Governance Gaps in the Global Supply Chain by Auret van Heerden

Labor activist Auret van Heerden talks about the next frontier of workers' rights -- globalized industries where no single national body can keep workers safe and protected. How can we keep our global supply chains honest? Van Heerden makes the business case for fair labor. At the head of the Fair Labor Association, Auret van Heerden takes a practical approach to workers' rights, persuading corporations and NGOs to protect labor in global supply chains. 

Why You Should Listen to Him:

Raised in apartheid South Africa, Auret van Heerden became an activist early. As a student, he agitated for workers' rights and co-wrote a book on trade unionism; he was tortured and placed in solitary confinement, then exiled in 1987. (Later, in post-apartheid South Africa, he became labor attaché to the South African mission to the UN.) For the past decade he's been the president and CEO of the Fair Labor Association, or FLA, an initiative that brings together companies, NGOs and universities to develop and keep up international labor standards in global supply chains.

Founded in 1999, the FLA grew out of a task force convened by President Clinton to investigate and end child labor and other sweatshop practices. Difficult enough in the US, protecting labor is even more complex in the global economy, with its multiple sets of laws and layers of contractors and outsourcers. Policing the entire chain is impossible, so the FLA works instead to help all parties agree that protecting workers is the best way to do business, and agree on voluntary initiatives to get there.

Van Heerden and FLA create a safe space in which stakeholders representing different interest groups within a global supply chain can work together to resolve conflicts of rights and interests, filling in the governance gap. Van Heerden's newest initiative: the Institute for Social and Environmental Responsibility, which will conduct research and convene multi-stakeholder forums on corporate responsibility.

"The gold standard, I think, is the Fair Labor Association. It leads the way ... because its Secretariat is encouraged and even mandated to cast a critical eye on performance and to recommend practical innovations."

John Ruggie, UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights

Inside Job: A Documentary by Charles Ferguson

A brilliant new (dramatic) documentary from Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson ("No End In Sight"). Inside Job is the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, Inside Job traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia. Enjoy:)

Crisis of Capitalism by David Harvey

David Harvey, the British-born geographer and Professor of Anthropology, spoke at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in London recently on the Crises of Capitalism. The RSA, in turn, produced this short animated feature.

Dr. Harvey, who is perhaps best known for his critique of neo-liberalism, remains one of the leading exponents of Marxist socio-economic thought. Having said this listen to his brief 11 minute lecture and see if there is anything with which you can disagree. Dr. Harvey is currently on a lecture tour for his Marxist critique of both the global financial crisis and the narratives told about it.

The principal question that he addresses is it time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane?

FRONTLINE: God In America

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

"The American story cannot be fully understood without understanding the country's religious history," says series executive producer Michael Sullivan. "By examining that history, God in America will offer viewers a fresh, revealing and challenging portrait of the country."

As God in America unfolds, it reveals the deep roots of American religious identity in the universal quest for liberty and individualism -- ideas that played out in the unlikely political union between Thomas Jefferson and defiant Baptists to oppose the established church in Virginia and that were later embraced by free-wheeling Methodists and maverick Presbyterians. Catholic and Jewish immigrants battled for religious liberty and expanded its meaning. In their quest for social reform, movements as different as civil rights and the religious right found authority and energy in their religious faith. The fight to define religious liberty fueled struggles between America's secular and religious cultures on issues from evolution to school prayer, and American individualism and the country's experiment in religious liberty were the engine that made America the most religiously diverse nation on earth.

The Republican Corporate Power Grab

Back in January, in my State of the Union Address, I warned of the danger posed by a Supreme Court ruling called Citizens United. This decision overturned decades of law and precedent. It gave the special interests the power to spend without limit – and without public disclosure – to run ads in order to influence elections.

Now, as an election approaches, it’s not just a theory. We can see for ourselves how destructive to our democracy this can become. We see it in the flood of deceptive attack ads sponsored by special interests using front groups with misleading names. We don’t know who’s behind these ads or who’s paying for them. Even foreign-controlled corporations seeking to influence our democracy are able to spend freely in order to swing an election toward a candidate they prefer.

We’ve tried to fix this with a new law – one that would simply require that you say who you are and who’s paying for your ad. This way, voters are able to make an informed judgment about a group’s motivations. Anyone running these ads would have to stand by their claims. And foreign-controlled corporations would be restricted from spending money to influence elections, just as they were before the Supreme Court opened up this loophole.

This is common sense. In fact, this is the kind of proposal that Democrats and Republicans have agreed on for decades. Yet, the Republican leaders in Congress have so far said “no.” They’ve blocked this bill from even coming up for a vote in the Senate. It’s politics at its worst. But it’s not hard to understand why.

Over the past two years, we have fought back against the entrenched special interests – weakening their hold on the levers of power in Washington. We have taken a stand against the worst abuses of the financial industry and health insurance companies. We’ve rolled back tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. And we’ve restored enforcement of common sense rules to protect clean air and clean water. We have refused to go along with business as usual.

Now, the special interests want to take Congress back, and return to the days when lobbyists wrote the laws. And a partisan minority in Congress is hoping their defense of these special interests and the status quo will be rewarded with a flood of negative ads against their opponents. It’s a power grab, pure and simple. They’re hoping they can ride this wave of unchecked influence all the way to victory.

What is clear is that Congress has a responsibility to act. But the truth is, any law will come too late to prevent the damage that has already been done this election season. That is why, any time you see an attack ad by one of these shadowy groups, you should ask yourself, who is paying for this ad? Is it the health insurance lobby? The oil industry? The credit card companies?

But more than that, you can make sure that the tens of millions of dollars spent on misleading ads do not drown out your voice. Because no matter how many ads they run – no matter how many elections they try to buy – the power to determine the fate of this country doesn’t lie in their hands. It lies in yours. It’s up to all of us to defend that most basic American principle of a government of, by, and for the people. What’s at stake is not just an election. It’s our democracy itself.

Thank you.

Remarks of President Barack Obama

Saturday, September 18, 2010

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

This a simple yet powerful video about the credit crisis, which makes very complex financial techniques and innovations easy to understand. For example, the video does a nice job on the concepts of securitization, CDOs, CDFs, asset backed securities, and maps out the relationship between economic actors. Enjoy:)

The Crisis of Credit Visualized distills the economic crisis into a short and simple story by giving it form. It also argues that designers have the ability to see a complex situation, then turn around and communicate it to others. By giving graphic form to the credit crisis, it becomes comprehensible. Not only do economic activities take shape, but new relationships can emerge between these shapes.

Worse Than War | Full-Length Documentary

This is a brilliant documentary that attempts to understand a social phenomenon that is worse than war--genocide. "By the most fundamental measure -- the number of people killed -- the perpetrators of mass murder since the beginning of the twentieth century have taken the lives of more people than have died in military conflict. So genocide is worse than war," reiterates Goldhagen. "This is a little-known fact that should be a central focus of international politics, because once you know it, the world, international politics, and what we need to do all begin to look substantially different from how they are typically conceived."

WORSE THAN WAR documents Goldhagen¹s travels, teachings, and interviews in nine countries around the world, bringing viewers on an unprecedented journey of insight and analysis. In a film that is highly cinematic and evocative throughout, he speaks with victims, perpetrators, witnesses, politicians, diplomats, historians, humanitarian aid workers, and journalists, all with the purpose of explaining and understanding the critical features of genocide and how to finally stop it. More about the film--click here.

The Hidden Influences of Social Networks by Nicholas Christakis

This is a brilliant talk on the role of social networks in our human lives. We're all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don't even know.

Why you should listen to him:

People aren't merely social animals in the usual sense, for we don't just live in groups. We live in networks -- and we have done so ever since we emerged from the African savannah. Via intricately branching paths tracing out cascading family connections, friendship ties, and work relationships, we are interconnected to hundreds or thousands of specific people, most of whom we do not know. We affect them and they affect us.

Nicholas Christakis' work examines the biological, psychological, sociological, and mathematical rules that govern how we form these social networks, and the rules that govern how they shape our lives. His work shows how phenomena as diverse as obesity, smoking, emotions, ideas, germs, and altruism can spread through our social ties, and how genes can partially underlie our creation of social ties to begin with. His work also sheds light on how we might take advantage of an understanding of social networks to make the world a better place. For more on his work click here.

NOVA: Mind Over Money

In the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, NOVA presents "Mind Over Money"—an entertaining and penetrating exploration of why mainstream economists failed to predict the crash of 2008 and why we so often make irrational financial decisions. It's a show that reveals how our emotions interfere with our decision-making and explores controversial new arguments about the world of finance. Before the current crash, most Wall Street analysts believed that markets are "efficient"—that investors are reasonable and always operate in their own economic self-interest. Most of the time, these assumptions of classical economics work well enough. But in extreme situations, people panic and conventional theories collapse. In the face of the recent crash, can a new science that aims to incorporate human psychology into finance—behavioral economics—do better?

"Mind Over Money" features some of this new field's most compelling experiments. We'll see how the brains and bodies of Wall Street traders respond as they buy and sell stocks. We'll watch as an ingenious experiment reveals how an excessive number of spending choices can overwhelm consumers' ability to make rational decisions. Through these entertaining real-life experiments, NOVA will show how mood, decision-making, and economic activity are all tightly interwoven. By delivering unexpected insights from leading analysts and powerful experiments, "Mind Over Money" exposes the mysterious and surprising nature of two of the most powerful forces on our planet: the human mind and money. View full video here: CLICK

Debate: Understanding Palestinian Politics

Many in the Western media present Palestinian politics as a primitive, suicide-bombing expression of anti-Israeli anger. But nothing could be further from the truth. Watch a long-form debate between the two largest political factions, Fatah and Hamas, as they discuss reconciliation and the future of resistance.