It’s too soon to re-post the 2012 Ethics Alarms essay about why Labor Day is important and worth celebrating, as I did so just last year. If you missed it and are interested, it is here. Today we think (or we should) of labor unions as the ultimate example of Eric Hoffer’s observation that “Every great cause begins as a movement, degenerates into a business and ends up as a racket.” (I love the quote, but what he really wrote was “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” Close enough….). That fate unites them with #MeToo, Time’s Up, Black Lives Matter, LBGTQ rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, anti-nuke organizations, and feminism, as well as “states’ rights,” free enterprise, the Tea Party, anti-Communist groups, the Libertarian Party and more. Like many of those movements, however, the labor unions were necessary and advanced the cause of core American principles from a place where they had been stalled.

Incidentally, the first post today began as the first item in this warm-up. This happens a lot: the topic becomes too complicated to do justice to in a multiple topic post, so I have to move it out and start all over again. Many other topics in the warm-ups, cool-downs or whatever I call them could justify whole posts, but a stand-alone post requires searching for graphics, more writing, and adding tags, making it a far more time-consuming process. I would love to have the time and financial resources to cover ethics as it needs to be covered. Somebody should. But every way I’ve considered to produce significant income here reduces access, and it would be ethically wrong to make that trade-off.

1. Before leaving the topic of ignorance-producing journalism hysteria…do read this piece of irresponsible climate change primal screaming by long-time Times Democratic Party propagandist Paul Krugman. He’s an economist of dubious quality, but he knows no more about climate science than the average greengrocer, as his column shows repeatedly. “Big business wants to prioritize low taxes over the fate of civilization,” his op-ed’s cut line reads. Nothing apocalyptic about that!

This is a guy who can’t even make reliable predictions in his own field—you recall that he famously wrote on election night 2016 that Trump’s election would mean that the markets would sink and never rise again—and yet he is allowed to make dumb scientific assumptions in the pages of the New York Times. The fact is, and it is a fact, the the U.S. can’t do anything about climate change, even assuming something can be done,without the full commitment of China, India and the developing countries, and that is just not happening. Nor is China trustworthy in any respect, but it would doubtlessly love to have the United States cripple itself economically to signal its virtue, if not its wisdom. The cancellation of the Keystone pipeline has one good point: it is the perfect symbol of climate change madness. Everyone agrees that the Obama, then Biden edict will not have any effect on rising temperatures whatsoever while costing jobs and removing an energy source, but it makes environmental hysterics happy, and that’s enough.

2. Sidewalk ethics. Were people always so rude and inconsiderate on sidewalks? Having to walk my dog three times a day for 30 minutes or more has led me to spend more time on neighborhood sidewalks than ever before, and every trip is an adventure. Spuds is too friendly for a 65-pound engine of muscle, so I avoid running into kids, unknown dogs and people coming our way by crossing the street, taking detours, and generally not taking chances. But kids come running up from behind us, startling me as well as the dog. Joggers, who have always acted entitled since they first rose out of the primordial ooze, whiz by us, at us, and from behind us like we were invisible, often requiring me to yank Spuds back from charging them. He has recently developed a phobia of wheeled vehicles, beginning with those e-scooters (if he sees an abandoned one, he approaches it like I would approach a live hand grenade). I had crossed the street to avoid an unloading bus of summer camp kids only to see an old coot on a bicycle heading right at us, so I moved Spuds onto a nearby lawn. When the bicycle began to pass us—on the sidewalk—my dog lunged at the bike, and I yanked him back. He might have come within six feet of the bike. The rider stopped and I apologized for startling him, saying that I was trying to cure my dog of his bicycle issues. “I don’t give a damn—control your dog!” the jerk shouted. “Look, I did control my dog,” I answered. “You, on the other hand, are breaking the law. Ride your bicycle on the street where it belongs, dickhead.” He was a dickhead, you know.

[Notice of Correction: It appears that I was wrong: in Virginia, bicycles can use the sidewalk, though in all of my years living here I have never seen an adult doing so. A Virginia resident so informs me, so I misinformed the old coot. But he was still violating the law, which requires sidewalk riders to yield to pedestrians and to signal their intentions audibly as they approach. He drove Spuds and me off the sidewalk onto a lawn, so he was still a dickhead, just a different kind of dickhead.]

Then there are the oblivious. Just now, Spuds and I were trapped by two sets pf parents with kids who saw us behind them and just camped out on the sidewalks on both sides of the street anyway. The father on the right side of the street was walking at a snail’s pace while one son dawdled ten yards behind and his brother meandered 15 yards behind him. On the left sidewalk, a mother with a baby carriage stopped and began a conversation shouting across the street to the guy with the two slug-like sons. There was literally nowhere for me to go. Spuds sat patiently and I stood for ten minutes waiting for one side or the other to clear.

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…we have this: The Zinn Education Project.

A website named for anti-American, Marxist, fake historian Howard Zinn has gathered thousands of signatures of teachers nationwide. The signers pledge to teach the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their classrooms in defiance of any bans by any state government or local school districts.

Josan Perales of Estes Park, Colorado wrote: “We must ‘go for broke’ as fierce and conscious educators fighting for liberation for ALL. THIS is the work.”Fairfield, Connecticut teacher and signer Chris Parisi explained his acceptance of the pledge by writing, “During the Cold War and throughout the 150-year reign of Confederate-apologist revisionist historians, our textbooks were sanitized. The truth about slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and white male supremacy were purposefully buried under a romantic Lost Cause Mythology.”

You know, “the truth.” Teachers have the authority to teach “the truth” as their political ideology moves them to see it, and if communities, schools, parents and legislatures believe that their indoctrination is inappropriate, then they intend to teach what conforms to their agenda anyway.

To: State Legislators
From: [Your Name]

“One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” – Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 1963

“We, the undersigned educators, refuse to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events.”

The petition has so far attracted 7,357 signatures from teachers in at least 27 states.

The preamble reads [forgive me from interjecting along the way, but I get to have some fun!)…

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Ah, I remember it well: in 1972 on this date, American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer defeated Russian Boris Spassky to become the first U.S. player to achieve the World Championship. At the time, this was seen as a major Cold War victory, because Soviet players had essentially been trading the crown back and forth for decades. The feel-good story soon turned sour, however, because Fischer rapidly proved himself to be emotionally unstable, not to mention a massive jerk and an anti-Semite. I thought about this as the Emmys approached, with Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit” carrying several nominations into the broadcast. That show is about an emotionally damaged female chess champion, also, like Fischer, a former child chess prodigy. As far as I can determine, all chess prodigies are maladjusted, and their parents are guilty of child abuse for allowing them to devote their childhood to a single-minded obsession with a game, however valuable it is as intellectual stimulation. A current American child chess whiz revealed that he practices ten hours a day.

I used to play competitive chess, but like the lifetime underachiever I am, I refused to do the work to become really excellent. That would have required spending many hours memorizing chess opening and classic games, and I had other interests. I was a talented instinctive player, but eventually plowed under by pale-skinned, dead-eyed contemporaries who may well be in rubber rooms now. Bobby Fischer was a warning, but not one that has been heeded as well as it should.

1. As promised, a CVS update! The original post is here. As of today, I have called CVS’s complaint line three times over the episode described here. In total, this has cost me almost three hours that I will want back when I am on my death bed. The first call resulted in the usual scripted sympathy and apologies (one I had reached a real human being) and a promise that I would receive a call from someone in authority in “24 to 48 hours.” I did not receive such a call, so I called the complaint line again, adding the failure to live up to the commitment to my list of complaints. This time, after the wait for a human voice and the scripted sympathy and apology, I was told that there was no notation mentioning a follow-up call on my complaint report “That’s your problem,” I replied. “I know this game: you make that promise, and hope the complaining customer gets busy, or forgets, or otherwise moves on without you having to do anything. That won’t work with me.” The nice woman swore that this was not the case. This time, she read me my complaint report number, and gave me the name of the “group leader” who would be calling me in—yup!—24 to 48 hours.

Again, I did not receive the promised call. So yesterday, I called for the third time—same wait, same scripted sympathy and apologies—and said that I now had three complaints: the outrageous treatment I received in the initial incident, the failure of CVS to follow up as promised after my first call, and now the failure to deliver as promised with a call from the “group leader.”

This time, I got a different story. The agent said that it takes 7 to 10 days to investigate such complaints, as the process includes reviewing store video. I told her that no one mentioned that at all previously, though it made sense. Now I know there’s security video of me being accosted by a women who had just walked into the store while I was objecting to the handling of my problem. It will show her pointing and gesticulating, and making the bluff of taking out her phone to call the cops on me. Since it will not have sound, however, its probative value will be limited.

Meanwhile, I’m moving our prescriptions to Walgreen’s, and doing incidental shopping elsewhere. Stay tuned…

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Don’t mind me, it’s just that I’ve been feeling like I’m wasting my time lately….

1. Please stop sending me links to whatever perpetually disgusting and hypocritical HBO comic Bill Maher has said because he appears to be courageously buck woke cant and the boring partisan spin of almost every other TV comedian. Now he’s criticizing progressives because he’s smart enough to figure out (though they haven’t) that they completely beclowned themselves by hitching their credibility to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The King of Smug isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is, but he’s smart enough to see that the smarter rats will soon be fleeing the sinking ship. It doesn’t matter: Maher was one of the most vicious hate-mongers against President Trump and Republicans; he also advocated wrecking the economy to get rid of a President he didn’t like. Maher isn’t really a brave iconoclast, he just plays one on TV. I doubt that he has any principles that he wouldn’t discard without blinking, if it brought him some publicity and lengthened his already inexplicably long career as a public asshole.

2. Now, that doesn’t mean that Bill’s assessment isn’t correct for once, just that he aided and abetted those who stuck the country with Joe and Kamala and is therefore ethically estopped from flip-flopping now. Every single institution and individual who was part of this reckless, cynical and transparently irresponsible fiasco should be mocked, shamed, harangued and humiliated until death, especially the voters. Charles Cooke, a conservative NeverTrumper with the similarly Trump-bashing National Review, has written a very accurate essay on exactly what Democrats did, “that, in a desperate attempt to remove President Trump from office, the Democrats tailored themselves a straitjacket from which they will struggle mightily to escape.” They also stuck the United States and its citizens with a President and a Vice-President they knew were unfit for office so the party could gain power, placing the nation and its welfare at risk. Just like Bill Maher stating that wrecking the economy and putting Americans out of work was “worth it” if it resulted in Trump’s defeat, the Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) decided it was worth it to place the nation’s fate for four years in the hands of what Cooke calls, in an understatement, “a pair of losers.” And they knew that was what they were doing. It is one of the worst betrayals of trust any American political party has ever engaged in.

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1. As with the Giuliani suspension, I have grave doubts whether this ruling is apolitical. Judge Parker, a Michigan federal district judge, issued a 110-page order sanctioning Trump lawyers Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and others for their filing and advocacy of a federal lawsuit that was one of several law suits alleging fraud and illegality in the handling of the 2020 election. The full opinion here, but lawyer Bruce Faughan has done a neat cut and paste job to produce a Reader’s Digest condensed version:

[A]ttorneys have an obligation to the judiciary, their profession, and the public (i) to conduct some degree of due diligence before presenting allegations as truth; (ii) to advance only tenable claims; and (iii) to proceed with a lawsuit in good faith and based on a proper purpose. Attorneys also have an obligation to dismiss a lawsuit when it becomes clear that the requested relief is unavailable.

For purposes of Rule 11, an attorney who is knowingly listed as counsel on a pleading, written motion, or other paper “expressly authorize[d] the signing, filing, submitting or later advocating of the offending paper” and “shares responsibility with the signer, filer, submitter, or advocate.” In this age of electronic filing, it is frivolous to argue that an electronic signature on a pleading or motion is insufficient to subject the attorney to the court’s jurisdiction if the attorney violates the jurisdiction’s rules of professional conduct or a federal rule or statute establishing the standards of practice.

Even if there are sanctions available under statutes or specific federal rules of procedure, . . . the ‘inherent authority’ of the court is an independent basis for sanctioning bad faith conduct in litigation. To award attorneys’ fees under this “bad faith exception,” a district court must find that (i) “the claims advanced were meritless”; (ii) “counsel knew or should have known this”; and (iii) “the motive for filing the suit was for an improper purpose such as harassment.” When invoking its inherent authority to sanction, “[a] court must, of course, . . . comply with the mandates of due process, both in determining that the requisite bad faith exists and in assessing fees.”

[L]itigants and attorneys cannot come to federal court asserting that certain acts violate the law based only upon an opportunity for—or counsel and the litigant’s suspicions of—a violation. The rule[s] continues to require litigants to ‘stop-and-think’ before initially making legal or factual contentions.

[A]n “empty-head” but “pure-heart” does not justify lodging patently unsupported factual assertions. And the good or bad faith nature of actions or submissions is not what determines whether sanctions are warranted under Rule 11(b)(3). Inferences must be reasonable and come from facts proven, not speculation or conjecture. Pursuant to their duties as officers of the court, attorneys typically do not offer factual allegations that have no hope of passing as evidentiary support at any stage of the litigation. Substituting another lawyer’s judgment for one’s own does not constitute reasonable inquiry.”

As an initial matter, an affiant’s subjective belief that an event occurred does not constitute evidence that the event in fact occurred. Plaintiffs are not entitled to rely on the discovery process to mine for evidence that never existed in the first instance. Attorneys are not journalists. It is not acceptable to support a lawsuit with opinions, which counsel herself claims no reasonable person would accept as fact and which were “inexact,” “exaggerate[ed],” and “hyperbole.” Nor is it acceptable to use the federal judiciary as a political forum to satisfy one’s political agenda. Such behavior by an attorney in a court of law has consequences.

An attorney’s right to free speech while litigating an action “is extremely circumscribed.” Something does not become plausible simply because it is repeated many times by many people. An attorney who willingly continues to assert claims doomed to fail . . . must be deemed to be acting with an improper motive.

The nation’s courts . . . are reserved for hearing legitimate causes of action. Individuals may have a right (within certain bounds) to disseminate allegations of fraud unsupported by law or fact in the public sphere. But attorneys cannot exploit their privilege and access to the judicial process to do the same. And when an attorney has done so, sanctions are in order. Here’s why. America’s civil litigation system affords individuals the privilege to file a lawsuit to allege a violation of law. Individuals, however, must litigate within the established parameters for filing a claim. Such parameters are set forth in statutes, rules of civil procedure, local court rules, and professional rules of responsibility and ethics. Every attorney who files a claim on behalf of a client is charged with the obligation to know these statutes and rules, as well as the law allegedly violated.

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