Tag Archives: business

Drop the Harpoon! Whale-Watching is Good Business

Photo via TopNews New research into the whale-watching industry is confirming what we’ve known all along–that the world’s largest mammal is worth more alive than it is dead . Sure, there may be a dwindling number of folks salivating at the thought of whale, think… Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Drop the Harpoon! Whale-Watching is Good Business

Wall Street Tabloid Asks CNBC Anchor ‘How Does It Feel To Be A MILF?’

The editor of the Wall Street e-tabloid Dealbreaker on Wednesday actually asked CNBC anchor Trish Regan, “How does it feel to be classified as a MILF?” For those unfamiliar with the term — as was Regan! — it means “Mom I’d Like to,” well, let’s say have sex with. Nice thing to ask an Emmy-nominated 37-year-old mother of two, wouldn’t you agree? Yet that wasn’t even the worst of Bess Levin’s questions (Levin in bold, h/t TVNewser ): Question number 2: How do you feel you measured up next to Mandy and her assets? I think I held my own. For those that don’t watch CNBC, Amanda Drury was originally brought over from CNBC Asia to fill in for Melissa Francis who was going on maternity leave. When Levin asked about Mandy’s “assets,” she wasn’t referring to her stock portfolio if you catch my drift. As such, Regan was being questioned about how her bra size compared with Drury’s. Seem a little childish to you? Wait. It gets worse:  Question number 3: If you had to: Charlie Gasparino or Dennis Kneale? Killing yourself is not an acceptable answer. I think I would have to kill myself. Or be on life-support. And then? Who would it be? You think it would still be appealing for them? Dennis Kneale and Charlie Gasparino? Yes, one of them would definitely still go for it, if not both. Question number 4: Just so we can be fair, in that same vein, if you had to get down and dirty with one of the anchorettes on CNBC, whom would you choose? See this question is just as hard as the last but for the opposite reason. I’m not into women but if I were it would be really difficult. We have a lot of beautiful ladies at CNBC. Add it all up, and Regan was asked: how she feels about young men wanting to have sex with her; which guy on her network she’d like to have sex with, and; which woman.  All of this raises a number of questions such as what is this Dealbreaker, and why would a serious journalist want to have anything to do with it? Fortunately, fashion magazine Elle did an article on Levin in April offering us some insights: The 25-year-old editor of Dealbreaker.com, the financial industry’s online tabloid that reports on corporate scandals and insider gossip, some of which she overhears at happy hour in the finance world’s watering holes, has become a mustread on Wall Street. Posting nine times a day, she’s been known to scoop the mainstream business media and retains a fiercely loyal following who seem to have an infinite appetite for her biting, off-kilter commentary about the money business- you don’t see The Wall Street Journal running headlines like “Neil Barofsky Will Cut a Bitch” or “Spotted: Ruth Madoff Getting Her Tan On.” Dealbreaker, which draws 300,000 unique visitors a month, has posted hedge funds’ for-investor-eyes-only marketing materials, which three years ago sparked a lawsuit that named Levin and Dealbreaker’s publisher; they later settled. During the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch merger last year, Merrill employees depended on Levin to report what their company wasn’t telling them.  The New York Observer recently wrote of Levin: Because of someone else’s car accident and a physics-class coincidence, Bess Levin is the most important young Wall Street blogger in the country. But Dealbreaker has a certain crackle-a taste for picking out and serving up the day’s fascinating little nuggets of finance news. It’s a must-read.  John Friedman wrote about Levin earlier this month: Levin, at only 25 years old, is reputed to be the scourge of Wall Street. Clearly, she gets a kick out of poking holes in the pompous image of Wall Street professionals, to the delight of journalists who don’t have the same cleverness — or freedom — to write like her. The media universe embraces Levin as a symbol of the Really New Journalism (sorry, Tom Wolfe), someone whose job description is to lampoon the establishment and entertain the masses with both biting and good-natured sarcasm. Levin has a knack for writing irreverent, witty and insightful stuff. But what makes proudly hard-bitten journalists look at her in something approaching awe is her precocious age. Levin is not too far removed from attending Amherst College or, even high school in suburban New Jersey. That seems like part of the attraction. But Friedman made a more salient observation: Much of Levin’s success results from the states of the journalism and Wall Street landscapes. The rise of the Internet has attracted a large number of young readers who would sooner dig a ditch than buy a newspaper or a magazine at a newsstand. This situation has forced the nation’s once-stodgy media companies to dig deep to tape [sic] young, adventurous writers, who are at home on the Web and can communicate with their peers. Which likely explains the need for the tawdry, but why would someone like Regan, who just gave birth to twin daughters, want to associate with someone who views her website’s approach as “Wall Street torture porn?” It’s certainly not for the exposure, as despite Elle’s fawning, 300,000 unique reads a month is nothing; NewsBusters typically does over 5 million. As for the whole peer thing, one doesn’t imagine Regan at 37, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, views Levin as her contemporary. With this in mind, although Dealbreaker devotees might have loved these sex-related questions — according to Levin, they came from readers — I’m having a hard time understanding why the seemingly conservative Regan put herself in this position. Isn’t this degrading to women looking to be taken seriously in the business world and not be treated as sex objects? Or is this the state of modern feminism?   As for Levin, who clearly must be doing something right given her glowing reviews, one has to wonder why someone of her intellectual capacity feels the need to occasionally wander into the gutter. If she really has the eyes and ears of hedge fund managers and financial sector CEOs, can’t she keep their attention without the smut?  As the father of a sixteen-year-old girl, I certainly hope so. 

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Wall Street Tabloid Asks CNBC Anchor ‘How Does It Feel To Be A MILF?’

Get Ready for .xxx

The shadowy Masonic cabal that controls the internet will likely approve the “.xxx” domain name system—intended for porn sites and M

Drake Says Original ‘Light It Up’ Verse Was ‘Way Harder’

In MTV’s ‘Better Than Good Enough’ documentary, Drizzy is seen recording new rhymes for Jay-Z-assisted track. By Jayson Rodriguez, with additional reporting by Shaheem Reid Drake Photo: MTV During MTV’s “Drake: Better Than Good Enough” documentary, the Toronto MC is shown making last-minute adjustments to two songs the day before his debut album, Thank Me Later, is set to be mixed and mastered. One of those tracks, the Jay-Z-assisted “Light Up,” features Drake’s last-minute rhymes. “I like these bars better than the other bars,” he tells his road manager after laying down the new verse and listening to a playback. ” ‘Cause the other bars are so, like, ‘Oh, it’s kiddish.’ This is, like, I really think I’m the sh–, and then Jay comes and puts me in my place.” In an interview with MTV2’s “Sucker Free,” Drake revealed that his original verse was more aggressive and that he used it on a collaboration with a certain Kanye West prot

MRC’s Dan Gainor Responds to Gay Parenting TV on CNN

If you’ve noticed more gay characters with children on television and in movies, you’re not alone. CNN has noticed too, and they’re calling it “the new normal.” In a June 24 segment, Corinne Water reported that homosexuals “hope TV shows like ‘Modern Family,’ ‘Glee’ and the new film ‘The Kids are Alright’ represent a growing trend in Hollywood storylines: gay parents.” The segment featured one opponent to Hollywood ’s normalization of gay parenting: Media Research Center Vice President for Business & Culture Dan Gainor. “ Hollywood has done a great deal of work causing acceptance in American culture for homosexuality,” Gainor said. He added later, “Again, what they’re trying to do is normalize something that a lot of people, certainly in those states, don’t want to normalize.” But Winter’s segment presented Gainor’s view as the abnormal one (even showing his picture in black-and-white for an unexplained reason). Actress Julianne Moore, who stars in “The Kids are Alright,” argued that “the entertainment world reflects popular culture. I think that this was happening in the world. So what you’re seeing in television and in film is what’s going on in our society at large, which is a great thing.” Winter closed the segment by asking a gay couple if they thought they were normal. To absolutely no one’s surprise, they said they were normal parents, and Winter left it at that. However, Winter didn’t mention statistics that suggest Hollywood is not reflecting what’s going on in society, or that gay parenting is not normal. According to Colage , an “national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more” gay parent, Census data found that that “more than 250,000 people under the age of 18 [were] living with unmarried same-sex couples” in 2000.   Colage argues the number of children with gay parents is higher, but acknowledges that other estimates are speculative. Assume for a moment that a full 250,000 children live with gay parents. They would represent 0.003 percent of the 72.4 million children counted in the 2000 Census. The number itself is extremely small, and it’s not even close to proportionate. Commonly cited estimates guess 10 percent of the population is homosexual. (The Centers for Disease Control found the number was closer to 4.1 percent for each gender in 2002.) CNN anchor Kyra Phillips used the segment to tease an upcoming special, “ Gary and Tony Have a Baby .” Soledad O’Brien’s one-hour special highlights what Phillips called the “struggle” of two gay man trying to have a biological child of their own.

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MRC’s Dan Gainor Responds to Gay Parenting TV on CNN

Did Ed Schultz’s Construction Company Get Stimulus Money?

While defending the Obama administration as a champion for small business owners, MSNBC host Ed Schultz revealed that his construction company more than doubled its number of employees in the past year – thanks to the stimulus bill. “We’ve gone from eight employees to twenty employees in the past year, because of the stimulus package,” he said of his construction company. “We’ve put some people back to work. There is some growth.” Schultz made that revelation as a guest on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” Wednesday morning. In a segment of the show where he was discussing corporations shipping jobs overseas and skimping on benefits to regular workers and labor union members, Schultz stepped up and defended President Obama. “This President, and this administration, has done more for small business than any other President has in the last thirty years,” he claimed. “There’s more tax incentives on the table right now, there’s more incentives for small businesses to go out and do things, to hire – we never saw this under any other President.” Schultz whined that tax incentives for big corporations hurt the American middle class by providing opportunities for them to send jobs overseas. He credited President Obama with providing opportunities for small businesses to thrive in the United States. However, Schultz also lamented that certain Obama administration policies, such as increasing taxes on foreign earnings, ending secret ballots in union elections, EPA regulation of greenhouse gasses and restrictions on oil are “pro-corporate and anti-worker.” With corporations attacking labor, cutting wages, and going after pensions, Schultz claimed that age discrimination is taking place in the business world, and that “we’ve now developed this culture that it’s not good to pay anybody.”         The transcript of the segment, which aired on June 23 at 9:30 a.m. EDT, is as follows: ED SCHULTZ: Now we’re at a crossroads in this country. We have to make a determination if we believe that having 10 percent unemployment for a long period of time is the direction that we want to go. Do we understand that the social pressure and the economic pressure that that’s going to put on the country? I don’t think that’s where Americans want to go. And I think that we’re going to see a real surge of buy American, a loyalty to American products, because I think the middle class folks in this country have seen exactly what has happened, this attack on labor that has taken place, that all of a sudden it’s okay to reduce wages, or attack people’s pensions. And we’re also seeing in this country right now age discrimination. Because there’s a race to the bottom line. We’ve now developed this culture that it’s not good to pay anybody. And we have to have somewhat of a push for economic patriotism, in reinvestment in people. We have to understand that people make the difference. And if we don’t value that at every level, we’re not going to be the country that we can be. We’re not going to be the country that we were at one time. We still can achieve greatness, but we gotta get the big money out of politics, we’ve gotta get what is destroying the middle class in this country, and reinvigorate this country with breaks for the middle class, and a real focus on job creation. And I think the President’s trying to do that, but — of course the way the Congress is right now, all the bickering that’s going on, and there’s really no bipartisanship to speak of that addresses any of this — I think we’re in for a long struggle here, a real long struggle. (…) HOST: Mr. Schultz, the Wall Street Journal echoes that caller’s sentiment. They have a headline that echoes the caller’s sentiment that business groups say the Obama administration is hostile toward jobs. And they have a list of grievances: Increased taxes on foreign earnings, stalled free trade agreements, shareholder rights to nominate directors, end to secret ballots in union elections, expanded damages for pay discrimination, EPA regulation of greenhouse gasses, and restrictions on oil. ED SCHULTZ: Those were all pro-corporate, and anti-worker. This President, and this administration, has done more for small business than any other President has in the last thirty years. There’s more tax incentives on the table right now, there’s more incentives for small businesses to go out and do things, to hire – we never saw this under any other President. He’s doing anything he possibly can. But the money is tight. The money is very tight. And until we loosen up the lending practices in this country, we’re not going to have – and until small businesses have access to capital, we’re not going to see this turn around. The President is doing everything he possibly can. In fact, the Republicans aren’t even matching him on any of this stuff. They think it’s all about the corporations and all about the top two percent. In the book, I document – and I want this lady to read this book, and come back and tell me if I’m wrong. The number of foreign countries that are operating in this country that don’t pay tax – does she think that’s a good thing? Is it a good thing for corporations not to pay their fair share? Now I’m not here to say that all corporations are bad. They do hire people. But they’ve also shipped a lot of jobs overseas, because we have set the table for them to do that with tax incentives that have come back to hurt the great American middle class which built this country. So when does the little guy get a break? Now I’m a small businessman. I have my own broadcast company, and I also have a construction company. I can tell you about all the things that you have to put together to make a construction company work. We’ve gone from eight employees to twenty employees in the past year, because of the stimulus package. We’ve put some people back to work. There is some growth. There’s incentives on the table for my employees. And so, you know, I don’t have to do this. I could just go fishing at the lake. But we’ve got to have some type of leadership at every level of the economy, and those who have lived the good life, and those who have had the fortune of making a few dollars to put it back into the kids, to put it back into the youth of the country, to care about the infrastructure again. And I don’t see corporations doing that. I see them caring about the foreign countries and getting cheap labor. Well you know what cheap labor’s going to do? Cheap labor’s going to take this country down. And the disposable income is starting to rot away for Americans.   

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Did Ed Schultz’s Construction Company Get Stimulus Money?

African Lion Burgers Served at Arizona Restaurant as Part of Its World Cup Promotion

By Annalyn Censky, staff reporterJune 23, 2010: 5:19 PM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — A small Arizona restaurant found itself at the center of a nationwide backlash that included a bomb threat after it announced plans to offer lion burgers this week as part of a World Cup promotion. But following the supply chain back to the mom-and-pop butcher that processed the alleged lion meat turns up an even more bizarre tale. The story started when Cameron Selogie, owner of Il Vinaio restaurant in Mesa, Ariz., bought about 10 pounds of so-called African lion meat, planning to mix it with ground beef to make burgers honoring the FIFA World Cup's South African location. Selogie sent an e-mail newsletter to his restaurant's patrons advertising the special. That newsletter — which was the sole publicity Selogie had planned — exploded into a media blitz when one of the e-mail recipients turned out to be an animal activist. She spread word to a local TV station, and the news has since circled the globe, even garnering a brief write-up in the online version of London's Daily Telegraph. Lion burgers are an attention-grabbing idea, but it raises the question: How, exactly, does an Arizona restaurant manage to get its hands on African lion meat? Welcome to the mysterious world of back-alley exotic meat purveyance. Selogie said he bought the meat through a Phoenix distributor, Gourmet Imports-Wild Game — a one-man operation owned by Rick Worrilow. Selogie says he did his research, and was told that the meat came from a free-range farm in Illinois that is regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, Worrilow, who essentially serves as a middleman between farms, meat processors and restaurants, also said the meat came from a completely legal plant in Illinois. And even though he didn't know the name of that plant, Worrilow said he was confident that the meat was inspected by federal regulators. So where's this supposed African lion farm in Illinois? Well, here's one clue: When the meat arrived at Il Vinaio on Tuesday evening, Selogie said it came in packaging with the name “Czimer's Game & Sea Foods.” Czimer isn't a free-range farm. It's a butcher shop located just outside of Chicago in Homer Glen, Ill. Lions, ligers and bears … Czimer's website advertises standard wild game: pheasants, quail, ducks, venison, buffalo and so on. But then, sprinkled through the product list, some wilder offerings pop up. Like llama leg roasts. Or camel cutlets. And African lion meat. You can snag it in shoulder roast, steak, tenderloin or burger form — or, for a bargain, try the ribs at $10 a pound. So where does Richard Czimer, the company's owner, get these lions? The meat is the byproduct of a skinning operation owned by another man, Czimer said in an interview with CNNMoney.com. He declined to name that gentleman. “This man buys and sells animals for the skin, and when I need something and he has ability to get it, I will bargain for the meat. It's a byproduct,” he said. And where does that mystery man get the lions? “I wouldn't have any idea,” said Czimer, who operates a small retail store in addition to his wholesale business. “He has his sources, and I do not infringe on his business, just as he does not infringe on mine.” He's willing to take a hands-off approach: “Do you question where chickens come from when you go to Brown's Chicken or Boston Market?” he asked. Czimer's exotic-meat dealings have landed him in hot water before. Back in 2003, Chicago newspapers covered his conviction and six-month prison sentence for selling meat from federally protected tigers and leopards. Czimer admitted to purchasing the carcasses of 16 tigers, four lions, two mountain lions and one liger — a tiger-lion hybrid — which were skinned, butchered and sold as “lion meat,” for a profit of more than $38,000. His supply chain may be murky, but like the Arizona restaurateur and the meat salesman, he expressed total certainty that his lion meat is USDA-approved and thoroughly inspected by regulators before it reaches his processing plant. But here's a twist: The USDA says it doesn't inspect lions bred for meat. That's the job of the Food and Drug Administration. Is it legal to eat lions? Yes, according to the FDA's communications team. The African lion isn't currently a federally protected endangered species and it qualifies as a game meat, FDA spokesman Michael Herndon said in an e-mail. While the African lion is not considered endangered by U.S. regulators, it is classified as “threatened” by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, an international protection agreement. As for Czimer, his shop is officially registered with the FDA and has been inspected by state regulators, Heardon said. Meanwhile, back in Arizona, Selogie is taking the protests in stride. He plans to have bins of ice water outside for picketers who brave Arizona's 100-degree heat to protest as he serves up the burgers on Wednesday and Thursday night. “I do feel bad that people are so concerned about this. But for most people, this is the king of the jungle and that's the only reason they can give me for their concern,” he said. “We're not doing anything to endanger the species.” To top of page added by: EthicalVegan

Leaked Draft of G20 Decisions Shows Commitment on Climate Change, Clean Energy

The G20 at an earlier meeting The WWF has leaked a document that is called “Preamble, Context and Decisions – June 11, 2010” for the G20 Conference happening this weekend in Fortress Toronto. Key environmental takeaways include that they will do what they say they will do, something Canada in particular has not been good at: We are determined to be accountable for the commitments we have made, and will instruct our Ministers and officials to take all necessary steps to implement them fully within agreed timelines. But it gets better, with some commitments regarding clean energy and climate change: … Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Leaked Draft of G20 Decisions Shows Commitment on Climate Change, Clean Energy

Why Hasn’t Racism Been Blamed For Obama’s Poor Response to the Oil Spill?

When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans in 2005, numerous media members blamed racism for President Bush’s supposedly poor response to the disaster. According to LexisNexis, there were almost 1,000 reports in the nine weeks following the storm’s passage through the Gulf of Mexico that tied racism to the government’s post-hurricane strategy. Five years later, as oil slams the same region and polls show the public actually more unhappy with the response to this crisis than they were after Katrina hit, no such nefarious connection is being espoused. Why? Consider the media firestorm the following remark by rapper Kanye West set off just a few days after the hurricane hit New Orleans (video follows with transcript and commentary): I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they’re looting. See a white family, it says they’re looking for food. And you know that it’s been five days because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I’ve tried to turn away from the TV, because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before I’ve even given a donation. So now I’m calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help with the set up the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they have given them permission to go down and shoot us…George Bush doesn’t care about black people. Moments after this was uttered on live television, CNN’s Larry King asked guest Jesse Jackson about it: LARRY KING, CNN: Jesse, I understand that Kanye West, a rapper at the NBC telethon tonight, unscripted, said that President Bush, George Bush does not care about black people. Do you have that feeling? JESSE JACKSON: Well, he responded mighty late and mighty slow. There was one response to the tsunami and some years ago to the — a response to the Armenian earthquake crisis, but he came in five days late, with platitudes. And in the case of 9/11, he came in two days later and embraced all those who were involved. There’s a sense of alienation, a sense of distance, and we don’t feel good about it. I hope that there will be renewed commitment, not to just involve Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton, but why not involve people like Congressman Bennie Thompson from Mississippi and Cynthia Cleo Fields (ph) and Senator Bigenfiggis (ph). We… KING: But you don’t… JACKSON: … ought to have a sense of being a part of this, and we’re not. KING: You don’t think he doesn’t care? JACKSON: Well, he does not show it. And that’s the — that’s the rub. And we need to know, we need to have access for dialogue, and we don’t have it. CNN was all over this story doing numerous segments about it in the coming days, but the supposedly most trusted name in news was certainly not alone in advancing this truly disgraceful theory. All three broadcast network news divisions reported this possible connection as did most American newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, etc. Magazines also did stories about what the disaster said of race relations in this country. The disgusting notion that Bush’s response was due to racism was espoused for years by press members and still is to this very day. Potentially even worse, this assertion helped make Bush a lame duck less than a year into his final term while assisting the Democrats to take back Congress in 2006 as well as the White House in 2008. As a result, this ugly contention will likely be a part of our 43rd President’s legacy unless sane minds in the future fight to counter it.   Yet, no such connection to the government’s pathetic response to the current disaster in the very same region is being made. Why?  Consider that a recent CBS News/New York Times poll found: Just 32 percent say Mr. Obama has a clear plan to deal with the oil leak, while 59 percent (including 64 percent of Gulf coast residents) say he does not. The numbers are not much better among those who watched the president’s Oval Office speech on the spill last week, with 35 percent of that group saying he has a clear plan and 56 percent saying he does not. If Bush was still President, would media blame racism for his lack of a plan? As the answer seems an almost certain “Yes,” why is that?  Regardless of the reason, the press would be dead wrong just as they were about Bush’s response to Katrina. Despite their assertions, whatever the White House did or didn’t do after that hurricane hit had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the race of those effected. That was a disgusting assertion back then that should never have been made or advanced by anyone in our media. BUT, if they were going to make such a connection then, and would if Bush was still in the White House, that they’re not espousing it now despite how absurd it would be makes the way they treated our 43rd President even more reprehensible.   Less so is the lack of curiosity about what is the reason for Obama’s pathetic handling of this crisis. Former New York City major Rudy Giuliani said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week that the response to this oil spill would have been swifter and better coordinated if it happened in the Atlantic Ocean and was impacting the East Coast. Assuming he’s right — and I believe he is — why would that be? Should government’s response to a disaster relate to what states are impacted by it? Such does seem to be the case with the current Administration which seemed quite disinterested in the recent devastating floods in Tennessee. Not surprisingly, the press also largely ignored that disaster. So what gives here? Are some people in this country entitled to greater federal assistance in an emergency than others? Aren’t we all Americans, or are some inherently more so? Finally, if folks in the media believe as I do that this response would have been different if the spill was battering East Coast beaches with oil, where are the questions and the investigations into why that is, or is such curiosity only acceptable when a Republican is in the White House?

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Why Hasn’t Racism Been Blamed For Obama’s Poor Response to the Oil Spill?

Green Eyes On: Overcoming the BP Disaster and Others Like It

Photo via: Komo News. Guest blogger Sara Snow is a green lifestyle expert and board member for Discovery’s 24/7 future-forward network Planet Green. I recently got an email about a “life architect,” Nick Kolesnikoff and his book Your Turn: Empower Yourself to Change . The email offered tips on overcoming disasters like the BP oil spill, a few of which I thought were worth repeating. Here are five tips from … Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Green Eyes On: Overcoming the BP Disaster and Others Like It