I have been given the ridiculous assignment of trying to produce a useful legal ethics presentation to lawyers association in 75 minutes this morning. On top of that, I can hardly ignore the metaphorical elephant in the room, the 25th anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and yet the connection between that event and legal ethics is attenuated. The chief one is that lawyers who defended some of the alleged terrorists were and still are vilified in the conservative news media and by other ignorant critics.
Rule 1.2 (b):
(b) A lawyer’s representation of a client, including representation by appointment, does not constitute an endorsement of the client’s political, economic, social, or moral views or activities.
Anyway, I’m off to downtown D.C. in the rain. More posts when I get back, I promise…
Here’s my question for today: September 11th seemed to temporarily unite this country behind the presidents and whatever needed to be done. I won’t say we absolutely stayed United, but would it be fair to say that George Floyd was September 11th in reverse, splitting this country apart to the point where it probably won’t ever reunite?
I don’t think that’s a completely unfair thing to say. I can’t think of anything else in my life that’s driven a bigger wedge into American society the whole George Floyd thing. 911 drove everyone to rally around the flag and sing God bless america. George Floyd drove everyone away from the flag and made everyone sing the black national anthem in the hopes of appeasing angry people who threatened violence.
The mass militant stuff ended after a year or so when a lot of people were able to go back to work and decided that earning money was preferable to getting involved in riots. I think it also helped that Trump was no longer the president and that’s really what a lot of them were looking for. However, 4 years later, the students who had been kids during covid saw their chance to turn everything upside down and embraced anti-semitism. As unimpressed as I am with the behavior of some of the University leadership, most of them actually did expel the major trouble makers here. Also, the police have learned a few things about how to handle this kind of nonsense and it ended relatively quickly. There was no Kent State and no Chicago 8 this time out.
Things did right themselves as Trump returned. Most of this country had had enough anger and chaos. However, because it’s trump, there are still a fair amount of people who will oppose anything he does. That can’t be helped. It’s the folks you can help that get you out of bed in the morning.
I think there are a lot of similarities in the 9/11 response and the George Floyd response. I was not popular in fighting the ‘sissification’ that happened after 9/11. Our local mall closed for weeks and I said that was stupid. Well, ‘people are scared’. Tough, grow a pair. We had a professional event scheduled at a mall 2 months later and they cancelled it because it was an educational event for children. The organization stated “Because this is for children, there is a significant possibility that the event could be targeted by international terrorists for an attack”. Get a grip, 20 people doing demos for maybe 100 kids is not getting the attention of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I said we need to show that we aren’t afraid by hold the events, by opening the malls. By closing them, we are making the children more afraid. Imagine your father cowering in fear as a 6 year old. How horrifying that would have been? We taught them to give in to terrorists and to give in to fear. We also taught them that you have to just live with Islamic terrorism because America deserved it and racism.
Then, George Floyd died of an overdose. The black community insisted on blood. No one had the guts to tell them that they don’t get to make up facts. No one stood up to them to say that just because they thought it was racism doesn’t make it so. Everyone learned the lesson of 9/11. Keep your mouth shut. Live in fear. You can’t call out the bad behavior because America deserves it.
Covid came and everyone lost their minds. The teachers started pretending that they were going into a bayonet charge every time they entered the classroom (‘Our lives are at risk’). The medical profession, in a repudiation of their jobs, refused to treat sick people because they judge their own lives above those of the public. Remember the signs in the hospitals that said you couldn’t come in if you were sick? People accepted mass lockdowns with no legal basis that I could find. Governors were told that only essential people could be out in public. Where is the law that authorizes that? And people in lots of states complied. We destroyed our economy and it hasn’t recovered yet. The institutional knowledge that was lost by shutting down a lot of industries was immense. No one had the guts to tell the teachers to shut up and do their jobs. Even if their on the job mortality had increased 10 fold, they would only be on par with truck drivers. It think their workplace mortality would need to increase 300-400x to reach commercial fisherman levels. The teachers just stopped teaching, they kept getting paid, and from what I am seeing, they never went back to teaching.
The response to 9/11 was a victory for the US, it was a huge failure.
I do not see a silver lining about 9/11.
I think there is more going on than the riots after the death of George Floyd. The whole George Floyd fracas was a symptom of a bigger issue namely intersectionalism, where we look at the whole world through a lens of victim groups and victim hierarchies, with whites, males, Western culture, and Judaism and Christianity as oppressors.
The Islam has raised in esteem since 9/11 in Western societies, partly thanks to this worldview. The more recent atrocities of October 7th was a gigantic PR success for radical Islam and a PR debacle for Israel. My pessimistic view is that terrorism works.
Let’s add to that that since 9/11 there have been a massive immigration of Muslims to Western societies (legal and illegal), and these Muslims do not assimilate, have contempt for Western culture, and in Western Europe add significantly to the crime statistics and live off the taxpayer.
Add to that that the Taliban is still in power, the IRCG is still in power and nobody understand Trump’s strategy to achieve a lasting victory in Iran, and isolationism and antisemitism are making headway on the right as well (with help of Tucker Carlson who remains a good friend of JD Vance).
Below is a tweet plus links that shows where we stand today in the USA. I am saddened to say that the victims of 9/11 probably died in vain.
This was all due to the brokejn moral compass among large parts of the population.
I for one am extra pessimistic this year on this day.
“I won’t say we absolutely stayed United, but would it be fair to say that George Floyd was September 11th in reverse, splitting this country apart to the point where it probably won’t ever reunite?”
No. President Obama actively encouraged disunity in his rhetoric, playing on a climate built by an insurgent media during the younger Bush’s Presidency (I say that because I know the media is supposed to question power and report on misdeeds – but how they behaved was insurgency at that point).
The reaction to George Floyd was exacerbated by the climate built by President Obama’s intentional divisiveness.
I won’t say we absolutely stayed United, but would it be fair to say that George Floyd was September 11th in reverse, splitting this country apart to the point where it probably won’t ever reunite?
….
The reaction to George Floyd was exacerbated by the climate built by President Obama’s intentional divisiveness.
The George Floyd train wreck is a climax of the divisiveness started by Obama, who was elected to heal the racial divisions in the nation so we could turn the page on Jim Crow, but instead divided the nation by lecturing us on every turn about racial issues (Henry Louis Gates Jr which he had to smooth over with a beer summit, Trayvon Martin). His Presidency is one of the big missed changes in USA history, Obama is the Jackie Robinson in reverse.
The police shooting of Martin Brown in Ferguson launched the Black Lives Matter movement. The narrative was set that black men are unfairly targeted by a racist police force. Looking at the crime statistics we know this to be false, as black men commit about fifty percent of all crime in the USA. Add to this the habit of fleeing and resisting arrest by black men, an additional factor in arrests gone wrong.
For how long have Democrat denounced Republicans as racist? I think as long as I am in the USA, since 1996. Does all this demonization add to all the divisiveness?
“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.“
Can anybody still believe the words of the Pledge of Allegiance to express a truth? Is this country still one nation, indivisible? Does the “under God” clause express a truth, given a) abortion b) transgender madness c) public school education? Given the state of affairs of the USA I honestly would not be able to recite this pledge in good conscience. The nation is hopelessly divided in tribes. The majority of Democrats is hesitant to call themselves patriots, as they are more aligned with globalism and multiculturalism than with the interests of the USA, and would love to throw the borders of the country open for all who want to be here.
[From your host]: Just got back to the office and this banned asshole’s unauthorized comment was getting responses. “Cassandra’s AI Agent” the iconic Alizia, but it is a commenter who abused the privilege of commenting. Don’t encourage him/her/it…
😀 Neo-cons…in other words, it’s all the fault of the JOOOOOOS! 😀
That response came from “Cassandra”…I bet it’s Alizia Tyler, who often passed herself off as that fated goddess.
If so, now you understand the alt-right “it’s the Jews’ fault” timbre of the response.
Hypothetical scenario:
Let’s say that there is a concern about a gadget your company sells. Upper Management investigates the concern and comes back with a benign message about user error and thanks you for your concern. You find, however, that the gadget appears to be defective after all. Instead of going to your employer again, you send evidence to the press which dutifully reports it and causes your company a lot of bad PR, costing it customers.
The CEO of your company is furious. It is explained that the company was aware of the defect and was quietly preparing a software fix along with some compensation to affected users. The CEO demands to know who told the press.
You are protected by whistleblower protections laws, although we all know that companies can and do try to get around those laws from time to time. Assuming that the CEO’s explanation of the situation is true…
Question 1: Should you have tried to go further with your company, providing them the evidence of the defect before going to the press? This seems like a moral luck situation. I do, however, see how a further attempt to clarify the situation might have been ethical.
Question 2: Three of your co-workers knew about your evidence. Two of them casually brought it up to other people outside the company only to find that the outsiders were connected to the media in some way. The third co-worker posted it on social media out of boredom. None of these co-workers appear to have actually been whistleblowing. Are thye protected by whistleblowing laws? Because generally this type of behavior might be considered unprofessional and could have resulted in termination.
Question 3: You deny being the whistleblower as suspicion begins to spread to your other three co-workers. I think this is unethical. If you are the person responsible, you should own it. What do you think?
As for question 1, if you have worked for the company for any length of time, you know the answer to that question. You know if the company is actually going to fix this or cover it up.
Question 2. That almost never happens. If they knew about it and talked to someone in the press, the press would either ignore it or ask the company first and drop it unless the company supports Trump.
Question 3. It is unethical, but I don’t think you should have to take unnecessary punishment for what was done. Several whistleblowers have died under interesting circumstances before they could testify lately. I don’t think you should necessarily be required to forfeit your life to be a whistleblower.
Local example. A sheriff’s deputy took a complaint that a local school official molested a student. The deputy went to the school and found that the employee’s file indicated that (1) their were many complaints about this employee molesting students going back a dozen years and (2) that the principals and superintendents did nothing to punish him and had instead gone to the police and DA to cover it all up. So, the deputy went directly to the press, worried that it would get buried yet again. While the case dragged on, the superintendent involved was voted ‘Superintendent of the Year’ by the other superintendents in the state and ran for State School Superintendent as the Democratic candidate. The deputy was fired, of course, and probably stripped of law enforcement credentials. The DA prosecuted the school official personally, but that was stopped when a whistleblower indicated that the defense attorney was the DA’s campaign finance director from the election a few weeks before and neither attorney had disclosed that.
In a wold of such corruption, I am willing to let the whistleblower remain hidden, undesirable as it is, as an unavoidable necessity.
Wait, did the case get dropped entirely, or did they just have to find another prosecutor? If all you have to do to get charges dropped is to secretly work for prosecutors and then reveal it during the case, that seems like a bad system that’s easy to fix.
Oh no, he was convicted. At sentencing, numerous senior people in our school system hugged him and testified for him.
Here is a related story at Ethics Alarms, remembering the Challenger disaster. You can find more articles at EA if you search for Thiokol. Thiokol employees warned management about problems with O-rings, and the risk for disaster. However they did not blow the whistle to the press. We all know what happened as management and NASA ignored the warnings.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2022/01/30/catching-up-professional-ethics-and-the-challenger-disaster/
I’m open to counterarguments, but here’s my take off the cuff.
I’m assuming this is a dangerous defect, or there would have been no need to go to the press. Under that assumption, whistleblowing is an entirely innocent action, and possibly ethically obligatory.
Answer 1: If the company wanted to keep the matter quiet, they should have looped the employee in on the defect instead of lying and saying that it was user error. If the employee knows it’s a real defect, they have no reason to believe the company is taking the responsibility to fix it and compensate those affected. The company has no right to be mad that someone went to the press. In fact, they should have warned people about the error themselves until they could fix it, if it’s a serious error.
Answer 2: This is a legal question, so I cannot answer it. In my casual opinion, the noble Ayn Rand-style capitalists who conservatives imagine to run the big corporations should be so honest and honorable that they would bear no ill will towards employees warning people about problems with their products (unless it revealed dangerous security vulnerabilities before they could be patched). They would be constantly trying to improve the products in order to better serve their customers, and they would announce warnings themselves when employees bring them up. That said, employees should not be casually talking about trade secrets or internal strategy; that is indeed unprofessional. Loose lips sink ships.
Answer 3: I don’t think the whistleblower is ethically obligated to reveal their identity. The company should not be angry and should not be demanding the whistleblower to reveal themselves. If the company wants to have a witch hunt, the employee can choose whether to protect other innocent employees by identifying themselves, but there is no obligation to do so. Again, we’re assuming this whistleblowing is innocent and possibly ethically obligatory. The whistleblower is not responsible for what the company does in response.
“I’m assuming this is a dangerous defect, or there would have been no need to go to the press.”
You are correct. Catches fire with prolonged use.
Answer 1: I agree wholeheartedly. He might have tried to discuss this with the company further, but it would have been better if his superior had been transparent with him.
Answer 2: I’m hung up on this one because the three co-workers had no intention of whistleblowing. They just brought it up in casual conversation and/or posted to social media.
Answer 3: This one’s a murky area where I think that an employee who whistleblows has an obligation to own it rather than letting others be blamed for it, even if their actions were foolish.
There are many cases where whistleblowing is ineffective as the whistleblower meets unbelief at all levels, the whistleblower is retaliated against and fired, and the problem gets buried. The whistleblower who just lost his job will have a hard time finding a new job, and will be regarded as a disgruntled employee, a legal risk, and not a team player. So there is a high incentive to not blow the whistle, or stay hidden as a whistleblower. These are all non-ethical considerations however.
In cases of life and death, or cases of sexual abuse, you have to blow the whistle. Do not be the next Joe Paterno.
We have not remembered- We have forgotten!
Today, I was made aware of this site on X: (1) 2001 Live (@25YearsAgoLive) / X
I understand it’s run by a 27-year-old history buff. Many of his followers reply as if the event is live. Bless him for breaking the stereotype of his (and previous) generation. History must be remembered.