Leadership

Ethics Heroes: NFL Owners

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The less THIS happens, the better.

I was wrong about the N.F.L.

On Tuesday, the N.F.L. owners voted to move kickoffs back to the 35-yard line, where it was until 1994. The new rule will make the game less exciting but more safe. I didn’t think they’d do it.

The league has a problem—I mean, other than the impasse in labor negotiations that threatens to disrupt the coming season and lose owners and athletes millions. Its game is more popular than ever, but little by little, the evidence is mounting that it is also lethal. Playing pro football injures the brains of a higher percentage of the athletes than anyone suspected, and far worse than suspected. Players are quite literally sacrificing their lives, or at least two or three decades of them, for the Sunday entertainment of America. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Tampa Bay Rays Manager Joe Maddon

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Joe Maddon, fulfilling his duty to confront racist jerks

During a Sunday Spring Training game at Charlotte Sports Park in Florida, Tampa Bay Rays  manager Joe Maddon heard a fan berating Rays centerfielder B.J. Upton with a racial insult. Maddon summoned stadium security and had the fan thrown out of the park.

This may have happened before, but I can’t recall a similar incident. Racist catcalls and epithets are rarer at baseball games than they once were; they are far from gone. Baseball players have to endure a certain amount of abuse, true, but not this kind. Heaping racist insults on an athlete from the safety of the stands is cowardly as well as uncivil, and the First Amendment doesn’t extend to “fighting words” in a private venue.  Every manager, coach, usher and spectator should follow Madden’s lead.

The fan, by the way, denies Maddon’s account. Since baseball managers are not in the habit of ejecting fans for nothing, I find the denial less than credible.

To Wisconsin Unions, a Depressed Woman’s Suicide Is Just Another PR Weapon

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

"Oh, no. Poor ..hey, wait a minute! We just might be able to use this!"

“The ends justify the means,” for better or worse, has always been the modus operandi of the American union movement. Back at the beginning of the 20th Century, this often translated into violence, as union leaders used bombs and murder to counter equally vile tactics—or worse—by their industry foes. Union violence is more common today in the threatening than in the actual execution, but the public unions battling Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin have made it increasingly clear that ethics, fairness and truth are not going to stand in the way of their objectives, particularly the objective of winning the battle for public support.

A new low may have been reached with the effort to blame Walker for the suicide of Jeri-Lyn Betts, a 57-year-old teacher suffering from chronic depression, who apparently committed suicide last week.  Continue reading →

Obama’s Social Security Cover-Up, as the Media Snoozes

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

USA Today ran a sensible editorial a couple of weeks ago calling for the Obama administration to stop cravenly caving to groups like the AARP, Congressional Democrats, and increasingly, liberal/progressive commentators who claim that Social Security isn’t really a budgetary problem. The fiction: since Social Security has received more from taxpayers than it has had to pay out since 1983, the Social Security Trust Fund has built up a whopping $2.5 trillion, guaranteeing enough to meet the program’s obligations ( despite yearly deficits, now that the population is senior-heavy) until the money is scheduled to run out in 2037. The truth: the trust is empty. Congress had raided it regularly for non-Social Security spending, so now the yearly Social security deficits (37 billion dollars last year, a projected 45 to 57 billion in 2011, and a half trillion total in the decade underway) are putting a direct burden on the already reeling Federal budget.

Good for USA Today: this is responsible, public-spirited journalism. the public has heard so many lies from politicians and elected officials about Social Security that it is thoroughly misinformed and confused, and an informative, unbiased editorial from the nation’s most read newspaper is exactly what is needed. But the Obama administration couldn’t handle the truth, so it trotted out White House Budget Director Jacob Lew, who denied that there was a problem, writing in response… Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Fort Wayne Mayor Tom Henry

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Mayor Trivial T. Spineless

He was, without question, the best mayor Fort Wayne, Indiana has ever had. When he first took office, he consolidated city departments launched construction of Fort Wayne’s massive underground sewage system and built the city sewage treatment plant, which is used to this day, seventy years later. When W.W. II came, he held war materials drives, upgraded city equipment and services, and broke ground for was is now Fort Wayne International Airport. and lowered city tax rates. In his last term, he opened up a major area of the town for development by elevating the railroad tracks. And he kept taxes low.

For 21 years beginning in 1934, this dedicated public servant was only not mayor for three years: he died at his post in 1954. And the people of Ft. Wayne haven’t forgotten him. This year, when city officials asked its citizens to vote on whose name the new government center should bear, the response was overwhelming. Ten times more people again voted for the former mayor they had always voted for while he was alive than for anyone or anything else (the runner-up choice was “Thunderdome”).

The current mayor, however, has decided not follow the results of the poll. He thinks the name would be inappropriate. You see, the famous leader that the people of Fort Wayne want to honor was named Harry Baals.

The current mayor’s name?  Trivial T. Spineless. Continue reading →

No Time for Brackets

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Thank God THAT's taken care of...

I don’t need to go into great detail on this; either it bothers you, or it doesn’t.

I strongly suspect there are many of President Obama’s supporters who are bothered, but will never admit it: hence the silence from the mainstream media. I am certain that there are many on the Right who are bothered, but since they are bothered by everything the President does, their annoyance is easy to dismiss. Many, I know, won’t see it, can’t see it, don’t care, and will just turn their attention other matters with a shrug, if that. For my part, I am bothered because I believe that leaders have to be competent and to engender trust by showing good judgment, and I believe the President of the United States has an added obligation to maintain the weight, credibility, and honor of the office, and therefore its strength.

President Obama’s special invitation to ESPN to come to the White House and announce his bracket picks for the NCAA basketball tournament was as frightening a demonstration of tone-deaf leadership malpractice as I have seen, or read about, from any of the 12 U.S. Presidents of my lifetime. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Find The Tell-Tale Mistake!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Unfortunately, James O'Keefe is no Nellie Bly

Kansas City Star reporter Mary Sanchez has posted an excellent column entitled “James O’Keefe and the Ethical Bankruptcy of ‘Gotcha’ Journalism.” Outside of an unfortunate final “Let’s see some genuine evidence that NPR’s coverage is biased” conclusion (you mean, other than its choice of stories, its lack of ideological balance, Nina Totenberg, its treatment of Juan Williams, and its institutionalized positions on issues like Palestine, gun control, abortion,  and illegal immigration?), she makes a strong case. But her piece is marred by a tell-tale gaffe that makes me doubt her own ethical orientation.

Your challenge in today’s Ethics Quiz: Find it! It occurs in this section: Continue reading →

Nuclear Crisis Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Meltdown! Radiation! Mutations! Well, I guess that's all we have to know.

I just heard, for the twelfth time, Sen. Joe Lieberman telling “Face the Nation” that the United States should put the brakes on nuclear energy plant construction “right now until we understand the ramifications of what’s happening in Japan.” Meanwhile, the anti-nukes crowd is out in full force, seeing Japan’s crisis as their opportunity to scare the bejesus out of the public, which is nervous about nuclear energy anyway since they know nothing about it, other than that something bad happened at Three-Mile Island, the Russians had a catastrophe at Chernobyl,  Jane Fonda made that scary movie, “The China Syndrome,” where they shot Jack Lemmon— “And don’t they make bombs with that nuclear stuff?”—and the fact that Homer Simpson works for a nuclear plant that creates three-eyed fish and is run by that evil old Montgomery Burns. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Rep. Dennis Kucinich

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Muslim women, in ethical garb

During last week’s hearings on the alleged radicalization of Muslim-Americans, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, protesting that the hearings were an example of prosecution and bigotry, said:

“Islam is a religion based upon peace, goodwill and the ethical treatment of all people on this planet.”

Politics involves advocacy, and zealous advocacy sometimes metastasizes into exaggerations, overstatements, and lies. Determined governors are called dictators and criminals; those questioning global warming models are compared to Holocaust deniers. Believing that an attack on an enemy nation is in the best interests of America, leaders who should be saying, “We have good reason to believe that this nation has weapons of mass destruction and is inclined to use them,” say instead, “We know where the weapons are and the threat is imminent.” Other leaders who are trying to get important health care reforms passed say, “Don’t worry—if you like your current plan, you’ll be able to keep it!”, neglecting to add the caveat that that plan you like may be forced out of existence if the bill is passed.

These excesses range from deceitful to outright lying, but they are all unethical, all disrespectful of the truth and the public that has a right to it, all aimed at manipulating public opinion with falsity.

I find Kucinich’s statement especially indefensible, because the degree of his presumably misstatement of the truth was completely unnecessary if his motives were good. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Tears of Keith Ellison”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Less to do with the original post and more concerned with weightier matters is this thoughtful comment by blameblakeart, the Comment of the Day:

“This event in Japan has crystalized for me Jack – we as Humanity, as Earthlings – are all in this together, side of the aisle being probably the least of our worries. We need to use our smarts and our will to manifest a better, more abundant, more perfect world, all together, not just for a chosen few.

“10000+ years ago there were hundreds of species that basically cease to exist. What the 8.9 Japanese earthquake tells at least me is that life is tremendously fleeting, but intensely beautiful, magic, and precious, of all things, Human and Of this Earth. I don’t know why there are those out there trying to distract us from these simple truths with all these bogus, hateful, incendiary tactics.”