Leadership

Terry Francona, Accountability, and Moral Luck

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Good job, Terry. 'Bye.

Barack Obama, and indeed all leaders, current and future, have reason to heed the results of meeting to be held today between the ownership of the Boston Red Sox and the traumatized team’s manager of eight years, Terry Francona. Francona will learn whether his tenure—he is beyond question the most successful manager in the team’s century-plus existence—will end as a consequence of his squad’s historic and inexplicable collapse, robbing it of the play-off spot that seemed guaranteed less than a month ago. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Yankees Manager Joe Girardi

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don't believe I'm posting this.

It has come down to the final day of the season, with the (or as they are known in these parts, MY) Boston Red Sox tied with the Tampa Bay Rays for the final spot in the American League playoffs. The Yankees have been dominated by the Red Sox, their long-time rivals, most of the season, while the Rays have been easier pickings. Lo and behold, it is the Yankees playing the Rays, in a game that could determine who will be the Yankees’ opponents in the League Championship series.

The game is otherwise meaningless to New York, which has already clinched a play-off berth. At this point, a play-off bound manager’s job is to decide which marginal players will be on the post-season roster, to line up his pitching, and to steer clear of injury. Asked if he was bothered that Yankee manager Joe Girardi was surely not going to oppose the Rays with his best team, Boston Manager Terry Francona shrugged. He had earned the right to use the game to prepare for the play-offs, Francona answered.

Yet here was Girardi, starting a team made up of most of his regulars, replacing his pitchers as soon as they were in peril, and generally managing the game against the Rays as if it were the final game of the World Series. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Author Karen Hunter

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In a jaw-dropping example of naked bias, dishonesty, and Bizarro World journalistic ethics, African-American author Karen Hunter complained on MSNBC that the Associated Press was racist by transcribing President Obama’s speech to the Congressional Black Caucus without restoring his intentionally dropped dropped G’s, as other services—unethically—did.

Here’s part of the AP version:

“Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. “Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”

Hunter said the AP’s version was “inherently racist.” Continue reading →

President Obama’s Integrity Collapse

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It is one of the Ethics Alarms truths that “When the going gets tough, the tough get unethical.” That is not universally true, however, for there are individuals, in public and private life, who manage to maintain their ethical values even under pressure, even when unethical tactics appear to be an inviting way out of peril, even when maintaining ethical integrity can lead to failure and defeat.

I once thought Sen. John McCain was such a man, but I was proven wrong when he defeated a conservative rival for his Senate seat by embracing unethical policies and positions that he had once decried. I once thought that Barack Obama, despite his other deficiencies as a leader, had a strong claim to being more honest and ethical than his likely Republican rivals. He is now proving me wrong again. Continue reading →

A Fan’s Obligation: 12 Life Lessons From Being a Red Sox Fan

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Thanks Carlton. I won't forget.

This is not going to be a fun day.

The Boston Red Sox, the baseball team to which I have devoted a remarkable amount of my time, passion and energy over a half-century, are threatening to complete late season collapse of embarrassing and historic proportions. A spectacularly bad month of September has the team holding on to its once assured post-season play-off slot by its fingernails, and the squad appears to be dispirited and unhinged. Today the Red Sox play a double-header with the New York Yankees, the team’s blood-foe, and its prospects don’t look good. I, of course, must watch both games.

Following a losing baseball team is emotionally hard—I listened to or watched every game the Red Sox played in a six year period in which they never had a winning season— but following a collapsing winning team is much, much worse. It feels like a betrayal, yet at the same time the fan feels guilty for being angry with the players, who undoubtedly are suffering more than you are. This is, after all, their career. Still, you have had your hopes raised over many months; you have, if you are a serious fan, attached your self-esteem to your team’s fortunes. Watching it tank is like watching a presidential candidate you have argued for, and gone to rallies for and contributed to make an ass of himself in a debate. (And no, I’m not a supporter of Rick Perry.) Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Actor Morgan Freeman

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Ah, God...you disappoint me.

As long as shameless, irresponsible race-baiters keep attributing opposition to President Obama’s presidency to bigotry, I’ll keep naming them Ethics Dunces.

The latest in this disgraceful parade is distinguished African-American actor Morgan Freeman, who told CNN’s Piers Morgan in an interview that the Tea Party and the Republican Party antipathy to the President is motivated by racism, saying…

“Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What’s, what does that, what underlines that? ‘Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here’…It is a racist thing…it just shows the weak, dark, underside of America. We’re supposed to be better than that. We really are. That’s, that’s why all those people were in tears when Obama was elected president. “Ah, look at what we are. Look at how, this is America.’ You know? And then it just sort of started turning because these people surfaced like stirring up muddy water.” Continue reading →

The Cowardly GOP Presidential Field

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Cowards. All of them.

In three consecutive Republican presidential debates, members of the partisan audience have displayed obnoxious and callous attitudes in response to questions directed to the candidates. In the first, a portion of the assembled conservatives cheered an accounting of the convicted murderers put to death by the Texas penal system. During the second, vocal members of the audience shouted “Yeah!” to Wolf Blitzer’s questioning whether uninsured Americans should just be allowed to die without medical care. Then, in this week’s debate, the crowd jeered a videotaped soldier who declared himself as gay before asking if the candidates would support the recent elimination of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” as military policy.

Pundit efforts to characterize these outburst as typical of the Republican, conservative or Tea Party constituencies are blatant stereotyping, cynical and unfair. Anyone who has any experience speaking or performing to an audience knows that a few people can dominate audience reaction without being representative of it. No, it is not the Republican constituency that was exposed by these incidents, but the contenders for that party’s and the nation’s leadership. The failure of any one of the assembled candidates, nine in the first two debates, ten this week, to clearly and emphatically condemn the offensive reactions and the “thinking” underlying them suggests that none of the candidates possess the integrity, courage, confidence and values required to be a trustworthy leader of the United States. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Which Musical Comedy Censor is More Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

How could anyone predict that this show would be risque?

Rick Jones brought these sorry tales to my attention, and they are perfectly suited to an Ethics Quiz.

Your challenge: Explain which of the censors in these two incidents was more unethical.

Censor A: The mayor of Carrollton, Georgia, Wayne Garner, who ruled last week that a city-funded professional production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was not suited for a community production. The city council had contracted with a theater group of actors, singers, dancers, musicians and crew, and had committed $2,500 of taxpayer funds in up-front production costs to prepare for four performances in October. The mayor’s spokesperson said that the production was going to contain racy choreography,despite the fact that it was supposed to be a “PG show.”

How a counter-culture musical specifically about gender bending, kinky sex and transvestites was supposed to be “PG” is anybody’s guess.

Censor B: Thomas Fleming, Superintendent of Schools in the Richland School District in western Pennsylvania.   He prompted District officials to veto the high school’s choice of the classic 1950s Broadway musical Kismet as a 2012 production, because it suddenly occurred to him that the characters in the play, which takes place in old Baghdad, are Muslims. Continue reading →

Troy Davis, Lawrence Brewer and the Capital Punishment Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

At this point, nothing about the death penalty  in the United States makes any sense, logically or ethically, and that is true for all sides of the capital punishment debate. September 20 should be designated Capital Punishment Day in memory of the contradictions, absolutist pronouncements, convenient rationalizations and everything else that occurred in the years, days and hours before Troy Davis’s execution in Georgia. Then perhaps America as a society will devote one day a year to considering rationally and unemotionally how the death penalty should fit into its criminal justice system without having the discussion warped by the peculiarities of  individual cases. As it stands now, not only is capital punishment an ethics train wreck, the policy debate about it is an ethics train wreck. Everyone who even dips his toe into either becomes irresponsible, conflicted or intellectually dishonest.

Did you know that another inmate was executed yesterday? I didn’t, until this morning. In Texas, white supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed Wednesday night for the horrific 1998 dragging death slaying of James Byrd Jr., a man from East Texas who had his head pulled off by a chain attached to a truck for the offense of being black. If death penalty opponents are serious and have any integrity, they needed to show it by protesting the execution of Brewer exactly as intensely as they opposed the death of Davis, but of course they did not. Continue reading →

Why Doesn’t This Government Ethics Alarm Go Off…Or Does It Even Exist?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

"Let's see...cheese on a Ritz, or Beef Wellington...Hell, let's spring for the Wellington--everyone OK with that?"

I just don’t understand it. I never have.

In a report released today, the Justice Department’s inspector general revealed that U.S. Justice Department agencies spent absurd amounts for lavish food at conferences, in one case serving $16 muffins, in another dishing out beef Wellington appetizers that cost $7.32 per serving, and in yet another, a March 2009 conference of the Office on Violence Against Women, serving Cracker Jacks, popcorn and candy bars at a single break to the tune of $32 per person. Yum!

The abuse isn’t unique to the Obama Administration, but it has gotten worse. The inspector general reviewed a sample of ten Justice Department conferences held between October 2007 and September 2009 at a cost of $4.4 million, a period that included the administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama. The Justice Department spent $73.3 million on conferences in fiscal 2009, compared with $47.8 million a year earlier, according to the report. Continue reading →