It has been revealed that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s family foundation makes extensive use of off-shore tax havens and hedge funds in the Cayman Islands, avoiding U.S. taxes that other major foundations choose to pay. You know the Cayman Islands: that’s where the criminal law firm in John Grisham’s novel The Firm helped its Mafia clients hide their income. I’m not suggesting that Bloomberg is ripe for a takedown by Tom Cruise. I am suggesting that it looks terrible, and leaders have a duty to avoid looking terrible. Continue reading
Business & Commercial
Tea Party Vengeance
What possible justification can there be for setting out to get someone fired for expressing a private opinion, however crude or confrontational? Vengeance isn’t a justification. Intimidation isn’t a justification. Neither is “because I can.” Causing someone to lose his or her job as retribution for legal conduct with no connection to that job is meanness for the sake of meanness, bullying, and a bright-line violation of the Golden Rule.
This is what the head of a prominent Tea Party organization did to Lance Baxter. Continue reading
Progress, with a dash of…WHAT???
Penguin Group Australia had to reprint 7,000 copies of its new cook book, Pasta Bible, last week,when it was discovered that the recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto called for “salt and freshly ground black people.” (“It’s a cook book!!!!!“—“To Serve Man,” The Twilight Zone)
Guess what it was supposed to say. That’s right. Continue reading
Ethically Irresponsible Headline of the Month: The Drudge Report
“WILL OBAMA RETURN $994,795 IN GOLDMAN SACHS CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS?” screams the Drudge Report, in response to the Obama Administration’s charges of fraud and corruption at Goldman Sachs.
What exactly is this headline trying to imply? Continue reading
The Hannity-Fox-Tea Party Connection
When you don’t stop something that is obviously unethical until people start screaming and pointing fingers, the reasonable presumption is that it wasn’t the fact that it was unethical that made you take action, but that you were going to be criticized for it. Thus Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch’s last-second cancellation of Sean Hannity’s appearance at a Tea Party event get no ethics brownie points—in fact, quite the contrary. Continue reading
Ethics Quote of the Week: Sportswriter William Rhoden
“What is character? In the N.F.L., character is need.”
—–New York Times sports columnist William Rhoden, explaining how teams seek to draft players “with character,” a.k.a. “who don’t commit felonies off the field,” unless, of course, the player is especially talented and they need what he has to offer on the field in order to win.
This intellectually dishonest standard is not restricted to pro football. Voters want ethical and honest elected representatives, unless they keep taxes low and deliver goodies to their neighborhoods. Corporations want executives with character too, unless a manipulative, deceitful, scheming whiz makes the company’s profits soar. The student with great promise will be excused or merely admonished for offenses that a school will suspend lesser students for.
The well-documented human tendency to endure unethical conduct from high-level performers while holding less gifted and accomplished individuals to higher standards of character serves to undermine ethics generally, confirming as it does the principle that the prettier, smarter, richer, more powerful, more famous you are, the less obligated you are to care about others, do the right things, or obey the rules.
For this is the Star Syndrome. In the coming months and years, Ethics Alarms and its readers will encounter it often. Continue reading
Obama’s Coal Mine Tragedy Verdict=Abuse of Power
There are two disturbing implications of President Obama’s premature condemnation of Massey Energy for the recent tragedy at its Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, where an explosion killed 29 miners on April 5. The first is that the President appears to have a flat learning curve, as this repeats his error in the Professor Gates fiasco in Cambridge, Mass, in which Obama condemned the conduct of a Cambridge police officer without getting all the facts. The second is that for a former law professor, Obama has a rather loose grasp on the concept of Due Process. Continue reading
Ethics Hero: CNN
CNN has begun to get hammered in the ratings, in the midst of a policy change that has the venerable cable news staking out novel ground: it is being objective. This used to be known as “journalism.” Continue reading
Petersen Was Right: “Jon & Kate” Exploited Their Kids
Back when everyone was buzzing about TLC’s reality show “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” long before the dark side of the show began to emerge, before the messy divorce of the couple, before Kate was revealed as a castrating control freak and Jon showed himself to have the maturity of a 12-year-old, and long, long before Kate demonstrated that she may be the least watchable dancer ever to appear in televised dance show, child performer advocate Paul Petersen was sounding the alarm that the show violated child labor laws. Reality show producers sneak in through loop-holes in the laws regulating scripted shows, and Petersen, to nasty derision from some quarters, kept making the point that what the Gosselins were doing with their eight children was against the law, harmful to them, and wrong.
Now that the show is off the air, Pennsylvania, where it was filmed, has finally gotten around to looking into Petersen’s allegations, and guess what? He was right all the time. Continue reading
A. J. Pierzynski, Baseball Cheating and Moral Gray Zones
The baseball season is certainly off to an unethical start.
In Tuesday’s game between the Blue Jays and White Sox, Toronto pitcher Ricky Romero’s gestating no-hitter was aborted in the 8th inning in part because of some deceptive play-acting by ChiSox catcher A. J. Pierzynski. Every era has one player who acquires a reputation for being tricky, a.k.a. “dirty,” and Pierzynski is the current title holder. When he came to bat against Romero, the catcher with the unspellable name took advantage of a pitch that bounced in the dirt near him to hop up and down as if his widdle toe had a ball-induced boo-boo. Incredibly (for even the White Sox announcers were chatting about how obvious it was that the ball hadn’t touched A. J., noting that he wasn’t even hopping on the most plausibly injured foot), home umpire Tim McClelland stood by silently as Pierzynski trotted to first base. Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston protested to no avail, and, not for the first time, A. J. Pierzynski had stolen first base. Now Romero had to pitch from the stretch rather than a wind-up, and the no-hitter (and the shut-out) was no-history seconds later, as Toronto’s Alex Rios hit a home run.
Did A. J. Pierzynski cheat? Should he be fined or punished for feigning an injury, as some have suggested? Continue reading
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