Business & Commercial

Offense By Proxy: “Laugh At The Crippled Girl!”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Offender and his friend,the Unoffended Offended.

Forest Thomer II  says he was conducting  “guerrilla marketing” when he went to a May 23 “Party in the Park”  hosted by the local Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. Pointing to Ally Bruener, wheelchair-bound because of Muscular Dystrophy, he quizzed various groups in the crowd, asking, “Do you want to laugh at the crippled girl?” Then Bruener, who is an aspiring comic, wheeled up, told a joke and announced the location and time of  her next performance.

Surprise! Someone was offended—so offended that the police were called. They threatened to shock Thomer with a taser and then arrested him, charging disorderly conduct by virtue of “grossly abusive language.” This could have sent Thomer to jail for a month. When Thomer’s attorney made it clear that he was going to argue censorship, the city changed the charge to “Turbulent behavior,” whatever that is. Amazingly, this ridiculous case actually went to trial, and after four days that could have been better spent making napkin holders out of popsicle sticks, a jury found Thomer “not guilty.” Continue reading →

Maryland’s Question 7: A Lesson in Progressive Corruption

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Think of the children!

Maryland is supposedly one of the most progressive states in the country. One can make one’s own calculations about what it means that such a state is ready to wholeheartedly embrace government-sanctioned gambling as the easy and cowardly solution to its fiscal problems, despite the fact that the populations most harmed by gambling are the very people good progressives are supposed to care about most. My assessment is that resorting to gambling for state revenue is irresponsible, callous, venal and hypocritical. But an unholy alliance of cynical liberals, who argue for gambling because its ill-gotten tax revenue will support education (and we all know that the more money you pay teachers, the better educated our children will be), greedy business interests, and libertarians, who regard gambling as “victimless,” is now poised to add casino table gambling to the state’s sanctioned traps for its poor, desperate, dumb, corrupt and addicted. should Maryland’s voters approve “Question 7” on the ballot November 6th.

How progressive. Continue reading →

Trust and “The Paradoxical Commandments” of Dr. Keith

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In case you were wondering what was on that third tablet that Moses dropped…

I’m preparing a long business ethics program for a large corporation with some ethics issues (which is to say, for a large corporation), and while reviewing my files on business leadership re-discovered some material that I hadn’t looked at for a long while. One of them was “Anyway,” a poem that was also turned into an inspirational book by its author, Dr. Kent M. Keith.  He first wrote it for student leaders in 1968 while an undergraduate at Harvard.

One wonders if what he called “The Paradoxical Commandments” would have occurred to anyone but a student, before he could become jaded, cynical, disillusioned, or stuffed with so many scholarly  details, controversies and nuances regarding ethics that such an idealistic view was tainted forever.  (I should note that Dr. Keith has obviously become none of those things, perhaps because he was able to remain true to his own youthful advice.)

The poem is really about trust, the essence of ethics. There is no question that those who trust—in people, in institutions, in justice, in fairness—will inevitably be betrayed and disappointed, sometimes tragically.  Yet to stop trusting in those things, which so much human experience and simple logic dictates is the safest, most sensible course, is to damn one’s life and the society we live in to perpetual mediocrity, fear, and darkness. Democracy is based on trust of an idea: that human beings can be trusted to live their own lives, and that under the inspiration and catalyst of freedom, will create, persevere, love and build a healthy and happy society. There is plenty of evidence that suggests that trusting this idea is risky and foolish, yet trust is its only hope for fruition. So we must trust anyway.

I’ve never posted Dr. Keith’s poem on Ethics Alarms before. I should have. Here it is: Continue reading →

Ethics Oxymoron: The Psychic Friends Network’s Honest Scam

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

You don’t see this every day: an inherently dishonest business based on exploiting  consumer gullibility and ignorance making its deception clear in publicly released materials.

The Psychic Friends Network, which is allowed to advertise its fake psychic and fortune-telling services by appending a small sentence declaring that it is “for entertainment only,” has been to bankruptcy and back since those halcyon days when it was being pitched on TV by pop star Dionne Warwick. Now it is looking for investors, and  forecasting $64 million of net income for fiscal 2015. Hey–a forecast from a self-acclaimed network of psychics is money in the bank, right?

Uh, no. Says the PFN, being careful, candid, and admitting their business is 100% hooey:

Let’s get this straight: The Psychic Friends Network, which induces consumers to pay its “network” employees to tell them what is going to happen in the future, states in its public materials that it has no way of telling what is going to happen in the future. Does this make it an honest scam? Can there be such a thing as an honest scam? Is it ethical to invest in an enterprise that openly admits that its premise is a lie? I don’t think so. Will many people invest in such a business?

I don’t know.

The funny thing is, neither does the Psychic Friends Network.

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Sources: Bloomberg

 

Ethics Hero: Reebok

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Of course it’s for publicity.

The woman is 6’2″. OK, she’s only 5’1″, but still: that’s one big shoe..

Sure it’s marketing. Certainly it contributes to Reebok’s prestige and good will, and will help sell its shoes.

Never mind. There are many ways that the athletic sportswear company could have promoted itself without helping someone who desperately needed it. Instead, it made three free custom pairs of size 24, 10E sneakers for Igor Vovkovinskiy, the tallest man in the U.S. He was suffering, and now he can walk without pain.

The 7’8″ Rochester, Minnesota man had undergone 16 foot surgeries in six years because he could not find shoes that fit his giant feet.  Reebok heard about his plight and decided to help him. The special shoes took months to manufacture, and each pair would have cost about $15,000 if Igor had to pay for them. In fact, he was taking contributions to help him afford pain-free footwear. Now, he says, he can finally walk again

Capitalism doesn’t have to be ruthless and cold. It just needs to be creative, and pay attention. It is possible to maximize profit and still do good for people along the way, sometimes with the very same act.

Good for Reebok, and good for Igor Vovkovinskiy. Capitalism at its best.

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Facts : New York Daily News

Graphic: Star Tribune

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Website of the Month: Third Tier Reality”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Okay, so you weren’t born on third base like this guy. It doesn’t mean you can’t score.

40 yr. old Gen-Xer delivers a worthy Comment of the Day, leveled at my criticism of the Angry Unemployed Law Grad blog, “Third Tier Reality.”  I think it provides valid perspective, though I also think the post’s characterization of how this issue has been handled on Ethics Alarms is somewhat unfair. (You can read my response under the original article.)

Here is the Comment of the Day, on the post, “Unethical Website of the Month: Third Tier Reality”:

“My point is that the situation Nando is railing about is more complex than the scenario of a bunch of disgruntled youth, unwilling to “work hard”, whining for a hand-out. Nando may pour it on thick with name calling and scatological imagery; fair enough. However, to dismiss the underlying message is overly simplistic, dismissive of people’s good-faith effort and ignores the real economic hardship that many face. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: Third Tier Reality

/ Jack Marshall / 119 Comments

Mr. Furious, of the Mystery Men

Third Tier Reality is one of many blogs recently founded by disappointed law graduates who somehow labored under the misconception that a law school degree guaranteed that they would get 6 figure offers from big law firms and then live the life of Denny Crane until they could retire to a Caribbean island at the age of 55. A depressing number of these deluded souls managed to get themselves in hock up to their eyeballs, and when the recession hit and law firms cut back, felt first, like fools, second, angry and desperate, and third, that it was everyone else’s fault. Thus was born the “law school scam” conspiracy theory. Third Tier Reality, like the others of its breed, maintains that law schools intentionally misled scores of trusting students to pay their obscenely high tuitions,  knowing that they were pumping out more lawyers than the legal market would bear.

To the extent that the site tries to educate would-be law students that there is no guaranteed gravy-train at the end of three years of law school, the website is, at worst, harmless. “My goal is to inform potential law school students and applicants of the ugly realities of attending law school,” he writes. His message: Do not seek a law degree unless…

“(1) YOU GET INTO A TOP 8 LAW SCHOOL; (2) YOU GET A FULL-TUITION SCHOLARSHIP TO ATTEND; (3) YOU HAVE EMPLOYMENT AS AN ATTORNEY SECURED THROUGH A RELATIVE OR CLOSE FRIEND; OR (4) YOU ARE FULLY AWARE BEFOREHAND THAT YOUR HUGE INVESTMENT IN TIME, ENERGY, AND MONEY DOES NOT, IN ANY WAY, GUARANTEE A JOB AS AN ATTORNEY OR IN THE LEGAL INDUSTRY.”

That’s all good advice, though it presumes that more people get law degrees under the delusion alluded to in (4) than I believe is true. Nobody ever told me that a law degree guaranteed a high-paying job as an attorney, and if we understood that decades ago when law was booming, I don’t see where the confusion set in. I worked in the administration of Georgetown Law Center, and that school never made such a representation. In addition, Third Tier Reality goes further, as its brethren blogs do, to insist that a law degree from less than a “First Tier” school is actually an impediment in the job market. I hate to kick this particular hornets nest again, but this is a self-serving rationalization for failure. Continue reading →

A Trivial Attack Ad That Reveals Untrustworthiness

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

All is lost now…

The Obama campaign’s new creation is a 30-second spot that opens with shots of Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and other business villains. “Criminals. Gluttons of greed,” intones the ad’s solemn narrator. “And the evil genius who towered over them? One man has the guts to speak his name.”  Then the ad cuts to Mitt Romney, pulling two words out of his debate comments (the words that came before them were, “I love..”), saying “Big Bird….Big Bird…Big Bird”

B.B. then appears in a montage of Sesame Street clips, as the narrator says,  “Yellow. A menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows it’s not Wall Street you have to worry about. It’s Sesame Street. Mitt Romney, taking on our enemies no matter where they nest.”

It’s an epically stupid ad, if for no other reason that it recruits a non-profit organization’s symbol into a partisan political attack ad, without that organization’s permission. The Children’s Television Workshop has officially  “requested” that the Obama campaign remove it. The ad is far worse than that, however: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “’Miracle Flights’: More Air Travel Cheating”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Frequent commenter Barry Deutsch provides some useful counterweight (as usual) to an Ethics Alarms post, this one regarding fake handicapped flyers in airports. Here is his Comment of the Day, on the recent post, “Miracle Flights”: More Air Travel Cheating”:

“Eh. I’m sure some people do cheat – but I’m also sure that some people who the article implies are cheaters, aren’t doing anything of the sort.

“I’m not usually bothered by the five-minute walk from when I get out of security to my gate in the Portland airport. But standing on the security line is much harder. First of all, it can easily take up to 20 minutes if the airport is crowded, so I’m standing for much longer. And even if it’s only five minutes, standing still (with occasional shuffling) is just much, much harder on me than walking is. My bad knee and heel, normally slight nuisances that I ignore while walking, sometimes scream with pain waiting on line. Continue reading →

“Miracle Flights”: More Air Travel Cheating

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I wondered about this.

“If you don’t tell anyone that I won a Silver in the Olympic hurdles this summer, there’s 50 bucks in it for you… Deal?”

When I was recovering from a hip replacement, and even before, when it was getting painful to walk, I requested wheel chairs from the airlines when I had to fly. It was wonderful. A nice attendant whisked me in front of the lines and through security, and I was also the first person on the plane. Nobody ever asked me what was the nature of my disability; they just trusted that I wouldn’t engage in such a dastardly act as to fake being hobbled—you know, just like nobody would pretend to be someone else to steal a vote. Never happens—why do anything to  check? The system—I mean the wheelchair system, now, not the voting honor system—seemed ripe for abuse to me, but before today, I had never heard of anyone exploiting it.

According to a recent report, a lot of people do. Continue reading →