Author: Jack Marshall

Depressed Ethics Considerations, April 8, 2025

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Today is my late wife’s birthday, and I’m surprised how much it is affecting me. And I really can’t afford to be off my metaphorical game right now.

Here’s a Facebook post from another once reasonable, calm, considered lawyer Facebook Friend: “We entered The Great War 108 years ago today. Don’t tell The Orange Dick-tater that name or he’ll get jealous and want to start an even Greater War.” Another anti-Trump warrior—and former staffer of mine— claimed that AG Bondi has announced a new policy allowing the Feds to “seize” the gun of anyone deemed to be a “threat.” I couldn’t find any news reports on such a development. “They said the Democrats were coming for their guns!” she wrote in high dudgeon today. The only gun policy development, posted on today by WaPo, is “Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Monday that she would rescind a Biden-era gun policy that yanked licenses from federally licensed firearm dealers if they intentionally falsified records or sold weapons without running a background check.” That’s deliberate fake news. The Biden gun policy yanked licenses from federally licensed firearm dealers if they were deemed to have intentionally falsified records or sold weapons without running a background check under a “no-tolerance” perspective. Opponents said that this would cause dealers to lose their licenses for paperwork errors.

It is increasingly difficult to find straightforward, honest and complete reporting.

Meanwhile,

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Comment of the Day: “Tariffs Have Been Needed For Decades”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I meant to post this retort to Steve Witherspoon’s guest column yesterday (as it was “Tariffs Monday” at Ethics Alarms, but was waylaid by life. Canadian EA correspondent Humble Talent began a long and lively debate thread with his Comment of the Day, and I encourage you to read it all, here. Meanwhile, here’s Humble…

Oh! I almost forgot: I read another anti-tariff piece today titled “I Shot the Tariff.” I should have thought of that. Phooey.

…

I’m always disappointed when there’s something that I’m actually familiar with in the media, because a lot of the media smudging that happens around the areas that they’re familiar with stand out like a sore thumb.

Tariffs have been one of those things. And this attack on Free Trade is another.

You want to know what’s bullshit? The idea that any nation can pull of autarky (“a system where a country or region aims for self-sufficiency, minimizing or eliminating international trade and relying primarily on its own resources and production.”) No one can pull off autarky and maintain efficiency, product diversity, and quality of life. You will eventually need to trade for something.

You want an example for America? Potash. There are exactly three active potash mines in America, because the resource effectively does not exist in America. You import 96% of potash used for crop fertilizer. Without potash imports, you would be unable to add phosphorus to your crop input chemistry, and your yields would suffer. Which would then impact your already insufficient food production system. Your people would literally starve. Which means there will be trade.

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I’d Say This Shows a Serious Ethics Deficit On the Leftward Side of the Ideological Scale, No? I Mean, I Could Be Wrong….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab and The Network Contagion Research Institute performed a survey to assess support for political violence in the U.S. Among the findings: 55% of those who identify as progressive said murdering Trump can be justified. Forty-eight per cent said killing Elon Musk might be reasonable as well. Of the group surveyed as a whole, 38% said it was at least arguably justifiable to murder Trump with 31% feeling the same about Musk.

“The findings signal a threat to political stability and public safety,” NCRI/Rutgers concluded after thinking really hard about it. The NCRI/Rutgers survey also found that 39.8% of respondents said that they could justify destroying a Tesla dealership to protest DOGE.

Be proud, Democrats! You now are the party of violent morons.

David Winston’s opinion piece for Roll-Call accurately describes how dangerous this kind of “resistance” culture is for the party, never mind for its hit targets. He writes in part,

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The National Parks’ Dumb Response To Trump’s “No DEI” EO Explains So, So Many Things…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The National Park Service website has an Underground Railroad page. It used to feature a large photograph of the remarkable female “conductor,” Harriet Tubman (left above). The page began, “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage.” But some boob or combination of boobs thought that the Trump EOs and other measures aimed at purging divisive, partisan and often discriminatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs from the government, education and other private institutions mandated eliminating straightforward and historically accurate information. It wasn’t just the National Parks Service, of course. The Defense Department also eliminated many pages that celebrated important minority veterans, such as civil rights champion and icon, Jackie Robinson.

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Not Opinion, FACT: AG Bondi Is Wrong and Unethical To Suspend Justice’s Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Immigration Litigation

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
- This is your opinion? - It's a fact.

I was afraid of this.

I am completely in sympathy with President Trump’s determination to have only people he can trust as his department and agency heads after his first term debacle, when so many people stabbed him in the back that his suits must have looked like pin cushions. Nonetheless, appointing Pam Bondi as Attorney General was reckless and hard to defend, as Bondi and “legal ethics” have seldom been compatible. This episode is a particularly blatant example.

Erez Reuveni has worked at the Justice Department for nearly 15 years, most recently as the acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. Reuveni appeared in federal court in Maryland last week to respond to the court’s questions regarding the government’s admission that it should not have deported Kilmar Abrego García on March 15 as part of the airlift of purported gang members to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Reuveni acknowledged the mistake and told a judge that he did not know what authority the U.S. used to deport Abrego García. “My answer to a lot of these questions is going to be frustrating,” Reuveni told U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis. “And I’m frustrated that I don’t have answers to a lot of these questions.” Xinis ordered the Trump administration to arrange the return of Abrego García, who is married to a U.S. citizen, by no later than 11:59 p.m. today.

Attorney General Bondi promptly suspended Reuveni. Bondi explained, “At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States. Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

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Tariffs Have Been Needed For Decades

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Guest post by Steve Witherspoon

[It’s shaping up as “Tariffs Monday,” at least in the morning! JM]

I worked as a Manufacturing Engineer in a metal fabrication plant for thirty years (I wore many hats in this small company) and I personally saw what other countries (especially, China, Mexico, and Canada) were doing to undermine manufacturing in the United States of America. The USA should have put tariffs on at least these three countries 20+ years ago, but instead they were allowed to continue to unfairly practice “free trade” with us unabated.

China took one manufacturing and assembly job after another, then China used its financial capital to seriously undercut USA steel manufacturing causing steel mills in the USA to slow to a dead crawl and increase their cost a lot. In addition to that, the steel coming out of China was rusty and didn’t meet quality standards and distributors were having real problems providing quality steel to long term customers like our company. We had to slow production of some products as a result of supply problems and that hurt some of our customers and that trickled down to problems for some consumers.

Canada has been undermining aluminum and stainless steel manufacturing in the USA for over twenty years, as they practiced their unfair “free trade”  with us unabated. When Canada’s stainless steel production slowed we had to seriously slow the manufacturing of some products. One stainless steel product that had to be slowed we made for a local company and that product ended up on United States Navy submarines. I personally know people who worked (past tense) in aluminum mills and they watched as the plants slowed down to a crawl. People got laid off and retired early as Canada took over most of the market for some aluminums.

Then there is Mexico. That nation has been undermining USA assembly plants of all kinds for well over twenty years. Where do you think a huge portion of assembled consumer goods are coming from, including PC computers? Yup, it’s Mexico and usually just across the USA/Mexico border. These are not the only countries that have been unfair with all this “free trade” bull shit.

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Comment of the Day: Friday Open Forum [Tariffs Thread]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That’s the New York Times graph this morning showing stock markets since President Trump’s inauguration. The lowest line (in orange) is Japan; the next lowest line is the U.S. The reason for all of those declines are believed to be Trump’s tariff policies.

A commenter last week asked why Ethics Alarms hadn’t discussed Trump’s tariffs. My response was, 1) I didn’t see them as an ethical issue and 2) I wasn’t informed sufficiently on the topic to opine on it. Veteran EA commentator Chris Marschner said, “Hold my beer!” The post below is the result: you van review the whole thread, which includes more from Chris, here.

***

I don’t know if this is an ethics angle per se but the tariff objections illustrate without question America’s unwillingness to suffer any short term discomfort in order to obtain long term security. I keep hearing that Trump is a narcissist such that he has this inappropriate sense of sense but one of the clinical signs of narcissistic behavior is a sense of entitlement. The minute anything Trump does causes some immediate discomfort or loss many in the public feel they are entitled to what they had before.

A large percentage of the stock market gains are illusory because much of that growth was driven by inflated profits and subsequently inflated stock prices. Consumer and producer prices rise before costs are actually incurred because labor costs are negotiated on longer term contracts as are so many of our commodities. The Biden administration fueled those inflated profits – and he said as much in a speech in the port of Baltimore – when he poured 2 trillion dollars into the economy with too few goods to buy. Employment gains in the last 4 years were in large measure government jobs that produce intangibles whose values are only measured in terms of their employment.

People need to realize that the algorithms used by traders are driving much of the sell off because tariffs are deemed to be anti-growth. What the buy/sell programs are not factoring in is the 6 trillion dollars worth of investment commitment which will revitalize our semi-conductor industry and other strategic industries. We have to buy spare avionics parts for our military and the base materials for our medicines from our political adversary who has a 100 year plan to dominate the globe.

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Institutional Ethics Dunce: The Pittsburgh Pirates

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Wow. Morons!

A crucial component of institutional competence is “know the history and culture of the organization you work for.” Obviously the Pittsburgh Pirates, one of the original National League Major League Baseball franchises, contains too many employees who lack this component. Had not this been true, the team would not have taken down a tribute to Pirates icon and Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente, whose uniform number, 21, was retired by the club, to put up a liquor advertisement.

How clueless can you get?

“Hey, Fred, what does this “Clemente 21″ thing stand for?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Stinky, just some old guy nobody remembers! Just cover it up!”

Clemente, who died in a plane crash while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Nicaragua, played 18 seasons for the Pirates, during which he joined the elite ranks of players with 3000 hits, had a .317 lifetime batting average and won four batting titles, twelve Gold Gloves, two World Series, and a National League MVP award. He may not have been the greatest Pirate—that honor goes to Honus Wagner—but he was and is the most beloved. For the team to replace his number with a liquor ad was spectacularly ignorant.

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R.I.P Walter “Rip” Claassen (April 6, 1962 – March 24, 2025)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ugh. The ethical dilemma of the impossible friend.

Today was Rip Claassen’s birthday, and also the day I learned that he had died of a massive stroke two weeks ago. Rip was involved in many aspects of my life: he was my son’s homeschooling tutor and his first employer, he was the costume designer that I turned to most frequently as artistic director of The American Century Theater, and I also hired him as a stage director on a couple of occasions. He was a very talented, sweet, kind and sensitive man.

He was also a very eccentric man with a lot of problems. That photo above is how he looked and often dressed in his later years, but Rip—and this not unusual for a costume designer—was likely to wear the damnedest things, including pajama bottoms, in public. He was, as he would usually tell you soon after he met you, what they used to call an Asperger’s sufferer—apparently Asperger was a Nazi or something, so the name has been “cancelled”; I don’t what the condition called now—which means that he was bad at reading social cues and tended to get obsessed with certain topics to the extent that he couldn’t focus on anything else. But Rip did a marvelous, courageous job of coping with and minimizing the damage caused by this malady, and I respected him for that. In fact, I urged him to market a service of helping parents of children with that autism-spectrum problem. (He never did.)

Rip bought a theatrical supplies business which he promptly drove into bankruptcy with his quirks. Grace and I loaned him a substantial amount to help him buy the business (okay, it was Grace’s idea), and it was money we never saw again. After that disaster, Rip started asking us for more “loans”—not just us, but my wife was generous and sympathetic to a fault. Eventually, it was the only reason we ever heard from him: he was desperate, the wolf was at the door, he was homeless, nobody would hire him. I gave Rip pro bono legal services and other assistance, but after handing over a couple hundred more dollars that we really couldn’t spare, I finally convinced Grace that we weren’t going to take his calls and emails any more. The Marshalls were having their own problems, and a friend in need who only contacts you to fill that need is a perplexing friend indeed.

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Unethical Quote(s) of the Month: The New Republic

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Head-explosion warning!

“[T]heir all-stick-no-carrot approach to autocracy has only created a suddenly vibrant resistance that’s protesting local Tesla dealerships and storming Republican town halls.”

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor at The New Republic, in The New Republic, in a column titled, “The Fight for the Post-Trump Future Has Already Begun.”

Linkins had served as a senior editor at ThinkProgress, and was a long-time staff writer at The Huffington Post, which should tell you all you need to know about his biases. I know Jason a little: his wife was an occasional cast member in productions of “The American Century Theater,” and he won some brownie points with me by being loved by such a talented, delightful woman. But as you can tell from the quote, he’s a manipulative Far Left activist, either completely deluded or  following the unethical mission of conning the public into seeking, then accepting, government domination of their lives.

By what perverted interpretation are the protests (read: domestic terrorism) at Tesla dealerships “vibrant”? They are unethical, cruel and moronic. Like the “storming” of town halls, these are pretty clearly organized efforts fueled by paid operatives, just like yesterday’s protests. Democrats aren’t even doing a good job hiding the artificial nature of these “resistance” efforts. Then there’s the predictable and dishonest framing of a President using legitimate Presidential power as “autocracy.” One seldom sees so many tells in a single sentence that all scream, “I am an Axis hack trying to deceive the public!”

That wasn’t the worst quote, in truth, just the one that struck me first as ridiculous on its face. Here are some others:

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