accountability

Unethical Quote, Conduct and Organization: The Hacking Collective Called “Anonymous,” No Matter How Despicable Its Targets Are

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
I think the missing heads explain a LOT

I think the missing heads explain a LOT

I considered making Anonymous the subject of an ethics quiz, but there isn’t any genuine ethics question about the group that an ethical 7th grader shouldn’t be able to answer while playing a videogame.

It is an arrogant and  lawless group of vigilantes, and nobody ought to be confused into admiring it or applauding its actions because Anonymous has chosen adversaries even more revolting than it is. The fact that Anonymous is currently tormenting the Westboro Baptist Church, those homophobic religious fanatics who think harassing family members of fallen soldiers at funerals is a reasonable method of proclaiming  opposition to homosexuality, certainly triggers a positive response on the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, but that is visceral, not rational. Citizens do not forfeit their rights because you don’t approve of their conduct, even if their conduct is objectively offensive.

First, the unethical quote, from an email sent to a website by a representative:

“Just hacked Westboro’s site. Freedom of speech is one thing. But freedom to hate is another. A domain such as “godhatesfags.com should not exist despite rumblings of members picketing Sandy Hook. Those families have enough anguish to deal with.” Continue reading →

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 →

Accountabilty Check: President Obama’s Bizarre Defense of Susan Rice

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

“Don’t pick on my poor. defenseless, untrustworthy ambassador!”

Add to the list of the Top Ten Outrageous Remarks of President Obama this stunner, the low-light of his first full press conference since March.

“If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham and others want to go after somebody they should go after me. For them to go after the UN ambassador who had nothing to do with Benghazi…to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.”

“Accountability” continues to be an alien ethical concept to the President, and this proves it. U.N. Ambassador Rice went on the Sunday morning TV shows four days after the deadly Benghazi attack and after U.S. intelligence had determined that the attack that killed the American ambassador in Libya was not a spontaneous demonstration sparked by an anti-Islam video, but a planned, organized, terrorist enterprise. She did this while asserting in no uncertain terms that the attack was not what U.S. intelligence had told the State Department and the White House that it was. Rice, in making this mistaken or dishonest case on behalf of the administration, put her name, her status, her credibility and her position behind it. From the moment she became the Administration’s spokesperson on Benghazi, she had something to do with Benghazi. Continue reading →

A No Tolerance Rule For Cabinet Members: Don’t Threaten Reporters

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Intolerable.

I’ll make this simple, and get right to the point: any Cabinet member who threatens a reporter with physical violence for doing the job journalists are supposed to do should be fired. No exceptions. Moreover, that should be obvious and beyond debate.

Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, didn’t like a question he was asked by Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Dave Philipps. The investigative reporter had tried to reach Salazar for months through his press secretary seeking a comment on a story Philipps had written about how a Colorado man with business connections to Salazar had been sold hundreds of federally protected wild horses that have subsequently vanished. The man is under investigation, and one of his businesses is slaughtering horses, not that any of this is germane to how Salazar treated Phillipps.  When Philipps began asking Salazar about the program and possible personal ties he had to the wild horse buyer now under investigation, Salazar abruptly ended the interview. He then pushed The Gazette’s camera aside, got nose to nose with the reporter, and said, pointing, “Don’t you ever…you know what, you do that again… I’ll punch you out.” Continue reading →

Be Careful What You Wish For Dept.: “Occupy” May Finally Have a Plan, and Sure Enough, It’s Ethically Bats

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Oh, yes,THIS is bound to work out well…

The core of my objection to Occupy Wall Street and its progeny was and is that it never had the discipline, cohesion or communications skills to make it clear what the “movement” really wanted to accomplish, other than generally blaming all the world’s ills on the wealthy and successful. This was the reason for its failure, though Occupy fans like to say that it “succeeded” by starting a national dialogue about corporate executive salaries and the growing disparity in income levels between the richest and the poorest Americans—as if that dialogue hadn’t been ongoing long  before the first sign went up in Zuccotti Park.

Now there are signs that the Occupy bitter-enders are hard at work launching a real, substantive effort with a specific goal, albeit and insane one: to bring down the financial system with a “debt strike.” ( In These Times headlined its story about this “You Are Not A Loan.” Pretty clever!) The idea is to refuse to pay back the interest or principal on outstanding debt, and to insist that all loans and interest  be forgiven, since the debt system is inherently corrupt and rigged to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.

We shouldn’t have to expend a lot of argument on why this is unethical. People, companies and nations in serious debt reach that point because they spend more money than they have. They borrow money promising to repay, agreeing to pay an additional fee, interest, for the privilege of using money that doesn’t belong to them. The vast majority of debt is not amassed by desperate debtors who have to deal with the equivalent of Loan Shark Larry and risk broken legs or death unless they pay unconscionable fees. Most debt comes from wanting something before you can pay for it. While laws are in place to minimize predatory lending and to provide a safety net (in the form of bankruptcy) so people and companies don’t end up destitute and in debtor’s prison, essentially the system, like society itself, exists on trust, the cornerstone of all ethics.  Lenders give their money to trustworthy loan-seekers, and charge higher interest rates to those who they deem less trustworthy. That is fair. Continue reading →

Ethics Train Wreck Watch: The Petraeus-Broadwell Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

There is too much information awaiting disclosure to do a thorough ethical analysis at this point, but it is already clear beyond question that the David Petraeus-Paula Broadwell scandal is an ethics train wreck, with many more individuals and perhaps institutions involved than the direct participants. Today’s news reports that the adulterous affair prompting the much-respected CIA Director’s sudden resignation was triggered by Broadwell’s  threatening e-mails to another women she suspected of vying for the General’s affections clinches train wreck status. This thing is still rolling.

Other features of the wreck-in-progress: Continue reading →

Ethical Quote of the Month: Gen. David Petraeus

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position as D/CIA. After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation.”

—-Gen. David H. Petraeus, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in a public statement announcing his resignation from that position.

How quaint.

Democrats and Republicans must have felt that they had stumbled into the Way-Back Machine and delivered into England circa. 1904. A high government official resigning over adultery, sex,…”personal misconduct?” How bizarre! Naturally, Sen. Diane Feinstein, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee,  announced that she would have supported Petraeus if he had chosen to stay. “I wish President Obama had not accepted this resignation, but I understand and respect the decision,” she said in a statement, and described Petraeus’s resignation as an “enormous loss for our nation’s intelligence community and for our country.”

The right way to leave after an affair, apparently, is to try to cover it up, submit to extortion, corrupt others in the process, and only quit when the hideout is surrounded, the hounds are clawing at the door and someone is yelling at you through a bullhorn—you know, like former GOP Sen. John Ensign, who waited two years to resign while his colleagues, like Feinstein, looked the other way. Nobody gets it in Washington—“it” being the ironclad principle that leadership must set the highest example, not the lowest level it can get away with, or the whole system rots below. Nobody, apparently, except the man who just resigned. Continue reading →

Accountability Check: Blame Yourselves, Conservatives

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

…twice shy.

The rhetoric, accusations, insults and breast-beating from conservative talk radio and its audience are every bit as offensive as Michael Moore’s bleating that American voters were morons after the 2004 election. No, it is more offensive—that’s right, more offensive than Michael Moore. Conservatives thoroughly disgraced themselves when they had control in Washington, and have barely improved since. They deserved to lose in 2008 because of their unethical conduct from 2000-2008, and that they are still paying for those years in 2012 is obvious and just. If conservatives don’t like the Obama Administration and its policies, if they think the United States is in deep trouble as a consequence, they should stop blaming voters and admit that it couldn’t have happened without their greed, stupidity, arrogance and incompetence: Continue reading →

There Is Nothing Noble About A Deathbed Confession…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Don’t you just hate it when you think you are going to die and confess a horrible crime and then you miraculously recover?

…which is why this O. Henry-esque story makes me smile.

Someone stabbed Joyce Goodener in the neck, set her on fire and bludgeoned her to death with a cinder block in 1995. Nobody was arrested for her murder. But three years ago, James Washington, a Tennessee prisoner, thought he was dying from a heart attack. The downside of confessing to a crime right before you kick off is nil, and the up-side might be admission through the Pearly Gates, so Washington confessed to a prison guard that he had killed Goodener. “I have something to tell you. I have to get something off my conscience and you need to hear this,’” he told the guard, James Tomlinson. “I killed somebody. I beat her to death.”  He confessed all the gory details. Then, conveniently unburdened, Washington waited to go into the light, to mercy, forgiveness, and maybe a nice pair of wings and a golden harp.

Oops. He recovered. Now he’s facing at least another 50 years in prison.

There is nothing admirable or ethical about a death-bed confession. It doesn’t show contrition, honesty, accountability or good citizenship. Such confessions are examples of self-serving cowardice. Although it is true that the world would be a better, safer place with Washington gone, the fact that he now has to face earthly retribution rather than reap the benefits of heavenly absolution is the essence of justice.

But hey, thanks for sharing, James!

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Facts and Graphic: Daily News

A Disappointing and Damaging Ethics Dunce: The Obama Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

No matter who wins the Presidency on November 6, one thing is for certain. We now can be sure that the day will come when a future Presidential campaign runs an ad that concludes, “Don’t vote for him: he’s an asshole!” For that, we will be able to place the blame on, of all people, Barack Obama, and his 2012 campaign. This is the same Barack Obama who promised, the first time he was running for President, to change the tone in Washington; the same President Obama who told a group in 2010…

“But there is a sense that something is different now, that something is broken, that those of us in Washington are not serving the people as well as we should,” Mr. Obama said. “At times, it seems like we are unable to listen to one another, to have at once a serious and civil debate. This erosion of civility in the public square sows division and cynicism among our citizens. It poisons the well of public opinion….Civility is not a sign of weakness.”

Yet his 2012 campaign’s embrace of gutter-level name calling and divisive rhetoric, with the full participation of both the President and the Vice-President, has guaranteed that the tone Obama promised to change will change for the worse, and that the well of public opinion will be more toxic than ever. Continue reading →