In 2020, Edge Cable Holdings, a Facebook subsidiary, was burying a new fiber-optic cable into the seabed near Tierra Del Mar, Oregon. Working beneath a rugged mixture of basalt rock mounds, unconsolidated sands, and sandstone bedrock, the company’s drilling operation went awry. Stalled out, they ditched their metal pipes, drilling fluids, and other construction materials in the ocean: Out of sight, out of mind.

When Oregon’s Department of State Lands learned of the abandonment, they ordered Edge Cable Holdings and Facebook (now Meta) to pay a fine. But the damage was done. Two sinkholes formed along the installation path and most of the materials will remain lodged in the seafloor forever. These items, and thousands of gallons of drilling fluid, pose an ongoing risk to the surrounding seafloor ecosystem. Despite public outrage, the company returned to complete the cable in 2021, with debris from the first attempt still lodged in the seabed.

The cable was not the first to slither into Oregon’s stretch of the Pacific Ocean, and it’s by no means the last. Big technology companies including Amazon, China Mobile, and Google are flocking to Oregon’s coastline to land transpacific fiber-optic cables. Most recently in August 2023, the Department of State Lands approved a 9,500-mile fiber-optic cable connecting Singapore, Guam, and the United States.

What has transformed Oregon into an undersea cable hotspot—and how is the installation process affecting a vibrant ocean ecosystem? The explanation resides in tax breaks, swift permitting processes, cheap energy, vast amounts of open land for data centers, and a historical carelessness for the environment shared by the state and tech companies alike.

Fiber-optic cables transmit data with pulses of light through thin glass fibers. In 2022, they provided over 98 percent of the world’s internet services and international phone calls. There are more than 745,000 miles of submarine fiber-optic cables in operation around the world—that’s enough cable to wrap around the Earth’s equator more than 29 times. It’s the work of cables, not satellites, that connect us on a global scale.

Although undersea cables seem to be torn from the pages of a futuristic science fiction novel, they aren’t a new technology. The first functional telegraph cables crossed the Atlantic seabed in the 1860s.

The Pacific, a wider and deeper ocean basin and therefore more difficult to wire, received its first transoceanic cable in 1902. By the early 1900s, the global seafloor hosted around 200,000 miles of telegraph cables. And by the 1950s, that number reached nearly 500,000 miles of telephone and telegraph cables, with fiber-optic cables first joining the mix in the 1980s.

Back then, many transpacific cables landed in California, Washington, and British Columbia, where they could link up with transportation hubs and industrial centers on land. That began to change in 1991, when Oregon landed its first transpacific fiber-optic cable. Called the North Pacific Cable, the privately owned line connected Oregon to Alaska and Japan. In the three decades since, the state has welcomed a new fiber-optic cable every four or five years, in tandem with new data centers—large, high-security buildings that store rows of servers. These servers host the internet’s millions of websites.

There are significant onshore incentives for cable owners to land their lines in Oregon. Oregon’s “enterprise zones” tax-exemption program allows individual towns to negotiate property tax breaks for big construction projects, thereby saving companies millions of dollars each year. In exchange for the tax breaks, tech companies provide a small influx of jobs and tax revenue to small communities hurting from the decline of the timber industry. In 2015, Oregon lifted its cap on enterprise zones to attract even more data centers, just as more cables arrived along the shoreline.

Consider Meta, which owns a 4.6 million square foot data center complex in rural Prineville, Oregon. Although it’s far from the ocean in a former timber town, this data center connects to a network of underground fiber-optic cables, including the controversial undersea cable installed near Tierra del Mar. In 2015, the Oregonian reported that the data center complex received $30 million in tax breaks that year alone.

For Meta, as well as Amazon, Google, and Apple, Oregon offers a win, win, win.

So who exactly is losing?

The coastal ecosystem. During installation, it’s standard practice to bury cables multiple feet into the seabed to avoid snags by fishing vessels. The most common burial method is plowing, during which a remotely operated vehicle cuts a ditch into the seafloor and inserts the cable into the trough. Another method, jetting, uses high-pressure fluids to liquefy sediments on the seafloor, easily slicing a clean line into the seabed in which the cable can burrow. Companies also use directional drilling to bore diagonally into the seabed from the shore. All of these methods squish or displace any worms, crabs, sea stars, urchins, anemones, corals, or sponges living within the trenching path.

Once installed, submarine cables settle into the seafloor ecosystem. In search of hard substrate to call home, marine life will colonize the cable’s exterior. After a few decades of service, cable owners have historically abandoned their lines in the ocean, a decision that is both cheaper for companies and often results in less disturbance for colonizing species. Inert but not biodegradable, most dead cables will sit in the ocean indefinitely, hidden from the public who is usually none the wiser.

The 2020 Facebook/Edge Cable Holdings abandonment prompted Oregon to pass a 2021 law instituting firmer planning and decommissioning regulations for new undersea cable projects. Still, the increasing scrutiny doesn’t appear to be slowing the big tech companies. As Amazon builds its recently approved line to Guam and Singapore, the tech giant is also building another data center in Umatilla, Oregon, a small town on the Columbia River.

Data centers are no better for terrestrial environments than submarine cables are for marine. The buildings suck significant amounts of power from the grid. Oregon’s renewable energies, like hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River, can’t cover data centers’ growing energy demands, meaning utility providers must tap into fossil fuels and increase their greenhouse gas emissions. Despite Oregon’s efforts to decrease the state’s carbon footprint, some regions are moving backward in the fight against climate change. Big tech companies, and their big buildings, are spurring that reversal.

Across Oregon, communities and ecosystems are confronting the physical impacts of a world that runs on internet—impacts that our regulatory systems have yet to reckon with.

The post Are Meta, Google, and Amazon the Sea Monsters of Oregon’s Coastline? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What happens when a globe-spanning corporation becomes so powerful that even nations have to answer to it? In the 18th century, the British East India Company (EIC) came close. Founded by royal charter to act as a trading arm of the British monarchy, the company grew into an imperial power in its own right.

After winning the Battle of Plassey in 1757 near Calcutta, the Company became the de facto ruler of Bengal and eventually much of South Asia. Then, in China, the EIC repeatedly violated the ruling Qing dynasty’s prohibition on the opium trade, helping to precipitate the Opium Wars and emerging victorious after strong-arming the emperor into legalizing the trade. Conquering faraway lands and evading countries’ efforts at domestic regulation, the EIC became as powerful as a nation, a colonial power ruling a vast area, and a power base that overshadowed its alleged rulers at home.

Today, a very different corporate force extracts monopoly profits and threatens national sovereignty, as the tech companies that already control the digital systems and data of billions of people worldwide—Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft—now invest aggressively in artificial intelligence, a technology poised to transform the future by changing the ways we work, shop, learn, and communicate.

Since the generative AI app ChatGPT launched publicly in November 2022 and became the fastest growing consumer application in history, commentators have rushed to celebrate AI’s potential or decry its risks. But few have focused on an important factor in how these technologies will shape the world: The companies building these systems are unprecedented in their economic might and political influence.

The tech giants’ globe-spanning power and influence hearkens back to the EIC’s vast rule and lack of accountability. Like the EIC, the tech powers are not cowed by national governments. The Pentagon’s new cloud infrastructure will be built and run by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. OpenAI threatened to “cease operating” in the EU in response to regulation. It’s dangerous for companies to get so large and powerful that they can dictate what regulations they will accept—no longer having to answer to state controls intended to serve the public interest. As French President Emmanuel Macron asked in 2019, “who can claim to be sovereign, on their own, in the face of the digital giants?”

Such outsized power makes regulating AI particularly important. Academics, activists, and civil society groups have made the current and potential harms from AI abundantly clear, while technologists and researchers have criticized the biases built into many AI systems and warned of the existential risks potentially posed by super-intelligent machines. These risks include turbocharged propaganda, privacy violations, and the loss of human control over advanced AI systems.

To protect citizens from these potential harms, governments should regulate as they do elsewhere—limiting the risks from AI in the same way that they protect consumers from unsafe products and practices. Despite its novelty, and complexity, AI can—and should—be regulated just like any other technology. Training data can be disclosed, models can be licensed, legal accountability for harms can be established, and consumers can be protected. If AI heralds a “fourth industrial revolution,” as some enthusiasts claim, the fact that no politician has even proposed a regulatory regime comparable to those ensuring the safety of car taillights, Tylenol, or ground beef should give us pause.

Instead, politicians around the world are enthusiastically embracing AI with little to show for their stated concern for monitoring its safety. The U.S. Secretaries of State and Commerce, echoing Silicon Valley hype, recently wrote that AI “holds an exhilarating potential to improve people’s lives and help solve some of the world’s biggest challenges, from curing cancer to mitigating the effects of climate change to solving global food insecurity.” Similarly, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres claimed AI “has the potential to turbocharge global development, from monitoring the climate crisis to breakthroughs in medical research.”

These politicians seem to need to believe that AI will solve the spiraling crises of global warming, inequality, and authoritarian backsliding, and kickstart a productivity boom benefiting the average worker. As a result, they yield to ever-greater political and economic power of the big tech companies, and pay mere lip service to meaningful regulation.

Global policymakers do speak of voluntary commitments, frameworks, non-binding orders, advisory committees, and ethical guidelines. President Biden’s recent executive order on AI instructs agencies to write reports, conduct risk assessments, and hire “chief AI officers.” The only binding requirement on AI companies is a reporting requirement if they exceed a certain threshold of computational intensity. Even the European Union’s AI Act, derided as overly interventionist by politicians in the U.S. and U.K., may ultimately exempt large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT from oversight.

None of these should be mistaken for a serious commitment by national governments to regulate AI. We should be clear about the emerging regime of AI governance: self-regulation with a government imprimatur. A similar approach, in which regulators trusted the wisdom of supposedly “efficient markets,” led to the disastrous 2008 financial crisis.

Maybe someday AI will cure cancer and solve climate change, as some policymakers prophesy. Or maybe someday the machines will take over and become our overlords, as others warn. What’s more likely in the meantime is that without meaningful regulation, AI will make our corporate overlords even stronger. Far from liberating us from precarity, the AI revolution will intensify inequality and corporate power.

Already the big tech companies building advanced AI—dubbed “the magnificent seven” for their outsized stock returns over the last few years—now comprise 28% of the S&P 500 index and have outperformed the broader market by roughly 40 percentage points in 2023. There’s little chance this will trickle down to workers: Earnings calls with major corporations reveal expectations that AI will reduce labor costs—which translates into job losses for workers replaced by computers.

We should remind ourselves what a more historically normal trajectory of AI regulation might look like. The current approach is not a prudent response to technological novelty but a reflection of massive power imbalances between the tech giants building AI and national governments. The echo of the East India Company reminds us how dangerous these imbalances can become. The starting point for framing this new technological and economic era should not be the financial interests of big tech but established models of regulation, capable of steering corporate profit-seeking towards the common good.

The post Why Won’t Governments Regulate AI? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Like many frontline workers across the country, Denise Kohr saw her pay at Amazon increase over the past year; as for her say, not so much.

“They don’t want to hear from me,” complained Kohr, who has picked and packed products at a fulfillment center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, since 2018.

Kohr—who after a 25-cent bump last fall, along with a shift change that boosted her wage, now makes $22.95 an hour—still wishes she earned more money. But her bigger frustration is this: Whenever she makes a suggestion about how work should get done, she is invariably dismissed by management. “It can’t possibly be a good idea,” she said, if it’s coming from an entry-level employee.

As America celebrates Labor Day 2023, a tight job market and smart public policy have translated into wage gains for many lower-income workers. Though it’s unclear how long the trend will last, and there is still a long way to go for tens of millions to reach a true living wage, those at the lower end of the pay distribution have made up a ton of ground since the COVID-19 pandemic.

But while the pay gap has narrowed, what scholars call the “voice gap” doesn’t seem to have budged.

New research reveals that a majority of workers—young and old alike—don’t believe they have the right amount of say when it comes to compensation and paths to promotion. A sizable voice gap also exists on issues such as training and scheduling. This is consistent with earlier findings published in 2019.

“There certainly hasn’t been a dramatic shift in a positive direction,” said John Ahlquist, a professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, who co-authored the most recent study.

Meanwhile, Gallup polling shows that only 30% of U.S. employees feel their opinions at work count.

This lack of voice comes against the backdrop of a “hot labor summer,” with Southern California hotel workers, as well as Hollywood writers and actors, going on strike, and UPS drivers threatening to do so before the Teamsters union was able to win what it termed a “historic” contract in July. The United Auto Workers, whose contract is up in September, are the latest to consider taking to the picket lines.

At least some of the agitation can be interpreted as a blowback to constant stifling by corporate America. “All we want is . . . to have a little more dignity, and to have more of a say in what we have to do on a day-to-day basis,” Jaysin Saxton, a worker and union organizer at a Starbucks in Augusta, Georgia, told a Senate committee in March.

Speaking up at work can be risky. Kohr maintains that she has been “targeted and bullied” by supervisors at Amazon after raising safety concerns and fighting for those with health challenges to receive proper accommodations. “When you buck the system, you become a problem child,” she said.

Kohr, who is a member of the workers’ rights organization United for Respect, has been planning with co-workers to put together “an employee advocacy group” to improve communication with their facility manager. But when they informed him about it, she said, “he encouraged us to put our efforts elsewhere.”

Amazon disputes Kohr’s take, stressing that it offers channels through which employees can relay thoughts and concerns to management, including 13 affinity groups, and that Kohr’s warehouse recently adopted one of her ideas to enhance safety.

Perhaps the most curious thing about companies not listening more to their workers is that it’s bad for business. Gallup estimates that if six in 10 employees had faith that their opinions matter, rather than just three in 10, organizations could realize a 27% reduction in turnover, a 40% drop in safety-related incidents, and a 12% uptick in productivity. When workers use their voice, it can also spur innovation—an indication that many employees are eager to contribute, not just carp.

So why, then, don’t more companies seek employee input?

For one thing, C-suite execs tend to be confident they have a pulse on their employees’ thinking, thanks to HR surveys, on-site visits, and “open-door” policies that, at least in theory, allow workers to contact upper management without fear of retaliation. The problem is that these mechanisms are prescribed by the company itself. “Those are not substitutes for real worker voice,” said Thomas Kochan, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Indeed, the real deal requires executives to provide workers with something that many find even tougher to part with than pay: a bit of their power.

In addition, managers worry that allowing workers free voice might lead to unionization—something most employers are determined to defy at all costs. “They will bring in all the armor to defeat that,” Kochan said.

Still, the specter of collective bargaining explains only part of management’s unwillingness to heed workers’ recommendations. “It’s deeper than that,” said Bianca Agustin, the co-executive director of United for Respect, which has its roots in the United Food and Commercial Workers but is not a labor union. “It’s just a disrespect for working people and what management thinks they can bring to the table.”

As an example, Agustin pointed to a shareholder resolution at Walmart submitted by an hourly worker and United for Respect member named Cynthia Murray. Her proposal sought an independent review of company policies and practices on workplace safety and violence, including gun violence. “As a 22-year Walmart associate,” Murray declared, “I am personally invested in keeping myself and my fellow associates safe at work.”

At Walmart’s annual meeting in May, Murray’s resolution received nearly 24% of the vote—well above the 20% threshold that proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis says should lead the board of directors to “engage with shareholders . . . and demonstrate some initial level of responsiveness.” Yet Walmart won’t meet with Murray, telling her in a letter that it already regularly reviews its protocols to “ensure a safe and healthy work environment.”

“If she were any other shareholder—not a worker—the vote would have triggered a dialogue,” Agustin said. “It’s very discouraging.”

Walmart declined to comment.

All sorts of notions have been put forth to bolster worker voice: placing rank-and-file employees on corporate boards, creating European-style works councils, expanding employee ownership, and more.

But the most straightforward approach is to make it easier for workers to unionize—something that has proven a very tall order despite a flurry of activity over the past few years by organized labor and soaring popularity for unions. In 2022, a mere 10.1% of American workers were unionized, the lowest rate on record.

As the hot labor summer fades to fall, it’s hard to be sure what will become of all of the high-profile union drives currently underway. But some are uneasy that even where labor organizers have made inroads, like at Starbucks, companies will take advantage of toothless labor laws and delay negotiating—and that worker excitement for a union will wither away. If that happens, “it’s going to be devastating,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School.

Not only would that mark another setback for worker voice on the job, but it would imperil something much greater: a chance to elevate the voice of the working class in national affairs.

A rich body of scholarship has established a clear connection between union strength on the one hand and political stability and economic and social justice on the other. With unions diminished, “you create the room for demagogues to grow,” said Ray Marshall, who served as secretary of labor under President Jimmy Carter.

By contrast, when unions had a more robust presence in the United States, representing a third or so of all workers in the 1950s and ’60s, organized labor played a key role in civil rights and other movements pushing for equality. “People want to know how to get involved,” said Ahlquist, the UC San Diego professor. “You get a very different answer if it’s coming from the Proud Boys than if it’s coming from a union.”

Dorian Warren, a political scientist and co-president of the nonprofit Community Change, echoed those sentiments. “If union density had stayed at 30%,” he said, “there would have never been a Trump. The weakening of worker voice leads to authoritarianism.”

As you dig into that Labor Day hot dog, it is a good time to remember: When employees’ voices are ignored or squelched, it is terrible for workplace democracy. It may be even worse for American democracy.

The post Why Corporate America Needs to Listen to Workers’ Voices appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Being in mining was never part of my plan. As a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a priest with a pilot’s license, living and working in remote Australian communities. I got an advertising degree, joined the foreign service, and spent five years working for the government, including three years as a junior diplomat in Samoa. But I never really fit in. I resigned from the foreign service in January 1999, when I was 27, and returned to my hometown, the remote and dusty mining town of Mount Isa in outback Australia.

There, instead of attending cocktail parties and rubbing shoulders with prime ministers and ambassadors, I mowed lawns, raked leaves, and did landscape work. About 10 months into my career break, my older sister Cassie handed me a newspaper advertisement for a “Senior Advisor, Indigenous Affairs” position at Mount Isa Mines, one of Australia’s oldest and most profitable copper, lead, zinc, and silver mines. MIM, as it’s known, wanted to hire an Indigenous Australian who grew up in the local community and understood its issues and challenges—someone like me. I didn’t expect to get the job, but I did.

Today, more than 20 years later, I am one of just a few Indigenous senior leaders working in the Australian mining industry. As the Chief Advisor for Indigenous Affairs for Australia at the Anglo-Australian metals and mining corporation Rio Tinto, I help our executive leadership team and board of directors improve our relationships with, and outcomes for, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, employees, and communities.

People like me are go-betweens, walking in two worlds. We are translators for companies and communities. We help them understand each other to achieve mutual benefits.

There are many complexities and challenges. Mining, a symbol of industrial progress and wealth creation, has unfortunately also left a legacy of exclusion, displacement, and exploitation of Indigenous peoples worldwide. In Australia, where the main exports are iron ore, coal, gas, and gold, the industry has spent decades disregarding and excluding the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are Indigenous to the nation’s lands and waters.

Back when I took my first industry job, at MIM, many in my community thought I was either brave or naïve. But I believe Indigenous peoples must sit at the decision-making tables within corporations, not as passive stakeholders but as active influencers. We can actively secure redress for past misdeeds and lead an approach within the industry that will respect cultural heritage, drive economic benefit, and achieve environmental integrity.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands and possessed the land under our own laws and customs. Science suggests that we’ve been here for at least 65,000 years; the British colonized Australia less than 250 years ago. Over time they took our lands from us, and wrote laws that made it hard for us to fight back.

Indigenous people were powerless observers. In the 1950s to 1970s, mining companies discovered iron, coal, uranium, and industrial minerals such as bauxite, copper, lead and zinc in many places. Indigenous people rarely had any say, or ability to intervene, when commonwealth, state, and territory governments granted companies mining leases. Outsiders oversaw the destruction of our sacred sites, without recompense.

That includes near Mount Isa, my hometown. When I stepped into my role at MIM in 2000, the Kalkadoon Traditional Owners of the region had no stake in, and received no economic benefit from, mining operations. Open-pit mines had left large, gaping craters in their ancestral land. The Traditional Owners had no formal engagement with the mine, no dedicated Indigenous employment programs, and no social investment initiatives. They were organizing a native title claim aimed at legally recognizing and securing the Kalkadoon people’s historical rights to their ancestral lands and seeking a more inclusive approach to land and resource management for the future.

Leadership at MIM recognized that it was time to develop a better relationship. That’s where I came in.

Understandably, people expressed a lot of frustration in the initial meetings between the company and the Indigenous community. I felt about as welcome as a roast turkey at a vegetarian dinner party. I was verbally abused, physically intimidated, and called all sorts of names (nicer ones included “company man” and “sell-out”)—by people who were almost like family to me.

Over time, I built connections and trust. Soon after I started at MIM, I went to my boss, the mine site’s executive general manager, and convinced him to provide office space for the Traditional Owners to organize their title claim and conduct meetings. It was a small thing, but it signalled goodwill. Kalkadoon leaders still use the space today, as the registered office for their Native Title corporation.

This was an important lesson: A simple gesture of respect goes a long way—often much further than years of legal negotiations or purely transactional interactions. In September 2001, the Kalkadoon people, the Queensland Government, and MIM, among other mining companies, negotiated an Indigenous Land Use Agreement that paved the way for roughly 90 exploration licenses in the vicinity of Mount Isa. And that was only the start of what has become an enduring relationship between MIM and the Kalkadoon people.

I believe we are entering a new era of recognition for Indigenous people’s rights. The looming fight against climate change compels companies to listen to us. It’s often stated that Indigenous peoples represent about 5% of the world population but hold 80% of the remaining natural resources and biodiversity, including critical minerals. What will be the role of Indigenous people in the “just transition” to a low-carbon future—and is a green future that depends on more mining even possible?

Indigenous people still struggle. Our life expectancy is about 20 years less than non-Indigenous Australians, and I have seen many family and community members die early from preventable diseases. Proportionately, we are the most incarcerated people on earth. Our languages are disappearing, and colonization has eroded our cultural practices.

Still, I’d like to think we’re in a better place overall than when I started in this industry. Indigenous communities have more equal say, and greater control, than ever before—and the fact that more Indigenous people are coming up through the ranks and taking our rightful place in seats at corporate tables across the country has a lot to do with it. My hope is that the economic and social position of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, too, will rise.

The post I’m Indigenous Australian, and I Work for a Mining Company appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the turn of the 20th century, floods, fires, and waste plagued the United States. Industries burned through resources and blew toxins into the air, with few restrictions. States and federal governments were only beginning to approach questions of the environment and did so in piecemeal ways.

In 1907, responding to the need to improve transportation, President Theodore Roosevelt tasked the Inland Waterways Commission with studying how to better manage rivers. The commissioners recognized a need for interstate coordination in this effort. Two in particular—Gifford Pinchot and William John “WJ” McGee—went further. They asked Roosevelt to invite all the country’s governors to Washington to discuss the pressing issues of water and natural resources.

Roosevelt complied, inviting the governors of all the states and territories, along with representatives from hundreds of civic, economic, and media organizations, to the White House. The resulting Conference of Governors, beginning on May 13, 1908, and lasting three days, offered a glimpse of political and economic collaboration that extended beyond normal boundaries of party, state, industry, and even time. The conference represents a not-so-distant precedent for today’s need to extend our political thinking beyond narrow parameters.

According to the New York Times, the Conference of Governors’ unprecedented composition and purpose promised “history-making possibilities.” The paper reported 44 governors attending, though the published proceedings identified 36. Alongside them, four at-large members were invited to “represent the public,” which appears to have meant ensuring the discussion integrated economic concerns: steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, railroad executive James J. Hill, labor leader John Mitchell, and Democratic mainstay William Jennings Bryan. Finally, 500-some representatives from myriad organizations—trade associations, unions, publications, and the like—joined as observers.

At the opening dinner, the attendees dined with Supreme Court Justices, members of the Cabinet and Congress, and other prominent officials in the White House’s state dining room while the United States Marine Band played.

Despite the night’s pomp, the tone of the following day’s conference was serious, even somber. According to Roosevelt’s opening address, “Conservation as a National Duty,” nothing less than the “continuance of the Nation” was at stake. During the 50-minute speech, interrupted by frequent nonpartisan applause, the president asserted the importance of cooperative planning and for elevating community rights over individuals’ pursuit of riches. “In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit,” Roosevelt said. “The time has come for a change.”

Others shared this view. The following day, railroad executive James J. Hill spoke on “The Natural Wealth of the Land and Its Conservation.” Hill spent most of his allotted time offering chilling statistics of shrinking forests, diminishing ores, and declining soil fertility. He argued that these statistics represented not only a bleak economic future but also a potentially violent political one, borne out of desperation and poverty.

Hill believed that if industry leaders understood the dire resource situation, they would manage resources more carefully. Espousing a key element of Progressive conservation doctrine—that of applying sound business principles to resource management—he compared the nation to a corporation and the leaders gathered as a board of directors. The “board” needed to consider the resource wealth available and marshal it responsibly, he suggested, looking toward long-term investments over near-term profits, or they would ruin “a national patrimony that can never be restored.”

As the conference concluded, the governors approved a slate of resolutions and presented them to President Roosevelt. The declaration reiterated the themes of resources as foundational wealth, the importance of planning, and the need to cooperate. Its final line announced the governors’ intent plainly: “Let us conserve the foundations of our prosperity.”

By the end of the three days, the governors were also eager to discuss collaborating on other matters, such as extradition laws and divorce standards. They resolved to meet regularly thereafter. That commitment eventually turned into the National Governors Association, which now meets twice a year.

Another effect of the summit was that Roosevelt appointed the National Conservation Commission, which would inventory the nation’s resources. The commission produced a three-volume report that appeared in February 1909 and featured a detailed accounting of the nation’s dwindling stocks of various resources, including estimated dates for when they would be exhausted.

These achievements were all the more striking because the Progressive Era was no harmonious nonpartisan moment. Progressives saw themselves in a battle between good and evil on behalf of “the people” versus “the interests.” Muckraking journalists took down corruption from city halls to corporate boardrooms. Roosevelt used the power of government to tame big business. One of the biggest victims was James J. Hill himself: Roosevelt ordered the investigation that led to the 1904 Northern Securities Co. v. United States case that broke up Hill’s holding company. Roosevelt also invited his political rival Bryan to the conference.

Still, the participants overcame these differences and set their eyes on the nation’s shared future. As Secretary of State Elihu Root urged in his address to the group, they performed their duties not only for their parochial interests but also for “the common good.” Pinchot later wrote that the Conference of Governors “a conception of the land they lived in that was brand new,” and suggested history might remember the conference as one of history’s turning points. More measured historians have called it one of the “climactic moments” of Roosevelt’s presidency.

Today, Roosevelt’s concerns about the risks to the “continuance of the Nation” have transformed into warnings about global catastrophes. Twenty-first-century environmental concerns extend past accounting stocks of national resources. Now, researchers aim to identify thresholds of global ecological viability. Researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, for instance, have investigated planetary boundaries to determine the requirements for sustaining life. Our worries encompass the globe and question whether the planet can maintain its resilient capabilities.

Meanwhile, the “common good” is more elusive than ever. While pulses of reform have appeared—the rise of regional planning in the interwar period, the emergence of land-use planning for conservation and urban development in the 1960s and 1970s—coming together over future shared interests feels like a faraway ambition. Imagine a similar conference today, in which Joe Biden invited Gretchen Whitmer, Ron DeSantis, and Elon Musk to share a stage. Commitments to base politics and baser instincts would produce only vitriol and communicate only enmity.

In our hyper-partisan moment, looking beyond short-term advantage has become a dwindling resource. The 1908 Conference of Governors may not have been the grand historical turning point Pinchot imagined, but it can be a touchstone. A common focus and commitment beyond party, nation, personal interest, and the present has been possible and must be again for the good of the planet and all its people. As the stakes have risen beyond a nation’s supply of resources, so must the solutions and the seriousness with which policymakers, industrial leaders, and civic organizations approach the future.

The post When American Governors and Moguls Came Together to Prevent Environmental <br>Catastrophe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is a tale of two new skyscrapers—and of two cities that have more in common than they care to admit.

The Wilshire Grand Center towers 73 stories and 1,100 feet over downtown Los Angeles, making it the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. A project of the conglomerate that owns Korean Air, it opened this summer.

In San Francisco, the Salesforce Tower, which takes its name from the cloud computing giant that will be its signature tenant, rises 61 stories and 1,070 feet over the South of Market district. When it opens in early 2018, it will be the second-tallest building west of the Mississippi River.

Each building has literally changed its city’s skyline, and both structures are being celebrated by their developers as emblematic of their cities’ soaring ambitions. Considered together, however, they make a more earth-bound and less flattering point about the state of the California imagination.

The Wilshire Grand, like Los Angeles, is skinny and bright. The side and top of the building emit bright, color-changing lights that can be seen throughout the region. But up close it feels remote, even though it’s in the middle of a metropolis. Reaching the Wilshire Grand on foot isn’t easy, given how it’s cut off by the 110 Freeway on one side, and on two others by the heavy traffic of Wilshire Boulevard and Figueroa Street.

And although the building is touted as a gift to Los Angeles, it doesn’t engage the public at the street level. And when you enter, you’re pointed in the direction of an elevator that takes you up to its most significant space the public can access—the 70th-floor lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, which has terrific views of the city. (You can go up three floors from there if you’re willing to spend money at restaurants or bars.)

While the hotel lobby offers great views of Los Angeles, the whole structure reveals the city’s weaknesses and dependencies. Because L.A.’s relatively stagnant economy has produced a glut of office space, the tower’s offices aren’t really needed, and so real estate companies promoting the space and politically connected government entities have had to lease the space. And because the building was built by a foreign company—Korean Air Lines and the Hanjin Group—it serves as yet another reminder that L.A., for all its size, is really more an overgrown outpost of other powers than the Pacific Rim capital it purports to be. After all, its major institutions—from some major movie studios, to the Los Angeles Times, to the Dodgers—are owned by out-of-towners.

The Wilshire Grand. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

By contrast, Salesforce Tower seems to be of a piece with San Francisco, both for better and for worse. Like the Bay Area’s tech industry, the skyscraper is a dominant, almost menacing presence hanging over the city. The tower’s city connections are deliberate: A bridge connects it to a park atop the still-under-construction Transbay Transit Center. The building also has a street-level plaza that will be Transbay’s main entrance, and a massive, glass-door lobby that will be itself a public space, opening right onto Mission Street.

But the Salesforce Tower also embodies a San Francisco paradox. This place that produces technology to connect the world can feel small and insular. Between the new skyscraper and two buildings across the street, Salesforce is creating its own campus within the city. The park itself is billed as a sort of bariatric chamber (a place “to re-center”) to keep workers from getting the bends in the real world. Within this rarified air, there is retail to satisfy workers’ every need. “It’s all right here. Right now,” says the tower’s publicity.

The preciousness of the project cries out for parody. The building has no corners—it’s all curves. The building also literally breathes, with “innovative outside air intakes on every floor” that “provide outdoor-fresh air to each occupant to support health and wellness.” The interior is expected to include “mindfulness zones” and décor that nods to redwood forests and brown-and-yellow signage of the style favored by the National Park Service.

Such touches fit the only-from-San Francisco corporate culture of Salesforce, which wraps relentless acquisitiveness (now more than 24,000 employees and $8.4 billion in annual revenues) in touchy-feely corporate language that appropriates the Hawaiian concept of “Ohana,” or extended family.

An excerpt from the most recent annual report: “We are the #SalesforceOhana, a trusted family of employees, customers, partners and communities, united around delivering success to all of our stakeholders and improving the state of the world. Our Ohana propels us forward and we nurture it as we grow.” If L.A. is an outpost, San Francisco seeks to turn the world into its #utopia.

For all the municipal differences that the two skyscrapers reflect, what’s most striking about visiting them—as I did recently—is just how similar they are.

Both are glass towers designed for maximum environmental sustainability and earthquake safety. Both seek to capitalize on enormous growth in the neighborhoods below. Both have a statement near their top—an open-air bar on the 73rd floor of the Wilshire Grand, and an LED-based artwork at the Salesforce Tower that is billed as the world’s highest piece of public art.

And both have a bit of fraud in them, at least in matters of height. Like the diminutive Tom Cruise, the Wilshire Grand and the Salesforce Tower make themselves appear taller than they really are. The Wilshire Grand gets its extra height from a 295-foot tall spire on top, which means that from the highest floor, the 73rd, you’re still looking up at other buildings downtown. Similarly, Salesforce has 170 feet of glass panels above its inhabitable space, which goes only 900 feet high.

The architectural cognoscenti have given both buildings mixed reviews and there have been a few shots at each from the hoi polloi (the San Francisco Examiner compared the Salesforce Tower to a sex toy). But mostly there have been shrugs, because neither building excites. And neither structure matches the public esteem for the towers they now top. In L.A., the U.S. Bank building, also known as the Library Tower, still looks taller and more glorious than the Wilshire Grand, even though the newbie is 82 feet taller. And in San Francisco, the hulking presence of the Salesforce Tower seems out of scale compared to the graceful Transamerica Pyramid, which is 200 feet shorter.

But to protest these new skyscrapers is pointless, because both buildings reveal a hard truth about power in California: For all our boasts about being the home of new economies and progressive politics, our corporations still stand the tallest. Korean Air’s logo lights the Wilshire Grand’s crown. And San Francisco, for all its supposed independence, has genuflected to Salesforce, agreeing to rename the Transbay Transit Center and the park on top of it for the cloud computing company.

I’m disappointed that all that money and corporate power couldn’t make either skyscraper a true marvel. Neither is big or grand enough to make you say “wow.” And in fact, both buildings were supposed to be bigger—Wilshire Grand was originally planned as two taller towers, and Salesforce as a 1,200-foot-tall giant—but were downsized through corporate compromise.

Perhaps anticipating criticism, Korean Air Lines’ chairman Yang-Ho Cho has quoted a Buddhist monk in official letters about the Wilshire Grand: “Perfect is not something that already exists; perfection lies in the ever-changing moments that comprise our lives.”

Fair enough. But the problem with California’s skyscrapers is not a lack of perfection, but a lack of imagination. Our two greatest cities have produced two new large buildings that offer little in terms of a vision for a future.

If California is going to build giant monuments above faults, then why can’t our skyscrapers take bigger risks in their design and their contents? Why can’t they offer edges that incite love or hatred, that provoke us to aim higher?

A structure that stands 70 stories tall really needs to stand for something.

The post New Skyscrapers in L.A. and S.F. Tell Tall Tales About California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For centuries, this society has been especially receptive to economic innovation and the strategies of wealth-seeking that so often accompany it. Openness to new technologies and new ways of doing business exacerbates information gaps between sellers and buyers. Those gaps, along with the enthusiasm that comes with new products and investment vehicles, create opportunities for fraudulent promoters and the bait-and-switch brigade.

As the journalist Edward Smith noted in the 1920s: “Every social change, every new invention brings to life a fresh manner of separating the sucker and his money. It may be and usually is only a disguised evolution of an older swindle, but it is new to the victim and therefore effective.”

That said, the last few decades—the period since 1980—have seen a dramatic increase in the scale and breadth of American business fraud. Of course, Americans in earlier eras encountered fraudulent investment scandals, like the market manipulations at the Re brokerage firm (which came to light in the early 1960s), or the misrepresentations made by the National Student Marketing Corporation (in the early 1970s). There also were egregious consumer frauds, such as the abusive mode of selling home heating systems by the Holland Furnace Company. But the worst of these episodes took place within medium-sized corporations, or on the fringes of the economy.

Today, fraud has become big business. In the last four decades, fraud cases running into the billions of dollars have become commonplace. So have allegations of marketing duplicity or false accounting against many of the largest corporations operating in the United States. Massive government contracting frauds roiled the defense industry in the 1980s and the healthcare industry the following decade. Consumer frauds have steadily targeted older Americans, first through telemarketing and now via the web.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, accounting scandals rocked a series of major corporations, including Enron, WorldCom, and Sunbeam. Over the past decade, pyramid schemes such as those run by Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford have bilked tens of thousands of investors. And in the run-up to the global financial crisis of 2008, the provision of marketing information throughout the entire chain of the American mortgage system became shot through with duplicity, with falsehoods embraced by appraisers, mortgage brokers, third-party loan assessors, underwriters, and distributors of derivatives.

This era of gargantuan fraud scandals is still with us. Even after the reality check of the most recent financial crisis, major fraud scandals keep happening: LIBOR rate-fixing; creation of myriad unauthorized accounts at a major nationwide bank, Wells Fargo; and another alleged billion-dollar pyramid scheme, Platinum Partners.

What accounts for this dramatic growth in the magnitude of corporate deception? The post-1980 preference for deregulation has played a big role. Cuts to enforcement budgets have been a common theme in explanations of fraud episodes. So has the disinclination among policy-makers to impose regulatory constraints on newly emerging markets such as financial derivatives.

A key premise among supporters of deregulation is that the reputational incentives created by markets will serve to check the rankest frauds. Corporations won’t go down the path of duplicity, this way of thinking presumes, because the long-term consequences of lost business can be so devastating. Unfortunately, the behavior of scores of corporations over the past few decades belies this comforting narrative. Companies have so decisively bought into the use of short-term incentives to structure compensation for employees and executives that it’s often hard for them to think much past the next quarter’s financial results.

After the 2008 financial crisis, American policy-makers placed a premium on containing marketplace duplicity. Most importantly, Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), with major duties: improving the flow of financial information to consumers, monitoring the operation of consumer credit markets, and bringing enforcement actions against businesses that engaged in unfair, deceptive, or abusive tactics. The CFPB has worked hard to simplify financial disclosures to consumers, and has clawed back almost $12 billion through a series of settlements with financial firms accused of wrongdoing. But in this same period, Congress also loosened disclosure requirements for many start-ups, a deregulatory move that has raised concerns about new opportunities for fraudulent promotion of new companies.

We now have an administration in Washington that trashes regulation of all sorts and appoints vehement opponents of regulation to run federal agencies. It’s not hard to imagine that enforcement budgets for consumer and investor protection will once again take a big hit, and that federal regulators will adopt a more forgiving posture toward dodgy marketing tactics.

Such policies are their own kind of sucker’s bet. If the Trump Administration implements them, the long history of American business fraud suggests that we can look forward to more headlines about major corporations that have cooked their books or cheated their customers. When scandals of this sort accumulate, they have consequences beyond short-term economic losses. Indeed, they undermine the social trust that underpins our country, and healthy capitalism itself.

The post Why Suckering Americans Is a Booming Business appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I tell people at cocktail parties what I do, they’re always curious. “You’re a namer-of-things? That sounds like fun. Tell me more,” they say, seemingly surprised that it’s an actual job.

In fact, the profession has grown in the last 15 years or so with the explosion of entrepreneurs and startups that need to name everything from products and services to websites and apps. “Verbal identity” is at the core of every product launch, and it includes not just names but slogans and taglines.

I’ve written for a variety of industries: entertainment, aerospace, architecture, hospitality, and real estate. I once wrote titillating titles and captivating catalog copy for lingerie retailer Frederick’s of Hollywood. For more than 15 years, I worked for toy manufacturer Mattel.

These days, I’m a naming consultant hired by branding agencies to tackle projects for clients that have included a faith-based financial institution, an online investment service, wine marketed to women, and a new blood transfusion technology. I’ve coined quite a few cute names. For example, City Block is a note cube with a city map printed on its side. Then there’s HandJive—fashion gloves designed for cyclists.

When I get hired to name a product, the branding agency provides me with a briefing document that outlines the client’s business strategy, identifies the competition, and suggests preferred directions, themes, or language. Then I go to town. I get into a naming zone. I typically start the day with a walk for fresh air and ideas. I window-shop and take note of company names or clever taglines (like Gap’s “Fall into our sale”). I stop at the neighborhood newsstand, scan the magazine covers, and flip through the pages if I have time. I hang out on Twitter, where I connect with other word nerds and tweet about names. (Seatylock, a bicycle seat that converts into a heavy-duty bicycle lock, is a recent favorite.)

I’m often one of several namers working on a tight deadline—anywhere from just 24 hours to a few days—to generate as many as 200 names. With luck and persistence, a short list of top contenders is presented to the client.

The work requires staying on task—or going off on tangents. The tools of the trade go beyond Roget’s Thesaurus. I peruse foreign-language dictionaries, as well as a rhyming dictionary, visual thesaurus, and the Oxford English Dictionary to study a word’s historical origins. If I’m looking for a three-letter word, I can search wordfind.com.

Successful naming demands focus, linguistic alchemy, and midnight oil. The creative process of naming is always tempered by legal scrutiny to ensure that a name doesn’t already exist. It can be tricky: A name may be available as a URL or to register as a limited liability company, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can be used to market goods or services. My clients—mostly small businesses and startups—hire trademark attorneys to register and protect the names that I’ve come up with for them.

I worked for Mattel during the period when the Internet took off; names that included the word “girl” were often already taken by porn websites. The company, of course, had to be very protective of its brand. And because the toys were sold around the world, names that included words that didn’t need to be translated were popular: “Le Weekend” and “Chic” were favorites.

Research is easier than when I started thanks to companies that allow you to search and register domain names. But it can be difficult to find a name that hasn’t already been claimed. Domain squatters (individuals or businesses that register a URL to sell it for profit) also tend to snatch up good names. One common solution to this problem is to leave out a letter: See Flickr or Tumblr.

My parents tell me I was born for this occupation. As a little kid, I was verbal, inquisitive, and imaginative, demanding we name the dishes my mom tossed together with leftovers—even if it was as simple as “chicken surprise” or, for variety, “chicken delight.”

Even then, I paid attention to the names of beauty products. I blushed when my mom revealed she was wearing Revlon’s “Naked Pink” nail polish to a PTA meeting. That naughty nomenclature set the bar in the beauty industry. Today, nail polish manufacturer OPI has hands-down cornered the market with its quirky, clever names. My top pick for a pedicure is their classic “I’m Not Really a Waitress” red. Rule No. 1 of my profession: A name should be memorable.

I earned a B.A. in journalism, which groomed me to write compelling news headlines. A good name is just like a good headline. Engaging. Urgent. Telegraphic.

My first job in advertising was in-house copy chief for the L.A. retail institution Aaron Brothers Art and Framing, where my wordplay worked to sell stuff: “Discover a framed poster of King Tut at a very pharaoh price.” When the store introduced a new line of picture frames, I was instructed to “call it something,” and the line became “Moderne.” My career as a namer was born.

In 1990, I jumped at the chance to tap into my inner child and took a job as packaging copywriter for Mattel. Over the course of more than 15 years, I produced countless descriptions and taglines, and hundreds of names, for toys. Most were aligned with traditional gender roles: testosterone-tinged for Hot Wheels, cuddly and sweet for baby dolls, and trendy for the 11-1/2-inch fashion diva herself, Barbie.

I worked at Mattel on a team with a graphic designer and a structural engineer. We met with product designers who made preliminary drawings, engineers who created prototypes, and marketing mavens who called the business shots. In our brainstorms—or as we called them, “name storms”—we entertained dozens and dozens of ideas. The work wasn’t always fun and games and required many levels of approval. But the rewards were big: A name in print on a package or in a TV commercial. What could be more exciting than to hear a little one ask for Baby Ah-Choo at Toys “R” Us?

Rule No. 2: A name must be easy to pronounce. Some of my favorites: Stack-tivity: a set of building blocks, each with a playful activity on it. A child could draw on the blank face of the What’s Her Face doll. There were plenty of names that I loved that were nixed by a higher authority. For example, Paw-Pets was the perfect name for a set of animal finger puppets. Rule No. 3: Never fall in love with a name—and never take rejection personally.

In so many words, a good name is memorable, meaningful, and distinctive. You know it when you see it. Even more importantly, you know it when you hear it.

I recently bought a pair of men’s cashmere socks, despite the hefty price tag, because the name blended playfulness and luxury. I knew that the recipient of my gift would appreciate it, too: Ovadafut. The spelling may look exotic, but say it out loud.

If you say it out loud and you smile: bingo. That’s the game of the name.

The post Who in the World Named My Cashmere Socks? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.