Common Sense, Benefits, and Peaceful Resistance

     What if there were a means of resisting the New World Order that required little effort or sacrifice on our part? Suppose we could resist the New World Order by having fun, spending less money, getting more value, having more free time, and consuming healthier and more delicious food and drink?

     No, the preceding paragraph isn’t a point of departure for some clarion call to sacrifice and arduous effort. I’m likely enough to do that in other articles.

     The key word here is benefit—a favorite word of advertisers. Modern advertisers know that people don’t buy products because they want products; they buy them because they want benefits. For example, they buy soft drinks because they want flavor, refreshment or quick energy, not because they want soft drinks.

     Maybe you’ve read the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The con men who sold the “new clothes” were the forerunners of modern branding. The emperor was deceived because he was convinced that the new clothes gave him status. Modern advertising is the art of making corporate propaganda seem like revealed truth.

     The early stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius predated Hans Christian Andersen by more than 1,600 years. His writings caused me to realize just how much modern advertising has led us to embrace slavery.

     Aurelius taught, among other things, that we are liberated by seeing things as they really are rather than being taken in by illusions and embellishments. As if to anticipate Andersen, Aurelius gave the example of a king’s purple robes. A king’s robe is nothing but the wool of a sheep stained by the blood of a sea snail, yet people’s imaginations cause them to stand in awe of it.

     Here I’ll address two lessons, but they’re inseparably interwoven. The first is how advertisers help us to trick ourselves. The other is the way we cheat ourselves in the ways we buy goods and services.

     Advertisers start by convincing target consumers (as they call them)  that they need a given benefit. Then they convince them that they can’t get that benefit in any way other than by buying a certain product.

     In addition to tangible benefits, advertisers have taken to marketing delusions. With huge advertising budgets, advertisers have gulled shallow people into thinking they can gain status—that’s the delusion—simply by buying something that has a certain logo on it. Like the king’s robe, it may be just an article of clothing, no better or worse than a less expensive brand.

     The difference between what the product is worth and what advertisers convince people that it’s worth is the difference between selling a product and selling a delusion. (And you thought that the emperor in Andersen’s story was gullible.) As soon as we accept that fact, we’re well on our way to spending less money and gaining more value.

     Let’s go a little deeper into this matter of benefit. We expect to pay for whatever benefit we hope to receive; but we’re often deceived as to how we must pay for it.  When we let advertisers do our thinking for us, they limit our options.

     In industrialized countries, the means of payment show a set of priorities that is designed to enslave us. Credit cards come first, followed by checks, then cash. Very few of us consider bartering for goods and services, although some people may give some of their surplus to others.

    In agrarian societies, priorities are the reverse of those in industrialized countries. In agrarian societies, people freely give to their neighbors and others. They also freely barter. Cash, and possibly checks, are sometimes used. Credit cards and other such instruments of debt are more likely to be recognized as folly.

     On a quarter acre of land back in the States, I planted three trees: apple, peach, and pear. They required almost no effort on my part, and the trees produced so much fruit that I couldn’t give it away fast enough. I had to allow much of it to go back to the soil.

     I also planted vegetables, berries, and spices. My small yard also boasted a flower garden, a rock garden, a water garden, a strolling path, and some small statuary. Since I focused on indigenous plants and natural gardening methods, my gardens required very little care. I called this arrangement a meander garden.

     Hand terracing the yard gave me plenty of exercise and satisfaction, and the food I grew was cost free and healthier than store-bought foods.

     Here in the big city, I can’t have a garden, but I do grow peppermint. From time to time, I buy food from the locals in the day market. It usually costs about half what it would cost at Carrefour, the French hypermarket that has put a lot of traditional mom-and-pop stores out of business.

     Here’s where economists enter the picture. I’ve heard all my life that thrift, which is economically beneficial for people as individuals, is economically terrible for people as a nation.

     That’s because most economists measure economic good by the gross domestic product (GDP). The more money people spend, they more value they supposedly receive. If they go into debt, they’re supposedly even better off.

     The trouble is, money spent doesn’t necessarily mean value received. If John’s income is twice as much as Bill’s but he spends half his income on medical bills, we can’t say that John is twice as well off as Bill. If more people in a certain country grow their own food or buy it from a farmers’ market, they’re receiving more value for less money than the country where more people buy their food in cans at a supermarket.

     We receive even more value if we sharply curtail our use of credit cards, checks, and even cash. The international banking cartel depends on us placing a higher priority on things they can manipulate than on things beyond their reach.

     They also depend on us failing to see things as they really are. They want us to believe that we can receive the benefits we want only by buying the goods, services, and even illusions that they control because that’s the only way they can get us to use fiat money, checks, and most of all credit cards.

     In point of fact, we already have all the power we need to gain freedom from economic slavery. Remember that people don’t buy air conditioners because they want air conditioners. They don’t even buy them because they want cooler air; they buy them because they want comfort. If comfort is what you want, who is most qualified to find the most reasonable and cost-effective means of gaining that benefit—you or a corporate advertiser?

     When we’re tempted to buy a product, we should stand consumerist advertising techniques on their head. We should ask ourselves, “What benefit do I want?” Then we can ask, “What’s the most reasonable way to get that benefit?” In most cases, we’ll find ourselves saying to the advertisers and the banksters, “No thanks. I’ll take the benefit. You can keep your lousy product.”

     As soon as we recognize that we can enjoy benefits without having to sell our souls to the banking cartel, we begin the road back to health, freedom, and real peace. Moreover, we’ll receive more than the benefits we had once thought could only be found in wasteful products. We’ll generate less pollution, conserve resources, incur less debt (if any), enjoy more freedom, and live happier and healthier lives. 

Video Responses to 911 Disinfo Agents

      Over time, it's easy enough to spot an Internet disinformation agent, otherwise known as a troll.  No matter how many times their lies are exposed, they continue to tell the same lies day after day.  The theory is, if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it.
     There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t receive emails encouraging me to hate Muslims, to hate immigrants, or to hate some other group of people. Since all of them follow a similar pattern, I can avoid repetition by writing a response here and now and use that response for all future hate messages.

    In one message to a meet-up group, someone hysterically decried the fact that two supposedly devout Muslims were appointed to government positions in connection with the alleged War on Terror. It was like “a fox guarding the hen house,” he shrieked with a ho-hum lack of originality.

     The writer reminded his suffering readers that two well-known acts of terrorism (actually false flags) had been pinned on devout Muslims.  He actually expected his readers to fall for that one, as if the 911 Truth Movement had never existed.

     I didn’t address the question of whether the two appointees really were devout anything or whether their dark complexions and Middle Eastern-sounding names caused them to be labeled Muslims. Nor did I question whether Muslims who were not devout would be more acceptable to him.

     Here is my response:

     "There you go again, repeating the Cheney-Bush line that 911 was pulled off by nineteen Arabs who couldn't fly an airliner or correctly fill out a visa form. This same illiterate gang that couldn't think straight somehow caused NORAD to stand down for over two crucial hours, magically created fake passports, convinced security guards at three airports that they were white and not Arabic, caused ordinary office fires to melt steel, caused the only known occasion in which steel-reinforced high-rise buildings collapsed due to office fires, somehow planted tons of thermite at the World Trade Center right under the very nose of President Bush's brother, who was in charge of security at WTC; and countless other impossible acts. You're saying that nineteen misfits were incredibly lucky for an endless string of coincidences to just occurred a certain way so as to allow them to pull off 911. You're saying that devout Muslims have drunken sex orgies the night before they plan to meet Allah.

     "There are only two explanations for 911: Either nineteen inept men benefited from literally dozens of highly unlikely yet (for them) fortuitous accidents that made 911 possible; or 911 was an inside job.

     "As for Nidal Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter, how did one person fire 146 shots and kill or wound 45 people--43 of whom were trained soldiers--in ten minutes? Who were his two alleged accomplices who were arrested and later released? He had no known ties to any radical Islamic groups, but he did have an official position as a consultant for the Department of Homeland Security.

     "At one time, Hasan also lived in Falls Church, Virginia, a popular residential area for CIA operatives. He attended the same mosque as Hani Hanjour, the incompetent pilot who somehow trained himself to fly a Boeing 757 well enough to perform feats that professional Boeing pilots say are impossible.

     Link: "World Records that Guinness Never Mentioned" 

     "Hasan received his baccalaureate in psychology from Virginia Tech, a popular CIA recruiting spot where CIA mind-control experiments are said to take place.

     "Do you remember what also happened at Virginia Tech? A student who had been using physician-prescribed psychotropic drugs killed 32 people and wounded many others. At the time, a lot of people suspected that mind control was at the bottom of it, citing the CIA's mind control experiments.

     "Hmm. Hasan had no known ties to Islamic terrorists, but he was up to his eyeballs in CIA and Homeland Security operatives.

     "Surely you know what a false flag operation is! In case you've forgotten, take a look at the following videos:

"When False Flags Don't Fly" and "The Last Word on Terrorism" , both from the Corbett Report.

     "Let me remind you that, as you spread hated of Muslims as terrorists, the global elite's think tank the Rand Corporation is putting the terrorist label on home schoolers, Ron Paul supporters, constitutionalists, and many other law-abiding Americans. Instead of promoting hatred of Muslims, thereby buying into the global elite's false paradigm to divide and conquer us, it would be wise for the people of the world to unite against the global elite."

     In another tiresome tirade, someone paraded Osama bin Laden as a piñata for anti-Muslim bigots, as well as an excuse for us to support wars that are highly profitable for international banksters, the military-industrial complex, and the disaster capitalists. Here is my response:

     "Osama bin Laden has been dead for several years. (video) He lives only in the fevered imaginations of disinfo agents who continuously trot him out as a bogeyman to encourage war and debt to the international bankers. Alleged bin Laden audio messages (post 2001), "authenticated" by the CIA, show signs of fraud. (video) Al Qaeda does not exist. It's a legal fiction invented by U.S. government prosecutors to enable them to prosecute bin Laden in absentia. (video) It allowed the government agents to transform bin Laden, in the American mind, from a CIA asset to a profitable international threat while, at the same time, retaining him has a CIA asset. (video)

     "Only six months after 911, President Bush admitted that he wasn't concerned about finding bin Laden. (video) Could that be another reason he was never captured or found? If bin Laden had been captured, federal prosecutors would have had the burden of proving that it was bin Laden who had done 911. Shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, the Taliban issued a statement to the effect that neither they nor bin Laden were responsible. They pointed out that the scope and complexity of the attacks point to 'a government.'" (video)

     In both messages, and in many other such messages, we’re given a false paradigm. It’s Christians against Muslims, liberals against conservatives, Democrats against Republicans, native-born Americans against immigrants, and so on. This false paradigm benefits no one but the global elite and their shills, including the shameless Internet trolls who parrot their line.

     Muslims, Christians, Jews, and sincere people of other religions have more in common with each other than we have with the global elite. Liberals and conservatives, libertarians and socialists have more in common with each other than we have with the global elite.

     There are seven billion of us and only a few thousand of them. When we stop playing the game by their rules—when we cooperate with each other instead of allowing ourselves to be manipulated into attacking each other—the power of the global elite will be finished. Then we can have peace.

"Captain Kirk Shows How to Beat the New World Order"
Other September 11, 2001, articles in this blog

Why Congressman Peter King is on a Crusade against Muslims

     You’re aware, of course, that Congressman Peter King (R-NY) has embarked on a crusade to investigate Muslims in America, supposedly to find out what motivates them to become "radicalized.” Millions of sensible Americans are scratching their heads, wondering why he"s doing this.

     According to a 2007 survey by Pew Research, American Muslims are about as radical as apple pie. (Source)

     Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky and Imam Jihad Turk  have an unconvincing explanation for King's crusade. They say that King is "making a mistake.”  (Source)  They rightly point out that King's witch hunt is more likely to stir up animosity against Muslims and perhaps serve to radicalize a few Muslims and more than a few non-Muslims.

     Excuse me, but a mistake is something that happens once, over a brief period of time. For example, if a beer-bellied man wore a tight-fitting, knit sport shirt, that would be a mistake. It would make him look like a product placement ad for Budweiser.

     I looked into Peter King's records and found more convincing explanations for the congressman's radical and un-American behavior.

     Like most politicians who began their adult lives as Vietnam draft dodgers (he cooled his heels in the National Guard until 1973), Peter King is gungho on America's wars of aggression and empire building. In his letters to constituents, he can be particularly harsh with constituents who try to reason with him.

     I realize that most politicians are far from smart, but stupidity alone doesn't explain King's witch hunt. After all, his campaign contributors didn’t get rich by being stupid.

     Who are his campaign contributors? Let's take a look at the 2010 campaign cycle.  (Source)

     Of the twenty top contributors to his 2010 re-election campaign, five of them are manufacturers of military weaponry. They are General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Honeywell International, and United Technologies. Open Secrets.Org doesn't have a link for United Technologies. Here's a link for it:  

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7004833821877183483&postID=9143759782290515867

     In the 2010 election cycle, Congressman King received a total of $62,250 from PACs or individuals representing those few companies.

     A brief search turned up the fact that United Technologies, Boeing, and Raytheon are closely connected. Boeing and Raytheon have been manufacturers of the tomahawk missile—the missile that many researchers believe was used to attack the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Boeing and United Technologies are sister companies. Boeing and Honeywell have undertaken joint projects.

     During that same cycle, he received $11,000 from Goldman Sachs, which needs no introduction.

    If you’ve never heard of Park Strategies, don't feel embarrassed. I had to look it up myself. They are lobbyists for the military-industrial complex, the banksters, and "homeland security.” 

(Source) King received $11,550 from them.

     Of course, heavy-hitting campaign donors don't dish out that kind of dough just because they like a candidate. For them, it's an investment.

     Does it pay off? Well, let's take a look at which companies got the most federal taxpayer dollars for FY2010. I’ve placed in parentheses the amount they received in return for their campaign (ahem!) "contributions.” .(Source)

     Below each name, I've given the total amounts of money that their PACs or individuals gave to Congress (Source: Open Congres.org)

1. Lockheed Martin Corporation ($38,512,401,433.23)

Contributions 2010 cycle: $2,669,689

2. Boeing Company ($21,956,065,368.89)

Contributions 2010 cycle: $2,805,693

4. Raytheon Company ($16,106,903,431.28)

Contributions 2010 cycle: $2,172,978

22. Honeywell International Inc. ($2,938,415,700.74)

Contributions 2010 cycle: $3,861,235

     In case you’re wondering, what Goldman Sachs's PACs and perps did with the billions of dollars in bailout (read: embezzlement) money, they gave $5,868,239 to congressmen for the 2008 election cycle and $2,482,477 during the 2010 cycle.  Where else can you get a multibillion-dollar return on an eight-million-dollar investment?

     Never let anyone tell you that our congress critters are cheap crooks. As Pete King and his unindicted co-conspirators have shown us, they're some of the most expensive crooks that blood money can buy.

The Day the Gentle Sea Gypsies Defeated the Globalists

     During the Great Tsunami of December 26, 2004, the Moken people were directly in harms way. Unlike 150,000 other people living along the coasts of the Indian Ocean, however, they weren't killed. In the aftermath of the tsunami, when disaster capitalists swooped down like vultures, stealing the lands of survivors, the gentle Moken held onto their land.

    How they survived and how the Moken, unlike countless other peoples, avoided being victimized even after becoming victims holds lessons for all of us.

     I first learned of the Moken people a couple of years ago, when I was researching mermaids for a literature course I was teaching. They're often called the "sea gypsies." In the languages of Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia, they're called "sea people."

     The Moken are an Austronesian ethnic group living along the Andaman Sea. Many of them claim no nationality and live in small houseboats for most of the year, stepping onto the land only once in awhile. They know so much about the sea that marine biologists, climatologists, and other marine scientists are still learning from them.

     Often, their children learn to swim before they learn to walk. Making their living from the sea, they can hold their breaths underwater longer than almost any other ethnic group on Earth. They also have better underwater eyesight—even in salt sea water—than almost any other ethnic group on Earth.

     Many other Moken live along the shores of countries in the eastern Andaman Sea, either in villages on the coast or in villages positioned on stilts above the sea. Unlike most other Austronesians (such as the Polynesians, Melanesians, Micronesians, Taiwan aborigines, and others), the Moken are shy about tourists.

     On the morning of December 26, 2004, the earthquake struck the region with a power equal to 23,000 Hiroshima bombs. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center would become aware of it eight minutes. By that time, the tsunami was only sixteen minutes from making landfall.

     All along the coasts of the Andaman Sea, the tide suddenly rushed outward, away from the land, leaving fish flopping on the shore. All along the Andaman coasts, people hurriedly scooped up fish by whatever means they could. Residents and tourists alike were thrilled by this curious event.

     The Moken—the sea people—saw this event in a more ominous light. They had heard the old stories. This phenomenon told them that the sea had not eaten in a long time, and it was hungry.

(video)

     Moken led the way to safety. People who followed them to higher ground survived. Those who didn't listen were killed.

     The Moken village in Thailand, like the villages of other peoples all along the Indian Ocean, were completely wiped out. National governments all along the coasts of the Indian Ocean promised disaster victims that they would eventually be allowed to return to their lands. In the meantime, they were instructed not to try to return.

     It was all a lie, and the Moken knew it. The truth is, all over the Indian Ocean, special concessions were given to land developers, and armed security guards were posted to prevent people from returning to their homes to rebuild. Just as the Moken survived because they knew the sea, the reclaimed their land because they knew the government.

     In her book The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein describes how the gentle Moken took matters in hand and saved the day:

     “They marched past the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their old houses had been. In some cases, reconstruction began immediately... The most daring reinvasions were performed by Thailand's indigenous fishing peoples called the Moken, or "sea gypsies." After centuries of disenfranchisement, the Moken had no illusions that a benevolent state would give them a decent piece of land in exchange for the coastal properties that had been seized. So, in one dramatic case, the residents of the Ban Tung Wah Village in Phang Nga province 'gathered themselves together and marched right back home, where they encircled their wrecked village with rope, in a symbolic gesture to mark their land ownership,' explained a report by a Thai NGO. "'With the entire community camping out there, it became difficult for the authorities to chase them away, especially given the intense media attention being focused on tsunami rehabilitation.'  In the end, the villagers negotiated a deal with the government to give up part of the oceanfront property in exchange for legal security on the rest of their ancestral land." (link)

     Other disaster victims—those who trusted the government's promise of new homes—lost everything they had. This scenario was a template for Hurricane Katrina victims, victims of the Haiti earthquake, and even victims of the 2008 Financial Meltdown.

     The Moken showed us the way. There are almost seven billion people on this planet and a comparatively tiny minority of disaster capitalists, globalists, and other robber barons. We outnumber them by about a million to one. If we're united, they can't stop all of us.

How Disinformation Specialists Hijack Freedom Movements

     You may have had this experience: You receive a feel-good email message that expresses something you’ve been feeling for years. Sure, there are one or two points that don’t quite fit your beliefs, but a few points in a two- or three-page article may be overlooked. It’s the overall, feel-good message that counts. You forward it to others on your email list and forget all about it.

     But wait. What if you re-read the message before passing it on, only this time in a more critical frame of mind? On the second reading, you may realize that, in two or three pages, none of the feel-good passages say anything new. The only new material is in the one or two points that you found disagreeable.

     Welcome to the world of idea placement advertising. It’s kind of like product placement advertising, except that ideas rather than products are being peddled.

     Our minds have a guard at the gate. Each time a message comes to the gate, the guard decides whether the message is true. If it’s considered true, the message is allowed into the short-term memory and, with good behavior, it will be allowed into the long-term memory. At that point, it’ll be hard to erase.

     Try this experiment: Find someone whose name isn’t George and start calling him George. No matter how many times you call him George, the guard at his mental gate will reject the suggestion that that his name is really George.

     The guards at gates, however, can be fooled in a variety of ways. If the guard can be fooled into thinking that it’s not really a message—that it’s really entertainment—the message goes straight to the long-term memory where it becomes one of that person’s core beliefs.

     Remember also the Russian proverb, “The best place to conceal a knife is in plain sight, with a spoon and fork.” That’s one of the ways that the corporate media and other disinformation specialists slip their messages past our brains’ guards at the gate.

     To be forewarned is to be forearmed. Allow me one example: I recently read a feel-good article supposedly written to promote a sense of national unity among Americans but containing a hidden message to support the agenda of the global elite.

     In a recent article, neoconservative propagandist Michelle Malkin wrote an article called “We, the unhyphenated Americans: Meet my people.” Right away, the title of the article makes us feel good.

     From my own perspective, it was pleasing to know that the author is a native Filipina. I lived in the Philippines for four months and formed a fondness and admiration for Filipinos that has endured for 40 years. Many Filipinos attend my church. Thus, for me, Michelle Malkin’s heritage enhances the impressiveness of her article’s title.

     After the first few paragraphs, though, I got suspicious and did a quick Internet search of her professional credentials. Here are some comments I later made concerning what I had found in the article and the Internet search:

     “Michelle Malkin, the author of the...article falls into the same trap (or more likely sets the trap) as the people she derides. In the article, she pretends to be inclusive of all Americans, but "her people," as she calls them, are exclusively Republicans. Don't forget that the Dubya Bush administration and their co-conspirators gave us 9/11, the USA PATRIOT Act, TSA groping and high-tech voyeurism, the Department of Homeland Security, torture, the end of habeas corpus, the end of posse comitatus; and endless wars against literally millions of innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

     “Are those criminals "her people"? Apparently so, since she posits everyone who opposes these wars, abuses, and usurpations are people who have no argument beyond accusations of Islamophobia.

     “It's supposed to be an urban legend that people slip razor blades into Halloween candy, but Ms Malkin has given it a new twist and made it a fact. She's slipping poison into a highly agreeable concept.

     “That should not be surprising when you look at her career.

     “She worked in Washington, DC, as a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Never heard of it? They're funded by the Ford Motor Company Fund, CFR co-founder Exxon Mobile, CFR premium member Pfizer, and the Earhart Foundation. The Earhart Foundation is noted for funding such neocon schemes as the American Enterprise Institute which, in turn, gave us the Project for the New American Century, which favored "a new Pearl Harbor" several months before 9/11.

     “She hasn't forgotten who has been feeding her all these years. During her career of barking for her supper, she has barked at the tables of MSNBC, the Boston Globe, and Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel.

     “In 2004, when Vietnam War hero John Kerry was running for President against a selfish coward who had pulled strings and even broken a lawful contract to avoid the draft, Michelle Malkin derided Kerry for not being as big a war hero as Kerry had claimed. Through clever wording, she said that Kerry's "wounds were self inflicted." When asked by Chris Matthews whether Malkin's comment implied that Kerry had wounded himself to get a Purple Heart, she ducked the question but allowed the suggestion to stand.

     “Michelle Malkin is clearly a RINO neocon operative whose money trail leads back to the Rockefellers, Goldman Sachs, the disaster capitalists, and other threats to peace and freedom. Be very careful when--or if--you read one of her feel-good articles. Her candy is likely to be laced with arsenic or razor blades.”

     Michelle Malkin is only one of many Trojan horses in the freedom movement. I singled her out only because it was her article that was forwarded to me—not by a disinformation specialist or a paid Internet troll but by an innocent dupe. 

     Remember that the devil comes to us as an angel of light.  Pray for wisdom and freedom from manipulation; and read with care.

Are Major Polluters Bribing Environmental Watchdog Groups?

     I recently received an email and, no, it wasn’t a hoax. It was a thoroughly detailed and thoroughly documented writing that proved beyond doubt that oil companies and other such corporations routinely donate large sums of money to well-known environmental watchdog groups. These groups include Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.

     If you’re a liberal, you may take this to mean that major polluters are bribing environmental watchdog groups to look the other way. If you’re a conservative, it could mean that environmental extremists have been extorting millions of dollars from honest businessmen.

     If the title of your doctoral dissertation in Business Administration was Monitoring Corporate Social Responsibility, it’s likely to mean neither. As it is, that really was the title of my doctoral dissertation.

     Those of us who are working to restore the American government to the American people have enemies besides the obvious enemies that threaten our way of life.

     We must jealously guard our credibility. We must also guard against time wasters. Getting into a lather because we’ve misread a situation undermines our credibility and causes us to spend time on non-issues instead of issues of real import.

     Corporate social responsibility (CSR) isn’t simply a matter of doing good works at the expense of profits and otherwise being a good person. Thinking that you’ll stay out of trouble just by being a good person is a recipe for a CSR disaster. You can be blindsided by anything that happens anywhere along your supply chain, and you can’t watch everything at once.

     We’re accustomed to the schema that corporations and watchdog groups are natural enemies. Depending on your perspective, corporate managers will try to get away with anything they can (such evil corporations as Monsanto come to mind) or watchdog groups are “gotcha brigades” just looking for honest businessmen to slip. In most cases, neither schema is accurate.

     Most watchdog groups want corporations to behave responsibly, and most corporate managers want to avoid being labeled as irresponsible. It’s in the interest of both sides to see to it that the corporation isn’t seen as socially irresponsible.

     As I’ve indicated, supply chains have become so long and complicated—many of them experiencing some changes from one batch to another—that it’s not possible for one CEO or one vice president in charge of CSR to watch every link in the chain at once. There are many ways for a company to monitor CSR, including several uses of information technology (IT) for monitoring CSR. Astute CEO’s make use of as many ways as they deem necessary.

     There is, however, no substitute for eyes on the ground; and there’s no substitute for an early warning system. Effective watchdog groups serve both purposes.

     Put yourself in the CEO’s place. Your company’s reputation and sales depends on the accuracy of reports that cross your desk. Suppose those reports were all you had to indicate that a supplier in the Andes Mountains was acting responsibly toward the rainforest and rainforest natives. Would those reports be enough to put your mind at ease? The late Peter Drucker, whose books (such as The Effective Executive) revolutionized business management, wrote, “An effective executive will go out and look.”

     That’s what watchdog groups do. For most corporations with long and complex supply chains, staying on good terms with watchdog groups is the most cost-effective way to go out and look.

     If it can be shown that environmental watchdog groups are giving major polluters a clean bill of health in exchange for hefty donations, then we’d have an issue. In fact, if the major polluters in question happen to be Chevron or BP, we’d have prima facie evidence of a corrupt bargain.
(Shown at right:: "Steven Donziger, shown above in Ecuador in 2003, was accused of doctoring evidence in the pollution suit."  Source:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703395904576025912265522124.html