U.S. Society

The Bell Salary Scandal and the Victims’ Breach of Duty

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

In most respects, this months horror story about the incredibly corrupt officials of Bell, California doesn’t require any ethics commentary. The verdict is obvious. Robert Rizzo, Bell’s city manager, was collecting an $800,000 a year salary to run a dirt-poor town of  40,000 residents. Part-time city council members took home almost $100,000 annually, mostly by paying themselves to serve on municipal boards and commissions. Rizzo stood to collect a $600,000-a-year pension, and police chief Randy Adams, who was paid more than most big city police chiefs, had arranged for a $411,300-a-year pension. The city officials of Bell were predators, using their positions to steal money from the cities citizens. To pay for all the rich salaries and pensions, Bell’s crooked officials passed unconscionable property taxes, levied on a city population that averaged income less than $25,000 per capita . Even Charlie Rangel wouldn’t argue that this is politics as usual.

Nevertheless, this is a republic, and citizens, even citizens of small towns, have an obligation to pay attention to what their elected officials are doing. Continue reading →

Nettleton Middle School, Embracing Racism in 2010

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Help me out here: which category does this story fall under:

  • School administrator incompetence?
  • Warped community ethical  standards?
  • Racial quotas run amuck?
  • Evidence of human devolution?
  • Proof that time travel is real?

I’m not sure. I do know that when a memo like this one is issued by a school principal, indicating that class officers for the sixth, seventh and eighth grades are restricted by race, there had better be a lot of firing going on, really soon, up and down the entire school system and maybe the town government as well, because the people in charge must not be trusted for one more second to have anything to do with educating American children. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce or Hero? The Paradox of “The Amex Angel”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

You probably heard the story. About three weeks ago in Manhattan,  ad executive Merrie Harris was approached by a homeless man who asked her for some spare change. Harris told the man, Jay Valentine, that she had no change, but offered to lend him her American Express Platinum Card if he would promise to return it. Valentine assured her he was trustworthy, and, incredibly, Harris gave him the card. He returned the card a short time later after a modest shipping spree that added twenty-five dollars to her bill. The New York media sang the praises of both Harris and Valentine, dubbing Harris “the Amex Angel” and calling the episode “a shining act of generosity, trust and honesty.”

I almost designated Wilson an Ethics Hero at the time, but something stopped me. I have been considering the implications of the strange story ever since. It may have been that shining act, but I’m not convinced it was even ethical. Is that possible? How can an act of generosity, trust, and kindness not be ethical?  Continue reading →

Defining Fiscal Irresponsibility Down and the $578M School

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The shocking thing about the new $578 million school complex recently unveiled in Los Angeles, other than its obscene price tag, is that it was a one-day news story, and a minor one at that. There are no demonstrations; Fox News isn’t screaming about it. One education blog blandly asked, “Some view the school and its deluxe amenities as a showpiece for the community, while others view it as a waste of taxpayer money. What do you think?”

“What do you think???” WHAT DO YOU THINK???

The Robert F. Kennedy Community School is a showpiece for the community, all right: it shows that the community is run by irresponsible, incompetent officials, and that the community’s taxpayers are the human equivalent of sheep. Continue reading →

Primary Ethics: Good and Bad Results for Civic Diligence

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The tendency of American voters to hand over the reins of power to the sons, daughters, and wives of popular or successful leaders simply because they shared a last name, a bed or some DNA has always been an embarrassment, proof of the most unfortunate aspects of democracy when it is driven by civic laziness rather than diligence. Beneficiaries of this generations-long deficit in seriousness and responsibility include presidents (Adams, Bush); U.S. Senators (Kennedy, Gore, Clinton, Bayh,**), representatives (Kennedy, Bono, Jackson…), and governors (Bush, Bush…). Some have performed well, some not so well, but all of them were initially elected because voters knew their names, and illogically ascribed to them whatever it was that they admired about their family members, regardless of experience, qualifications, or evidence of governing skill.

In Tuesday’s primaries, voters rectified one especially egregious example of this phenomenon, and committed a new one. Continue reading →

The Legal Rape, and the Limits of Cultural Tolerance and Religious Freedom

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Sometimes conduct is just wrong, and a culture should be able to reject and condemn it confidently without engaging in navel-gazing over cultural tolerance and diversity. The position, unfortunately popular, that all cultural determinations of right and wrong are equally valid is both lazy and insidious, though it has wormed its way into the minds of some who would cal themselves “progressive,” but who are more appropriately called “confused.”

In this category is a New Jersey Court judge, who refused to find a Muslim defendant guilty of sexual assault despite undisputed evidence that he raped his wife multiple times, (immediately prior to their divorce), saying at one point,

“You are my wife, I can do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do.” Continue reading →

Obligation or Charity: Retired Baseball Player Pensions and Fairness

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It is an old ethical problem: what is “fair”?  If you help someone, are you obligated to help everyone? Does charity have to be consistent to be fair? Does a potential beneficiary of generosity have a right to demand it? It is obviously good for those who are fortunate and successful to share the benefits of their success with the unfortunate and less successful, but is it unethical if they choose not to?

These are some of the ethics issues being raised in a controversy launched by the major league baseball veterans, now retired, who played  between 1947-1979. In those days, when free agency was just beginning and top players made six-figure salaries rather than seven or eight as they do now, a player needed four full years of  time on a big league roster to qualify for  medical benefits and an annuity. In 1980, however, new rules put in place by the Major League Baseball Players Association  granted health insurance benefits to those with just one day of service, and a pension after merely six weeks. The new benefits were not retroactive. Continue reading →

Politics, Ethics, and the Idiot Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Kim Lehman, who is one of Iowa’s two national Republican Committee members, responded to Politico’s report last week about the large and, oddly, increasing number of Americans who believe that President Obama is a Muslim, with this tweet:

“@politico You’re funny. They must pay you a lot to protect Obama. BTW, he personally told the muslims that he is a muslim. Read his lips.”

When Lehman was asked by the Des Moines Register what speech she was referring to, she cited an Obama speech in Cairo last summer in which he reached out to Muslims “to seek a new beginning.” In that speech, Obama made no comment about being Muslim. In fact, he said he was a  a Christian, saying,

“…Now part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I’m a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith. As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam.”

Never mind that, Lehman said; the speech still “just had the appearance that he was aligning himself with the Muslims.” Continue reading →

Staten Island Ethics Quote of the Week: Hate—Bad; Greed, Disrespect and Envy—Meh

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“I don’t think it’s a hate crime, it’s just a recession out there.”

—A Staten Island neighbor of 17-year-old Yashua Plair, who has been arrested and charged with a hate crime for shouting anti-Latino epithets while attacking a 15-year-old Mexican boy to take his i-Pod.

Oh. Well, I guess it’s OK then. Continue reading →

Summer Rerun: “Ending the Bi-Partisan Effort to Destroy Trust in America”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

[TV is full of reruns these days, and sometimes I am grateful for them, for it gives me a chance to see episodes of favorite shows I had missed for some reason or another. Back in early March, I posted the following essay about the origins of America’s current crisis of trust in our government, and how it might be cured by our elected leaders. Since then, the crisis has deepened, and as I was doing some routine site maintenance, I reread the post. It is still very timely (unfortunately), and since far fewer people were visiting Ethics Alarms in March, I decided to re-post it today, with just a few minor edits. I promise not to make this a habit. Still, trust is the reason why ethics is so important in America: if there is a single post of the more than 700 I have written here since October 2009  that I would like people to read, this is it.] Continue reading →