Business & Commercial

July 4th Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Light whatever ethics fuses you choose here today. As usual, traffic is minor on a long weekend. I have only one matter to pass on: Sen. Bernie Sanders’ dishonest and aburd criticism of the Paramount/CBS/”60 minutes” settlement, which would be an “Unethical Quote of the Week” if so many Axis hacks and liars hadn’t been saying the same thing. Quoth Bernie,

“Paramount’s decision will only embolden Trump to continue attacking, suing and intimidating the media which he has labeled ‘the enemy of the people.’ It is a dark day for independent journalism and freedom of the press — an essential part of our democracy. It is a victory for a president who is attempting to stifle dissent and undermine American democracy.”

Asshole.

In order:

1. Trump should be “emboldened.” The media has been indulging in fake news, manipulated reports, partisan bias and anti-democratic fact-hiding for far, far too long, and a reckoning is overdue as well as necessary.

2. The press should be intimidated to make it stop abusing the freedom of the press and deliberately misleading the public.

3. The news media is the enemy of the people. The “60 minutes” scandal showed why.

4. The dark day for independent journalism arrived the first time a major news source like CBS set out to elect one candidate over another instead of reporting objectively and fairly on both. Making it clear that journalists face some adverse consequences when they betray their public trust this brightens the day.

5. The essential part of democracy is the public being reliably informed about the world, the nation and its elected officials objectively, responsibly and fairly. so they can competently participate in their own government. When the free press decides to misuse its power and special privileges to mislead the public, that’s an attack on democracy.

6. How can anyone describe what CBS did with the Harris interview (or NBC, with “Saturday Night Live,” giving Harris an illegal free campaign commercial three days before the election) as “dissent”? Answer: They can if they are dishonest, unscrupulous, shameless Machiavellian leftists like Bernie. This is the guy who said outright that Harris was pretending to be more moderate in her views to get elected, and that was fine with him. “By any means necessary,” after all!

Did I mention that Sanders is an asshole?

7. Bernie and anyone else who stood by and allowed a demented Democratic President be manipulated by unelected back-room aides is estopped from ever using the term, “undermine American democracy”again. Channeling Albert Brooks in “Lost in America,” I’d say that they can’t even use the components of that phrase, “undermine,” “American,” and “democracy.”

8. And can we please stop tolerating the “Paramount settled because it wants the merger to be approved” lie, the agreed-upon narrative the news media has pushed to shift the blame from “60 minutes” to Trunp? Paramount and CBS settled because they did not dare go through discovery, which would reveal high level emails in which various executives openly discussed how to make sure Harris won and Trump lost. Those would create a professional scandal from which CBS might never recover.

Paramount/CBS Pays For Its Unethical Election Interference: Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

It looks like the settlement will amount to around 16 million dollars when all is tallied up, more than what ABC paid for George Stephanopoulos repeatedly (but not maliciously, oh no, never that!) calling Donald Trump a “rapist” on national TV. Several cynics were telling me today that this was “a drop in the bucket” for Paramount—it doesn’t matter. The settlement is an admission of wrongdoing, and what CBS and “60 Minutes” did by stealth editing a Kamala Harris interview late in the Presidential campaign to make her sound like less of an idiot was wrong, another “enemy of the people” act, and a blatant attempt to mislead voters and support the Democratic Party under the guise of journalism.

More important than the symbolism of the money perhaps is CBS’s promise to install a mandatory new rule requiring the network to promptly release full, unedited transcripts of future Presidential candidate interviews. It is the “Trump Rule.” That a television news division had to be forced into institutionalizing such transparency tells us all we need to know about the dismal state of broadcast journalism.

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On the Illegality of Illegal Aliens

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Guest column by Ryan Harkins

We have this report from HotAir explaining that that the ICE raid on the meat packing plant in Nebraska was not simply due to the fact that the plant hired so many illegals. Instead, the focus of the raid was on an identity-theft ring running out of that plant.

I want to make it clear I am all in favor of whoever in the world who wants to come to the United States to make a better life for themselves should have the opportunity. I’d give top priority to those who wish to become US citizens, but I’m generally in favor of letting into the country far more people than our current immigration system allots. How many more, I can’t say, as I’ve not crunched the numbers. But in general more immigrants means more workers, more production, higher demand for services, all which contribute to a growing economy that enriches everyone here.

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Announcing a New Ethics Alarms Principal: The Jumanji Axe

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

As regular and long-time readers here know, Ethics Alarms is fond of useful analogies and metaphors from popular culture that illustrate regularly occurring ethics breaches, self-defeating irresponsible conduct, or the proper remedies or reactions to them, in society at large or various segments of it. Hence we have the Barn Door Fallacy, the Julie Principle, the Popeye, the Nelson (“Ha-ha!”), the Ripley, the Costanza, and quite a few others.

I was, just this morning, in a discussion with a bar ethics counsel regarding a serious problem in the legal world. It is a corrupt system that neither the legal profession nor the incompetent news media has let the public know about, one that amounts to a multi-level scandal that hurts everyone except the unscrupulous, greedy lawyers who participate in it. At one point she said to me, “You know, we have had the means available to address this all along, and it never occurred to us even when the solution was not only obvious, but right in our hands.”

And I thought of that moment above from “Jumanji.” At least the kid in the movie had an excuse, since he had been turned into a monkey….

Do you have some current candidates for an Ethics Alarms “Jumanji Axe”? Let me know about them in the comments.

New Ways To Cheat: The Fake Flight Attendant!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Tirone Alexander, 35, has been convicted of impersonating a flight attendant at least 120 times in order to get free commercial airline flights between 2018 and 2024 . He also doesn’t know how to spell “Tyrone.”

There is a common airline policy (that I never heard of before) allowing flight attendants and pilots from other airlines to fly for free. Alexander knew about the benefit because he had worked as a flight attendant for regional airlines between 2013 and 2015. He visited airline websites and checked the “flight attendant” option during the online check-in process. There he would find a form asking applicants to list their current employer in the industry, their hiring date, and badge number. Alexander faked all of it and counted on no one bothering to check. No one did.

Almost all examples of audacious cheating and grifting depend on 1) people trusting strangers to be honest, which is, sadly, a mistake; 2) people not doing their jobs diligently, which many don’t; 3) systems that have yawning loopholes that sociopaths can exploit, and 4) the cheater/con artist having boundless audacity.

Number 4 eventually gets most cheaters caught.

Alexander has been found guilty of four counts of wire fraud and one count of fraudulently accessing a restricted area of ​​the airport. He faces decades in prison at his sentencing, which is scheduled for August 25.

Meanwhile, the airlines will be tightening their free flight policies, and maybe eliminating them. As is so often the case, the rare cheat spoils a nice thing for everyone else.

From Boston, a Stunning “King’s Pass” Rejection [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“The King’s Pass” is #11 on the EA Rationalizations List, where it is described as follows:

One will often hear unethical behavior excused because the person involved is so important, so accomplished, and has done such great things for so many people that we should look the other way, just this once. This is a terribly dangerous mindset, because celebrities and powerful public figures come to depend on it. Their achievements, in their own minds and those of their supporters and fans, have earned them a more lenient ethical standard. This pass for bad behavior is as insidious as it is pervasive, and should be recognized and rejected whenever it raises its slimy head. In fact, the more respectable and accomplished an individual is, the more damage he or she can do through unethical conduct, because such individuals engender great trust.

Sports teams, both professional and amateur, are among the organizations most vulnerable to The King’s Pass, which is also called “The Star Syndrome.” Thus it is particularly satisfying to see the only sports team I care about, the Boston Red Sox, take a strong stand against the rationalization in one of the most vivid anti-#11 moves within memory by any organization in sports or out.

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Greta Thunberg Is Danny Bonaduce

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Now hear me out.

The National Review has a scalding—but more or less fair—-evisceration of Greta Thunberg, the past-her-pull-date former teen climate change activist. An excerpt:

You remember young Greta, right? The vinegar-rictused, Swedish ecological activist whom the media turned into a global celebrity back in 2018…Who can forget the climax of it all, the legendary comedy of Thunberg’s 2019 United Nations address? Visibly reading from a script and adopting actorly mannerisms — shrieking “HOW DARE YOU?” and bawling about “stolen dreams” and “stolen childhood” — Thunberg condemned the capitalist West for desecrating the hopes of neurotics like herself. “We’ll be watching you,” she warned icily…A neurodivergent teenage girl was granted supreme moral authority over mankind by adults desperate to weaponize her “vulnerability” to club the world into bending to the eco-socialist agenda pushed by her handlers. We were asked to take it all extremely seriously…Hungering for continued relevance, Thunberg responded by escalating her tactics, seeking arrest at anti-mining and anti-oil protests across Europe to garner headlines. But the media reaction was tepid, and the thrill was gone. It surprised me not the slightest bit when she instantly transitioned from environmental activism (old and busted) to pro-Palestinian activism (new and sexy with the kids these days) in the wake of the October 7 massacre. A year later, she was performatively arresting herself on podcast appearances to signal her solidarity with Hamas.

The bombardment ends with this: “As for myself, I couldn’t care less about Thunberg’s fate. If the Israeli Navy wants to hole her boat below the waterline as the French did to sink the Rainbow Warrior, then it’s no problem of mine. I don’t ever want to write about her again, and unless she escalates to suicide bombing, I intend not to. For as much as her astringent mien and unearned pretense make her a figure of comedy, I find her morally repulsive.”

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“Oh, And We Have Deadly Snakes In Our Yard…”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The Ethicist (Kwame Appiah to his friends and NYU students) gets a lot of questions about a common dilemma: what kind of things does a selling homeowner have an ethical duty to inform a potential buyer about? My favorite version of this issue—because you know how I am—involves houses where horrible murders have taken place, or ones that are rumored to be haunted.

Most of these non-horror movie situations are solved by a strict adherence to the Golden Rule. Would you want to be told that a property has X? If so, tell the potential buyer. Yeah, being ethical may cost you some money, or even a sale. Nobody ever said being ethical was easy or always beneficial to the ethical actor.

Last week Kwame was asked by condo seller of she was bound to tell a potential buyer that the condo association uses “pesticides, herbicides and other chemical treatments” that environmentalists regard as harmful, even though they are legal. The seller has been part of a group trying to force the association to go “green” without success. The Ethicist’s answer was reasonable: if the condo association was obeying local laws and ordinances, the dispute was none of the purchaser’s business until after the property was transferred. “[W]hen it comes to selling your unit, your responsibility doesn’t extend to reshaping a buyer’s worldview,” he wrote. “Those who dissent should make their case for reform, but disclosure is usually reserved for departures from what is recognized and approved — from what a reasonable person would anticipate. You’re free to voice your concerns. You’re not required to.”

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Comment of the Day: “BREAKING! Verizon Sucks!”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Much thanks is due to Ryan Harkins for helping to keep this from becoming “Jake Tapper is an Asshole” Tuesday with some thoughtful commentary about why customer service is almost universally terrible. This comes in the wake of my beginning a vendetta against Verizon, which damaged my business, lied, cost me money, wasted my time, raised my blood pressure, and made it all worse by generously offering me eight dollars and change for my trouble.

Here is Ryan’s Comment of the Day on the post “Breaking! Verizon Sucks!”

***

My wife and I just encountered a situation with Spectrum, for internet services, and Ameritas, for life insurance. In each case, speaking with a different customer service representative ended up in wildly different stories and results, and in each case has left us angry and considering cancelling and seeking another company.

On the Ameritas front, my wife has a life insurance policy that was issued when she was a baby (I’m not permitted to say how many years ago, but she’s an early Millennial…), and we’ve been dutifully paying the annual premium for years for the $50k whole life policy. The problem is that since the policy is so old, the company apparently has no idea how to handle it anymore. It isn’t available to view through their website. Apparently it can’t be converted to a different policy that is able to be posted online. When discussing what to do moving forward, we’ve been told

  • We’ve actually paid all the premiums, and now we have the policy in full, no further payments are needed until an unknown date a few years from now
  • We’ve actually paid all the premiums, and now we have the policy in full, no further payments are needed until an unknown date far in the future
  • We haven’t paid all the premiums and need to pay late fees for not paying this last year’s premium
  • We don’t have to pay late fees, but we do need to pay the premium (that we’ve already paid)
  • We’ve not paid the premium that we have paid and are in danger of losing our policy altogether
  • We’ve not paid the premium that we have paid and our policy is changing into a different, inferior type of policy

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BREAKING! Verizon Sucks!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

For the nearly four days Verizon’s incompetence cost me, including two angry clients, one lost assignment that would have earned me at least $200, a missed bill payment that resulted in a penalty of 22 bucks, and over four hours wasted on phone calls and technicians, the company just texted me what its penance would be. Here’s the full text:

“Due to a service outage, we’ve issued a credit of $8.61 that will appear soon in your account.”

Anticipating this, yesterday I tried to get through to a human being in Customer Service to register my objections to both the Verizon service I received (and didn’t receive) over those four days, and my conclusion that the company owed me a lot more than just compensation for the time the internet and phone weren’t working. First I was trapped in a loop trying to sell me various products and services offered by Verizon’s “partners.” Next I reached an AI who mimicked a human being, even saying “um” here and there, who wouldn’t stop talking even when I did my best Michael Palin impression from the immortal “Travel Agent Sketch” (his screaming “SHUT UP!” begins at around the four minute mark)….

On my third try, I was told that a live representative would pick up after an estimated “13 minute” wait; the wait time was really 44 minutes. Then I was told that I had reached the repair department, but I was promised that I would be forwarded to a live person “who can help you” without dealing with recordings and AI liars. After a half hour of the most horrible elevator music since Montovani played “The Pina Colada Song,” I hung up.

I can’t even buy a good straight-edge razor to go on my planned “Sweeney Todd” rampage for $8.61.”