Link Loving 20.02.11

• The world’s fattest countries – and it’s not who you think. Joshua Keating.
• The extent to which Proctor & Gamble research their customers. Freaky.
• Will Straw has five reasons for why we can’t trust David Cameron with The Big Society.
• Victoria Beckham’s autumn ’11 collection is actually…quite good.
• Dwight Tower on how organising groups can end up decruiting instead of recruiting.
• Stephen Hale hails (haha) the end of North vs South.
• Bill McKibben goes behind the scenes in the fight against coal. (Longer piece on the US fight against coal coming soon.)
• Will Horwitz on what Joanna Lumley is getting up to – helping to save legal aid.
• Penelope Trunk on how to make a connection with anyone – and some great speech-giving advice.

Sunday Afternoon Music

Awesome tune from Congolese rapper, Baloji.

And this lovely little song by Thiago Pethit from Brazil.

Non-Gated Communities

“You’ve chosen to live in a gated community madam, so can you please provide documentation to prove you’re allowed in this non-gated community?”

Brilliant stuff from The Equality Trust.

Business And Sustainability

Business and sustainably are not comfortable bedfellows. There are too many stories of environmental and social failure – BP, Dow Chemicals, Monsanto – for us to embrace the current market model as compatible with a sustainable future.

At the base conference earlier this week, this awkward relationship was on full view. Well-meaning individuals were eager to find new ways to take the sustainability message into the heart of their business, but struggling to re-align company aims from where they currently are. Caroline Lucas MP said that in all her years in the European Parliament and now in Westminster, she had never been lobbied by businesses for stronger environmental action. And you can understand why – business is about maximising profit, and that’s that.

Sometimes you come across the happy case of mutual benefit – for example, The Aldersgate Group, bringing together businesses, think-tanks, NGOs, politicians – on the idea of green growth/job creation. Sky gave some compelling examples of cost saving measures that also saved carbon, and how they’re now reaching out to their customers through the power of Ross Kemp.

But not all corporate social responsibility is good. (Natalya Sverjensky’s blog will testify to that.) The presentation from a senior executive at Coca Cola was deeply troubling. His words about future targets fell flat, and his incomplete understanding of what sustainability means in practice revealed itself as a question from the audience challenged him on the inherent contradiction between an unhealthy product and the need for sustainability.

As an observer, the general theme that emerged for me was the struggle by business as it is to fit into a world that has changed. Business needs to change, and I believe, our idea of what business is needs to change. (May I suggest Umair Haque’s new book for further reading.)

And yet in the business world – real leadership, real courage, and real vision is possible. It looks like this –

Who knew carpet tiles could be so interesting?!

Teaching The Democrats How To Fight

This is a fantastic interview on AltNet with the two founders of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Very much worth reading if you work in online organising, progressive politics or follow the US political scene.

It looks at the new strategy PCCC is using – combining online action, fundraising for candidates, field operations and insider lobbying, some of the battles it’s had with the Democratic Party – notably healthcare, and has a big lesson on advocacy – ask politicians to follow, not to lead.

Article here.

Link Loving 19.02.11

• I used to live with someone who worked in SEO, so none of this is a surprise. But if you’re new to the secrets of search optimisation… NY Times.
• Nikolai Grozni on the Bulgarian Revolution of 1989. (I didn’t know much about it either.)
• Jan Freeman on the art of dodging bad words and our love of euphemism.
• Boohoo – the Koch Brothers can’t take a joke. Noam Cohen reporting.
• A lot of talk about nature deficit disorder at the moment, Randall Williams has the story.
• Adam Ramsay on a roll with this fantastic piece explaining why UK Uncut are now turning their attention to the banks.
• Jeremy Kahn argues that the crude reality is that everything is OK. Oil shock, oil schmok?
• Fascinating piece on Sebastian Junger in the Scientific American about war and the human mind.
• The things dreams are made of: India’s foreign minister reads the wrong speech at a Security Council meeting.

Breaking The Stereotype: Arnie And Alex

After asking on twitter why every BBC radio piece on Africa has to feature singing children in the background – I was sent this. Isn’t it brilliant?

h/t Luis Davila

Reclaiming Adam Smith

Time-stretched journalists seeking a free-market viewpoint will often go straight to the Adam Smith Institute. These are the people who want to sell-off the national forests and privatise the NHS.

They position themselves as ‘the voice of market reason’ when they say things like ‘banks are in the same line of work as every other business‘, but frankly – they are just wrong.

It’s important to remember that Adam Smith was writing in the late 18th/early 19th century, so his work was on political philosophy, not what we today call ‘economics’. Famously, there’s less maths in his seminar treatise The Wealth of Nations than in a first year degree course. He’s far more concerned with the relationship between psychology and human economic activity, and he does so much better than many of later his free-market followers. For example, he identified in humans;

1. The inability to focus on long-term outcomes
2. A concern for the well-being of others
3. A tendency to overrate one’s own abilities
4. An inclination to underestimate risks.

This feels very different from the ‘markets solve everything’ approach we hear from the Adam Smith Institute whenever they’re quoted in the media. Perhaps they should rename themselves the Milton Friedman Institute?

h/t John Cassidy

Link Loving 18.02.11

• Chief Obama campaign Blogger Sam Graham-Felson finds the middle ground on internet/Egypt in The Nation.
• Jon McGregor (brother of Matthew) writes about his 90s road protest days. Great stuff.
• How revolutions happen – patterns from Iran to Egypt. BBC.
• Australia getting ready for marriage equality? ‘It’s time’ says GetUp.
• The new Wailin’ Jennys album came out last week and it is AMAZING.
• Pictures of people on bikes from the ‘olden’ days. Wonderful.
• Great profile piece on Avaaz from the Times. (pdf) Two particularly good quotes from Ricken,

“There are two types of fatalism. The belief the world can’t change, and the belief you can’t play a role in changing it. If in a few hundred words you produce a convincing counter-argument, people respond.”

““Refusing to engage in politics declares victory to all the unscrupulous forces trying to use it for their own ends.”

• A geographic map of charities – revealing how, as ever, it ain’t equally distributed.
• Today sees Belarus start a new series of show-trials. (Yes, we’re still in 2011, not 1951.) Andrej Dynko.

Polluters: A Hot Date?

It’s still Valentine’s week, so I’m going to squeeze this campaign in while I can.

PolluterHarmony is the No.1 matchmaking site for polluters, industry lobbyists, & politicians. An absolutely brilliant spoof site.

“Turns out we share some hobbies too – staying up late at night, gutting clean energy bills. It’s not that we spend a lot of time together, but it’s like we finish each other’s legislation!”