Obama's Fair Pay Restoration Act

Two days ago, Obama signed his very first bill and sent a very clear message of meritocracy and justice. It’s certainly a remarkable day for women!

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“First of all, it is fitting that the very first bill that I sign -- the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act -- that it is upholding one of this nation's founding principles: that we are all created equal, and each deserve a chance to pursue our own version of happiness.

[…]

Lilly Ledbetter did not set out to be a trailblazer or a household name. She was just a good hard worker who did her job -- and she did it well -- for nearly two decades before discovering that for years, she was paid less than her male colleagues for doing the very same work. Over the course of her career, she lost more than $200,000 in salary, and even more in pension and Social Security benefits -- losses that she still feels today.

Now, Lilly could have accepted her lot and moved on. She could have decided that it wasn't worth the hassle and the harassment that would inevitably come with speaking up for what she deserved. But instead, she decided that there was a principle at stake, something worth fighting for. So she set out on a journey that would take more than ten years, take her all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and lead to this day and this bill which will help others get the justice that she was denied.Because while this bill bears her name, Lilly knows that this story isn't just about her. It's the story of women across this country still earning just 78 cents for every dollar men earn -- women of color even less -- which means that today, in the year 2009, countless women are still losing thousands of dollars in salary, income and retirement savings over the course of a lifetime.

Equal pay is by no means just a women's issue -- it's a family issue. It's about parents who find themselves with less money for tuition and child care; couples who wind up with less to retire on; households where one breadwinner is paid less than she deserves; that's the difference between affording the mortgage -- or not; between keeping the heat on, or paying the doctor bills -- or not. And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month's paycheck to simple and plain discrimination.

So signing this bill today is to send a clear message: that making our economy work means making sure it works for everybody; that there are no second-class citizens in our workplaces; and that it's not just unfair and illegal, it's bad for business to pay somebody less because of their gender or their age or their race or their ethnicity, religion or disability; and that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory, or footnote in a casebook. It's about how our laws affect the daily lives and the daily realities of people: their ability to make a living and care for their families and achieve their goals.”

Complete speech and video here.

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The decision is certainly inspirational. But morality already tells people not to discriminate others based on gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. Therefore, how much does the bill change the situation?

Changing the subject, if the idea is provide everyone with the chance of pursuing their own version of happiness, why is it that the majority have the exact same unsustainable dream of owning stuff?

Systemic reform is the only course for ‘decimated’ investors

Great article! It appropriately questions what we currently understand as sustainable investment.


Author: Sarah Stranahan
Published on January 25th, 2009
http://www.responsible-investor.com/home/article/if_not_now/P0/

"At a recent conference in New York, I was asked to speak about the Needmor Fund’s 20 years of experience as a mission investor. I wrote a paper comparing Needmor’s returns to the returns of a traditional foundation, which was founded by the same family, uses the same investment consultant and has a very similar investment strategy. In the end, I decided not to read my prepared paper. The reason had nothing to do with my conclusions: Needmor in fact outperformed the traditional fund by 4.5% last year, but by only 0.4% over the last five years. My careful analysis revealed the majority of this short-term outperformance was caused by the quality bent of Needmor’s screened equity managers, which basically supports the conclusion that ESG screens are a proxy for good management. This quality bent functions like a hedge, so that one consistent result of Needmor’s mission investing has been to reduce portfolio volatility. No, the reason I decided not to read my paper was that I was embarrassed by its irrelevance. At the conference, I listened to my peers make the case that social (or sustainable or ESG) investing is competitive with the dominant markets and it made me wonder.

Why are we trying to prove that we are as good as the dominant markets? The dominant markets have failed dismally. Needmor did 4.5% better. So what? We still lost 25% of our endowment. We failed in our fiduciary duty and disappointed our grantees and our staff because we had faith in the dominant markets. A generation lost their retirement security, millions lost their jobs and their homes, and the next generation is foregoing or deferring higher education. And we did 4.5% better. Yippee. The word decimated is a Latin military term used to describe an army that has lost 10% of its soldiers. We were all decimated. Why are we talking about a fraction of a point of performance difference within a failed paradigm? That’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to be talking about systemic reform. Let’s look at the paradigm that failed. It can be summarized as: “Unregulated markets are the most efficient allocators of capital and pricers of risk and they will result in the greatest and most sustainable global economic growth.” This was not just a financial paradigm. It underpinned the dominant theories of global development and political progress.

Unregulated markets were supposed to lift the world’s population out of poverty, and this, in turn, was supposed to lead to education, empowerment, and engagement in the political process, which would lead to, “ta da!”, democracy. This entire set of paradigms has failed. Unregulated markets have not only destroyed $12 trillion worth of savings, but they have destabilized emerging economies, erased 10 years of development and created uncertainty, chaos and corruption. They failed utterly, and in the nick of time. The only thing worse than the collapse of the markets would have been their continued success. We all know that maximizing global economic growth is disastrously unsustainable. We were on the brink of resource scarcity in oil, water, rice, wheat, corn and copper when the wheels fell off the car. If they had not fallen off, we would have driven over the cliff. Now at least we are crawling, not speeding, toward environmental disaster. And the dominant paradigm has been discredited. We should celebrate. Pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get to work. The problem is, we don’t have a nice, shiny, broadly accepted, politically feasible, researched and tested, safe new paradigm to pop in like a fluorescent light bulb. I wonder where we will find one? Who will stay up all night for six weeks straight to save us? If we leave the re-regulation of the financial and economic systems to the same people who became tremendously wealthy and powerful by dismantling the old regulations, they will design a system that preserves their tremendous wealth and power. They will spend trillions of dollars of our money putting the wheels back on the car and then they will drive it over the cliff. We can’t allow this to happen. We have to develop a financial system that is safe, secure and rewards equitable and sustainable economic behavior. We can draw on the ideas of the New Deal and Keynes, but there are new wrinkles of difficulty and complexity that have to be addressed: globalisation, extreme inequality, resource scarcity and global warming. I cannot tell you what the solutions are; but I do know that if we succeed we will build a financial system that rewards long-term thinking, internalizes externalities, reduces speculation, rewards sustainability and increases social equity. In other words, we will build a financial system that rewards investors like us.

We need new analysis and new ideas. And we also need to subject these ideas to rigorous critical review. We already know that the unintended consequences of well meaning reform can be disastrous. It was, after all, activist institutional investors who advocated for stock options tied to quarterly returns in order to align management interests with shareholder interests. The lesson is to be careful what you ask for: you just might get it. But ideas alone are not enough. To succeed we will need to build the political power to move a reform agenda that supports equitable and sustainable markets. We will need to hash out our differences, prioritise our agenda, and organise and educate an informed engaged constituency.

We will need to amass more power than the Wall Street lobby. To succeed we’ll need good ideas and good organising. We are all worried about our clients’ portfolios. No one is paying us to research financial market regulation, engage in public advocacy, or organise a coalition. But no one is going to do this for us. There are many ways to contribute to this collective effort. One is the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets at www.sustainablefinancialmarkets.net. Another, that I am involved in, is a coalition of organisations including The Social Investment Forum and the Community Development Finance Institution Coalition called The New Economy Roundtable.

Our purpose is: “To shift the dynamics of public discourse and public policy in the wake of the global economic crisis to highlight structures and solutions that support equitable and sustainable economies.” I hope you will join one of these efforts. Our experience at Needmor is that ordinary people become transformative leaders when they assume personal responsibility for the systemic problems that affect their communities."


Sarah Stranahan is chair of the Needmor Fund, a Toledo, Ohio-based fund that supports community investing.

Comforting poems

In this sensitive emotional moment, I've been finding a lot of comfort in Mario Quintana's poems.
Free translations below the original quotes



A arte de viver é simplesmente a arte de conviver... simplesmente, disse eu? Mas como é difícil!

The art of living is simply the art of co-living... simply, did I say? But how difficult it is!



BILHETE
Se tu me amas, ama-me baixinho
Não o grites de cima dos telhados
Deixa em paz os passarinhos
Deixa em paz a mim!
Se me queres,
enfim,
tem de ser bem devagarinho, Amada,
que a vida é breve, e o amor mais breve ainda...

NOTE
If you love me, love me quietly
Don't scream from the top of the roofs
Leave the birds alone
Leave me alone!
If you want me,
in the end,
it needs to be slowly, my lover,
'cause life is brief, and love is even briefer...



A amizade é um amor que nunca morre.

Friendship is the love that never dies.

A Letter to Mr. Obama from China

Author: Peter Senge
Published on Jan 20th, 2009
http://blogs.solonline.org/users/psenge/blog/

January 12, 2009

On the eve of your inauguration, the world, not just the US is attending to this historic day, perhaps unlike any before in history.

The expectations awaiting you are daunting.

Just last week I received a letter from Andre Beukes, recently retired Commissioner of the South African Police Service. Having lived through another historic transition, he saw powerful parallels between your inauguration and Mr. Mandela coming to office 14 years ago - except that now, “When President Obama moves into the Oval office, he will have to address the incredible task of giving hope to the whole world.”

In a world of unprecedented interdependence, we may continue the conceit that we elect a president of a country. But, in fact, for the U.S. or China or India or Russia, the impacts of our leadership choices reach far beyond our borders. I am sure I do not have to remind you of The Economist magazine’s global internet poll that showed that, although you captured 53% of the US popular vote, you captured over 80 % of their global vote. At no time in history has one country’s presidential election held such meaning for so many.

This seems to me to have one clear implication.

You do not need take on the burden of fixing America’s problems in isolation. Indeed the U.S.’ problems are the world’s problems. The U.S. did not weave the global financial web that shapes investment, and speculation, alone. It did not shape the rules that govern international trade, and massive misallocation of resources toward the wealthy, alone. It did not mold the norms of global consumerism alone. In each of these, U.S. institutions and culture have played a major hand, but hardly left the only handprint. We are not destroying the world’s tropical forests by ourselves, nor species and ecosystems, nor operating unilaterally to steadily worsen the gap between rich and poor. These are the side effects of global industrial expansion driven by systems of investment and commerce that transcend national borders and policies, and these systems will only change through levels of cooperative effort that will be unprecedented.
If ever there was a time for such cooperation it is at hand, not because it is a lofty ideal but an inescapable necessity.

Case in point: climate change, perhaps the archetypal global challenge, also offers a unique opportunity to do just this. Though there are obviously more pressing issues, there are no more important ones. Climate change and the host of related ‘sustainability challenges’ will shape the context for viable economic policies. In countries around the world, people’s views are shifting to no longer passively accept environmental destruction as the inevitable by-product of economic progress. Instead, people are seeing social and environmental damage as the consequences of the wrong products, powered by the wrong energy system, guided by the wrong economic policies. With the Copenhagen climate negotiations looming in December 2009, this year will likely be seen by our children as a turning point in cooperation and collaborative innovation, or a tragically missed opportunity to foster both.

Start with China. I have the good fortune of spending some part of every year in China, and I firmly believe that now is the time for working together on key global challenges like accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels.

Last year, China passed the US as the number one emitter of carbon dioxide. But China’s (gross) manufacturing export flow is over thirty percent of its GDP, almost half of which go to the U.S. So, a large share of China’s greenhouse gas emissions are really contributions to greenhouse gases driven by U.S. businesses and consumer demand. That the emissions are generated outside our boundaries hardly absolves us of responsibility in the matter. Who should be accountable for reducing these emissions when it comes time to commit to global emissions reductions targets in December? Is it the producers alone or the producers and their customers together? (Obviously, a similar argument applies to many other countries who purchase products produced in China, or who purchase services produced India)

So it is disingenuous at the least to point the finger at China and not recognize the three other fingers pointing back at ourselves.

If we approach climate change as a problem created by us all, very different approaches could be devised that would drive collaborative innovation – such as an agreed upon system of carbon labeling that would inform all regarding the embedded carbon in all products. Combined with effective mechanisms for pricing carbon emissions (such as in emerging cap and trade schemes), this could create consistent economic signals linking carbon producers and customers in reducing emissions.

Similarly, both our countries face powerful entrenched political interests aligned behind keeping fossil fuel energy prices artificially low. But businesses and customers alike are awakening to the foolhardiness of these policies. Just as the price of cigarettes hardly reflect their true cost, no one today can think that the low Chinese or US prices of gasoline at the pump or electricity at the socket reflect true cost – neither the costs of US troops in the Middle East nor those, current or prospective, of climate change, which the UK’s Stern report predicted could be comparable to the costs of WWII in the coming decades. Committing to higher fossil energy prices would take immense political courage, but it would create the consistent signals needed to drive innovation in alternatives. (This could be done, for example, by setting a floor under effective prices and taxing the difference if global market prices for fossil fuel energy fall below that floor, using revenues so generated to support investment in energy efficiency, alternative energy, and assisting the poor in adjusting to higher costs.)

And it is the pace and scale of this innovation that will tell the tale – and it is hard to imagine two countries better positioned to co-create this innovation. Together, the markets of these two countries combined for both energy efficiency and alternative energy dwarf the rest of the world. Rising environmentalism is one of the most powerful political forces in China. Rising green entrepreneurialism is one of the most powerful economic forces in the US. (“Cleantech” investment in green energy is already among the largest venture capital flows in the US - some say the largest). No country is better positioned than China to ramp up manufacture of alternative energy, and come down the corresponding cost curves - because of the enormous scale of future energy demand and its equally enormous need for distributed energy production that can slow the tide of mass urbanization (and Westernization) in favor of more balanced and distributed economic development. Just as the U.S. will need to create millions of Greentech jobs to reduce the carbon footprint of our urban and suburban population, almost three quarters of China’s population is still rural and will never be efficiently well served by centralized coal fired power plants.

In a nutshell, there is immense potential for partnerships between our two countries to accelerate the inevitable transition to a regenerative economy. This is what the Chinese call the “circular economy,” one modeled on the principles of the larger living world, versus the linear “take-make-waste” industrial-age paradigm.

It is understandable at times like this for a new President to call upon Americans to step forward and contribute to solving the problems we face. But, I also believe it is a time to reach out to other nations and say that now is the time when we must all step forward to solve the problems that we have all created.

The world has gotten used to an arrogant America. Rather than a sign of weakness, asking for help and partnership might just be the signal of hope that the world is looking for.

Peter Senge is a faculty member at MIT, the founding chair of SoL, Society for Organizational Learning and Chair of SoL China.

He is the author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization and co-author of The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World

Sustainability Online Games

I'm doing a research for a sustainable business online training I'm designing for the bank's employees and came across some interesting free online courses.

The Vinyl game represents a PVC manufacturer. The player should decide on what industrial plants to invest and what sustainability measures to adopt, while managing the cash flow and suffering stakeholders' pressures. I recommend it.

The McDonald's game doesn't allow as many options, but it has at least two merits: promote a more systemic view of the food chain and bring up the power of democracy and decentralised criticism. There's basically no way one can do well!

Diffusion of Innovations

Have you ever felt your organisation doesn't see some obvious trends?

Do you think changes take a lot longer than they could / should?


Everett M. Rogers, pioneer of Diffusion of Innovations theory, author of the second-most-cited book in the social sciences, concluded in 1962:

adopters of any new innovation or idea can be categorized as

innovators - 2.5%
early adopters - 13.5%
early majority - 34%
late majority - 34%
laggards - 16%


Good news is: by the time you conquer 1/3 of the early majority it's virtually impossible to stop the wave of change.

The animals save the planet

Because of work, I have been involved in a lot of baby talk recently. Let me explain: 4 out of 9 people in my team are either pregnant or had a baby in the last 3 months.

On top of that, there are 2 Mums and 2 Dads of kids up to 4 years old.

As they exchange experiences, ask advice to each other and comment on the latest cartoons, I learn interesting lessons for the future :-)

The series of short cartoons I want to share is 2 year-old Isabelle's hit. Using a simple and funny language, it talks about some of the most important environmental issues.

Here comes Isabelle's favourite:



And this is the one I really like:



You can find all the others at http://www.animalssavetheplanet.com. Engage the kids you know, too!

"Best job in the world" on paradise island

An Australian state is offering internationally what it calls "the best job in the world" - earning a top salary for lazing around a beautiful tropical island for six months.

The job pays 150,000 Australian dollars (105,000 US dollars) and includes free airfares from the winner's home country to Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef, Queensland's state government announced on Tuesday.



In return, the "island caretaker" will be expected to stroll the white sands, snorkel the reef, take care of "a few minor tasks" -- and report to a global audience via weekly blogs, photo diaries and video updates.

The successful applicant, who will stay rent-free in a three-bedroom beach home complete with plunge pool and golf buggy, must be a good swimmer, excellent communicator and be able to speak and write English.

"They'll also have to talk to media from time to time about what they're doing so they can't be too shy and they'll have to love the sea, the sun, the outdoors," said acting state Premier Paul Lucas.

"The fact that they will be paid to explore the islands of the Great Barrier Reef, swim, snorkel and generally live the Queensland lifestyle makes this undoubtedly the best job in the world."

Lucas said the campaign was part of a drive to protect the state's 18 billion Australian dollar a year tourism industry during the tough economic climate caused by the global financial meltdown.

"Traditional tourism advertising just doesn't cut it sometimes and we are thinking outside the box by launching this campaign."

Queensland Tourism Minister Desley Boyle said some people might question whether it was risky to let an unknown person become an unofficial tourism spokesperson for the state.

"I think the biggest risk will be that the successful candidate won't want to go home at the end of the six months," she said.

"This is a legitimate job which is open to anyone and everyone."

Applications are open until February 22nd. Eleven shortlisted candidates will be flown to Hamilton Island in early May for the final selection process and the six month contract will commence on July 1st.

Source: Yahoo! News

Green Passport

For the ones taking holidays this summer / winter (depending on your hemisphere), it's worth it checking the UNEP's Green Passport guide for tips on how to reduce your footprint while you enjoy your trip the most!