I only got two posts up yesterday. That’s not acceptable, and I’m sorry. Ethics Alarms has a goal of registering four posts a day, come rain or shine, because even that level—it’s typically about 3,500 or more words a day, counting typos—doesn’t keep up. I don’t feel too badly when I can only manage three. Yesterday was a terrible day, beginning with the ordeal of having to deal with liars, incompetents and SOBs along with malicious technology as I tried to get an overdue waste water treatment bill handled. By the time what should have been a 15 minute process was over, it was after noon, Spuds was annoyed (I almost wrote “ticked” which has other meanings when a dog is the subject) and I was so furious and frustrated that I could hardly function.
Professions
No Wonder We Can’t Trust Political Journalists If They Do THIS…
Why am I not surprised?
White House correspondents are constantly stealing things from Air Force One. In February, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Kelly O’Donnell , felt compelled to send what was described as a “terse email” to her colleagues reminding them taking items like embroidered pillowcases, wine glasses, whiskey tumblers, blankets and gold-rimmed dinner plates “reflects poorly” on the press corps as a whole.
Really? I did not know that! Who would have guessed? Thanks, Kelly!
Actually, O’Donnell’s warning received no responses at all, reportedly, though one member of the press corps apparently returned a pillowcase he had pilfered.
Politico reports that this has been going on for a long time, with reporters stealing taxpayer purchased items with the Air Force One insignia on it being treated as a “rite of passage.” “On my first flight, the person next to me was like, ‘You should take that glass,’” one current White House reporter told Politico. And then the corrupting correspondent “was like”—OK, guess the rationalization.
Come on, guess! I’ll give you 30 seconds….
Time’s up! Politico quotes thusly: “They were like: ‘Everyone does it.’” Ah yes, the #1 Rationalization of them all, and the watermark of the ethically unlettered, “Everybody Does It.” Politico: “Several colleagues of one former White House correspondent for a major newspaper described them hosting a dinner party where all the food was served on gold-rimmed Air Force One plates, evidently taken bit by bit over the course of some time” and ” Reporters recalled coming down the back stairs after returning to Joint Base Andrews in the evening with the sounds of clinking glassware or porcelain plates in their backpacks.”
Politico apparently thinks this is all hilarious, ending its story with a facetious, “Are you IN POSSESSION OF AIR FORCE ONE DINNERWARE? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.“
We receive our information about the work of our President and his staff through the filter of people without even rudimentary ethics alarms: arrogant, unprofessional, untrustworthy and self-indulging assholes.
Fani Wallis Scandal Footnote: A ‘Bias Makes Legal Ethicists Stupid’ Moment
This is disheartening, though not unexpected.
I have written about how thoroughly my colleagues in the legal ethics field are politicized, biased and frequently rendered unable to see the ethical issues through the fog of their peer-reinforced distortions. Yesterday, as my legal ethics expert listserv was buzzing with commentary on the judge’s “split the baby” response to Fulton County Fani Willis’s screaming conflict of interest, prosecutorial misconduct, race-baiting and stunning arrogance. One prominent lawyer in the field, a woman whose commentary is usually perceptive, wrote this in part…
Speaking of Conflicts of Interest and To Prove I’m Occasionally Right: Let’s Revisit “‘Baseball Super-Agent Scott Boras Has Another Super-Conflict And There Is No Excuse For It,’ the Sequel”
I have never recycled a post so soon (this one was was featured in January) but these are special circumstances:
- After my analysis of the Fani Willis conflicts scandal did not jibe with the judge’s decision, my self-esteem is at a low ebb, and I feel the need to point out my prescience in this matter
- This, like Willis’s self-made disgrace, is a conflict of interest, and one involving law as well…but also baseball.
- The conflict of interest I flagged in January has now had some of the adverse results I predicted, and attention should be paid.
- Baseball is one of the few things that has a chance of cheering me up right now, having gone through my first two weeks without Grace’s companionship and support. We followed the seasons (and the Red Sox) together since before we were married, as I taught her the game by taking her to watch the Orioles play Boston in old Memorial Stadium.
Two months after I wrote the post that follows, Spring Training is almost over and the season is less that two weeks away. Yet the two star pitchers I flagged as the victims of their agent’s greed and unethical conduct remain unsigned. I strongly believe that the reason they are unsigned is that the agent/lawyer they foolishly employ has been pitting teams against each other while using each pitcher as leverage to benefit the other, or so Scott Boras would argue. There is no question in my mind that if Blake Snell (above, right) and Jordan Montgomery (above, left), both talented left-handed starting pitchers that fill the same niche, were represented by different agents, both would have signed rich, long-term contracts by now. Because they have allowed themselves to be marketed by the same agent–an unconscionable conflict that baseball should prohibit and Boras’s bar association should sanction—they will not be ready to start the season even if both signed tomorrow. Pitchers who have had to miss large portions of Spring Training have frequently had off-years as a result: Boras’s greedy practice of representing competing talents may result in off seasons and even damage to their careers.
All of this could have and should have been avoided, and would have been, if baseball’s agents were subjected to any genuine ethical regulation.
Now here is the post… Continue reading
Friday Open Forum: Waiting to See If I’m Right…
Judge Scott McAfee confirmed yesterday that he will announce the fate of Fulton County’s designated “Stop Trump!” agent Fani Willis some time today. From the moment your friendly neighborhood ethicist heard the basic facts in this annoying story I was convinced that one way or the other she would have to leave the Trump case. One of my legal ethics colleagues emphatically disagrees, arguing that whatever conflicts of interest she created by hiring her illicit boyfriend to help prosecute Trump were matters of legal ethics discipline but irrelevant to the defendants. He also pooh-poohed the “appearance of impropriety” issue, echoing the American Bar Association’s logic when it took that category out of the ethics rules: actual impropriety matters, the mere appearance doesn’t.
Yet Willis is a government attorney, and employees of the state are required to avoid the appearance of impropriety because it erodes the public trust. If there was ever a prosecution that mandated a squeaky clean leader beyond suspicion or reproach, this is it. Instead, Willis has left an odoriferous trail of conflicts, arrogance, hypocrisy, dubious explanations and likely lies, all supported by her obnoxious reliance on race-baiting. I have been certain that she would eventually go down for all of this, and that my learned friend–who is apolitical— as well as the my myriad partisan-biased colleagues in the legal ethics association I belong to are wrong.
Well, we shall see . If you see Fredo (“I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”) leading off a post today, you’ll know I was right.
Meanwhile, talk about whatever interests you in the Wonderful World of Ethics.
Oh-Oh. Another Ethically Obtuse Question for “The Ethicist”
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but it sure seems to me that the questions being asked of the New York Times “The Ethicist” column (or the ones he’s choosing to answer) are increasingly obtuse. This suggests a dangerous trend. Are most Americans really that ethically incompetent? Or are the increasingly frequent (it seems to me) instances of blatantly unethical conduct modeled by our elected leaders and shrugged off by our news media causing galloping ethics rot?
The latest query for “The Ethicist” was, in my estimation, steeped in grade school-level ethics ignorance. A female designer who used to work for a sexually harassing boss when she was just getting started eventually told the bastard off and was fired in retaliation. Now she asks,
At Least They Weren’t Flying A Boeing 737 Max…
Now these were unethical pilots:
Evoking a memorable scene in “National Lampoon’sVacation” but in a passenger jet instead of a station wagon, the pilot and co-pilot of Batik Air flight en-route to Jakarta fell asleep in the cockpit of their Airbus A320 for 28 minutes. The 153 passengers and four flight attendants on board did not know that no one was flying the plane. A preliminary report by Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee explained why the plane drifted off its designated flight path during the January 25 incident, and it sounds like a version of “Airplane!”
For the EA “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” Files: Iowa Lawyer David L. Leitner
My chosen profession of legal ethics has not been covering itself with glory lately.
The Iowa Supreme Court suspended 68-year-old lawyer David L. Leitner as explained in a discouraging story in the Iowa Capital Dispatch. He’s out of the practice of law for two years: I would have disbarred him. First, Leitner represented an Iowa seed dealer who was convicted of bankruptcy fraud in 2007 after the lawyer helped him hide assets. Leitner created a company for the seed dealer with himself the company’s manager , allowing the seed dealer to send part of his income to the company while hiding it from the government, which the dealer owed about $71,000. (Can’t help clients try to defraud the government. Can’t go into fake businesses with clients designed to cheat on taxes. Pretty basic legal ethics.)
Now THIS Is an Unethical Lawyer!
The Tennessee Supreme Court this month disbarred a Nashville lawyer, Brian Philip Manookian, for habitual unethical conduct that I have a hard time believing that any lawyer would dare to engage in even once. Manookian, wrote the Court, “engaged in this long pattern of intimidating and degrading conduct” to succeed in a medical liability case, the Tennessee Supreme Court said. His goal was to coerce opposing lawyers “into standing down to avoid personal humiliation and emotional distress for them or their families. A business model of sorts, based on fear….To say that Mr. Manookian engaged in multiple offenses is to understate,” the state supreme court continued. “Despite lectures, fines, sanctions and suspensions from judge after judge, Mr. Manookian did not choose merely to continue engaging in misconduct—each time he received the expected negative reaction to his behavior, he responded by escalating it.”
Alan Page, Esq.: Role Model
After being so critical of the NFL’s ethics and business practices, I feel obligated to highlight the impressive example of Alan Page, a Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee (in 1988) who does not suffer from CTE and who exemplifies the kind of role model American youth should know about and emulate. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had no idea that Page had gone on from his NFL exploits with the Minnesota Vikings to, among other things,
- Establish and oversee the Page Education Foundation, which award Page Scholarships to black students who are then obligated to mentor younger children. The foundation has awarded nearly 9,000 scholarships and taken in approximately $16 million in grants.
- Earn a law degree from the University of Minnesota in 1978, while he was still playing football.
- Practice employment law in a law firm, join the Attorney General’s office, and eventually became assistant attorney general.
- Get elected to the Minnesota Supreme Court four times, sitting for 22 years on the court before hitting the mandatory retirement age of 70.
- Write inspirational children’s books with his daughter, Kamie Page.
Ethics Alarms 