Government & Politics

Nursing Strike Ethics and the Coolidge Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”

Long before he was famous for his abrupt and verbally stingy one-liners, Calvin Coolidge’s best known quote was this one, and we forget it at our peril. The line probably made him President: its context was the Boston police force strike of 1919. Coolidge, then Governor of Massachusetts, sided against the strikers, who despite legitimate demands for better pay and working conditions, lost their jobs. The next generation of Boston police officers, mostly hired from the ranks of veterans of World War I, got the benefits the strikers sought.

Coolidge’s sentiment is still valid, though unpopular, as ever, with organized labor and public servant unions. It was the philosophical and historical basis for President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the striking air traffic controllers during his first term, despite stong public sympathy for their stand. Like the Boston Police in 1919, they also lost their jobs for ever.

12,000 nurses in Minnesota Nurses Association are eligible to vote today on a potential indefinite strike. Continue reading →

Some Ethics Catch-Up Due on Climate Change

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It is clear that the Obama Administration, if only to bolster the fading support of its most Left-ward constituency, is going to try a full-court press to get some form of carbon tax or “cap and trade” bill. These were once referred to as “climate change” measures, but since polls are showing that the American public’s belief in Al Gore’s jeremiad is waning fast, now these are “prevent more oil spills like the one going on now” bills. Obama, much to the global warming zealots’ dismay, only snuck in one little “climate” in his Oval Office speech, and that was without “change.”

This is all just politics, but the fact is that the American public has some straight talk coming, and it doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon, or even the Deep Horizon. In the past year, the Climate Change Express has pretty much jumped the rails, with the collapse of international summit; the East Anglia “Climategate” revelations that supposedly objective scientists were blocking dissenting conclusions and hiding inconsistencies,  the uncovering of evidence of unprofessional  practices at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),  and some embarrassing pronouncements and predictions that appeared to be off by hundreds of years or so, or wrong entirely.

Despite all this, the U.S. media has been caught in a time warp, with no major news organizations altering their previous official conviction that the fact of catastrophic climate change and the main cause of it–human activity—are “settled science,” even though this is just plain false. Continue reading →

What’s Wrong and Not Wrong About the BP CEO’s Yachting Weekend

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Tony Heyward. the beset and beleaguered BP CEO who has become the public face of the oil company blamed for the devastating Gulf oil leak, took the weekend off to attend a yacht race off the Isle of Wight. For this he is being pummeled with more criticism, from Rahm Emanuel to Sen. Richard Shelby to angry bloggers on the Left, Right, and Center. Is going to a yacht race really that wrong, in ethical terms? Does it breach any duties or obligations? Here is the score card on what’s right, or at least “not wrong” about his conduct, and what is worthy of legitimate criticism. Continue reading →

Mark Kirk’s Misrepresentations: When Twice Is Too Many

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Mark S. Kirk, the Republican candidate for that troublesome Illinois Senate seat (the one Rod Blagojevich tried to sell, the one Roland Burris lied to get) was caught in perpetrating some credential-inflating on his curriculum vitae when it was discovered that what he had long claimed was an award bestowed on him for outstanding service as a military intelligence officer was really a group award for his whole unit, and, in fact, someone else had received the honor he claimed as his own. Continue reading →

The Senate Closes an Unethical Tax Loophole

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

When a defendant corporation is hit with punitive damages in a jury verdict, that means that in addition to causing the plaintiff’s injuries or damages, the corporation also was guilty of wrongdoing. Punitive damages are large amounts of money that the losing defendant must pay over and above compensatory damages, in order to make it too expensive for the company to keep doing what caused the original problem. This is one of the virtues of the civil justice system. Thanks to punitive damages, a lawsuit by a single injured party can result in a sufficiently painful financial penalty that the corporation has a significant incentive to reform.

So why do the tax laws allow companies to use punitive damages as tax deductions, since it 1) lowers tax revenues and 2) makes the damages less expensive, less painful, and less of an incentive to correct unsafe, dangerous or dishonest practices? Continue reading →

The Incredibly Unethical BP Boycott

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Readers of Ethics Alarms know that I think boycotting is at best economic bullying, at worst a non-violent form of terrorism, and generally unethical except in cases so rare that they are difficult to imagine. The current BP boycott is close to the worst variety, blunt and destructive mob anger akin to the reaction of the excitable citizens of Homer Simpson’s Springfield, whose solution to every crisis seems to be a riot.

BP was outrageously and perhaps criminally negligent in creating the conditions that led to the Gulf oil spill, and it is right and just that the burden of accountability and responsibility has fallen on them. And it certainly has fallen on them: as much as every citizen of the United States may want to personally kick the company while it is prone, the fact is that the dire consequences of its misconduct are already overwhelming, both long and short-term. Right now, the Gulf states are still dependent on the diligence and expertise of the company to try to limit the damage it has caused, and the company is, if only for its own survival, doing the best it can to succeed. This fact alone would make a public boycott of BP at this time senseless and counter-productive.

The boycott is also unfair. Continue reading →

“Seattle Cop Punches Girl In Face!” Ethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

YouTube is a wonderful resource that enriches our entertainment, makes us laugh, holds people in the public eye accountable for their actions, and give us better access to current events than ever before. In the area of police conduct, it has exposed abuses that might have otherwise escaped scrutiny. It is also eventually going to get a police officer killed.

The viral video of a Seattle cop punching a teenaged girl in the face has been getting the Rodney King treatment from the broadcast media and the web, with the immediate assumption that his actions are per se proof of police brutality and excessive force. All the societal hot buttons are stacked against the cop: he punches a woman (“You don’t hit a girl!“); she’s a teen (It’s an adult beating a child!); she’s black, and he’s white (Racism!); the underlying offense that triggered the incident was as minor as you can get. (“Jaywalking?”) Predictable, the sensation-hunting news outlets and the usual knee-jerk critics of the police (the N.A.A.C.P. and the A.C.L.U.) have pounced. This is neither a fair nor a competent way to examine a complex incident. Continue reading →

Obama’s Ethics Foul: A False Pledge

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Lost in the furor over the insulting “small  people” characterization by BP’s hapless Chairman was a seriously unethical statement by President Obama. If the President is lucky, nobody will remember it. He hasn’t been very lucky lately, however.

As with Hurricane Katrina and President Bush, the Gulf oil spill has subjected President Obama to some unfair public expectations, some of which stem from a basic misunderstanding of Presidential power. (There have also been his genuine failures to meet reasonable expectations based on correct assumptions about Presidential leadership—but that is another topic.) Unfortunately, President Obama brings this upon himself by habitually over-stating his influence over people and events that he can not really control. He did this again, when he announced BP’s agreement to establish a 20 billion dollar fund to address the leaking oil’s damage to the Gulf region, its businesses and its inhabitants: Continue reading →

Sharron Angle, Responsible Leadership, and the Unforgivable

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It all comes down to trust.

There are some things candidates for office do or say that render them permanently untrustworthy, and no apologies, however well-crafted and sincere, can change it. That is because there are some ethical boundaries a trustworthy individual literally will never cross. For example, Richard Blumenthal’s repeated claims that he was a Vietnam combat veteran fall below the minimum level of integrity, respect and honesty required for trustworthiness. Former Senator John Edwards has lied so often in public and private that no reasonable person should trust him to hold a leadership position.

Sharron Angle, the Tea Party darling who will be opposing Sen. Harry Reid for the Nevada Senate seat in November, also falls beneath that minimum level. This is not because of her hard, hard right positions advocating the abolishment of government-run Social Security, Medicare and the Department of Education. Those are legitimate topics for debate. But a recent interview with conservative radio talk show host Lars Larson has come to light in which Angle, then the longest of shots to win the Nevada Republican primary, said this: Continue reading →

The Ethics of Rejecting Clemency

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

A strange tale in the New York Times, told by reporter Adam Liptak, raises a persistent problem of executive ethics. Is it unethical for a state governor to reject a recommendation of clemency based on strong evidence?

As Liptak tells it, it had been 28 years since Ronald Kempfert had seen his father, imprisoned in an Arizona prison in 1975 for a 1962 double murder, when a lawyer contacted Kempfert and told him that his father had been framed—by his mother.  Nearly the entire case against the father, William Macumber, had been based on his wife’s testimony that he had confessed the murders to her. Kempfert, knowing his mother, and knowing the toxic state of their marital discord at the time of her testimony, agreed that she was quite capable of doing such a thing, and after doing some digging on his own, concluded that his father, now elderly and ailing, had been wrongly sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

There was more.  Continue reading →