Leadership

The Marianne Gingrich Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ugh. What a mess.

The ethics miscreants:

Marianne Gingrich: Seething with hate for Newt, she decided to try to metaphorically stick a shiv in his back by airing dirty laundry from their marriage right before the South Carolina primary, a do-or-die for him. Her interview with ABC was unfair and an act of pure revenge. You couldn’t call it whistle-blowing, since anyone who doesn’t already know what a likely sociopath Gingrich is has been watching too many re-runs of “NCIS.” Gingrich’s character, or lack of it, was established and in the books by 1998. Marianne should have not had to say a word, but everything she did say, she had said before, in an interview in 2010 in Esquire. Continue reading →

Creating Captain Costanzas

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Metaphor

I think I stopped finding George Costanza funny when I saw the “Seinfeld” episode in which he panicked at a kids party after smelling smoke and trampled the children rushing to be the first out the door. (His callous reaction to his fiancée’s death from licking envelopes had paved the way for my inability to laugh at George.) The thought of a real-life George Costanza, the most unethical character on a show about unethical characters, serving as the captain of an imperiled ship full of passengers is horrifying, but that’s basically what befell the unsuspecting tourists on board the cruise ship that tipped over after hitting a rock off the coast of Italy. Having caused the accident, it appears, by irresponsibly changing course, captain Francesco Schettino hit the life boats before most of his passengers, and claimed to be directing the evacuation from the relative safety of a lifeboat as he defied orders from the Italian Coast Guard to return to the ship. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Day: Rev. Martin Luther King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ And Vanity comes along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But Conscience asks the question ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.”

—-Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in his Feb. 6, 1968 speech in Washington D.C. entitled “A Proper Sense of Priorities.”

Saluting the GOP’s Most Ethical Candidate, Distrusted For Doing the Right Thing

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

We'll miss his daughters, too...

Jon Huntsman is gone, finally quitting the hunt for the Republican Presidential nomination long after the futility of his quest had been established. Huntsman was easily the ethics favorite in the competition, though Ron Paul’s candor and integrity also get high marks. He began his campaign with a call for civility, and seldom missed the high standard he set out for himself. Best of all, he correctly identified the ethics core of our nation’s various problems: the trust deficit. Huntsman began hitting this theme hard in Iowa, but perhaps not hard enough. The collapse of public trust in all our institutions is a very real threat to our democracy, for democracy, more than any government philosophy, requires trust to survive. Whatever it is that Republicans want right now, however, trust isn’t very high on the list, and neither is civility. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero AND Ethics Dunce: Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar scores a rare twin honor: He is an Ethics Dunce and an Ethics Hero in the same week.

Occupier, or just a vistor, Mr. Secretary?

First the good news, the Ethics Hero part.  Salazar has given the National Park Service  30 days to fix the inaccurate, misleading and truncated quotation on the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. He did this after giving the inept King Memorial Foundation plenty of time to do its job. It didn’t, and he took the initiative. Harry Johnson, president of the Foundation, told the AP he wasn’t sure what changes could be made. Well, how about using a real quote instead of a made-up one that makes Martin Luthor King sound like a preening Newt Gingrich?

Chiseled into the monument’s left flank because there wasn’t room for the actual quote is “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” What King really said in a 1968  speech was: “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” When Maya Angelou and others complained that the pompous-sounding non-quote make King sound like a boasting egotist (and one speaking from the grave!), the Foundation shrugged and erected the monument unchanged. Continue reading →

Romney, Firing, Leadership, and Ethics Bob’s Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yes, yes, firing people is one thing Donald Trump does well too. Shut up.

Ethics Bob Stone sent in a comment late last night that I replied to, but that I think deserves more discussion, on several points. Responding to my Ethics Hero designation for Ron Paul for coming to his adversary’s defense over Romney’s now infamous remark about firing people, Bob wrote:

“…I think Romney’s “I like to fire people”–even taken IN context–displays an inner heartlessness. I know about creative destruction, and I myself have taken actions to lay off people, and even fired a couple face-to-face. I did what needed to be done. No apologies.

“But did I like it? I HATED it.

“Romney’s comment seems of a kind with his strapping the family dog on his car roof for a 500-mi trip, or his advocacy of breaking up families to deport the parent or child who’s illegal. Gingrich was right.”

There are several issues here, some minor. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Rep. Ron Paul

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The identity of Mitt Romney's knight in shining armor was a surprise, but it shouldn't have been.

Ron Paul is, to engage in understatement, unusual, and often in a good way. How many politicians, for example, will actively defend their adversary in a campaign  right before a critical vote? Yet that’s what Ron Paul did, defending Mitt Romney, his main competition for the GOP presidential nomination, after Romney had blooped a line that will undoubtedly haunt him for a long time. “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” Romney had said. “You know, if someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I want to say ‘You know, I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.” It was predictable that the line would be truncated and taken out of context, and it was…by the press, by Jon Huntsman, by Rick Perry. It will surely be used against Romney by President Obama, who has adopted the position that people should be able to hold on to jobs whether they do them well or not— Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano, for example. But Paul would have none of it, saying,

“I think this is just typical politics and they’re unfairly attacking him on that issue,” Paul said outside a polling place at Webster School in Manchester. “He never literally said what they say he said. They’re taking him way out of context.”

Paul also defended Romney’s history as CEO at Bain Capital, the subject of a new attack video by Newt Gingrich, as an example of the free market working properly. “You save companies, you save jobs when you reorganize companies that are going to go bankrupt,” Paul said. “They [the critics] don’t understand.” Continue reading →

The White House’s Wonderland Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This is a weird one.

"Alice in Wonderland" party at the White House? I don't remember any party!

“The Obamas,” one of those “behind the scenes at the White House” books that has become a routine feature of every administration since the Reagans, has the usual tales about First Couples bickering and First Lady power trips. Author and  New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor has caused something of an uproar with her account of the first Halloween party the first couple hosted at the White House, in 2009. She writes that it was so lavish and “over the top” that the administration kept the event secret out of fear of a public backlash. After all, this was a time when the Tea Party was in full swing, the economy was at low tide, and there was the ten-percent unemployment rate, bank bailouts and Obama’s health-care plan battles. Not exactly a smart time for a Marie Antoinette-style costume blow-out. Continue reading →

The NAACP’s “Gotcha!” Games

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Somewhere there must be advocates for the African-American community who realize that the practice of lying in wait for white politicians to make a mis-phrased or politically incorrect statement and then pouncing on them with indignant press releases charging racial insensitivity is counter-productive, feeding mistrust on all sides and tempting many on the political right to just by-pass issues of concern to blacks as a lost cause with a hopelessly biased audience. Somewhere—but not in the NAACP, which has relied for decades on playing “gotcha!” games to flex its PR muscles and appeal to its most racially polarized core. I remember poor Ross Perot speaking to the group in 1988, and being pilloried for referring to an his all-black audience once as “you people.” Of course, Perot was appearing with the expectation that he would explain what a Perot presidency would do to address the problems of African-Americans, a group he was not a member of,  yet the completely self-explanatory and accurate, if clumsy, “you people” was attacked as patronizing and vaguely racist.

Now GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum is under fire by the NAACP for this statement: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” Continue reading →

The Third Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2011 (Part 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The 2011 Ethics Alarms Awards for the worst in ethics continues (you can catch up with Part I here) with the large and depressing…

 Shameless Bad Character Division

Jerk (defined as an individual who habitually places his personal benefit and ego gratification above the welfare of everyone and everything else) of the Year: Donald Trump

The Dennis Rodman Award, (Awarded to a professional athlete for a career and lifetime of  behaving like a jerk): Jose Canseco. Jose’s done it all, from being baseball’s Typhoid Mary of steroids, to getting arrested for various assaults, to writing a series of tell-all books designed to rat out the very players he corrupted, not as a service to his sport, but as revenge for it rejecting him. In 2011, he hit a new low, accepting money to appear in a celebrity boxing match (the 21st Century version of becoming a circus geek to pay the bills) and sending his less-talented, equally dim-witted, identical twin brother Ozzie to perform instead, hoping to fool the fools who hired him. This, of course, was fraud. It takes quite a jerk to take this award from Manny Ramirez, who became eligible in 2011, but Jose was up to the task.

Asshole (defined as an individual who intentionally and maliciously causes pain and harm to others because he can) of the Year: Rev. Terry Jones, the publicity-seeking leader of a tiny rural church, who caused riots and deaths abroad and ramped up political tensions between America and Muslim nations by threatening to burn, and finally burning, the Koran as a demonstration of contempt for Muslims and the Islamic faith. Continue reading →