Workplace

At the University of Michigan, A Controversy Reveals Dishonesty and Hypocrisy Underlying the DEI Fad

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

If Donald Trump accomplishes nothing more in his next four years than ending the nation’s tolerance to open borders while fawning over “good illegal immigrants” and driving a metaphorical stake through The Great Stupid’s DEI fad, electing him will have been worth all chaos that will come along with it.

DEI thrives as a hypocritical way to discriminate against white men and shift to a society based on rewarding achievement, diligence and ability to one based on group membership. That makes it un-American to the core. At the University of Michigan, the “director of the university’s office of academic multicultural initiatives”—you know, DEI—spoke out at a conference of such officers the university to opine that her university was “controlled by wealthy Jews and that because Jewish students are “wealthy and privileged” the don’t need diversity services. “Jewish people have no genetic DNA that would connect them to the land of Israel,” Rachel Dawson was quoted as saying.

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Comment of the Day: “Critics of Federal Workers Telecommuting May Exaggerate But the Truth Is Bad Enough”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

This Comment of the Day by new participant in the comment wars Dr. Blae cheers my pre-Christmas cockles more than most for two reasons: 1) I always love it when a first time commenter weighs in with a Comment of the Day. This is especially true since I spend so much time reading attempted first-time comments that read: “You suck, asshole!” 2) Genuine expertise on these topics is always a godsend. I am a pan-ethicist, meaning that I work in the ethics field regarding too many areas to count, legal ethics substantially but also business ethics, government ethics, sports ethics, academic ethics, journalism ethics, and more. I am neither a participant nor an expert in many of these fields themselves, so when ethics and one of them intersect, a specialist is especially welcome.

Here is Dr. Blae’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Critics of Federal Workers Telecommuting May Exaggerate But the Truth Is Bad Enough”:

***

So let’s break this down…

  • Federal agencies have been maintaining uninhabited office space in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the US.
  • The majority of federal workers, that can, telework/remote work and avoid coming into the office.
  • There is an assumption of a lack of efficiency due to telework/remote work, but the evidence is anecdotal or not directly relevant (e.g., office occupation).

Now for a couple of questions… prior to COVID:

  • When were government employees accused of being efficient?
  • What is efficiency? This is really important since the implication is a quantitative comparison, so we need some numbers.
  • Are all jobs/positions the same? Is there a single solution?
  • Where do most federal employees (in the DC area) come from?
  • How do you “drain the swamp” by reconcentrating employees in the swamp?
  • What is a comparison of costs between an employee doing telework/remote work v. being physically in the office?
  • Why do federal agencies continue to rent unoccupied spaces when according to GSA regulations/policies they are supposed to “right size” office space?

Ok let’s take into consideration a few points…

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Ethics Observations on the $765 Million Baseball Player

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

My Aunt Bea, the family progressive and knee-jerk Democrat, died this year at the age of 96, cantankerous and opinionated to the end. She was a big Cincinnati Reds fan (she lived in Dayton, Ohio) and I remember her having many arguments with my father when free agency exploded the salaries in Major League Baseball in the late 1970s. “No baseball player is worth those salaries,” she insisted. My father would laugh and say, “Bea, by definition they are worth those salaries, because the people who benefit from their unique talents are willing to pay them.” Then she would talk about teacher salaries, and my father would say, “It may seem unfair, but a lot more people are capable of teaching than are able to hit a fastball, and the sad fact is that a a large number of Americans care more about sports than they do public education.”

I wonder what my aunt and my father would be saying now after the announcement that Juan Soto, the young (26), amazingly talented slugger widely recognized as a generational talent and a certain Hall of Famer barring some catastrophe, agreed yesterday to a 15-year, $765 million contract with the New York Mets.

In his short major league career so far, Soto has already earned over 80 million dollars. Even though the previous record-setting contract was given out just last year to freakish Shohei Ohtani, who is both a great hitter (he was the National League MVP in 2024) and an ace starting pitcher, Soto’s new deal for just his batting prowess topped it. This contract automatically raises the worth of every other player, increases team payroll expenses, increases ticket prices, makes it increasingly unaffordable for families to attend baseball games, makes it more difficult for small market teams to compete, and, once again, makes Gordon Gekko look prescient when he said in “Wall Street,” “Greed is good!”

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Critics of Federal Workers Telecommuting May Exaggerate But the Truth Is Bad Enough

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

Last week one head-exploding story sparked by the rise of DOGE was the allegation that so many federal workers are allowed to work from home without supervision. Quotes…

“We only have six percent of our federal workforce actually going into work every single day.” – Senator Joni Ernst on FOX News, December 5, 2024

“If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%!” – Elon Musk, Twitter/X, December 5, 2024

“Most federal workers are eligible to telework and 90 percent of those are…Nearly one-third of federal workers are entirely remote …Service backlogs and delays, unanswered phone calls and emails, and no-show appointments are harming the health, lives, and aspirations of Americans.”– Senator Joni Ernst, “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings“.

I read these and many news stories arising from them and, frankly, found the claims hard to believe. As one would expect, the American Federation of Government Employees rushed to defend its members. Given the mission of that organization and its membership, one can reasonably expect it to shade reality and the statistics used to explain it to the public so the federal workers under attack are placed in the best light possible. I don’t trust statistics advanced by interest groups, and neither should anyone else. But just for giggles, let’s assume that all of the statistics raised to rebut federal workforce-bashers in “Exaggerating use and misuse of telework is demeaning attempt to justify job cuts” are 100% accurate, objective and unbiased. Then we know…

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Karine Jean-Pierre and Rationalization 19 C

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I would hope that even the most Trump-Deranged Democrat would agree that it will be a multilateral boon to have a White House spokesperson who is minimally competent even at the unethical main function of the job (that is, lying), rather than the current embarrassing occupant, Karine Jean-Pierre. She routinely demonstrates poor reasoning abilities and barely rudimentary comprehension of ethics as well as the Constitution; she is slow-witted, inarticulate, frequently unprepared and unprofessional.

I wonder if said Trump-Deranged Democrat might even agree that it will be a welcome change to have a President in office willing to fire someone he hired who hasn’t broken the law while holding a job in the administration (like Sam Brinton). I can’t swear that my research is conclusive, but so far, I’ve found no record of Biden dismissing anyone who was appointed, nominated or hired under his authority unless they were criminals. I am confident that this is an all-time record, and an ugly one, with Jean-Pierre standing as the poster girl for Biden’s acceptance of mediocrity (or worse) in government service.

This is the petard of DEI hiring: a President who makes “historic” selections based on group membership rather than ability is thereafter trapped: the hiring announces that what matters most is the sex, sexual preference, gender, race and/or ethnicity of the individual rather than that individual’s performance in the job. When my sister was complaining about Trump’s major agency nominations, I responded that if any of them proved to be disasters, he or she would be fired….unlike Pete Buttigeig, Tony Blinken, Alejandro Mayorkas, Merrick Garland, Lloyd Austin, the head of the Secret Service, the director of FEMA and others, such as Jean-Pierre. She had to concede the point.

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On Pete Hegseth’s Strange Drinking Pledge

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host and Army veteran told Megyn Kelly on her Sirius/XM radio show that he would stop drinking alcohol completely if confirmed as Doanld Trump’s Secretary of Defense. He referenced “general order number 1,” which prohibits military personnel from consuming alcohol during deployment, saying, “This is the biggest deployment of my life, and there won’t be a drop of alcohol on my lips while I’m doing it.” He continued, “That’s how I view this role as Secretary of Defense is, I’m not going to have a drink, at all. And it’s not hard for me because it’s not a problem for me.”

This is an issue because along with allegations that he has engaged in sexual misconduct in the past and the uncovered email in which his mother accused him of abusing women, CBS News has reported that when Hegseth accepted a six-figure severance payment and signed a non-disclosure agreement in his 2016 exit from Concerned Veterans of America, there had been reports (from unnamed sources, of course) that he was intoxicated on the job more than once.

I find Hegseth’s pledge more than a little strange. It is like a man being accused of beating his wife saying, “I have never beaten my wife and if you give me this job, I promise that I will never beat her again.”

“A drinking problem” typically suggests alcoholism, though there are non-alcoholic alcohol abusers. The latter can, in fact, just decide not to drink any more and do so successfully. Alcoholics, in contrast, have metabolic and psychological disorders that make sobriety a lifetime battle that they are likely to occasionally lose.

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“Monica Crowley and the Death of the Plagiarism Scandal,” The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

President-elect Trump today nominated Monica Crowley to be “Ambassador, Assistant Secretary of State, and Chief of Protocol,” a position that will coordinate and oversee U.S.-hosted events of note such as America’s 250th Independence Day anniversary in 2026; the FIFA World Cup in 2026 and the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028.  The position requires Senate confirmation. In reporting the nomination, The Hill described Crowley as “a former Fox News contributor,” which is deceitful and a cheap shot: she was that, but her experience is much more varied than that would suggest, and Crowley has legitimate credentials for that job—more, in fact, than many other recent nominations announced by Trump.

Crowley also, however, is a serial plagiarist, and her latest assignment from Trump—the previous one was in 2019, when then-President Trump announced Crowley’s appointment as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the Treasury Department—is another canary dying in the ethics mine.

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Ethics Quiz: The Wrong Snack

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is an ethics quiz in which I am curious whether my certainty regarding the answer might be mistaken. It’s also a pretty silly tale.

A Calhoun City (Mississippi)High School teacher, whose name was not released by the Calhoun County School District, thought she was giving her students beef jerky as part of a class birthday celebration, but in fact the snacks were “Beggin’ Strips” or some similar form of dog treat. At least eight children took at least one bite of the stuff, according to Dr. Lisa Langford, the district superintendent. One child reported an upset stomach; the district alerted the affected children’s parents and had the school nurse check with the Poison Center.

The teacher was summarily dismissed.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Was that a fair response by the school?

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Rationalization #19B, ‘The Insidious Confession,” or “It Wasn’t the Best Choice” Is Officially Re-Named: “The Bus Driver’s Mitigation.” Here’s Why…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Talk about a parent’s worst nightmare…

In Castle Rock, Colorado, a relief school bus driver got rattled and confused when the kids wouldn’t quiet down and the tablet showing his route broke down. His solution was to drop all the students off at an unscheduled stop miles from their homes. More than 40 students were abandoned at a busy intersection, and the bus drove away.

Parents were not pleased.

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Gaetz Withdraws His Name: Good

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This story is “breaking,” but I have to comment. Gaetz can’t be called an Ethics Hero here: if he were one, he would have declined the nomination immediately, as this controversy was, or should have been, a forgone conclusion. He said all the right things today,

“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1. I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that  President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”

…but he could have said them a week ago.

Whatever: As a lawyer, I would have joined any petitions or organized professional protests against Gaetz being confirmed for the job of the nation’s top attorney. I don’t blame Trump for wishing the plague on the Justice Department and hating my profession, but Gaetz was too far over the line. Several of his other appointments are uncomfortably close to the line if not over it as well, but Gaetz’s selection was so indefensible that it risked undermining Trump’s credibility before his administration got underway.

Is one of Gaetz’s motivations for “doing the right thing” the fear that if he didn’t withdraw, matters would come to the public’s attention that would sink the rest of his political career? Oh, probably. I don’t care. What matters is that an unqualified nominee took himself out of the running before too much damage was done..