“A lot of our folks have second and third homes and alimony payments and other obligations that require substantial current cash.”
—-A banker quoted anonymously by Stephen Brill in his essay, “What’s a Bailed-Out Banker Worth?” in the Jan.3 New York Times Magazine. The article discusses that financial industry’s rationale (or rationalizations) for its compensation culture.
The bottom line is this: President Obama’s nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration lied to Congress under oath, and Democratic senators who knew he was lying voted to confirm him anyway. Now that his misrepresentation has been discovered and reported, the Administration’s and the Senate’s position is that it doesn’t matter.
It does matter. Continue reading
Is it unethical to promote something in which you have a financial or other personal interest even if you would have advocated it anyway? When one is a respected and credentialed former public official, this situation can pose a real dilemma. You sincerely believe it is critical to take certain action; indeed you believed in the importance of this action before you had a stake in it. Continue reading
Welcome to the first annual Ethics Alarms Awards, recognizing the best and worst of ethics in 2009! These are the Worst; the Best is yet to come. Continue reading
Is it too much to ask that our government officials don’t try to con us, deceive us, and treat us like idiots?
Apparently so. Continue reading
A Youtube video shows Montana Senator Max Baucus (D) giving a rambling rant of a speech from the Senate floor, waving his arms and slurring his speech like Uncle Billy in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” as he condemns Republicans for being overly partisan in the run-up to the health care bill vote. Was he drunk? It sure looks like it to me, based on some considerable experience with such things, but no, the real reason he looks drunk to me must be my right-wing political bias, because only conservative blogs and media seem to see anything intoxicated about the good senator’s speech at all.
This isn’t just silly; it is harmful. Continue reading
Honest, I’m not picking on the Kennedy’s. That this surfaced today is a coincidence. But if you cross Ted Kennedy and Tiger Woods, you get Jack Kennedy, and what should appear on the web this morning but a surprising photograph:
TMZ, the celebrity trash website that likes to publish paparazzi photos of supermodels with spinach between their teeth, has a genuine scoop: it has gotten its cyber-hands on a photograph that appears to show a bevy of naked women frolicking on a yacht as a young Senator Jack Kennedy lounges nearby. [UPDATE: As explained by The Smoking Gun here, and discussed in a later Ethics Alarms post here, the photo was a hoax. The ethical issues raised by it and discussed below are still valid, however.] Continue reading
So that’s the lesson, is it?
As the year end lists almost unanimously “award” Tiger Woods the distinction of engineering the Scandal of the Year, pundits also seem to be nearing consensus on the lesson we should take from the golfer’s fall, which is: “Don’t make athletes and celebrities your role models or heroes. They are human beings like everyone else, and are guaranteed to disappoint you.”
Oh, I see…it’s all our fault. Continue reading
Today, on the Sunday before the new year, the New York Times Magazine has its annual issue of brief profiles of famous, important, and not-so-famous-but-still-important people who breathed their last in the past twelve months. It is always a fascinating collection; for me, the exercise is a slap in the face, focusing my wandering attention upon how many remarkable lives and achievements have escaped my awareness and proper appreciation—and this is only a small, random collection. The last of the profiles, however, was about a life I knew a lot about: Ted Kennedy. In my view, the piece fails an ethical imperative. It doesn’t mention Mary-Jo Kopechne. Continue reading
Any one with lingering doubts about whether law is capable of navigating the nuances of ethics should ponder the Christmas display at the Illinois State Capital, where an effort to avoid state support of religion has resulted in an offensive mockery of it that is inappropriate for any season.
The collision of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause (and the Supreme Court’s broad interpretation of it) with the cultural, traditional. historical, artistic and commercial aspects of Christmas have created an annual fiasco that looks silly, irritates everyone, and accomplishes nothing constructive. It would be better to have no Christmas display at all, and that fact proves the limitation of law, and the subordination of ethics. Continue reading
