Workplace

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/5/2017: Train Wrecks, Rationalizations, Donna, Debbie, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Goooooood MORNING!

(I’m over-compensating: I feel horrible today)

1  “These alleged actions, which haven’t been denied, are reprehensible, indefensible and unacceptable. Any elected official or state employee who has settled a sexual harassment claim should resign immediately.The people of Kentucky deserve better. We appropriately demand a high level of integrity from our leaders, and will tolerate nothing less in our state,” said Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin  after it was revealed that Kentucky House Speaker Jeff Hoover (R) recently settled a sexual harassment claim made by a female member of his staff.

What an ethically clueless bit of grandstanding from Bevin. The fact that an accusation hasn’t been denied doesn’t make it true. The fact  an out of court settlement was agreed to doesn’t make the accusation true either. Bevin has just painted a target on any official’s back who might have blundered across a line of workplace propriety once, and done so with an employee with an agenda, a grudge, a bill to pay, or the lack of the ethical intelligence to say, “That was wrong, don’t do it again.”

As usual with elected officials, Bevin is playing human pendulum, pronouncing an unfair and unreasonable standard in response to a culture where there previously were few standards at all.

Thought experiment: let’s say the Harvey Weinstein Ethics Train Wreck revealed itself in the Obama administration, and the uncomfortable woman in this photo…

..goes to Vice President Biden after the shoot and accuses him of sexual harassment, indeed, sexual assault. Uncle Joe apologizes, swears he meant nothing by it, says he always acts like this (because he apparently does), jokes his favorite magician is “David Cop-A-Feel”, just like President George H.W. Bush, but the young woman is adamant. She says she will go to the press and file a lawsuit unless he writes a check. Reluctantly, he does.

Should the Vice-President resign? Or just learn to keep his hands to himself?

2. Sentimentalists and socialists mourning the decline of unions just got a splash of metaphorical ice water in their faces.

After reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading online news sources, voted to join the Writers Guild of America, the sites’ owner, billionaire Joe Ricketts, announced that both were defunct.

 “DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure,” he said. Ricketts had lots money in every month of DNAinfo’s existence, while The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal and The Daily News were also cutting staff and costs. What were his writers and editors thinking? Continue reading →

A Kevin Spacey Update, The Sexual Harassment Feeding Frenzy, And A Guide To Sexual Harassers In The Workplace

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

This photo seemed appropriate somehow…

Kevin Spacey, it is now fair to say, has been a habitual sexual harasser.

We did not know that when Anthony Rapp made his accusation against the actor in a Buzzfeed interview. I would be very interested in knowing whether Rapp knew that. The posts here (this, and this) began with the assumption that Rapp’s motivations were as he stated them, and he did not say or suggest that Spacey was, like Harvey Weinstein, an active predator.

But in the ensuing days,  the pattern typical of accused harassers who really are harassers has emerged regarding Spacey. Other alleged victims came forward with their accounts.  Next  the employees on Spacey’s hit Netflix series “House of Cards” expanded the narrative…from CNNMoney:

Spacey made the set of Netflix’s “House of Cards” into a “toxic” work environment through a pattern of sexual harassment, eight people who currently work on the show or worked on it in the past tell CNN. One former employee told CNN that Spacey sexually assaulted him.

That, as they say, is the ball game for Spacey. He has even followed the hackneyed script for so many celebrities caught in misconduct: he’s getting “treatment.” Well, he doesn’t have many options. His show has been cancelled; his agency has dropped him. Spacey is very talented, but it will take him a long, long time to even partially recover from this, if he can.

I am going to write this anyway even though it won’t register on most people: the fact that Spacey turned out to be a lot more than a guy who got drunk and treated a 14-year old actor inappropriately at a party three decades ago doesn’t retroactively make the way Rapp’s ambush accusation fair or right. If he knew that Spacey was a present day harasser and made the accusation to break the dam, that’s something else, but again, he didn’t suggest that.

I’d guess that he’ll say that now, whether it is true or not.

Since Spacey was accused, several other celebrities, including Dustin Hoffman, have been fingered. The latest development is that several female members of Congress have said that they have been sexually harassed by their male colleagues, and of that I have no doubts whatsoever. Nonetheless, we are still in the witch hunt yellow zone, creeping into the red.

Here is part of a cautionary LA Times op-ed  by Cathy Young:

The fallout from the Harvey Weinstein scandals and the ripples from the “#MeToo” movement are having indubitably positive effects — above all, exposing and bringing to account predators who have enjoyed impunity due to their power and status. But there are some pitfalls. Many people — not just men with skeletons in the closet — fear that careers may be destroyed over minor misconduct and ambiguous transgressions. Troubling rhetoric abounds, condemning all sexually tinged dynamics in the workplace, stereotyping men as abusers and women as perpetual victims in need of quasi-Victorian protections.…Concerns that the post-Weinstein climate may lead to witch hunts against any man who flirts with a female colleague have been met with angry comments along the lines of “flirting in the workplace IS HARASSMENT.” A tweet by singer/songwriter Marian Call that got more than 2,000 retweets and nearly 6,500 “likes” asked, “dudes are you aware how happy women would be if strangers & coworkers never ‘flirted’ with us again … this is the world we want.”

But is it? It’s certainly not the world I want: Except in college, nearly every man I have ever dated was either a co-worker or, once I switched entirely to free-lancing, someone I met through work. This is not unusual, even in the age of dating websites and apps.

This has always been the aspect of sexual harassment law that renders it inherently unfair and to many, incomprehensible. In many cases the exact same conduct is harassment if unwelcome, and successful mating strategy if welcome.  Don’t bite my head off, but this was what Donal Trump was alluding to in his repulsive conversation with Billy Bush. He was claiming  that women like being sexually assaulted by the rich and powerful. In many cases, he may be right. Legally, when he’s right, it may not be sexual harassment. Ethically, it is still wrong. If the women feels compelled not to object to the sexual overtures because of an inequality of power, it is very wrong, and illegal. Continue reading →

“Why Is Madeleine Leader Still Employed?” And Related Puzzles

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

That was an email from Democratic National Committee Data Services manager Madeleine Leader, announcing that the Technology Department is looking to fill several positions and asking interested parties to forward the openings to their colleagues.

Note the last sentence:

“I personally would prefer that you not forward to cisgender straight white males, since they’re already in the majority.”

Nice.

Seven questions bubble up to the surface as I ponder this:

1 Why is Madeleine Leader still employed by the DNC? I can answer that one: her email accurately reflects the culture of the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Party. If she wasn’t completely confident that such an open expression of prejudice and discrimination would be acceptable, she would not have dared to put such a sentiment into print.

Even so, if the Democrats had an ounce of sense or even aspired to decency, they would have fired Leader with expressions of horror, and proclaimed her a rogue employee. However, the party apparently believes that its base and perhaps even the typical Democrat will read Leader’s message and say, “What’s the matter with that?”

2. Do progressives and Democrats really think there is a difference between saying “no white, straight males need apply” and “no black lesbians need apply”? I can answer that one too. Of course they do. They really think the latter is despicable, racist, sexist homophobia, and the former is just virtuous diversity at work.

They really do. No, seriously. They do.

3. Why was this story first reported at the Daily Wire, a conservative website, then at several other conservative websites, then on Fox News, and finally at The Hill, a political website that tilts left, but not yet at any mainstream media sources?

See #1 above. One reason the DNC thinks it can pretty much duck this embarrassment is that it knows the mainstream media will cover the party’s  tracks by not reporting the story. “Democracy dies in  darkness,” pompously proclaims the Washington Post on its front page. Right. The Post doesn’t want independents or anyone who isn’t in lock-step with whatever the Democratic Party does or says to know how low the party of Jefferson, Jackson and FDR has sunk, and how much it has abandoned democratic ideals. It has been three days since Leader’s email became public. The Post has kept the story in darkness.  So has the New York Times, apparently because blatant bigotry at the DNC isn’t news fit to print. Continue reading →

Further Ethics Observations On The Kevin Spacey Scandal [Part 2]

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments

[Continuing the reflections on the accusation against Kevin Spacey and its aftermath…Part One is here.]

I have always assumed that Spacey had endured some kind of serious trauma that explained his aversion to confirming that he was gay, since, really, it was so, so obvious. Many actors become actors because of familial abuse and self-loathing: if you think about it, it makes sense. They don’t like who they are and what real life has been, so they seek the fantasy life of being someone else on stage, films and TV.  Maybe Spacey’s long obsession with performer Bobby Darrin provided a clue. (Spacey eventually played Darrin in his own vanity film project. “Beyond the Sea.”) You have to be really unhappy with yourself to fantasize being in the shoes of Darrin, the talented, troubled heterosexual  actor-singer who died before he turned 40. Thus I was not surprised when Spacey’s brother Randall Fowler, 62, a limo driver and professional Rod Stewart impersonator, described the home in which he, Kevin and their sister were raised as resembling the plot a  horror movie.

  • Fowler says he and his brother were both sexually abused by their father, Thomas Geoffrey Fowler (whom the children called “The Creature”), and that their mother knew about their treatment at his hands. Their older sister, Julie, was also abused before she fled home when she was 18. In a 2004 interview, Spacey’s brother described how their ultra-right-wing father was a member of the American Nazi Party. He was so enamored with Adolf Hitler, Fowler claimed, that he trimmed his mustache to resemble Der Fuehrer’s.

“I grew up in a living hell. There was so much darkness in our home it was beyond belief. It was absolutely miserable,” Spacey’s brother said then. “Years later, our mother actually wrote a letter to all three of us, trying to justify what had gone on by saying she was abused as a child and so was our father. Kevin tried to avoid what was going on by wrapping himself in an emotional bubble….He was so determined to try to avoid the whippings that he just minded his Ps and Qs until there was nothing inside. He had no feelings.”

Fowler described his younger brother was an “empty vessel” who had never been in a real relationship with anyone. “Neither of us had a chance growing up with two such damaged parents, ” he concluded.

No, I don’t know that what a Rod Stewart imitator and publicity-seeking sibling of a famous actor says is completely true, exaggerated, or a fabrication.  But it fits. Spacey should be given the benefit of the doubt, and accorded some compassion. We all deserve that. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Weinsteining Of Kevin Spacey

/ Jack Marshall / 73 Comments

This latest boxcar on the Harvey Weinstein Ethics Train Wreck contains an ethics quiz because I have such mixed feelings about it.

Yesterday, actor and former child performer Anthony Rapp told Buzzfeed that in 1986, when Kevin Spacey was 26,  Rapp was 14, and both were appearing in Broadway plays, Spacey invited Rapp over to his apartment for a party. At the end of the evening, Rapp says, Spacey picked Rapp up, put him on his bed, and climbed on top of him. Rapp says he managed to squirm away and locked himself in the bathroom. Eventually he left Spacey’s residence, and never had any further contact with him.

Rapp is now 46. He says that before talking to Buzzfeed, he never told anyone about the traumatic  experience. However, Spacey’s success in his career constantly reminded Rapp of the incident.  “My stomach churns,” Rapp said. “I still to this day can’t wrap my head around so many aspects of it. It’s just deeply confusing to me.”

Rapp said he felt obligated to finally tell his story in the wake of the new awareness of the sexual harassment and sexual abuse culture in  the entertainment industry, sparked by Harvey Weinstein’s fall.

“And not to simply air a grievance, but to try to shine another light on the decades of behavior that have been allowed to continue because many people, including myself, being silent. … I’m feeling really awake to the moment that we’re living in, and I’m hopeful that this can make a difference.”

Spacey immediately tweeted an apology, and more:

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is Rapp’s public accusation fair, responsible, and ethical?

Continue reading →

Your NFL Anthem Protest Ethics Train Wreck Update…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

It’s Sunday, so the question naturally arises: What are NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem to protest now?

In Houston, a majority of Houston Texans players “took a knee” during the National Anthem prior to today’s game against the Seattle Seahawks, presumably to protest  team owner Bob McNair’s botched comment last week when he said allowing the protests was like letting the inmates run the prison. He probably meant to say “asylum” rather than prison. NFL players, so many of them being accused or convicted felons, are understandably tender on the prison topic. McNair quickly apologized, but it doesn’t matter.  After all, there has to be some excuse for protesting the Star Spangled Banner, right?

What I can’t figure out is, if you take a knee to protest the incorrect use of hackneyed phrases, does that mean you aren’t protesting social inequities in America? Does such a protest mean these players care more about their hurt feelings than solving social injustice, since kneeling during the Anthem does so much to further that goal? Continue reading →

Playing The Race Card For Intimidation, Power, And Profit

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

“Nice little airline you got there. Too bad if anything were to happen to it…”

The NAACP has hit on a new, unethical and brilliant extortion tactic. The venerable civil rights group issued an advisory warning calling for black travelers to be cautious about flying on American Airlines. This prompted the airline’s chairman, in response, to announce that the company does not “and will not tolerate discrimination of any kind.” In a previous advisory, the organization told African-Americans to stay out of Missouri. Next, it will tell them not to watch Fox News.

The NAACP attributed its warning to what it called “a pattern of disturbing incidents reported by African-American passengers, specific to American Airlines.”  It cited four incidents  as examples that “suggest a corporate culture of racial insensitivity and possible racial bias on the part of American Airlines.” Four incidents, of course, do not suggest a corporate culture or a pattern. How many white or Asian flyers have had similar confrontations? The NAACP doesn’t care, and I doubt it bothered to find out. The man who was dragged off a United flight in April was Asian. The female passenger who was allegedly struck by an American flight attendant earlier this year was white.  I consider myself abused by every airline I fly. Unfortunately, since I’m a Greek American, my only recourse is to conclude that the reason for my discomfort is that the industry is callous and incompetent, and its employees are poorly trained and supervised. If I were black, I would know my treatment was based on race. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/29/17: What’s Really Wrong With Single Payer, Incompletely Remembering Charles Kuralt, And Dana Milbank Boards The Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

(This is my favorite Arthur Sullivan hymn, even more than “Onward Christian Soldiers”…)

GOOD MORNING!

1 CBS’s “Sunday Morning” had a feature today on the late Charles Kuralt, the original host of the show, famous for his feature “On the Road” in which Kuralt visited “the real America,” meeting locals and revealing regional lore to the rest of the country. At the end of today’s segment, CBS bemoaned the fact that Kuralt, who died 20 years ago, was virtually forgotten, even among journalists if they had no grey in their hair.

This is an example of a larger crisis, cultural illiteracy, that often occupies my thoughts. The blame lies with our inadequate schools and its under-educated teachers, as well as popular culture. Barely knowing anything about George Washington, the root of the previous post, is an existential problem, but only slightly more dangerous are the multiple generations whose member can’t name ten U.S. Presidents, don’t know the dates of the Civil War or who the US defeated in World War II, and who have never heard of Jackie Robinson, Clarence Darrow, Brown v. Board of Education, Eugene McCarthy, Ingrid Bergman, or Lucille Ball.

CBS, however, was indulging its own special breed of disinformation by lionizing Kuralt. Yes, I remember well his plummy voice and avuncular style. I also remember, as CBS would have us forget, the fact that after his death it was revealed that being “on the road” allowed Kuralt to maintain one family in Montana and another, his official one, in New York City. His innovative proposal to CBS to fund his trek back and forth over the contiinent facilitated his betrayal of his family. Kuralt was a sociopath.

2. The most significant ethics story of recent weeks that I have thus far neglected was the announcement that Great Britain’s National Health Service will ban patients from surgery indefinitely if they are obese or smoke. Non life-or death operations, like joint replacements, will be put on hold  until such patients conform to the governement’s life style requirements

Obese patients “will not get non-urgent surgery until they reduce their weight” unless the circumstances are exceptional. Smokers will only be referred for operations if they have stopped smoking for at least eight weeks, with such patients breathalyzed before referral.

When the newly radicalized and Bernie-ized Democratic Prty going all-in for single-payer next year, this cautionary tale needs thorough debate. When the government controls health care, it has the power to constrict personal liberty. The British were horrified by this latest development, which can only be described as the other shoe dropping. What did they expect?

Of course, a party that controls a government that can withhold surgery until citizens conform to mandated life choices would never use that same power to demand other behavior from citizens. Or  assign priorities for surgical procedures to favored groups and constituencies.

Keep telling yourself that. You’ll feel better. Continue reading →

Abashed Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/28/17 [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Good Morning!

1 Following a day in which various exigencies and responsibilities, plus fatigue and distraction, caused me to whiff on getting up at least three posts I thought were worthy of consideration, yesterday I failed to get any up at all. This makes me very unhappy, and I apologize. A fly-in, fly-out assignment in New York City had me up early and back late, whereupon I had my son’s birthday to acknowledge, the World Series to scrutinize and some aching feet to attend to. Priorities can’t be ignored, and being able to recognize when something you want to do and are devoted to doing just cannot be done well in the time allowed is a matter of life competence. Yet I hate failing loyal readers who care about ethics issues and rely on Ethics Alarms to explore them, and feel negligent when this occurs…fortunately, not very often.

Still too often, however.

2. The emergence of Hollywood director James Toback as a serial sexual harasser (at least) had me preparing a post about why theatrical directors are especially prone to this conduct. The gist of it was that in college, where participation in theater is often more social than aesthetic, directors forming romantic relationships with their cast members is neither taboo nor typically exploitative. Similarly, in community theater such relationships are not unusual or unethical, unless they interfere with a director’s artistic duties: casting an inferior performer because she’s your girl friend or because you want her to be is per se unethical. These are the cultures that produce many directors, and they enter professional theater, and later films, with bad habits that cannot be tolerated or continued in a professional context. Similarly, performers also come out of that culture. It may be difficult for some of them to comprehend that what is arguably acceptable in amateur settings is becomes unconscionable in a professional one.

However, this cannot explain Toback’s conduct. An astounding 200 plus women now say they were harassed or assaulted by him, and the list filled up in less than week. Compared to Toback, Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby seem restrained.

Actress Selma Blair, for example, says her agent arranged for her to meet Toback for a possible role in one of his films after her career had begun with promise. Blair says the meeting was scheduled at a hotel restaurant, but  when she arrived the hostess told her that Toback wanted to meet in his hotel room. There, Toback asked her to perform a monologue nude, directed her to have sex with him, and said he would not let her leave until he “had release.” Then the actress says, he simulated sexual intercourse on her leg. 

I begin my sexual harassment seminars by stating that the problem is one of ethics. If you have respect for human beings regardless of gender, if you are fair to people you interact with, if you are caring toward them and obey the Golden Rule, if you apply the three basic ethics alarms checks (“Does this seem right? Could I tell my mother about this? Would I want this on the front page of my local newspaper?”), then you won’t be a harasser. But I can’t begin to explain how someone reaches the point of depravity and utter contempt for women that he would behave the way Blair describes Toback behaving. This is, to understate it, uncivilized. Was he raised by wolves? I suspect even wolves would be horrified by his behavior. My father never had to sit me down at 13 and say, “Jack, it’s time for a talk. It’s never right to simulate sexual intercourse on a woman’s leg when she has come to interview for a job.” I didn’t need to be told this. Who needs to be told this who isn’t already a dangerous sociopath?

Somehow, the culture of Hollywood devolved to such a state that abuse of power and women became a social norm, and even conventionally acculturated adults had their values erased and replaced. That is the only way the Tobacks and Weinsteins could come to exist. That culture is now too sick and entrenched to be wiped clean by a few scandals. It is going to take a long time to change it, if indeed it can be changed. Continue reading →

Being Fair To Elizabeth Warren: An Ethics Challenge

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It appears that Senator Elizabeth Warren may have blundered into another ethics controversy.

On  a Harvey Weinstein-themed segment of “Meet the Press,” Warren declared that she also had a  #Me Too” story to tell. As she related the memory to host Chuck Todd…

“I was a baby law professor and so excited to have my first real teaching job and there was a senior faculty member who would tell dirty jokes and make comments about my appearance. And one day he asked me if I would stop by his office, which I didn’t think much about, and I did, and he slammed the door and lunged for me. It was like a bad cartoon. He’s chasing me around the desk trying to get his hands on me and I kept saying ‘You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to do this. I have little children at home. Please don’t do this…and trying to talk calmly, and at the same time what was flickering through my brain is, if he gets hold of me, I’m gonna punch him right in the face.”

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is the host of “The Kuhner Report” on WRKO AM-680 in Boston. I know the station well, having grown up listening to it. Kuhner is not an admirer of Warren, to say the least, and decided to try to check the veracity of her “Me Too” tale. His conclusion: she’s lying. Kuhner writes on his blog:

The faculty member Warren is referring to is law professor Eugene Smith, who was her mentor and close friend at the University of Houston. The reason we know this is because at Smith’s memorial service in 1997 Warren recounted and spoke about the incident. But the account then was dramatically different. In fact, the very opposite.

According to Warren, Smith was her buddy and they were joking around in the office, in which she was laughing uproariously. Numerous witnesses say that, even when speaking at the memorial service, Warren laughed about the alleged incident. Which begs the question: Who cracks jokes about being sexually assaulted? Unless, of course, it never happened.

More importantly, Warren conveniently—and deliberately—left out a seminal fact: Smith suffered from polio. That’s right. He was unable to walk or move around without a wheelchair or crutches. According to his former colleagues, Smith’s polio was so severe they felt pity for him.

Warren herself, while trying to be humorous at Smith’s memorial service, inadvertently revealed how utterly disabled he was. She told a second story about when Smith took her to the faculty lounge for lunch. Smith ordered a steak. After it came, he then pushed the plate towards Warren, asking her to cut it up for him. “Can’t you see I’m a cripple?” he allegedly told her. “Sure. But I thought you knew that when you ordered the steak,” Warren retorted, which she says made him laugh.

The real point, however, is obvious. How does a man who is—in Warren’s words—a “cripple,” unable even to cut his own food (never mind walk), chase a woman repeatedly around a desk seeking to sexually assault/rape her to the point that she is so terrorized she is wondering how to escape though the door? The answer: It’s impossible. This is why many of Smith’s former colleagues say that, although they recall the incident, it was dramatically different from how Warren is describing it now. According to them, it was one big joke. Smith pretended to chase her around the desk, and Warren pretended to be shocked and outraged.

Moreover, in 1997, Warren was then a law professor at Harvard. If she had really been assaulted by Smith, then why did she travel all the way to Houston, deliver a glowing eulogy and praise Smith for his “character” and “moral integrity”? A woman who was truly sexually abused or harassed would never have done it. In fact, she would want nothing to do with him. Warren, however, did do it because she wanted to do it. She liked, even admired, Smith.

From this, Kuhner concludes,

“Warren may be the most depraved, cynical and mendacious member of Congress—and that’s saying something. Think about it: She is willing to smear the memory of a dead, disabled friend in order to win votes and prop up her feminist image.”

Continue reading →