Business & Commercial

Hey, At Least Donald Trump’s Foundation Is Unethical In Unequivocal And Straightforward Ways!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

trump-check

It is unethical for charitable foundations to serve as tax-free conduits to personally benefit one of its officers. It’s also illegal. The Donald J. Trump Foundation can certainly give a grant to a cause that Trump himself approves of and supports. If, however, that otherwise legitimate cause is an organization that employs his mistress (just hypothesizing here), or one that is chaired by a major contributor to his campaign in what looks like a quid pro-quo deal, or is a cause favored by a Senator who then votes for a bill favored by President Trump, these are all unethical abuses of a charitable foundation’s integrity. They are also common abuses that personal foundations regularly engage in and get away with. Another unethical use of charitable funds is to allow the foundation employ relatives and friends of foundation leaders at high salaries. Again, this is business as usual for many foundations, and is, while unethical, very difficult to stop.

If, however, a foundation that has tax exempt status uses funds that by law must only be used for charitable activities in ways that directly profit an individual connected to the foundation’s management, that’s a version of money laundering and a fraudulent use of charitable grants. There are no nuances there, none of the spin, legalisms and rationalizations used by the Clintons to justify their foundation’s unethical machinations. It’s just plain, unvarnished, unethical, illegal abuse.

That’s what Donald Trump has used his foundation for:

  • In 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club had to pay  $120,000  fines from the town of Palm Beach, Florida. Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines, and avoid litigation challenging their validity, if Trump would make  a $100,000 donation to a charity for veterans. Instead of making the contribution with his own money, or the club’s money, Trump had his foundation make the contribution (above), which was primarily composed of tax-deductible gifts to his foundation  from others. Trump’s business’s fine was essentially paid by the foundation, and the beneficiary was Trump.
  • One of Trump’s golf courses settled a lawsuit by making a $158,000 donation to the plaintiff’s favorite charity. Again, the Trump Foundation, gave the money, according to tax records.
  • In 2013, Trump directed the Trump Foundation to pay $5,000 for  advertisements touting his chain of hotels in programs for fundraising three events organized by a D.C. preservation group.

Finally, In 2014, Trump’s foundation  paid $10,000  at charity fundraiser for a portrait of himself. Continue reading →

“Flipping A Man’s Meat” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Is this what the culture has accomplished with its hard won respect for and acceptance of gay Americans? Really?

Neil Patrick Harris has done a series of quirky, benign spots  for Heineken Light, perhaps to lure us into a false sense of ease.  For in his most recent commercial,  Harris notes, as he stands next to a man grilling barbecue, that Heineken Light makes it OK “to flip another man’s meat.”

This is another in a long and growing list of TV ads based entirely on the assumption that adults think it’s hilarious to suggest obscene or vulgar innuendos. I’ve written about this phenomenon before, which is merely the normalization of crudeness in our discourse, nothing more, but nothing less either. So now we have gay sexual innuendo  by an openly gay actor to advertise beer. Isn’t that great? Boy, Heineken must be so proud.

The grill guy replies to the puckish—or flirtations?—former-Doogie that no man can do that, but late,  Harris asks him: “Can I flip your meat?”

Wow, that’s just hilarious! Why is it hilarious? Because it’s naughty? Because it’s daring? It’s certainly not clever, and if virtually defines the word “gratuitous.” It it a challenge to viewers, daring them to question the taste of joking about “flipping a man’s meat” when they routinely accept gross commercials with vulgar and gratuitous—you know, like this —heterosexual double entendres?  Is the assumption that gays will giggle, guffaw and slap each other on the back when they see this! “Good own, Neil!” Really? How insulting.

I can’t wait for the masturbation double-entendres in credit card and bank commercials. Continue reading →

The Ethical Dilemma Of The Successful, Failing, Local Small Business

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments
Now THIS is a gyros sandwich!

Now THIS is a gyros sandwich!

The little restaurant opened the same year my wife and I moved into the neighborhood. It specialized in yummy Greek fare like gyros, souvlaki, and Greek salads, but also made terrific hamburgers, subs and pizzas, and quickly became our reflex fall-back when we were too tired to make dinner or wanted a treat for lunch. The place was a family operation: the tiny, spunky middle aged woman who seemed to run the place—taking the orders, filling bags, taking the payment—had a Greek accent that reminded me of my grandmother and all of my relatives from her generation; her husband, silent, imposing, who was the chef; and over time, the two children, both of whom worked there when they weren’t in school.

The food was consistently delicious, fresh and authentic, but it was also satisfying to see an old-fashioned family business growing and thriving. A restaurant consultant would probably have said it was too old-fashioned, for the menu never changed, the faded prints of the Parthenon and the Aegean coast were the only decorations in the place, and it dealt only in cash. Still, the little Greek lady greeted you with a knowing smile when you walked in the door, and you knew you were going to be treated like a neighbor.

Then suddenly, the family was gone. The couple decided to sell the place and retire, and a long-time employee who had worked in various jobs over the years took the restaurant over. I knew him, of course, and we talked often. He’s a nice guy, determined, ambitious, hard working. He threw himself into the job of making the business boom. Now the restaurant accepts credit cards and delivers, is open on Sundays, has daily specials, and sports a newly-painted and (somewhat) less austere decor. He also jacked up the price on everything.

The new owner’s formula for success worked almost immediately. The restaurant, he told me, has almost doubled its business. The problem is, as my family gradually discovered, is that the entirely non-Greek staff, including the owner,  has no idea what their food is supposed to taste like. You know you’re in trouble when the entire staff mispronounces everything on the menu, (It’s GIR -Os, hard G, not, ugh, “JY-row,” like the name of the goose inventor in Donald Duck comics), but it’s worse than that. The feta cheese in the Greek salads, which are suddenly mostly iceberg lettuce, is scant and low quality. The once-marvelous cheese steak subs are bland; the onion rings are charred, and every now and then a carry-out order includes something inedible, like the freezer-burned veal parmigiana I had a few months ago. The owner was apologetic, but his candid “I thought that meat looked funny when I microwaved it” didn’t inspire confidence. Continue reading →

From The “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Work” Files: The 9-11 Mattress Sale Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 63 Comments

How many people were involved with this ad for Miracle Mattress?? How did it get on the air without someone with a brain cell twitching pointing out that it was so offensive that it would spark significant, indeed company-threatening backlash on social media? The company owner has apologized abjectly, but this is a serious management botch. Unless he is lying in his apology and didn’t know about the ad or see it before it was launched, he has hired a bunch of incompetent who are given far too much power.

The woman who starred in the commercial is the San Antonio store’s manager. She, at very least, has proven herself to be an incompetent fool. It might help business recover if in addition to her being fired, her head was placed on a pike outside the store…but that would be wrong.

On the bright side, maybe Colin Kaepernick  will buy a mattress there.

Someone Explain To Me, Please, Why Anyone Should Trust Wells Fargo With Their Money Ever Again?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Federal regulators announced today that  Wells Fargo employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts without their customers requesting them or being informed, knowing since 2011.  Employees even created phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said.The stealth accounts allowed the bank to charge millions in illicit fees,  while Wells Fargo employees boosted their sales figures and earned bonuses. Wells Fargo told CNNMoney that it had fired a staggering 5,300 employees over the last few years as they discovered the misconduct—but they didn’t tell customers what had been going on. .An investigation revealed that bank employees opened over 1.5 million unauthorized deposit accounts.

The scamster employees moved funds from customers’ legitimate accounts into newly-created ones without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. Then the victims were  charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees when  there wasn’t enough money in their original accounts. Wells Fargo hustlers also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their customers’ consent.

In response, the feds have hit Wells Fargo with the largest penalty since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began was founded in 201, ironically right around the timeWells Fargo started cheating its customer.. The bank agreed to pay $185 million in fines, along with $5 million to refund customers.

I don’t care how much the bank pays, or even if I get some of it (The Marshalls banked there, but as soon as I get home, that’s going to end.) I don’t care of I have to keep the nest egg in an old sock. I’m not trusting these people. The managers are inept or corrupt, and the lower employees are poorly trained and supervised, as well as crooks. This is a bank. The management has high fiduciary duties. It breached all of them. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Incompetence!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

oops

Film studio Warner Brothers hired Vobile, a company that tracks down illegally-streamed copyrighted material online and files hundreds of thousands of takedown demands every month, to find which sites were stealing WB’s property and to handle the miscreants.

Vobile, on behalf of its client, asked Google to ban many websites from search results, because they violated copyright laws by containing Warner films and videos. Among the sites targeted:  legitimate movie streaming websites run by Amazon, Sky Cinema, the film database IMDB….and Warner’s own websites.  For example, Google was asked to remove links to the official websites for Warner films like  “Batman: The Dark Knight” and “The Matrix.”

Nice job, Vobile!

Warner Brothers has yet to comment, although I would guess its comment would be along the lines of “#!%@*&!”

This is what comes of letting robots do human jobs, while charging fees as if humans were doing them. To be fair to Vobile, one sure way to stop illicit streaming is to block all streaming, just to be safe.

____________________
Pointer: Fred

 

Ethics Observations On The Financial Massacre Of The Aurora Massacre Plaintiffs

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

James Holmes’s 2012 attack on the Century Aurora 16 movie theater showing “The Dark Knight Rises” killed 12 people and wounded 70 others. Many of the survivors and relatives of those killed sued Cinemark, the theater’s owner, in state and federal court, arguing that lax security was the cause of the attack. Cinemark’s defense was that the shooting was unforeseeable. Two suits went forward, one in state court and one in federal court, with different plaintiffs. Cinemark prevailed in both. After the recent jury verdict for Cinemark in the state court case this summer, the company had sought nearly $700,000 from the victims under the “loser pays” Colorado law, which directs that the winning side in a civil case is entitled to recover its legal costs from the losing side. This is the predominant system in England and Europe. The litigation costs of Cinemark in the federal case are likely to be more than $700,000, maybe a lot more.

What’s going on here (the best question to begin any ethics inquiry)? Well…

1. The law suits were a terrible idea. This was the result, in part, of the increasingly popular ideological virus in our society that is slowly reprogramming previously functioning brains to believe that nobody should have to pay for their misfortunes, and that somebody with deeper pocket and more resources should always be obligated to pay instead. This is increasingly a staple of leftist thought: the government, insurance companies, corporations, people with more money, all of them should be potentially on the hook when misfortune strikes others, because that’s fair.

2. It’s not fair, though.  It is profoundly un-American and unethical.

If those parties have caused the damage, or had the power and responsibility to mitigate it, or promised to pay for it, then there are ethical arguments to support them paying some or all of the expenses. But if something terrible happens to you, those people should have no more obligation to be accountable for your harm than you should have responsibility for taking care of them. That’s not the message sent by the culture though. Lawyers love the message that if you are harmed, somebody else can be found to ease your pain. They love it, because they can share in the bounty if a lawsuit seeking damages prevails, and this attitude guarantees more lawsuits. Continue reading →

The Complimentary Room Service Tip Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

I don’t know why these ethics conundrums always attack when I’m on the road, but they do.

Today I am briefly in Atlantic City on business, and last night, just prior to a terrible night’s sleep, I put out one of those door-hangers with a breakfast order on it, to be delivered at 7:30 AM. The room’s pen didn’t work until I wrote over my room number a few times: I thought the 7 in “702” looked a little funky, but it was definitely a seven. Or so I thought: 7:30, then 7:45 rolled around the next morning, and no breakfast.  When I called Room Service, they explained that they thought I had written 4o2, hence no room service.

What? First of all, it didn’t look like a 4. Second, my name was still on the thing: if there was any question about the room, why wouldn’t they check using my name?

After giving Room Service some well-deserved grief, I was told that my order would be up “in a minute.” A minute turned out to be 20 minutes, but a nice young woman eventually arrived with my coffee and pancakes, and told me that management was paying for breakfast.

Hmmm…did this mean she lost her tip? It seemed churlish to ask her, so I said, “Well, they won’t be paying your tip (though for all I know they would), so here…” and I dug into my wallet for a few dollars. But I didn’t have a few dollars. I had a one, a ten, and a bunch of twenties. Giving her a one would look cheap (though it well might have been a tip on top of the one she would get from my order anyway), and a ten was excessive. I gave her the ten.

Now I’m wondering: can I get reimbursed for that? My client is paying for the room, and the comped breakfast actually was a gift to him, not me. The ten dollar tip, though, was entirely discretionary on my part, and I usually don’t ask for travel reimbursements for expenses like that.  So the comped breakfast is going to benefit my server, unjustly enrich my client, and cost me an extra ten bucks.

It doesn’t seem fair, somehow. Well, my server’s smile when I gave her the ten dollar bill was almost worth it.

Almost.

 

About That Obviously Dishonest Disclaimer On Movies And TV Shows

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons, places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.”

The character of Jake LaMotta is fictional, and any similarity to Jake LaMotta is purely coincidental...

The character of Jake LaMotta is fictional, and any similarity to Jake LaMotta is purely coincidental…

This and disclaimers like it on movies and TV shows have driven me crazy for a long time. So often the text is an obvious lie. I first began obsessing about it during the early days of “Law and Order,” when Dick Wolf’s show would herald the fact that its episodes were “ripped from the headlines,” then end with a disclaimer that said it was completely fiction. Sometimes, an episode was obviously based on a specific crime and specific individuals, and the actors were made up to look like the actual criminals. The disclaimer was and is a lie, and since it was obvious, why did they bother? Legally, it does no good to publish a boilerplate disclaimer that says, “We’re not really doing what any fool can see we are doing, ” except to discourage potential lawsuits by stupid people. I am of the (minority, unfortunately) position that it’s unethical for lawyers to author legally meaningless language like this for the sole purpose of misleading the ignorant.

The background of the disclaimer is interesting; Slate just published the story, which I realized I once knew but had forgotten.

The 1932 MGM film “Rasputin and the Empress”, was based on the events leading up to the fall of the Romanovs, and starred John, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore. Its most famous sequence was a version of the antic assassination of Rasputin, an event largely known because of the book written by one of the assassins, Prince Felix Yusupov, portrayed as “Prince Paul Chegodieff” in the film. The film also suggested that the Prince’s wife, “Princess Natasha,” was raped by Rasputin—suggested but not shown, since Rasputin was played by John Barrymore (Drew’s grandfather) and the princess was played by his sister, Ethel.  Princess Natasha was the avatar for Princess Irina Alexandrovna of Russia, who, like her husband Prince Felix, had escaped Russia before all the royals were killed.

Yusupov, living in Paris, heard about the film and decided that since audiences would recognize him as  the fictional killer of Rasputin, they would also assume that his wife was raped by Rasputin. She wasn’t, or if she was, only she and the Mad Monk knew about it. Officially, Irina and Rasputin had never met. An MGM researcher had pointed out this factual discrepancy to the studio during production and warned that the Yusupovs could sue, but was pooh-poohed off the lot. She was correct, however, for Irina Yusupov sued the studio, and after watching the movie twice, the British jury awarded her £25,000, or about $125,000. MGM took the film out of circulation for decades, and when it turned up on Turner Classic Movies, the pseudo-rape scene was gone. Continue reading →

Ann Coulter’s “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!” : Unethical Book Title Of The Millennium?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Ann Coulter: Take seriously at your own risk. Just like Donald Trump...

Ann Coulter: Take seriously at your own risk. Just like Donald Trump…

I have long been waffling over whether to bother mentioning Ann Coulter’s cheerleading for Donald Trump, which began almost a year ago. Coulter is freakishly unethical and proud of it, a rare professional fick, whose shtick (I guess one shouldn’t use fick and shtick in the same sentence: sorry) is to pander to The Angry Right in such obnoxious and inflammatory terms that the Angry Left goes bananas with hate, thus selling books and providing her with media appearances to promote them. I have  assigned her to the dark corner reserved for performance artists who posture and lie for a living, for that’s Ann. I have no idea what she really believes, just as I have no idea what James Carville, Milo Yiannopoulos or Rush Limbaugh really believe—and anyone who really thinks that they know what Donald Trump really believes is beyond redemption, since it is quite evident that he doesn’t know himself.

Thus when I heard that Ann’s latest book, doubtlessly written in about five hours of dictation and containing some measure of her trademark snark, which she is very skilled at, was called “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!,” I was sorely tempted to express my disgust, especially since Coulter, an educated woman and a lawyer, actually stooped to using that mark of an illiterate, “awesome,’ like the book was authored by a modern day Gidget. But why play into Ann’s hands? This is why she writes this crap: to cause buzz on the net and cable so she can sell the books to right wing idiots who will be soothed by her calculated pose.

The title is an absurd, almost Orwellian (“War is Peace”) lie. Trump, as much as anyone alive,  cannot be trusted regarding anything, especially to hold great power. The reasons for this are evident and undeniable, and have been so long before running for President, wrecking the Republican Party, threatening the United States’ public’s faith in democracy and handing the White House to the most corrupt candidate a Presidential race has ever featured was a twinkle in the Donald’s eye.

However, listening to Trump blather about immigration last week, and seeming to renege on his signature promise to depart each and every illegal immigrant, almost compelled one to direct massive schadenfreude Ann Coulter’s way. Continue reading →