accountability

Ethics Blindness: Why Is The Media Minimizing the Etheridge Assault?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Bob Etheridge street mugging story seems poised to join the coverage of Van Jones and ACORN as another depressing example of the mainstream media’s abandonment of objectivity, responsibility and ethical priorities.

Today, the day after a video surfaced showing North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge grabbing, restraining, and wrapping his hand around the neck of a young man who dared to ask him a question on a Washington D.C. sidewalk, “The Daily Beast’s” #4 story was the revelation that former Ebay CEO and current G.O.P. candidate for governor of California once shoved an Ebay subordinate in a moment of anger and paid six figures in damages. The story about a sitting U.S. Congressman assaulting a U.S. citizen without provocation on a public street doesn’t appear anywhere in the liberal-leaning news aggregation site’s news summary. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Charles Blow

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Such has been the narrative of his presidency: being treated like the janitor in chief — mopping up messes made by others and being chastised for leaving streaks.”

—New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, discussing the public’s impatience with President Obama’s response to the Gulf oil spill.

Blow’s revolting comment, buried toward the end of an article calling for President Obama to display more emotion [Translation: “Act!”] over the Gulf catastrophe, is nothing short of despicable, but perhaps we should be grateful for it nonetheless.  Now we know the drill: no matter what the issue, no matter what the provocation, biased, race-baiting commentators like Blow will judge any criticism of President Obama to be motivated by bigotry, and refuse to accord his critics the respect they expect to be given themselves. Continue reading →

Accountability Lessons, Oil Spill Ethics, and Obama’s Leadership Failure

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

President Obama has shown his inexperience and unfamiliarity with executive leadership ethics in many ways since he took office, but none are likely to be more damaging than his unease with accountability. He had better learn fast.

It is not surprising that so many mayors lose their jobs as the result of blizzards. Budget limitations guarantee that a city’s snow removal capabilities are set to the most likely levels of snowfall and not the extraordinary, once-in-a-decade event, yet when that once-in-a-decade event arrives, it will not do for the mayor to blame the budget or the weather or the City Council or the lack of a magic wand. The public doesn’t want to hear any of that: they want to be able to drive to work. They want the leader to fix the problem, because that’s what leaders are supposed to do. If a leader can’t fix the problem, he had better look as if he is doing everything possible and impossible to try. And he had better make it clear that he understands and accepts that it is his job. Continue reading →

Standards, the Salahis, Bluto, and Us

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

A sane culture discourages ethical misconduct by condemning and punishing it. The American culture, thanks to greed, intellectual rot and an irresponsible media, rewards unethical conduct by making it profitable. This isn’t a trivial matter.

Tareq and Michaele Salahi are about as despicable a pair as one can imagine, redeemed only by the fact that they haven’t caused any oil spills, aren’t abusing children and haven’t killed anyone. They are full-time grifters, and are diligently working to profit by exploiting America’s sick obsession with media celebrity. They crashed a White House dinner in November, costing several people their jobs, and launching multiple investigations that added to the tax-payers’ burden. None of that mattered to them, of course, because the irresponsible escapade advanced their idiotic, pathetic and selfish goal: joining the likes of Jose Canseco, Corey Feldman and Gary Busey on TV’s equivalent of belching, a reality show. Then, being completely shameless, they recently stalked a White House dinner again, getting themselves stopped by the Secret Service as they rode in a rented limousine, dressed in formal attire, with an “Inside Edition” camera crew in tow. This was just an “incredible coincidence,” they explained…wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Continue reading →

Rebate Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I  hit the roof yesterday when I found out that we had missed the deadline to apply for the promised $100 rebate on my son’s fancy cell phone. To make myself feel better, I checked with Consumers Reports and some other sources: sure enough, the Marshalls are not alone. It is estimated that 40%-60% of all rebates go unclaimed, to the tune of 4 billion dollars. What a deal for retailers! They lure you to the store with low prices. When you get there, you discover that the price will only truly be low after you mail in a rebate request and get a check in return. But you’re in the store, and have made the emotional commitment to buy. Later, you may find out that the various hoops you have to jump through to get the rebate back are annoying and time-consuming, and easy to botch. If you are busy, you may put it aside—and ninety, sixty, thirty, or even just seven days later, the rebate offer expires.

Are rebates ethical, or are they a particularly insidious form of consumer fraud, using the well-document human characteristics of impulse buying, inattention to detail, short attention span and procrastination against consumers to make millions of dollars in money that was supposed to be discounted but never was? Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Campbell Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Almost nobody is ever fired anymore. Obviously sacked Presidential staff, agency heads and Cabinet officials announce that they are leaving to “pursue other opportunities” or to be with their families. (Recent glaring example: Desiree Rogers, who “resigned,” just coincidentally after being instrumental in allowing two gate-crashers into a White House star dinner.) Nobody believes it, of course. The same is true of actors fired from movies, TV shows, and plays for being wrong for their parts or just impossible bt work with, who then announce that it was a “mutual decision.” All of this is intended to avoid the stigma of losing a job because, well, the individual just wasn’t delivering as hoped or promised. It doesn’t work, of course: nobody is fooled, but the charade simply adds to the public belief, increasingly justified, that everyone lies, all the time.

So although Campbell Brown’s stark honesty about why she is leaving her low-rated CNN show shouldn’t be anything special, it is. Continue reading →

12 Questions About the Jessica Colotl Case

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The old saw is that hard cases make bad law.  The case of Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old college student and illegal Mexican immigrant, is hard in some ways, to be sure. But it might end up making the law better. This is because the same circumstances that make it hard also highlight the ethical issues at the heart of the illegal immigration problem.  If we can agree on what is right and wrong concerning Jessica’s situation, a lot of the broader controversy will be clarified.

Colotl is a student at Atlanta’s Kennesaw State University, where she is two semesters from graduation. On March 29, she was pulled over by campus police for “impeding the flow of traffic.” She presented  an expired Mexican passport instead of a valid driver’s license, and was arrested and taken to a county jail. There she admitted that she was an illegal immigrant. She has been in the U.S. illegally since her parents brought her here at age 11. Now she faces possible deportation, though this has been deferred, in what can only be called an act of politically motivated mercy, until she has finished college.

Now let’s examine the ethics of her situation, fairly and dispassionately, by answering some questions… Continue reading →

Drug War Ethics: THIS Is Excessive Force…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Radley Balko, a senior editor at Reason Magazine, has been following the law enforcement tactic of paramilitary raids on American homes, some of which go horrible wrong, and many of which raise questions of propriety and proportion. One of the worst of these, a February raid on a family’s home in Missouri that featured the invading authorities shooting the family dog in front of a young child, is immortalized on this frightening video. The father was charged with marijuana possession and child endangerment, presumably because he used drugs in the presence of his.

Balko, who, like everyone at Reason, is a libertarian, uses the incident to press his opposition to the illegal status of recreational drugs. “This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years,” he writes… Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Roman Polanski

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I know, this is akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Still, Roman Polanski’s self-righteous protest of what he sees as victimization and injustice, recently published in the French magazine La Règle du Jeu, is worth noting if only as a useful case study of how privilege and rationalizations can lead to ethical delusion.

Polanski, proclaiming, “I can now remain silent no longer!”—which I doubt will take its place next to Dreyfus’s “I am innocent!” in the annals of memorable prisoner quotes—makes it clear in his statement that he has no remorse and admits no serious wrongdoing for drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13-year old girl, the 33-year-old crime that began his legal problems. Oh, he accuses authorities of being unfeeling to the now-grown victim, who has repeatedly said she would like to see the entire issue disposed of and forgotten so she can get on with her life, conveniently forgetting that his brutality and subsequent refusal to be accountable to U.S. justice are the sole reasons she is suffering. Continue reading →