Cross-posted with Advocacy
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Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts
Tuesday, 19 May 2015
Part 4: 'Slaving Away' outfall and fall-out : Woolworths admits moral responsibiity at Senate Inquiry : still refusing to meet workers and the National Union of Workers
Tuesday, 6 August 2013
Joe Camilleri of La Trobe University in conversation: Dialogue in diversity - a moral compass for troubled times
Dialogue in Diversity -
A Moral Compass for Troubled Times
An Open Conversation
with Emeritus Professor Joseph Camilleri OAM,
La Trobe University
Sunday 11 August
3.00 pm – 4.30 pm
Nunawading Uniting Church, 355 Whitehorse Road
For over 40 years, Prof Camilleri has researched, written, lectured and actively engaged around issues of culture, religion and dialogue. As founding director of the La Trobe’s Centre for Dialogue, he conducted a number of dialogues in conflict situations both in Australia
This conversation will be introduced by Rev John Cranmer. He will ask Prof Camilleri how Australians are grappling with the challenges of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity at home and abroad. Does dialogue offer a way forward? If so, how?
Gold Coin for entry
Café discussion opportunity to follow.
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Thursday, 26 July 2012
Xstrata and Glencore - certification of the social licence - business ethics or lack of them
On 20 May 2011, The Times Business Editor, Ian King, voiced little doubt that “small” investors, at least, should steer clear of carving out a stake for themselves in this particular golden calf.
In a remarkably robust comment, King damned Glencore as "...a business with dubious morals. It trades grain amid food riots and has been accused of profiteering and environmental offences in numerous poor and war-torn countries”. He went on: "Most of those signing up to buy shares in Glencore's flotation are major Middle Eastern and Far Eastern investors. Few of the traditional City institutions will touch the shares with a bargepole. The question is, should you?"
^^^^^
I posted yesterday about goings on in a proposed merger between Xstrata and Glencore - particularly involving a major shareholder, Qatar Holding. To-day The Network is having a closer look at Glencore.
Are money and morals mutually exclusive when money is large, omnipresent, and the clear focus of the actors involved? This question can be asked of many corporate players but, in researching Glencore, questions of ethics and morality come up time and again - across the globe. I think Australians should look closely at this corporation because, if the much mooted merger of Glencore and Xstrata comes into play after meetings in September, Glencore and Xstrata will become the third largest minerals and mining company in the world and a rival for BHPBilliton and Rio Tinto.
Check these links below
In Australia, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission has looked at the proposed merger and won't intervene to stop it. What a surprise!
Seems to me that we need a body that can look at corporate ethics and whether corporations are worthy of receiving social licence/certification to carry out their operations in Australia. Sometimes one thinks it would be just as easy for Hitler Inc to come into the country and build gas ovens. Why do nations everywhere have to open wide their doors to corporate cowboys simply because they are now wearing city suits and steering, not horses, but fancy motor vehicles?
Bolivia has nationalised Glencore mines there. This is part of an overall economic policy carried out by the Bolivian Government under President Evo Morales. Read more about this here.
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Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Thinking again before doing coffee at Gloria Jean's - the human rights of others are of little importance there
For a clearer picture please go to the original Facebook entry.
In adddition to the factors outlined in the graphic above,
I would point out that Gloria Jean's DOES NOT serve Fair Trade Coffee.
Gloria Jean's promotes coffee from the Rainforest Alliance
which is also supported by McDonald's.
Please decide for yourself.
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Saturday, 10 December 2011
Coming together: the military pimping of military women
It is strange how the synchronicity of what comes across one's path in close conjunction turns one's thoughts.
This week there has been a certain conjunction in:
Freeman Dyson's review of the Daniel Kahneman book, How to Dispel your illusions.
Geraldine Brooks' Third Boyer Lecture, At Home in the World.
Reports of the court martial investigating allegations a naval officer aboard an Australian warship repeatedly spanked the bare buttocks of a junior female sailor in the shadow of events in relation to sexual abuse at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA).
Dyson's review of Kahneman's work begins with insights into military decision-making. Military decision-making in the bureaucratic culture in which it exists is a mystery to many, not least to those within the military itself. It is often costly of lives and resources in quite profligate ways.
Brooks' Third Boyer Lecture gives full flight to her feminism. She tries to explain her views of women, war and feminism not least among these is consideration of a woman's right to fight and die as as a soldier for her country. In this stream of consciousness, Brooks speaks of meeting Janis Karpinsky early in Karpinsky's career. She speaks of the betrayal of military women by their colleagues across cultures.
Brooks points out that Janis Karpinsky - the only senior scapegoat connected to the torture at Abu Ghraib - was demoted and disgraced while male colleagues involved went onto develop and prosper in their military careers.
Brooks reports US servicewomen's role in the interrogation of Muslim prisoners by performing lewd behaviour. She points out that these actions have been officially reviewed and sanctioned. Brooks accusation is strong:
"The US military has sunk to pimping its female personnel."
Women, Brooks sums up, should approach the military life only with "a pair of tongs and a hazmat suit".
And while we hear news of elsewhere, how are things on the Australian homefront? Tawdry is one word for it. Demeaning is another as we hear of the spanking court-martial and actions at ADFA.
All this brings me to ask - what to do? Women have demanded and earned the right to pursue their careers of choice. Women have demanded the right of sexual freedom, a right men have always taken as their own. How then does a liberal society respond when women are abused, when freedom of choice is short-circuited?
My beginning suggestion is that we put away the tut-tuts or guffaws. What we need to develop within our civil society is a policy of no tolerance for such behaviour, such decision-making. We need to work at developing a society in which, when we hear of such behaviour, the perpetrators run the risk of becoming socially, politically, and financially outcast themselves.
There have to be such community sanctions in place that the perpetrators - no matter how high within the military, no matter the skewed view of what military situations might demand - know with certainty that they are indulging in high risk behaviour.
Human society has always functioned in this way - inclusion, exclusion; reward and sanctions. At this time in the 21st century, many human societies across the world are displaying a clear lack of moral compass. There is a significant inability to treat others with the respect which we would claim for ourselves. It is being writ large in financial collapse - but this could not have occurred without widespread individual moral collapse at its core.
In Australia, the settler contingent have always carried on like a colonised people ready to imitate and adopt the actions and attitudes of its "betters" in Europe or the USA. In the USA, we are currently looking at the religious co-option of one side of politics. Such religious co-option has widespread imitation in Australia. One thing we must remember is that religion
morality; religion does not equal morality. Lack of religion does not automatically mean lack of morality. Without entering into the depths of discussion about the cultural relativism of morality, I would suggest two things to bear in mind. Firstly, that the Christian's Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would be done by is found, in one form or another, across many religions and cultures. Here is evidence of a basic way forward in human society. Secondly, Australia has/had developed an ethos which may be fast eroding away. We have, in white culture, developed the concepts of being fair dinkum or, in Aboriginal parlance, being a true fella, and of giving everyone a fair go or an equal chance.
Being fair dinkum, giving everyone a fair go will take us a long way to keeping the moral compass of Australian civil society firmly in place. We need also to take heed of what our Aboriginal compatriots teach us, that without each other; without family and without culture and country we are empty shells.
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