competence

When A Corporation Trusts Too Much: The Saga of the Unlimited AAirpass

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

If you sell this guy a ticket to your all-you-can-eat buffet and he eats the table, is he at fault, or are you?

A strange subplot of the American Airlines bankruptcy is the saga of its unlimited AAirpass, a special deal offered by the airline in 1981. The company sold passes for a lifetime of free and unlimited First Class travel with no limitations at a price of $250,000. An additional $150,000 permitted AAirpass customers to buy one “companion ticket” that would let one person—anyone— accompany them on any flight, anywhere, again, for life.

Apparently eschewing competent market research—and you wondered why this airline went belly up?—American assumed that the lifetime luxury travel passes would be bought by corporations for their high-flying employees. But no; the purchasers were almost all very rich people with a lot of time on their hands. As designed, American got a quick influx of cash, but at an unacceptable and strangely unanticipated cost: the AAirpasses placed the company at the mercy of  few profligate travelers who exploited American’s carelessness to the edge of absurdity, thereby raising a fascinating ethical question: If someone lets you have the right to ruin them, is it ethical to do it? Continue reading →

The Messy Case of the Courageous/ Zealous /Inept/ Dedicated/ Venal/ Lying/ Unethical/ Ethical Lawyer

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The courtroom chaos of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Trial By Jury” was nothing compared to this!

One thing we do know for sure: the lawyer was rushed. And therein lies much of the problem.

This mind-blowing scenario, that could have easily been an episode on “Boston Legal” or “Ally McBeal,” occurred in California.  After a week long trial in a personal injury case where the brain-damaged plaintiff’s lawyer had asked for millions in damages, jurors  deliberated only four hours and announced they’d reached a decision. Both lawyers were certain a defense verdict, against the disabled man, was coming. Plaintiffs attorney C. Michael Alder pulled defense counsel  into the hallway for last-minute settlement negotiations, hoping that the defense would agree to some damages as insurance against a surprise plaintiff’s verdict. With his developmentally disabled client (who had suffered brain injuries in a fall from an ambulance) and his mother by his side, Alder exchanged figures and rejections with   defense lawyer James Siepler, who had an insurance claims adjuster on his cellphone.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Johnson was impatient, for the jury was ready to give its verdict. Literally at the last second,  Alder and Siepler agreed to a  $350,000 settlement, and returned to the courtroom. “The parties have advised me that they have reached a settlement of the case,” the judge informed the jurors, adding, “They will be happy to talk with you out in the hallway to get your views.”

They got the jurors’ views, all right. The jurors told the attorneys that they were going to award the plaintiff 9 million dollars. Continue reading →

Why Does American Public Education Stink? The Answer: Incompetence, Stupidity, and Fear. The Proof: THIS…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ah, that look that only a dedicated New York public school teacher can spark!!!

Over at Popehat, Ken has been on another roll, and his latest effort, as depressing and enraging as it is, is a real contribution to our understanding of the kind of entrenched foolishness, cowardice and incompetence in our nation’s public school administration that is gradually rendering the schools useless and our children uneducated.

Spurred by a New York Post story that seemed too horrible to be true, Ken set out to research the claim that the New York School system has compiled a long list of topics that are banned on student tests for a variety of reasons, prime among them that someone, somewhere, will be offended by them.  After some digging on the New York City Department of Education’s websites, what he found  was worse than how the Post had described it.

In an Appendix, he discovered a list of  test question topics “that would probably cause a selection to be deemed unacceptable by the New York City Department of Education… In general, a topic might be unacceptable for any of the following reasons:

  •   The topic could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students that might hamper their ability to take the remainder of the test in the optimal frame of mind.
  •     The topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation.
  •     The topic has been ―done to death in standardized tests or textbooks and is thus overly familiar and/or boring to students.
  •     The topic will appear biased against (or toward) some group of people.

Using those criteria, and undoubtedly using astounding numbers of hours and taxpayer dollars, the Department came up with the following jaw-dropping list of banned test subjects. I’ll flag with red the taboos that are especially outrageous or idiotic, though perhaps I should note the two or three that might be appropriate. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Officials Of the Month: Oh, Brother!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

My mood after I wrote this...

As more and more observers predict that the individual mandate, a cornerstone of Obamacare, will be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, I found my mind returning to the topics that have bothered me from the beginning. Why didn’t Congress make certain that it was on sound constitutional ground when it passed the law? Did they really understand what they were passing? Is it possible that our elected officials could spend so much time and occupy so much of the nation’s attention on an issue they didn’t understand? Surely our highest elected officials entrusted with devising the laws of this great nation must understand the powers and limits that relate to their duties in the Constitution. Don’t they? Isn’t that a minimum qualification for office?

George Mason Law Professor David Bernstein has provided clues to the answers to those question, and you’re not going to like them. He writes: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Eric Fehrnstrom

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

—-Top Mitt Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom, answering a CNN interviewer’s query about whether the leading GOP presidential hopeful’s increasingly conservative campaigning positions will hurt him with more moderate voters in he is his party’s nominee.

Translation: “Mitt Romney is a liar, and has no integrity, so he will continue to say whatever is necessary to persuade naive and inattentive voters—you know…most of them— into believing that his policies will please them.  This is why he has no respect for voters at all, and will lie to their faces. Hey, this is politics–that’s how the game is played! My boss is like President Obama, like George W. Bush, like all politicians, really–except nut-cases like Santorum, Paul and Gingrich, who keep saying the same crazy things they believe in no matter how unelectable it makes them. Mitt’s a realist. He hit reset when he was Governor of Massachusetts, then he hit reset when he decided to run for the nomination. He’ll hit reset again when he’s nominated, and you can be damn sure he’ll hit reset after he’s elected. Come on…anyone who believes what a political candidate says has to be an idiot, right?”

Start the countdown. Every day that passes without Fehrnstrom resigning—or better yet, being fired— is an additional reason not to trust Mitt Romney…in addition, that is, to the fact that he’d hire a cynical, incompetent jerk like this in the first place.

Ethics Quiz: Mixing Math and Black Humor

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

[Yesterday I was en route to Las Vegas for a speaking engagement—actually one of my rock classic parodies musical legal ethics seminars with rock singer and guitarist Mike Messer—and essentially went from 7 hour trip to hotel to restaurant to bed last night, then to an all day session today. I’ll catch up: I’m not ignoring comments, just haven’t had the chance to read them.]

"If Bugs Moran has 276 gangsters, and Al Capone's men massacre 7 every Valentines day beginning in 1929, how many gangsters will he have left today?" Hey, math is fun!

At the Trinidad Center City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., third graders have been given math problems like this…

  • “Tilda Tiger had many hungry children to feed on Thanksgiving Day. She caught 169 Africans, 526 Americans and 196 Indians. She then put the people equally into 9 enormous ovens to bake. How many desperate people were in each oven?” Not to mention…
  • “When I was sleeping in a forest last night, 2555 fire ants crawled up my nose and built a nest in my brain. I woke up screaming the next morning. My distraught mother rushed me to hospital for an emergency operation. The doctor was able to kill 1953 fire ants. The remaining ants in my brain formed themselves into 7 equal-sized groups and fled to 7 different organs in my body, one being my stomach. a) How many fire ants escaped? b) How many ants fled to my stomach?” As well as… Continue reading →

Wikipedia Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

An article in the Chronicle Of Higher Education serves as a stark lesson in how policies, procedures and bureaucracy can warp an organization’s purpose and lead to self-destructive conduct that injures stakeholders and destroys trust. The entity at issue: Wikipedia. And now we know why, despite the immense growth and improvement in the web’s community encyclopedia, it still can’t be trusted….and may never be trustworthy.

Historian and researcher Timothy Messer-Kruse tells of his decade-long effort to correct misinformation in Wikipedia relating to the Haymarket riot and subsequent trial in 1886, a landmark episode in the social, political and labor history of America. Messer-Kruse discovered that the entry included an outright error that had become standard in the historical accounts, but that he had personally proven was false through meticulous research. But Wikipedia wasn’t interested in accuracy: Continue reading →

Our Incompetent Broadcast News Media: A Frustrating Morning With Soledad O’Brien

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Soledad O’Brien, paving the road to Athens

This morning, on CNN, I managed not to change the channel as I usually do when Soledad O’Brien is on the screen. It was a mistake. The long-time CNN anchor is as low as newscasting can sink short of MSNBC when it comes to smugly-biased commentary, and unlike some of MSNBC’s lefty warriors, O’Brien is just not very bright. This doesn’t keep her from visibly wincing, rolling her eyes or winking at the supposedly simpatico viewer when she thinks her opinion is superior to someone she is interviewing, as unprofessional a habit as I have ever seen. She has a job because, I suppose, she is pleasant to look at and exudes confidence, though it is confidence unsupported by any actual skill, insight or knowledge. Continue reading →

Update: The King Memorial Quote Mess Is Officially A Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Martin Luther King Memorial Commission meets to address the quote controversy

When we last left the star-crossed Martin Luther King Memorial on the National Mall, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar had boldly declared that the Interior Department was ordering the embarrassing misquotation of the martyred civil rights leader changed, so he would not sound to future generations like “an arrogant twit,” in poet Maya Angelou’s neat phrasing. Now a war of words and intentions has broken out, with Salazar declaring that the entire made-up quotation (“I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”—something King never said, and probably never thought, either) had to be removed, and the correct quote (“…if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”) added, and Ed Jackson, the architect who oversaw the memorial’s development for years, saying that Salazar’s plan would wreck the structure. Asked if there was any way to remove the inscription from the memorial without destroying it, Jackson answered, “No.” Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Wolf Blitzer

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Watch out, Newt! It's SUPER-WOLF!!!

Once again Ethics Alarms finds itself in the sad position of calling conduct heroic that should be routine. Unfortunately, however, competent and responsible broadcast journalism isn’t routine, and if I was looking for a bold and quick-witted journalist to exceed the standard practice, it certainly wouldn’t be CNN’s plodding, timid and often befuddled Wolf Blitzer. Last night, however, as moderator of the latest GOP candidates debate, he did what few journalists ever have the confidence or courage to do: he challenged a politician on an absurd and hypocritical statement.

And yes, I confess…if Wolf fell slightly short of true Ethics Hero status by a couple of points, the fact that the politician involved was New Gingrich the Unethical put him over the top. If that be bias, so be it. Continue reading →