Finance

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Tell Of The Month: “Arrgh! The National Debt Hit $40 Trillion!”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“…and everything was so much better when it was only at 32.67 trillion!”

Watching my Red Sox TV broadcasts from Boston(as the team I have lived and died for …metaphorically of course…most of my life inconveniently rose from the dead last month and forced me to take two and a half hours I don’t have time for out of every day to follow their adventures), it has been mordantly amusing to hear all of the Democrats running ads following a script that says they will “stand up to Trump” and “deal with the National Debt.” When anyone, including President Trump, promises to take any serious action regarding the National Debt, they are proving they are stupid, naive or lying. There is no fourth alternative.

Nevertheless, the Axis media (and others) have now decided that the newly minted $40 trillion National Debt is exponentially more alarming than the $39 trillion debt, or the $37 trillion debt, and far, far more disastrous than in 1992, when Ross Perot ran for President primarily on the platform that a debt that was then “only” $4.06 trillion and about 46% the gross domestic product was dangerous and irresponsible and Democrats mocked him mercilessly. So “National Debt reaches $40 million!” is being headlined everywhere, blathered about on CNN, MSNow and the rest because Republicans have control of the Presidency and Congress, and mid-term elections are fast approaching.

I wrote about this hypocrisy and deliberate dishonesty by the Left just four months ago. Any Democratic candidate who cites the current explosion of the National Debt as a reason to vote for him, her or Democrats (and especially Democratic-Socialists) are untrustworthy liars: the claim is signature significance. No ethical, competent, believable candidate would make such a promise even once. It is proof of organic mendacity.

I was temped to repost the last EA essay on the topic, Ethics Observations on the National Debt…, but you can read the whole thing if you want; the tag for the topic and all of the EA posts on it is here. I’ll just leave with this quote—as with the rest of the post, it is as accurate today as it was then:

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Baseball Ethics: The Evil, and All-American, LA Dodgers

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I know, 50% of you will skip this one…and I pity you.

Today is a big crazy day for baseball fans: it is the MLB trade deadline, when those teams that feel they have a chance at post-season glory and World Series immortality will try to acquire significant reinforcements from the teams that have given up hope. The latter teams will dump contracts while trying to acquire younger, cheaper players, many still confined to the minor leagues, so “Wait until next year!” has a chance of coming true for their disappointed fans.

The event has become important since baseball emulated the other professional sports by diluting the importance of the regular season by increasing the number of teams that can qualify for the play-offs. As I have written in the past, I detest this development, which is a deformed offspring on the free agent system. After today, the 30 teams will have split into mostly non-competitive pushovers playing out the last two months without hope and much superior teams “going for the gold.”

The biggest star and the most valuable player in these annual sweepstakes is Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, the consensus choice as the Best Starting Pitcher in Captivity. Skubal has won the AL Cy Young Award two straight years. It is his free agent year, and the Tigers know his asking price to re-sign in beyond their resources. The team had to trade him now, and almost every team with a ghost of a chance to get to the World Series would love to have him. Who traded for him yesterday? Shockingly the one team that didn’t need him: the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers have won the World Series two years in a row, they are locks to win their division again, they have the most money and the largest payroll in the game, and basically have a team of All-Stars without Skubal. The trade reignited a protest in the sports media and on barstools that the Dodgers were unethically greedy and “ruining baseball” by monopolizing talent, emulating the New York Yankees dominance during baseball’s first century. (The classic 1950s musical “Damn Yankees” was adapted from the novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost The Pennant.”) My view: Nonsense. AOC, Bernie and Mayor Mamdani like that argument, because they are communists. The Dodgers have succeeded because they are well-run and make smart decisions, including making many that benefit fans at the sacrifice of the bottom line. Baseball, alone among team sports, promotes individualism, exceptionalism, and capitalist values. Teams are not are not limited regarding their payrolls, and players are not limited regarding how much money they demand to play. Furthermore, baseball has traditionally benefited by having teams playing the role of The Evil Empire. It’s like the villains in professional wrestling.

[Full disclosure: My feelings on the matter might be influenced a tiny bit by the fact that the Boston Red Sox, currently on a historic winning streak that pulled them out of today’s class of pathetic white flag-waivers into the mob of hopeful “buyers” (23 wins in the last 26 games) swept the Evil Dodgers in a three game series in LA, winning last night 8-4.]

Meet Amanda Lynn Tully, Expatriate, Student Loan Delinquent, Sociopath, Fick

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Amanda Lynn Tully, pictured above and one of the subjects of a New York Times article (gift link!) about people so troubled by the legal and ethical requirement of living up to their student loan agreement that they move out of the country to avoid paying up. More than 40 million borrowers have federal student debt to pay back, and 7.7 million have defaulted on their loans, according to recent data from the Education Department. Anecdotal evidence and conversations on Reddit and other social media indicate that some borrowers, like the dislikable young woman pictured above, think moving to another country is a dandy way to solve their problems.

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Ethics Observations on the National Debt…

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

Citizen Free Press, the conservative news aggregator that grabbed the niche from The Drudge Report after the latter went Trump Deranged, is constantly highlighting the National Debt’s explosion. This is legitimate news. Here is an item that appeared today:

“10 years ago today Trump promised to eliminate the national debt.Instead it has doubled to $39 trillion.“

Meanwhile, over the weekend, the Nation Debt was suddenly important to the Axis again, as those who were horrified over the minuscule number of casualties in the Operation Epic Fury were desperately looking for some way to criticize the amazing rescue of the downed pilot in Iran. All of a sudden, the Left was grousing about Trump spending all that money to rescue a single soldier (The Axis has no integrity at all. I hope that’s clear by now) and citing the National Debt.

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“The Ethicist” Slaps Down Manipulative Parenting

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was stunned that this question made it into “The Ethicist” column, but who knows: maybe it was a week light on difficult ethical dilemmas.

A mother who wanted to use Prof Appiah the way ethicists are often used in the consulting world—to back the client’s opinion after that individual has already made up his or her mind—wanted to be able to appeal to the professor’s authority in a family dispute. Her adult son is morbidly obese and she and her husband fear for his health. They want him to go on a chemical weight-loss regimen with Ozempic or the similar drugs, but he keeps getting fatter and fatter. Years ago, they bought a house for the son, and he is paying them back in monthly installments. Their plan is to waive the rest of the payments and give him the house now, but Big Boy’s father wants to condition their generosity on the son agreeing to use the drugs to lose weight.

An under-discussed sub-value on the Six Pillars of Character is autonomy, listed under the RESPECT pillar. That means allowing those we have contact with in out lives autonomy, and not using resources, power or emotional bonds to control the conduct and choices of others. To me, the answer to The Ethicist’s inquirer is an easy call, and I was pleased that his answer tracked with mine exactly.

Professor Appiah wrote,

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Imagine: You and I Have Friends Who Think This Bernie Sanders Quote Is Profound…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

…rather than unethical and idiotic. Some of these people even supported the old fool for President.

If fact, democracy dies in fatuous logic like that quote. Jeff Bezos has no more obligation to keep the Washington Post operating than I do. It’s a money losing operation that has squandered its reputation and good will by ceasing to trading objective journalism for leftist propaganda. At least Jeff’s $500 mil. yacht and his wife’s $5 million ring were worth what he paid for them. Bernie’s statement is like saying “If Bezos can afford expensive yachts and rings, then he should build bonfires with $100 bills.” Or “If Y spends money on A because he wants A, then he should waste money on X because I like X.” Brilliant, Bernie. But typical.

Without Bezos or some other billionaire with discretionary funds, there would be no Washington Post at all. Economics, however, has never been Bernie’s long suit, being the fan of Karl Marx that he is. There are few cognitive voids in Woke World more annoying that the “It’s wrong for people to spend money on what they want and care about because they should spend their money on what I want and care about.” The corollary to that is “Therefore, I should have control of those people’s money.”

In related news, climatologist Bjorn Lomborg has calculated that worldwide, governments have spent a staggering $16 trillion at least on climate change policies that have not succeeded in lowering the world’s temperature one bit. Meanwhile, not a single life has been saved. Limiting access to fossil fuels has made poor countries poorer by blocking their access to affordable energy. To be fair, many hustlers and companies have profited from this extravagant exercise in virtue-signalling. Why doesn’t Bernie focus on all those wasted taxpayer dollars? As Stephen Moore writes,

What could we have done with $16 trillion to make the world better off? What if the $16 trillion had been spent on clean water for poor countries? Preventing avoidable deaths from diseases like malaria? Building schools in African villages to end illiteracy? Bringing reliable and affordable electric power to the more than 1 billion people who still lack access? Curing cancer?Many millions of lives could have been saved. We could have lifted millions more out of poverty. The benefits of speeding up the race for the cure for cancer could have added tens of millions of additional years of life at an economic value in the tens of trillions of dollars. Instead, we effectively poured $16 trillion down the drain.

And…and…we could have saved democracy by keeping the Washington Post staff at full strength!

Verdict: Moore is correct. Well except that instead of “we effectively poured $16 trillion down the drain, he should have written we ineffectively poured $16 trillion down the drain.

President Trump Morphs into George McGovern! Didn’t See THAT Coming!

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In 1972, on the way to an epic trouncing by Richard Nixon in that year’s Presidential race, nice, clueless, ultra-liberal Sen. George McGovern’s flower child-fueled campaign was roundly mocked for a proposal to give a thousand dollars to every man, woman and child. This was called the ultimate nanny state hand-out plan, among the more polite criticisms of it. Now President Donald Trump, hardly one for tie-dyed shirts, says he wants to give most Americans a $2,000 handout funded from tariffs.

“A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” the President wrote last week in a Truth Social post. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News that the rebates would likely be given to families making “less than, say, $100,000.”  They might get a puppy and candy too.

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Talk About “The Wrong Hill To Die On”: Lisa Cook’s Refusal To Obey The President’s Lawful Dismissal Is Just Defiance

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The woman doesn’t have a metaphorical leg to stand on, except the disgusting (but still reflex), “There goes that racist Trump again, trying to bring down a black woman.”

“I strongly recommend that you suspend Ms. Cook from the Federal Reserve Board immediately,” states senior DOJ Ed Martin’s letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Of course. If he doesn’t suspend her, that’s grounds to fire Powell. “No one believes it’s appropriate for her to remain in her role while serious questions linger,” wrote Martin. That’s not quite right: Democrats and the Trump Deranged believe that everyone should just refuse to acknowledge that Donald Trump is President of the United States.

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An Incomplete Preview of Coming Attractions (Or Upheavals, or Reforms, Depending on One’s Point of View…)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I have hinted here at various times recently of a major ethics project that I am working on relating to a growing and so far barely recognized scandal in the civil justice system. It is time to reveal a few details.

There are corrupt tactics and practices in the legal world centering on the litigation of mass torts. They are responsible for losses totaling billions of dollars inflicted on the victims of injury, plaintiffs, corporate shareholders, and taxpayers. These have metastasized over the last decade, spread by the opportunities created by too-loosely regulated law firms being allowed to include non-lawyer partners (in D.C., Arizona, and Utah), the rapid explosion of litigation financing provided directly to lawyers and law firms after a century of being regarded as an unethical practice to be avoided, and a tsunami of unethical and deceptive maneuvers that have been largely ignored by or unreported to the legal profession’s ethics watchdogs.

Quite by accident, I became aware of these practices in my legal ethics practice, frequently by being retained by lawyers and law firms who were the victims of them, and whose clients were at risk as a result. I was stunned at the depth of ignorance of this scandal among most lawyers, which, of course, is one major reason why it continues unabated. I began having regular discussions with legal ethics authorities, and, upon finding a whistleblower who had been an architect of many of these practices, began assembling a coalition, still growing, to expose the bad actors, tighten up the laws, regulations and legal ethics rules that have allowed them to thrive, and to overhaul the system itself that is neither trustworthy nor safe.

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Witness to “Pay to Play”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I am not quite ready to write about the project I am currently involved in, but when I do, it will be a major story, and not just on Ethics Alarms. I found myself, mostly by happenstance, at Ground Zero in a massive scandal for the legal profession. Now I am working to expose it, make the public and the legal profession aware of it, and to both fix the problem and take measures in multiple sectors to ensure that it is permanently fixed. I’m not doing this alone; indeed I am focusing primarily on the ethical regulation front. However, the alliance is growing, and includes an insider whistle-blower, several public interest organizations, litigators, law firms, and at least one national association.

Regard the foregoing as a preview of coming attractions. This post is about a conversation I witnessed that continues to bother me, and will probably bother you as well. Some of the participants in the project were meeting with a prominent, well-connected D.C. attorney with a long history of legislative involvement. The topic was whether an Executive Order from the President would super-charge our effort. The lawyer said that he was close to an individual who “meets with the President every week” and that the contact was capable of carrying the EO request into the Oval Office.

“But it will cost you,” the lawyer said. “Access isn’t free.” “How much?” one of my delegation asked. “You give me a figure,” was the answer, “and I’ll let you know what would get it done.” The lawyer shook his head and smiled at $100,000, and kept giving a negative response until the number reached $100 million.” Now you’re talking,” he said. “That’s what this kind of thing takes.”

The group is confident that it could raise that kind of money—the scam we will expose and undo involves billions—but its ethics consultant, me, pointed out that our mission is to eliminate widespread and destructive unethical conduct. Using unethical means to accomplish that goal will taint the whole enterprise, corrupt it, and undermine trust in its motives and participants.

There will be no $100 million pay-to-play cash deals, at least as long as I am involved. However, the bland, “it’s always done this way”/”that’s just how Washington works” response we got from that prominent lawyer is by turns chilling, disillusioning, and discouraging.