Workplace

In the Wake Of The BP Disaster, Another Andersonville Trial

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
Someone has to be held responsible, even if nobody is to blame.

Someone has to be held responsible, even if nobody is to blame.

I don’t know about you, but I was certainly surprised to discover that in the view of the Justice Department, two men I had never heard of, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, were the ones responsible for the April 20, 2010 explosion of a BP oil rig that caused millions of barrels of oil to leak into the Gulf of Mexico for months, polluting the waters and the shores and causing billions of dollars of damages. That is the clear implication of the decision to prosecute the two rig  supervisors for manslaughter in the deaths of the eleven BP workers who perished in the blast.

Obviously, this makes no sense at all. Other government authorities have treated the BP spill as resulting from a complex series of errors, misjudgments, and regulatory violations on the part of several companies and their management teams. The allocation of responsibilities and damages will take years to unravel. How then can Kaluza and Vidrine, who are accused of disregarding abnormally high pressure readings that according to the government should have alerted them to the danger of a  blowout at BP’s Macondo well, be the ones facing criminal charges and prison time? How can this be fair, just, or even possible?

It isn’t fair or just. It is possible because it is easier to finger the two middle-managers who inherited the flawed well equipment that was a ticking time bomb than to put a whole company, or many companies, behind bars. As the F.B.I. agent investigating the theft of the Declaration of Independence keeps telling Nicholas Cage’s treasure hunter in the Dan Brown rip-off  movie “American Treasure,” “Somebody has to go to jail.” Kaluza and Vidrine may be the designated villains for the BP spill. Their only crime was one of moral luck: they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, the final links in a tangled chain of incompetence, corruption and miscalculations. Continue reading →

Lindsay Stone Scores A Jumbo: The “I Didn’t Intend To Do What I Did When I Intentionally Did What I Did” Excuse

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I have to give Lindsay Stone credit. You will seldom see as pure an example of an outrageous denial of the undeniable in a public apology as the one she just authored. Brava! And good luck with the job hunt.

Stone, who is an idiot, and her friend, who is an idiot whose name has yet to be tracked down by the media, collaborated on a photo showing Stone giving an upturned middle finger to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, while yelling something by the sign there that says “Silence and Respect.” The photograph was posted on Stone’s Facebook page and naturally went viral. Thousands of protesters bombarded the website of their employer, Living Independently Forever, with demands that the two be fired. Today, they were.

Before the inevitable axe fell (more on that in a bit), Stone posted this remarkable explanation:

Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: ABC 7 (Bangor, Maine) News Anchors Cindy Michaels And Tony Consiglio

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

[ To those who wonder why I am posting at Ethics Alarms when it’s 4:37 on Thanksgiving morning, I can only note that when you’re staying in a hotel in Baltimore and hacking your guts out with the world’s slowest moving chest cold, and your wife is asleep and your Jack Russell makes it clear it is either walk him or face the consequences—and with that breed, the consequences can mean anything from an unpleasant deposit in your suitcase or ground glass in your next meal, you’re going to be up for a while. A surprising number of prostitutes out around Fayette Street this time of night….and they were all more interested in Rugby than they were in me.]

When it comes to quitting on the job, there is the Steven Slater method, and then there is this.

Embroiled in various disputes with station management, the news team for ABC’s affiliate in Bangor, Maine (WVFX), Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio, decided to resign on the air, at the conclusion of the nightly news broadcast, without informing their soon-to-be ex-bosses. Normally I would frown at such a stunt as unprofessional, and I expected the pair’s performance to have a “take this job and shove it” flair. It did not. Their tone and execution was note perfect, saying good-bye and thank-you to their audience, community and staff, and barely hinting at any discord behind their departure at all, though one would have had to be a low-information voter not to surmise it. Michaels said afterward that the two had “figured if we had tendered our resignations off the air, we would not have been allowed to say goodbye to the community on the air and that was really important for us to do that.” Here was their farewell Wednesday night:

Continue reading →

Gen. Allen, Lockheed, John Edwards, Restraint Bias,and Further Musings on the Petraeus-Broadwell Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

Run away!

In no particular order:

  • In a tack that is being duplicated by other commentators on the left, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow essentially pronounced the scandal as much ado about nothing (Columnist E.J. Dionne dismissively referred to Petraeus’s affair as his “little secret”). See, as long as an incident involves sex, the Left’s default position is that it can’t be that bad. Maddow mocked the actions of Jill Kelley, the woman who Broadwell threatened and who alerted the FBI, saying, “Who contacts the FBI because of threatening e-mails? If I did that, they would have to set up a special division just for me.” Ha ha.  How many of your threatening e-mails credibly suggested that the head of an intelligence agency was having an illicit affair with an unstable wacko, Rachel? Kelley did the responsible, intelligent thing given the possible national security implications. But it’s certainly good to know that you wouldn’t…because it’s only sex, of course.
  • Other pundits are complaining that the FBI became involved when what Petraeus did “wasn’t a crime.”  Yes,  it’s the “It’s legal” rationalization. Why people who can’t comprehend that dangerous, destructive, serious misconduct can occur without breaking any laws are allowed to write newspaper columns, I’ll never understand. Petraeus’s affair was a violation of the ethics rules, in an intelligence agency with major responsibilities in national security. That is serious, inherently dangerous, and easily could have led to security breaches that were illegal. If a leader materially, knowingly and publicly violates an ethics rule, he cannot lead. This is why Petraeus, who understands this, resigned, despite the certainty that the Rachel Maddows of the media would have been happy to shrug off his actions as “no big deal.” …because it’s only sex, and “it’s legal.”
  • Kelley still boarded the ethics train wreck, not because of her actions in response to Broadwell’s threat, but in light of the revelation that she was maintaining a hot e-mail relationship with Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The FBI has uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of primarily e-mails containing “potentially inappropriate” communication between Allen and Kelley. Wait, what? Between 20,000 and 30,000 pages? What the hell is going on with our generals? This is obsessive, unhealthy behavior, even if he’s just writing her limericks and recipes. Something is serious amiss in the ethical culture of the U.S. military leadership Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Idiot, the Ex, and the Consequences”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I’ve been remiss in posting “comments of the day” of late; it is not a reflection on comment quality, which has been excellent, but rather on my own distractions. Here is a new one at last, from new commenter Kathryn. It appeals to me because it nails the subtext of the original post, and like most Comments of the Day, takes the original topic to the next stage of analysis. I hope we hear more from her. Here is Kathryn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Idiot, the Ex, and the Consequences.”

“I am waiting, perhaps overly optimistically, for culture to catch up with information availability and develop new ways of handling privacy outside of responding to information when it is made public, regardless of the source or context for that information. Everyone says/does something particularly unwise/unwell/without grace during their life. Technology is getting to the point that these moments, rather than being forgotten or a story told among friends, are fairly permanently in the public record. (The Internet is public, whatever Facebook settings attempt to convince you.) Continue reading →

The Idiot, the Ex, and the Consequences

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Denise Helms, who will probably not look like this the next time you see her if she knows what’s good for her.

My position would usually be this: for an employer to use a privacy setting Facebook post as justification for firing an employee is unfair. That applies to vacation photos of an elementary school teacher holding a beer and looking bleery-eyed at a pub, a Sunday school teacher doing a strip tease at a bachelor party, and political posts of a radical, vulgar or offensive nature. Two factors can change the equation, though. Action may be justified if the posting reasonably calls into question the trustworthiness of the employee in his or her job duties, or if the posting becomes public, subjecting the employer to embarrassment or undermining the employee’s ability to do her job, as in the naked teacher cases.

Denise Helms, the idiot referenced in the title above, posted this on her Facebook page, intended only for her closest, presumably most racist or most idiotic friends:

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Single Mother Tip-Stiffer

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

According to a poster on Reddit, a woman allegedly left the message above on her receipt after eating a pricey meal at a restaurant. “Single mom, sorry,” she wrote, in the space left for a tip. “Thank you—it was great!” The furious waiter’s colleague scanned and posted  the receipt, with appropriate invective that has been matched and exceeded by others on the site.

As usual, there are denials that the story is genuine, and claims that some single mother-hating trouble-maker created this miserable ethics smoking gun. “I think this bill is a fraud because I’ve met very few single mothers who expected to get special treatment for their status. They’re just hoping no one holds their situation against them,” wrote one skeptic. This is the “No True Scotsman” fallacy in Technicolor. The fact, if it is a fact, that few single mothers expect special treatment doesn’t prove that this one didn’t or doesn’t. Continue reading →

“The Girl” and the Hitchcockian Horrors of Sexual Harassment

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“Mr. Hitchcock requests your company in his hotel room over dinner.”.

HBO’s original film “The Girl” has premiered, and has garnered mixed reviews from critics, in part because they recoil from the film’s disturbing portrait of iconic director Alfred Hitchcock, played here by the great Toby Jones, who is almost as uncanny evoking Hitch as he was reincarnating Truman Capote in “Infamous.”  It tells the well-documented story of how Hitchcock chose newcomer Tippi Hedren as his latest blonde obsession (placing her in line behind Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh and others) and then relentlessly pursued a sexual relationship with the actress during the filming of “The Birds” and “Marnie.” Hedren, not surprisingly, found him about as alluring a potential sex partner as Hermione would regard Dobby the house elf. Less so, probably. Unlike so many actresses subjected to that kind of extortion as their final obstacle to stardom, however, Hedren refused to submit.

The movie is the most powerful and harrowing, portrayal of sexual harassment I have ever seen, and whatever its fate as a dramatic work, “The Girl” has a future, if anyone’s paying attention, in workplace training sessions. Continue reading →

Debate Alarm: The Fake Statistic Strikes Again

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Outrageous.

That damn statistic again. Well, there goes THAT head!

Candy Crowley, disgracefully, chose another question at a Presidential debate—the last one was 12 years ago—based on the completely false and misleading statistic, made up by activists, that women earn “72%” of what men do in the workplace, suggesting that there is widespread gender discrimination in wages. It’s not true; it hasn’t been true for decades. It’s a myth, and one that misleads the public by being given this kind of publicity and credibility. ( The question Crowley allowed even lowered the fake percentage an extra, and fake, 5% from the “77%” Bernard Shaw negligently used in a question to Joe Lieberman. in 2000.) I’m glad Romney didn’t dignify it with a direct answer—he was placed in the position of either telling the questioner, “That stat is imaginary,” or furthur imbedding it by treating it as reality.

I’m generally a fan of Candy’s, but this was irresponsible, and I’m disappointed in her. Public policy debate shouldn’t be framed by simple-minded, misleading factoids, and it is the duty of journalists to insist on facts.

Unethical Website of the Month: Third Tier Reality

/ Jack Marshall / 119 Comments

Mr. Furious, of the Mystery Men

Third Tier Reality is one of many blogs recently founded by disappointed law graduates who somehow labored under the misconception that a law school degree guaranteed that they would get 6 figure offers from big law firms and then live the life of Denny Crane until they could retire to a Caribbean island at the age of 55. A depressing number of these deluded souls managed to get themselves in hock up to their eyeballs, and when the recession hit and law firms cut back, felt first, like fools, second, angry and desperate, and third, that it was everyone else’s fault. Thus was born the “law school scam” conspiracy theory. Third Tier Reality, like the others of its breed, maintains that law schools intentionally misled scores of trusting students to pay their obscenely high tuitions,  knowing that they were pumping out more lawyers than the legal market would bear.

To the extent that the site tries to educate would-be law students that there is no guaranteed gravy-train at the end of three years of law school, the website is, at worst, harmless. “My goal is to inform potential law school students and applicants of the ugly realities of attending law school,” he writes. His message: Do not seek a law degree unless…

“(1) YOU GET INTO A TOP 8 LAW SCHOOL; (2) YOU GET A FULL-TUITION SCHOLARSHIP TO ATTEND; (3) YOU HAVE EMPLOYMENT AS AN ATTORNEY SECURED THROUGH A RELATIVE OR CLOSE FRIEND; OR (4) YOU ARE FULLY AWARE BEFOREHAND THAT YOUR HUGE INVESTMENT IN TIME, ENERGY, AND MONEY DOES NOT, IN ANY WAY, GUARANTEE A JOB AS AN ATTORNEY OR IN THE LEGAL INDUSTRY.”

That’s all good advice, though it presumes that more people get law degrees under the delusion alluded to in (4) than I believe is true. Nobody ever told me that a law degree guaranteed a high-paying job as an attorney, and if we understood that decades ago when law was booming, I don’t see where the confusion set in. I worked in the administration of Georgetown Law Center, and that school never made such a representation. In addition, Third Tier Reality goes further, as its brethren blogs do, to insist that a law degree from less than a “First Tier” school is actually an impediment in the job market. I hate to kick this particular hornets nest again, but this is a self-serving rationalization for failure. Continue reading →