Month: June 2012

Ethics Quiz: The Bank, the Addict, and the Broken Egg

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

There was a little software problem when Bank of America acquired LaSalle Bank and the two were transferring account data. As a result, LaSalle depositor Ronald Page found that he could make unlimited ATM cash overdraft withdrawals, even though he had only $300 in his checking account.  This tempting state of affairs lasted for seventeen days, and then from December 1, 2008 to May 31, 2009, Page gambled like a man on fire.  Unfortunately for Page and Bank of America—but fortunately for several casinos—Page is a gambling addict. He withdrew, and gambled away, $1,543,104.00

Now the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit says he is seeking to send him to jail for 15 months  after he pleaded guilty to charges of theft of bank funds. He is also going to be required to pay back the money, with interest, guaranteeing poverty for life.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz question:

Is this fair? Continue reading →

When Your Genius Is A Dunce: The Depressing Self-Outing of Rays’ Manager Joe Madden

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I trusted you, Joe. You broke my heart..

Organizations and institutions tell us a lot about themselves by the individuals they hold up as exemplary. To cite an example much on my mind these days, the conservative blogosphere’s canonization of the late Andrew Breitbart, master of the intentional half-truth, makes me dubious about its reliability and integrity. On  the other side of the spectrum, the fact that so many Democrats, and especially Democratic women, worship Bill Clinton reflects horribly on their values and tolerance for hypocrisy. Now, in the wake of Roger Clemens’ well-deserved acquittal for denying under oath acts that he almost certainly did, we have strong confirmation that a prominent individual Major League Baseball holds up as exemplifying, in the immortal and irritatingly pretentious words of “Terence Mann” about that corn field in Iowa, “all that once was good and it could be again”* is in truth an Ethics Dunce, and a big one at that. His name is Joe Madden, the American League’s 2011 Manager of the Year, and I am disappointed and depressed. (Yes, I have named Joe an Ethics Hero in the past.) Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Yesterday, Ethics Alarms discussed the deceptive editing of a Mitt Romney campaign video to make him look out of touch “with how real people live,” the attack line used so successful against President George H.W. Bush by Bill Clinton, after Bush had expressed amazement at grocery store price scanners. MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell cackled over the clip, which conveniently left out the point Romney was making. Naturally, other liberal flacks in the media picked up the theme, and cited the falsely edited segment.

Mitchell subsequently responded to complaints regarding the blatantly biased and unethical edit, and you can watch her response below: a huge shrug, and a dishonest “we didn’t have the chance” to play the whole thing (and instead decided to laugh at the Republican candidate for looking like a fool because we intentionally made him look like a fool.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Washington Sports Writer Sally Jenkins

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“Overreaching by government is far more harmful than any of the alleged offenses. It has poured more poison into the system than is contained in any needle.”

—-Sally Jenkins, writing in the Washington Post sports pages about the Roger Clemens prosecution.

Elsewhere in her column, Jenkins writes:

“Someone in authority at the Justice Department should have said to the federal investigators who pursued Clemens since 2007 on perjury charges, “You don’t have the evidence that can win a conviction.” The government never had a case, and knew it didn’t have a case (or at least should have), and brought the case anyway.”

Bringing a case when a prosecutor doesn’t have sufficient evidence is the epitome of unethical prosecution, and the Clemens case certainly qualifies. I can’t write much about this now, because I am preparing to give an ethics seminar to Washington D.C. government attorneys about legal ethics in government practice. I always find the government attorneys to be extraordinarily informed regarding ethical standards, and to have excellent ethical instincts. I will be talking about the Clemens case, and the Ted Stevens prosecution that went so horribly wrong, and the Fast and Furious investigation, in which a Federal Prosecutor announced his intention to take the Fifth Amendment if he was called before Congress. I will be talking about a lot of things.

There is obviously a problem.

___________________________

Spark: Ron Sarro

Source: Washington Post

Graphic: The Cell Phone Junkie

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

The News Media’s Election Year Ethics, Part 2: NBC Does A Breitbart

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

MSNBC serves up a lie sandwich for its viewers, and Jonathan Capehart chows down.

The Washington Post’s Op Ed page, courtesy of the paper’s liberal blogger Jonathan Capehart, was mocking Mitt Romney—he’s an out-of-touch rich guy, you know—for “waxing amazed at what he just saw or who he has just met as if he were a traveler in a strange and distant land for the first time.” Wrote Capehart:

“…Romney added to his parade of wonder with this beauty after visiting a well-known roadside convenience store chain in Pennsylvania. ‘Where do you get your hoagies here? Do you get them at WaWas? Is that where you get them? Well, I went to a place today called WaWas. You ever been to WaWas? Anybody been there? Some people don’t like . . . I know, I’m sorry. It’s a big state divide. But we went to WaWas . . . I was at a WaWas. I went to order a sandwich. You press a little touchtone key pad.… You touch this, touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier, and there’s your sandwich. It’s amazing!’

“What’s amazing is that Romney is seeking to lead a nation he appears to be visiting for the very first time. Pity he won’t settle for a t-shirt instead of the presidency as his souvenir” Continue reading →

How to Tell Whether A Service Provider Will Cheat You, in One Easy Step!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Call. It won’t do you any good, but do call….

I was waiting at a stop light in the left lane when the light changed, and suddenly the boxy little truck with printing all over it look a sharp left turn from the right lane across mine, narrowly missing my car and requiring me to slam on the brakes. After laying on the horn, I saw that it was a truck for a local cleaning service, and voila! There, on the back door in bold print, was the legend: We care about safe driving! 1-888-555-SAFE. And the vehicle’s number, “515 DI.” For once I could actually use one of those numbers to report a reckless jerk on the road!

I have trouble memorizing numbers, so I repeated the information over and over again, out loud, as I drove home: it helped that the little truck was right in front of me most of the way. I reached home, ran up stairs to my office, wrote down the number to be sure, and dialed it.

It was a fake number. it wasn’t even a disconnected number. It didn’t connect to anything.

Now I’m wondering if any of those “How am I driving?” numbers are real, and I’ll say this: if your phone number is a lie, I’m not letting your employees clean my house, especially if they drive like that.

If only the name of the company had been on the back of the truck.

Never mind, though.

I’m going to find it.

The News Media’s Election Year Ethics, Part I: The Right and Neil Munro

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Shut up, Neil.

While some on the left were making the ignorant and race-baiting claim that reporter Neil Munro’s rude interruption of President Obama as he announced his end-around Congress on the Dream Act was inspired by bigotry, conservative media outlets were making the equally absurd, but perhaps less offensive, claim that criticism of Munro was another example of how Obama is accorded kid gloves treatment by his allies in the mainstream media.

The main piece of evidence presented for this is an old clip from a Reagan statement about the Iran-Contra affair, in which reporters shouted out questions to Ronnie as he ended his remarks and turned the mic over to Attorney General Ed Meese. It is a forced, dishonest and pointless comparison: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day on “Young, Gullible, Lazy, Unimaginative and Unbelievable: I Wonder Why This Lawyer Has Trouble Finding A Job?”

/ Jack Marshall / 59 Comments

Back in October of 2011, I wrote a post in reaction to the sign reproduced left, held by an Occupy Wall Street protester who either was an unemployed law graduate or who plays one on TV.   Many are the ethical matters and controversies that have spilled on these pages since, and copious is the water that has flowed under the bridge, but because not very many people, comparatively speaking, read ethics websites in general and this one in particular, it took the better part of a year for that post to reach the laptop of  disgruntled law grad with access to a website for disgruntled law grads. Thus suddenly my name has been taken in vain in several fora where underemployed, student loan-burdened JDs hang out. Some, gratefully, have been kind enough to alert me with comments to Ethics Alarms, expressing their unhappiness with my insensitivity. This, the Comment of the Day, is such a post, by lawyer (presumably) Bobby Wilberger.

I must say at the outset that Bobby is lucky to have this posted, and I must say that because I don’t want another lawyer citing it as precedent. Bobby, who by definition if his post is to be taken seriously, had legal training, apparently didn’t absorb the part about following rules, being honest and truthful and reading documents relating to your work carefully. The posting requirements for Comments, clearly indicated at the top of this page, require a valid e-mail address. Bobby did not supply me with such an address, instead giving me a fake address with the clever suffix of “fake.com”.  This would pretty much ding Bobby if I were hiring, and is consistent with my over-all thesis that if you are an un- or underemployed law grad the first thing you need to do to get to the bottom of your problems is to look in the mirror.

I’ll have more to say after Bobby’s post. Here it is, the Comment of the Day, on Young, Gullible, Lazy, Unimaginative and Unbelievable: I Wonder Why This Lawyer Has Trouble Finding A Job?: Continue reading →

Roger Clemens Was Acquitted, Not “Vindicated”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The first ethics breach is the utter incompetence of reporters who nonetheless are permitted to go on the air and mislead the public. A jury acquitted baseball great Roger Clemens  of 6 counts of perjury today, and I have just screamed in my car, frightening Rugby (my Jack Russell Terrier), after hearing three reporters on three radio stations say that Clemens was “vindicated.”

Incompetents. Ignoramuses. Continue reading →

Should Black Journalists Be Promoting Race Loyalty As a Virtue?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Go Team!

On Sunday’s “Washington Watch with Roland Martin” on TVOne, host Martin questioned several black journalists about the support shown by the Obama administration and black leaders for Attorney General Eric Holder, currently stonewalling Congress regarding a full accounting of what occurred in the “Fast and Furious” debacle.

“Many Republicans are calling on him to resign by demanding he release more documents, also in the Fast and Furious case,” Martin said.  “So, I want to ask the panel, is this White House doing enough to protect the attorney general? And also, where is black leadership? I mean, here you have Eric Holder, who has been — first of all, he was a high-ranking official in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton. He becomes the black, first African-American attorney general. He has been very aggressive on many issues. But some folks are saying that look, he’s been taken to the woodshed and he is not getting the kind of support that you would think he would be getting.”

This is a disgraceful question that assumes that unethical conduct—racial bias— is somehow admirable. What difference does it make that Holder is the first black attorney general? How could that justify the media, the White House, black leaders or Congress treating  a black Attorney General any differently than they would treat a white, Asian or Cherokee Attorney General? Isn’t the issue whether he is a competent and effective Attorney General? Shouldn’t that judgment be race blind? Aren’t black journalists, like white journalists, obligated to keep race out of their assessments of how public officials behave? Continue reading →