Heart because I would have liked a book like this when my first marriage nose-dived.
I offer it in a spirit of brotherhood and with a strong faith that once our broken hearts mend, we have the capacity to be more compassionate, wiser, more resilient and stronger than we were before.For Men Who Have Everything, Including a Broken Heart, #1
#2 — Grieving is Healing
#3 — Beware Precipitous Action
#4 — Love Thyself
There’s more blogging and vlogging and to come. I promise it will be personal and positive. Sign up for email alerts and each time a new segment is posted, you’ll be informed. Thanks.

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