U.S. Society

Quick Ethics Reactions To A Morning’s Headlines…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I woke up with a headache, I have to read a really boring document before an upcoming conference call, and I woke myself up with an anxiety attack. It’s a perfect time, in other words, to react to a typical batch of morning New York Times headlines. Like…

  • “Mary Peltola, a Democrat, Defeats Sarah Palin in Alaska’s Special House Election”

Comment: Good! Palin has a lot of gall running for office anywhere, but especially Alaska, after she quit as governor for no good reason, unless one considers cashing-in a good reason. I am still looking for a clear explanation of how the ranked voting scheme worked in this election. It seems that the system provides an edge to the hateful, and also allows the gaming of democracy.

  • “Lea Michele Is Well Aware That the Pressure Is On”

Comment: She should be. The former “Glee” star exploited her agent’s betrayal of another client, Beanie Feldstein, to snatch away the lead role in Broadway’s bombing “Funny Girl” revival. It was show-biz treachery worthy of “All About Eve.” (I hope she falls on her metaphorical face.)

  • “An Apple Watch for Your 5-Year-Old? More Parents Say Yes.”

Comment: More parents have money to burn, apparently, and an appalling lack of common sense. But the watch has proven largely useless for adults, so maybe 5-year-old is the right market.

  • “‘Defund the Police’ Is Dead. Now What?”

Comment: Now what? Oh, I don’t know, maybe progressives are slowly returning to sanity? We know Charles M. Blow isn’t (that’s the headline of his latest column, one that doesn’t mention Donald Trump at all, amazingly.). He ends his lament, “I fear that the signal we are sending to all the people who truly believed that there would finally be real change in policing and the possibility of more equity in our criminal justice system is that racial equity is a tertiary issue, that it is lower than people want to admit on the social hierarchy of policy priorities. We will regret that.”

  • “The Man Behind Our Public Schools Would Be So Disappointed Today”

Comment: Yeah, I’d say that’s a safe bet.

  • “Children Need the Whole Truth About America”

Comment: Because the “whole truth’ about America is so clear and settled. Translation: “Children need to be indoctrinated  before they have the critical thinking to analyze the complexities of their nation themselves.”

  • “The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading”

Comment: Not the pandemic. The disastrous, incompetent, ill-considered, destructive and quite possibly politically motivated lock-down in response to the pandemic. Lest we forget…

 

 

 

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Comment Of The Day: “Verdict: ‘Quiet Quitting’ Is Unethical. Next Question?”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

[The caption on perhaps my favorite Charles Addams cartoon reads, “We never could have done it without him.”]

I thought that the essay on “quiet quitting” would spark a good discussion, and when I think that, I’m usually wrong. This time I was right, and among the excellent comments was this Comment of the Day by Tim Hayes, who focuses on the crucial aspect of the issue that I barely touched on at all: the responsibilities of management.

Here is Tim’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Verdict: “Quiet Quitting” Is Unethical. Next Question?”…

***

So, full disclosure, I hate the terminology and discussions around “quiet quitting”, both as a manager, and as an employee. Part of this is because it is unethical – but also part of it is because a lot of current discussions seem to be about deflections and doublespeak, and they just frankly aren’t doing anyone any good.

Some instances of quiet quitting are simply laziness on the part of the employee – this shouldn’t surprise us (I can make a strong argument that laziness when possible is actually a biological predisposition, and furthermore beneficial to societies when channeled appropriately), and while performing excellently is a virtue, and should be a path to success, it is not a necessity in all things. The American experiment, and indeed all civilizations (Western and Eastern), have gotten along just fine with the majority of individuals being mediocre – the trick has historically lay in defining mediocre as still sufficiently productive to support a society when the majority of its members are at that level, while allowing those who wish to perform exceptionally to do so. So, in the situation where quiet quitting is about laziness, the only major question to be answered is what constitutes acceptable levels of performance in the role at hand, and have those been adequately defined and communicated to the person in that role.

This is why I hate hearing the discussions as a manager – they almost always ignore that there is a failure of leadership/management in these cases. If I have someone who is performing the job as I’ve described it to them, and is actually meeting my set standards for acceptable levels of performance, yet their performance of their responsibilities is insufficient in some way, then it is axiomatic that I have failed to define as acceptable the levels of performance that are sufficient to fulfill my need. If, conversely, I have described acceptable levels of performance and the person is not meeting them, and so my business needs are not being met, than I am failing to hold this person to the standards I have set. Continue reading →

The Tuition Debt Forgiveness Fiasco So Far…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

President Biden announced last week that he will unilaterally forgive $10,000 in student debt for those making less than $125,000 annually. Pell Grant recipients will receive $20,000 in debt repayment funds if their income is below the $125,000 threshold. Administration officials claim that no individual or household in the top 5% of earners get any financial assistance from the program.

Well….

1. As we have learned to expect from the administration that was supposed to be a breath of fresh air after all those Trump lies, we cannot get an honest statement of what the Biden loan forgiveness vote-buying scheme will really cost. The official number has been $300 billion. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation issued an analysis earlier this week estimating that the student loan erasure will add nearly $330 billion to the deficit over the next decade. The Committee for a Responsible Budget puts the cost of the handouts at between $440 billion and $600 billion. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business estimates that the program will cost up to $1 trillion. Biden’s paid liar and unofficial village idiot (but she’s the first village idiot to be “of color, female, and a lesbian, and that’s what counts), White House Press Secretary Jean-Pierre, explains with her typical precision, “All of this as when it comes to costs will also depend on how many of the loans canceled were actually expected to be repaid.”

What do we call organizations that commit to a huge expense without knowing what it will cost…

2. …Or how it will be paid for? Administration officials say the program is “fully paid for” through “deficit reduction,” as the government will be spending less money that it did when it was leaking trillions in ad hoc federal spending to combat the Wuhan virus. Thus we are hearing doubletalk like this, from Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council (and he is, I believe, the first deputy director of the National Economic Council of Indian descent!):

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Ethics Quiz: Censorship At Northwest High

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I wrote editorials for my high school newspaper. The administration got quite annoyed with me for several of them, particularly the one that exposed the fact that the students in the “accelerated learning” program were often not disciplined for the same offenses that got other students suspended. (Also annoyed with me was my best friend at the time, who almost immediately got suspended as the school decided to prove there was no favoritism to the the best students (though, of course, there was). Still, nobody ever threatened to shut down the paper based on its content.

Then again, our paper never published anything about sex….

The students on the staff of the school paper at Northwest High School in Grand Island, Nebraska were ordered by administrators to use the names they were given at birth for their bylines because using their “preferred names”—apparently three of the students were transgender, whatever that means now— was too controversial.  In defiance, the student journalists dedicated an  issue to LGBTQ. issues, with two columns on the topic and a news article about the origins of Pride Month. The school responded by ending the newspaper entirely. The paper had been in print for 54 years at Northwest High, which has about 700 students and is the only high school in Grand Island, a small city about 95 miles west of Lincoln, the state capital.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Was shutting down the newspaper an ethical move by school administrators?

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Verdict: “Quiet Quitting” Is Unethical. Next Question?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I had happily never heard of the term “quiet quitting” until last week, and now it is supposedly a hotly-debated ethics topic. There’s nothing to debate about. “Quiet quitting” is not new (the term may be new), nor is there any defense for it. It is un-American to its core. But as so many American values are being eroded by revolutionary fervor of people who simply don’t like the unique history, culture and principles that make the nation the unique entity that it is, it figures that slacking at one’s job and being self-righteous about it would be on the rise.

It is, there is little doubt about that. Ethics Alarms has mentioned the trend of increasingly poor and unaccommodating service in every sector. The usual explanation is the under-staffing that the destructive pandemic lockdown facilitated, but it’s good that focus is falling on the declining belief in seeking excellence in all one does, and putting out one’s best effort at all times. The death throes of American dedication to excellence as a cultural value is what has been newly christened “quiet quitting,” the many ways in which workers reduce the time, energy, and care they commit to their jobs.

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If The Public Cannot Trust Accountants To Be Ethical, Who Can They Trust? Answer: Nobody

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Let’s begin with a confession and an apology. On June 28, the SEC announced that it had charged Ernst & Young LLP with extensive cheating by its employees on exams required to obtain and maintain Certified Public Accountant (CPA) licenses. Moreover the Big Five firm withheld evidence of this misconduct from the Security and Exchange Commission’s Enforcement Division during the SEC’s investigation. EY admitted the facts leading to the SEC’s charges and agreed to pay a $100 million penalty. [You can read the SEC’s press release here.]

I have no idea how I missed such a major and troubling ethics story. It’s my job to keep up on such matters; I teach accounting ethics, though I haven’t had a training assignment for that profession since the pandemic hit. I apologize profusely. I will work to do better. While the various breaches of government, journalism, legal and business ethics that occupy most of my attention on Ethics Alarms are important, none are more ominous than this story. It really feels like the canary dying in the mine.

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Ethics Dunces: The Operators Of Detroit’s Belle Isle Park

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

This place should not be in business.

The Giant Slide at Belle Isle Park reopened last week after being closed for two years because of the pandemic (how this ride could possibly be a virus-spreader is beyond me, but that’s The Great Stupid for you). The 50-foot metal slide has been a  Detroit summer tradition since 1967. When it went back into operation last week, however, “the waxing was a little robust,” according to Ron Olson, the chief of parks and recreation for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. It’s nice that he can be so cavalier about people nearly breaking their necks. As a result of that robust waxing, every bump in the slide sent fun-seekers airborne, as you can see from one of the many videos made of the thing above. One woman bumped her head and lost her phone, headphones, glasses, a shoe and even a sock on the way down.

What fun! GMAC Cash, a Detroit rapper, even put the experience to song: “You can break your back, on the Giant Slide,” he raps. “You can even break your neck, on the giant slide. You can even bump your head, on the giant slide.”

Apparently nobody connected with the park bothered to stage a few test runs to see if the slide was safe after being put back into service after two years. No state agency checked it either, though most such amusement park attractions have to be inspected before the public can use them. It gets worse. Even though the ride was obviously dangerous, over 500 sliders risked their necks before the slugs operating the park thought hard about the violence they were seeing and said, “Ya know, maybe we need to fix this.” Then they closed the ride. (It reopened last weekend.)

The ethical values on display here are competence and responsibility, or rather the lack of them. The fact that nobody was seriously injured is pure moral luck. This is how people get killed.

The episode ranks an “Otter”:

The Little League Cotton Fiasco: Good Job, Everybody! Now U.S. Race Relations Are In Ethics Zugzwang!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Boy, do I hate this story! As they say in “City Slickers,” “If hate were people I’d be China.”

During the Sunday broadcast of the MLB Little League Classic between the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox, ESPN cameras zoomed in on white Little Leaguers on the Davenport, Iowa team putting stuffing from a plush animal in the hair of second baseman Jeremiah Grise, who is black. This immediately triggered a full-throated cry of racism from the professional race-baiter, because, as you know, this is a racist nation with a racist history and a population full of racists and a black American is hardly any better off than Emmett Till.

Social media erupted with outrage. ESPN piously explained that it was investigating (the supposed scandal that it had triggered.) The social justice warriors and race grievance hucksters followed the path of Carolyn Hinds, a Toronto-based film critic and journalist who saw the viral footage and tweeted that it was “exactly what we think it is and some people need to be taken to task.” (She, of course, didn’t know what was going on, but since it confirmed her biases, said that she knew.) Hinds wondered if the actions were “something that happens regularly with this team,” and what kind of lessons about racial tolerance were being imparted by the players’ parents. The Little League, predictably, tried to grovel away the episode, saying that the kids had “no ill-intent.”

That didn’t come close to illuminating the episode The team’s conduct had nothing to do with racial intolerance, but the obscene reaction to it did. It turned out that both Grise and his white teammate put the cotton-like stuffing in their hair. They were performing an homage to Hawaii Little League star Jaron Lancaster, who has a cool white-dyed Mohawk. There was nothing racial in the conduct at all. ESPN just happened to only show the black kid.

Just an honest mistake, I’m sure.

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Open Forum, Insert Foot…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Or not…

I got myself and my company fired this week for being overly candid (and vociferous) in expressing my objections to the lazy, careless, incompetent support I received from the organization’s staff before and during a CLE seminar via, yecchh, Zoom. Essentially I cared more about the quality of the program than they did.

Well, it’s not the first time I’ve done this over the years; it’s reassuring to know I haven’t changed.

Here, in Friday’s Open Forum, candor is valued above all.

Have at it.

As for my misadventure, let us never speak of it again….

The Greatest Stupid Of All? When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring? KABOOM!? The Omaha Active Shooter Simulation

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I couldn’t decide what to call this story out of Omaha, Nebraska, but it it did make my head explode.

Catholic Charities of Omaha Executive Director Denise Bartels thought, if you can call it thinking, that an unannounced active shooter drill was a peachy keen idea, and that five days after the Buffalo supermarket shooting in May was the perfect time to stage it.

Yes, she’s a moron. So were Catholic Charities’ compliance coordinator, Carrie Walter and Security Director Mike Welna who also approved this crack-brained scheme that was so obviously irresponsible and dangerous that a child could have figured out that it shouldn’t happen. Unfortunately, no children were employed in the organization’s management, only stupid adults.

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