Business & Commercial

The Chris Davis Saga: How Much Money Is “Enough”?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments
Chris Davis is under there somewhere...

Chris Davis is under there somewhere…

I have too many political issues on the runway, and I’m about to be buried in snow. This seems a perfect time to reflect on Chris Davis, the slugging Baltimore Orioles first baseman who just re-signed with the team in a seven-year, $161 million deal. Yes, he’s a baseball player, but the ethics issue here is not confined to baseball, or even professional sports.

Two weeks ago, it looked as if Davis and the Orioles were at an impasse. The team had, we were told, offered a take-it-or-leave-it 150 million dollar package, and Davis and his agent had turned it down. Davis’s manager, Buck Showalter, told the press that he had asked Davis, who by all accounts loves playing in Baltimore,”How much is enough?”:  “I asked Chris during the season, ‘Chris, when you walk into a Target store, can you buy anything you want. So, how much is enough?'”

Sportswriters, not being reflective sorts,  even the smarter ones, who are always taking the players union’s position that the more money a player can squeeze out of fat cat owners the better, jumped on Showalter. Said CBS writer David Brown, “Showalter trying to shame him into taking less — so that ownership can keep more — is shameful in itself. Why isn’t Showalter asking Angelos ‘ How much is enough?'”*

Showalter, who is one of the most intelligent and perceptive people in the game, was not trying to shame Davis. He was trying to get him to think; he was trying to impart some wisdom…and some ethics. Continue reading →

The Seventh Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Best of Ethics 2015, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

DavisHand

The Awards continue (Part I is here)….

Most Important Ethical Act of the Year:

The US Supreme Court’s Decision in  Obergefell v. Hodges in which the Supreme Court considered whether states had to recognize a right to same-sex marriages, and narrowly decided that they must. The prejudice against homosexuality is ancient, deep, and complex, mixed up in confounding ways with morality and religion, and deeply divisive. Nonetheless, I felt that the opinion should have been unanimous; it’s a shame that it was not, but in the end, this will not matter. The result was preordained from the moment gays began coming out of the shadows and asserting their humanity and human rights. Since the Stonewall riot, the nation and the culture has learned a great deal about the number of talented and productive gay men and women in our society and our history, the pain, ostracizing, discrimination and mistreatment they have suffered, and the falseness of the myths and fears that lead to this suffering.  In the end, as Clarence Darrow said about blacks, it is human beings, not law, that will make gays equal. No topic immediately causes such emotional and intense debate, on this blog or in society, as this one, but the Supreme Court’s decision is a major step toward changing the ethical culture, by asserting  that gay men and women have the same rights,  in the eyes of the state, to marry those they love and want to build a life with, and by implication, that the beliefs of any religion regarding them or their marriages cannot eliminate that right.

Outstanding Ethical Leadership

Senator Rand Paul.   I am neither a Rand Paul supporter, nor an admirer, nor a fan.  However, his June filibuster-like Senate speech against National Security Agency counter-terrorism surveillance was a brave, principled,  important act, and a great public service. The point Paul made needs to be made again, and again, and again:  there is no reason to trust the NSA, and no reason to trust the current federal government either. The fact that on security matters we have no real choice is frightening and disheartening, but nevertheless, no American should be comfortable with his or her private communications, activities and other personal matters being tracked by the NSA, which has proven itself incompetent, dishonest, an untrustworthy.

 

Parent of the Year

Tonya Graham

Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother caught on video as she berated and beat on her son in the street for participating in the Freddie Gray rioting and looting. Continue reading →

Just in Time For The NFL Championship Games, Football Fans…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

NFL brains

In his interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, former NFL star wide receiver Antwaan Randle El revealed that at the age of  36, he can barely walk down stairs, and his mind is failing:

“I ask my wife things over and over again, and she’s like, ‘I just told you that. I’ll ask her three times the night before and get up in the morning and forget. Stuff like that. I try to chalk it up as I’m busy, I’m doing a lot, but I have to be on my knees praying about it, asking God to allow me to not have these issues and live a long life. I want to see my kids raised up. I want to see my grandkids.”

The odds are against him. Resaerchers believe that a majority of NFL players suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage caused by repeated head trauma.  CTE was at the center of the film “Concussion,” as well as the documentary that inspired it, “League of Denial,} about the NFL’s efforts to deny and obscure that fact it was slowly killing its players….for entertainment. And money.

Randle El says of the game he now wishes he had never played:

“There’s no correcting it. There’s no helmet that’s going to correct it. There’s no teaching that’s going to correct it. It just comes down to it’s a physically violent game. Football players are in a car wreck every week.”

Immediately after this story aired on CNN this morning, the network cut to an upbeat, exited preview of this weekend’s AFC NFL  championship. It was chilling.

Has there ever been a greater irrational, irresponsible, ethics disconnect in our society?

Enjoy the games…

How Unethical Is Spike Lee’s Oscar Boycott?

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

SpikeLee

Short answer: Incredibly unethical.

Spike Lee, ground-breaking black director, social commentator, Knicks fan and hot-head, announced that he’s boycotting the Oscars because its 2016 nominations list did not meet diversity mandates, and posted this rant/manifesto on Instagram:

“Again. I Would Like To Thank President Cheryl Boone Isaacs And The Board Of Governors Of The Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Sciences For Awarding Me an Honorary Oscar This Past November. I Am Most Appreciative. However My Wife, Mrs. Tonya Lewis Lee And I Will Not Be Attending The Oscar Ceremony This Coming February. We Cannot Support It And Mean No Disrespect To My Friends, Host Chris Rock and Producer Reggie Hudlin, President Isaacs And The Academy. But, How Is It Possible For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White? And Let’s Not Even Get Into The Other Branches. 40 White Actors In 2 Years And No Flava At All. We Can’t Act?! WTF!! It’s No Coincidence I’m Writing This As We Celebrate The 30th Anniversary Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday. Dr. King Said “There Comes A Time When One Must Take A Position That Is Neither Safe, Nor Politic, Nor Popular But He Must Take It Because Conscience Tells Him It’s Right”. For Too Many Years When The Oscars Nominations Are Revealed, My Office Phone Rings Off The Hook With The Media Asking Me My Opinion About The Lack Of African-Americans And This Year Was No Different. For Once, (Maybe) I Would Like The Media To Ask All The White Nominees And Studio Heads How They Feel About Another All White Ballot. If Someone Has Addressed This And I Missed It Then I Stand Mistaken. As I See It, The Academy Awards Is Not Where The “Real” Battle Is. It’s In The Executive Office Of The Hollywood Studios And TV And Cable Networks. This Is Where The Gate Keepers Decide What Gets Made And What Gets Jettisoned To “Turnaround” Or Scrap Heap. This Is What’s Important. The Gate Keepers. Those With “The Green Light” Vote….”

Now let me list as many of the ways Lee’s boycott is unethical (I may stray into why it is stupid as well),  as I can before my fingers get tired and nausea overwhelms me: Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The South Carolina Democratic Candidates Debate

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Debate transcript here.

1. The cynical effort to protect Hillary Clinton by scheduling debates at times when as few people as possible will watch them has officially become ludicrous, and also beyond denial. CNN’s alleged media watchdog Brian Stelter, in one of his occasional non-partisan episodes, grilled Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the strategy Sunday, and got a typical Wasserman Schultz-ish non answer, as she compared the TV rations with past debates and then mocked the Republican debates, which have been more conveniently scheduled and have garnered far more viewers. This time the tactic worked on me: my wife wanted to watch “Downton Abbey” (during the debate, one website wag on a post about the Democrats wrote, “Lady Crawley is losing the debate with Mrs Hughes and with The Hospital Board merger. Sad.”) Showtime was also running “The Godfather Epic,” which I had never seen, re-editing I and II together (but somehow differently from “The Godfather Saga.” I didn’t last to the end, so I assumed it also included III, and so wrote until a commenter put me straight), and then there was the football game. I had to watch the MSNBC re-run late into the night.

2. Several commenters claimed that Bernie was rude to Hillary, making funny faces, shouting. That’s Bernie, though, and here we go again: Hillary’s a feminist, but her supporters want to impose a double standard of how she is treated in the rough-and-tumble world of politics. This has, after all, been very effective from the race perspective insulating Barack Obama. If the Democrats dare to run such a corrupt candidate as Hillary, they will deserve Trump as the opposition, the one candidate who won’t pay any attention to media claims that he should pull his punches.

Nothing Bernie did during last night’s debate was nearly as outrageous as Joe Biden’s snorting, snickering, eye-rolling and constantly interrupting performance in the 2012 Vice-Presidential debate with Paul Ryan, as Martha Raddatz played “boxing referee who has taken a bribe” by ignoring it all. Well, but Ryan’s a guy, and a Republican , so he didn’t deserve common civility.

3. The central dishonesty in this debate and all of the Democratic debates is the inherent hypocrisy of simultaneously saying the economy is a mess and Wall Street is pulling the strings, while extolling the record of Barack Obama. Sanders is the most hypocritical, at one point proclaiming his pro-Obama bona fides as he runs a campaign calling for a revolution.  Here’s Sanders in his opening:

“As we look out at our country today, what the American people understand is we have an economy that’s rigged, that ordinary Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, 47 million people living in poverty, and almost all of the new income and wealth going to the top one percent….This campaign is about a political revolution to not only elect the president, but to transform this country….”

4.  Once again, all three candidates used cover words and vagueries to advocate “comprehensive immigration reform” without saying what that is. Nor did  NBC’s softball-tossing moderators, nor the candidates to each other, demand details and meanings. What “reforms”? Opening the borders? Making all illegal immigrants citizens? How long will illegal immigrant-pandering Democrats be allowed to get away with this? If they really are willing to sacrifice U.S. sovereignty, they have an obligation to say so, and clearly. Continue reading →

Diversity vs. Integrity: The 2016 Oscar Nominations

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

All white Oscars

When I began to watch the televised announcement of the Oscar nominations, I was prepared for a wave of minority nominations. After all, the Academy for Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences was lambasted last year for the absence of African American nominees, and with the Academy stuffed with knee-jerk, left-wing, Democratic donors, I assumed that last year’s criticism would prompt the voters to place an affirmative action thumb hard on every scale. To my amazement, I was wrong! For the second year in a row, all 20 nominees in the acting category were white. The only  nonwhite nominee was for Best Director (Alejandro G. Iñárritu).

This tells me that the Academy Awards, though they may be influenced by so many biases that the final awards—except in rare cases where a performance was so outstanding that nobody could argue with the choice without looking silly—are meaningless as credible determinations of merit, have integrity. They are not “fixed.” The Academy, whose chair is a black woman, would have loved to have a large, or even a small group of black nominees to be able to show more  diversity. The awards, however, are supposed to be based on artistic merit, not EEOC targets. It looks like the Academy’s members voted that way. Good for them.

Oh, naturally, Chris Rock (the Oscar night host—do you really think the Academy would have engaged his services if it didn’t want and assume plenty of black nominees?) has been launching verbal grenades, and Al Sharpton, the renowned film auteur, is calling for a boycott (“when the only tool you have is a hammer…”).  In the end, however, the complaint of black activists is self-defeating and hypocritical Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “In Search Of A Tipping Point: Trump, The Microphone, And Thomas Dewey’s Ghost”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Trump mic

Ed Moser, a sound designer, technical director and all-around theater pro (he produced and designed sound for my recent staging of “Twelve Angry Men”…he’s also a friend), enlightens us with some insider observation relevant to Donald Trump’s recent denigration of a sound tech. It also reveals an unattractive side of an earlier GOP presidential candidate. Here is Ed’s Comment of the Day on the post, In Search Of A Tipping Point: Trump, The Microphone, And Thomas Dewey’s Ghost:

I have a friend who engineered the sound for a large church back when McCain was a candidate. He visited the church for a “town meeting”.

My friend locked all the unused gear away, and for the event distributed only freshly batteried hand held wireless mics for the event with screw on caps on the bottom. Such caps are specifically designed to prevent clumsy performers from accidentally touching the controls on the bottom of the mic– where one could turn the mic off, change the battery, or worst of all, change the frequency. Then color coded the mics with bright spike tape, so that while he was at the sound board he could instantly tell which mic/channel he was dealing with.

The plan was for McCain to give a speech, then take questions from the floor. Runners would carry one of three hand helds to the person with the query, so the question could be heard throughout the house. There was a fourth back up.

If all of this sounds pretty standard for people who know what they’re doing and have done many such events before: well, it is.

That evening, during the event, the question and answer session occurs. The first mic, it develops, is dead. A quick check reveals that ALL FOUR are dead. Irked at having to come the the edge of the stage and get close to an actual person to hear an actual question, or perhaps just trying to infuse humor at an awkward moment, McCain points to the back of the house, right at my friend, and says to the crowd, “Fire that guy!”

He gets a laugh. Except from my friend, of course.

Continue reading →

Toward An Ethical Lottery

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Powerball

Powerball, like all government-sponsored lotteries, is unethical in every way except that it is not fixed, at least as far as we know. The excitement over lotteries is also depressing. The whole scenario is like something out of a movie about a dystopian culture in which only a lucky draw can rescue citizens from despair and failure—this, in a society of unique personal freedom and opportunities for success. The worst aspect of lotteries—arguably, since there are so many bad things about them—is that they are cruel cheats. As often as not, indeed more often than not, winning a jackpot just provides conclusive proof of why the individual needed a lottery to achieve even temporary affluence. The poor decision-making skills, inadequate education and self-destructive tendencies of many of these winners lead to disaster and  financial distress incredibly quickly; many have lost all of their winnings within five years or less,.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are people, many of them, who have the skills, ideas, talents and character to achieve great things for themselves and society if they had a little help, like some spare time and extra cash. Some of these people achieve a great deal without the time or cash, but might do more good for society with some help.

I would like to see a merit, ambition and potential-based “lottery,” which individuals enter with an explanation of their aspirations and some valid support for their ability to achieve them. Have the entrance fee reasonable, say, twenty bucks, and allow nominations to be submitted by others for a lesser amount, say, ten. Wait until the pool reaches an appropriate size, like 20 million dollars, and have a selection committee choose finalists to interview. In the end, a group of  worthy candidates are awarded a million dollars (or more, or less—I’m not designing details here) to see what they do with it. There will be no further strings attached.

Naturally there will be frauds and failures; it will be the job of the selection process to try to sniff out and avoid them, but some duds will slip through. Never mind. This would still be a “lottery” that has a fighting chance of benefiting society rather than a lucky few who spent money on an upscale, state-promoted version of the numbers game they should have been investing in a college fund for their kids or in a degree for themselves.

It would have a chance of making life a little better, rather than worse, which is what the current “games” do.

The Unethical Web-Shaming Destruction Of Holly Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

kilroysFB.0

“I will never go back to this location for New Year’s Eve!!!” young Holly Jones ranted on an Indianapolis bar and restaurant’s Facebook page. “After the way we were treated when we spent $700+ and having our meal ruined by watching a dead person being wheeled out from an overdose my night has been ruined!” The angry post accused the evening’s restaurant manager of rudeness, the party’s waitress of profanity and the establishment itself of inattention.

After a sharp on-line rebuttal by the restaurant, the Web Furies were unleashed. Jones’ post became the latest web-shaming catalyst and an invitation to join a cyber-mob where fun could be had by all turning an ordinary jerk into a national villain. Lots of people signed up. The mob tracked down Jones and bombarded her own Facebook page with hate—she took the page down—then moved on to the salon where she worked as a hairdresser, threatening a boycott unless it fired Jones.

So it did.

These exercises in vicious web shaming can be ranked along an ethics spectrum. At the most unethical end is the destruction of Justine Sacco, who had her legitimate marketing career destroyed by social media’s  hysterical over-reaction to a self-deprecating, politically incorrect tweet. Now she works promoting a fantasy sports gambling website, a sleazy enterprise that entices chumps into losing serious cash with a business model derived from internet poker—she not only had her life derailed, she was corrupted too.

At the other end is Adam Smith, the one-time executive who wrecked his own career, with the help of another cyber-mob, by proudly posting a video of himself abusing an innocent Chic-fil-A  employee because Smith didn’t like her boss’s objections to gay marriage.  Somewhere between the two is Lindsay Stone, who lost her job by posting a photo showing her pretending–she later said— to scream at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier while flipping the bird at the “Silence and Respect” sign.

The distance between Smith and Jones is the difference between words and conduct. Smith’s video showed him abusing a young woman, and his posting of the video indicated that he saw nothing wrong with it. Jones, in contrast, did nothing, other than prove herself to be, at least at the moment she posted her rant, an utter jerk. Everyone along the spectrum, however, including Jones, were excessively and unjustly harmed by the web-shaming  campaign against them. Last I checked, Smith was unemployed and destitute three years after his episode of atrocious judgment.

In the current case, the cyber-mob forcing Holly’s employer to fire her is ethically worse, by far, than anything she can reasonably be accused of doing by posting her criticism of the restaurant. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce And Unethical Column Of The Month: Univision Anchor Jorge Ramos

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments
Who is the traitor, Jorge?

Who is the traitor, Jorge?

There are some positions in some controversies that I really cannot manage to respect, because no matter how much I try to understand the points of view, they seem so obviously wrong and ethically indefensible. On “The View” yesterday, for example, alleged comedian Joy Behar, in discussing the character of Bill and Hillary Clinton, stated without joking that she would vote for a proven rapist for President, as long as he or she was a Democrat. This is the kind of position I’m talking about.

Yesterday, the Hall of Fame voting results were announced. Mike Piazza and Ken Griffey, Jr. were elected to the Hall by the baseball writers, and equally welcome to this ethicist-baseball fan was the fact that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, both unrepentant steroid cheats, were not elected, and their still paltry vote totals suggest that they may never be. Yet several baseball pundits, reporting on the voting results, preceded this aspect of the news with “Unfortunately.”

I don’t understand that attitude toward cheating at all. I have written about as much about Barry Bonds as any ethics topic on Ethics, and  the case against him is air-tight, with the only defenses ever put forth being invalid rationalizations, easily rebutted. Nevertheless, otherwise intelligent people keep repeating them, hoping to outlast reason and reality by perseverance and repetition. (Sadly, this often works, as “77 cents on the dollar,” “Bush lied” and “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” tragically prove.) In the last 24 hours, I have heard Clemens and Bonds called “great players” so many times that my teeth have been ground down perceptibly. Cheaters are never great, as I explained in one of my favorite posts of 2015.

I was preparing to once again swat down the cultural poison being peddled by the Bonds and Clemens defenders when another of the issues that I believe has no respectable “other side” again raised its uglier than ugly head, so I changed course. That issue is illegal immigration, as in “immigration that occurs in direct violation of U.S. law, making it illegal.” Those who engage in illegal immigration are immigrants, and because their manner of immigration is illegal, they are illegal immigrants. Those who insist on calling them merely immigrants are lying; those who favor euphemisms like “undocumented workers” are engaging in intentional deceit. No, I have no respect for their rhetorical dishonesty–their smug and falsely sanctimonious rhetorical dishonesty—and it should not be tolerated by any U.S. citizen who wants transparent debate on a crucial national policy issue.

The ethics violator in the immediate case is serial offender Jorge Ramos, who uses his position as a broadcast journalist—unethically, since his duty is to report the news accurately, not to spout propaganda—to advocate  unrestricted immigration by Hispanics and Latinos into the United States. It is a logically, historically, demographically, economically, politically and legally irresponsible, outrageous position, but he managed to exceed previously established depths in promoting it by writing, in a column for Fusion, that GOP candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are engaging in betrayal by “turning their backs on immigrants,” who, he says, just got here a little later than they did. Continue reading →