corruption
Rueful Observations On Obama’s Speechwriters Laughing About Writing Lies To Pass Obamacare
In the wake of Obama foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes boasting about how he managed to hoodwink the news media and the public regarding the negotiations with Iran, this disgusting display is not so much surprising and it is clarifying.
Monday’s edition of the Charlie Rose show on PBS featured Charlie chatting with former Obama speechwriters David Litt, Jon Favreau, and Jon Lovett to discuss their collaboration with the President to assist his (over-praised) communication skills. Much of the discussion centered on Obama’s stand-up comedy chops—Ah, what might have been! I’d gladly take my chances in that alternate universe—until the discussion turned to this:
CHARLIE ROSE: My point is do you have equal impact on serious speeches? Because it’s about style, use of language, etcetera?
JON LOVETT, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: I really like, I was very — the joke speeches is the most fun part of this. But the things I’m the most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think. Health care, economic speeches.
JON FAVREAU, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: Lovett wrote the line about “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”
LOVETT: How dare you!
ALL: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
LOVETT: And you know what? It’s still true! No.
No.
Observations, somewhat diminished because this made MY HEAD EXPLODE: Continue reading
A Catastrophic Existential Failure Of Ethics And Institutions
Now what, Ben?
I woke up this morning nauseous, after a restless night. It could have been dinner, but I’m pretty sure that it was Indiana.
Not that seeing Ted Cruz suspend his quest to be President was upsetting in and of itself. He’s a terrible candidate and a dangerous man, and almost certainly unelectable, which in his case is a good thing. As it did with Chris Christie, who was exposed as a character-free fraud; as it did with Jeb Bush, who demonstrated an inability to think; as it did with Ben Carson, who proved why his theory that leaders need no relevant experience at all was nonsense; as it did with Marco Rubio, who provided the definitive definition of “empty suit,” the primary system worked, and eliminated aspiring nominees who were unqualified and unfit in various ways.
It has not worked, however, with Donald Trump. This was not a failure of the primary system or the political system (Hillary Clinton’s impending nomination will be a failure of the political system) but something far more ominous. We are faced with the threat of an unstable, incoherent, ethics-free and irrational man becoming our President because of a catastrophic breakdown in the ethics of our cultural, societal and political institutions, over a long period of time. As a result, our democracy, ideals and way of life are imperiled as never before.
It didn’t have to be this way. It’s just how things broke, that’s all. The United States has sewn the seeds of its own destruction many times before and lucked out, smelling like a rose after mistakes, miscalculations and stupid actions that easily could have ended Mr. Jefferson’s experiment in tragedy and chaos. We might get lucky again, I suppose. Trump might get squished by a falling piece of space junk. Hillary Clinton might get possessed by the spirit of Julia Sand. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Continue reading
Unethical Artificial Intelligence Teenaged Girl Web Bot Of The Month: Microsoft’s “Tay”
Developers in Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams made “Tay,” an Artificial Intelligence web-bot, to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding.” She spoke in text, memes and emoji on severalf different platforms, including Kik, Groupme and Twitter ‘”like a teen girl.” Microsoft marketed her as “The AI with zero chill.” You could chat with Tay by tweeting or Direct Messaging the bot at @tayandyou on Twitter. Though she was programmed to use millennial slang and be up to date on pop culture, she was, like Arnold the good cyborg in “Terminator 2,” designed so she would learn from her online interactions with humans, and you know how ethical humans are.
Within 24 hours, Tay was asking strangers she called “daddy” to “fuck” her, expressing doubts that the Holocaust was real and saying things like “Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now;” “Donald Trump is the only hope we’ve got;” “Repeat after me, Hitler did nothing wrong” and “Ted Cruz is the Cuban Hitler…that’s what I’ve heard so many others say.” For Tay, becoming more human meant becoming a vulgar, sex-obsessed, racist, anti-Semitic, Nazi-loving Trump supporter.
Imagine what her values would be like in 48 hours. Wisely, Microsoft is not willing to chance it, and Tay is now unplugged and awaiting either reprogramming or replacement. One of Tay’s last tweets was,
“Okay. I’m done. I feel used.”
Oh, yes, this artificial intelligence stuff is bound to work out well.
____________________
Pointer: Althouse
Ethics Quote Of The Week: Washington Post Sports Columnist Norman Chad On “March Madness”
“People often ask me, “Why do you ignore college basketball?” Really? That’s like asking a vegan, “Why do you ignore cattle farms?…Why wouldn’t I ignore college basketball? They just round up the usual suspects every year, and, believe you me, these people are awfully suspect. The game is rotten at its core; it’s only cheating if you get caught, and if you get caught, you’re only liable if you’re losing.”
—- Sports columnist Norman Chad, on why he doesn’t follow the NCAA basketball tournament.
To which I reply, “Exactly.”
As Chad notes in his column, big-time college basketball is pure dribbling corruption. The players are exploited and tossed aside, few of them graduating and most leaving with little real education. The athletic programs warp school priorities and eat up institution resources that should be devoted to the curriculum, the typically coaches are paid more than any three faculty members combined, and they teach their charges that cheating pays. Continues Chad in his inimitable style:
But the players don’t bother me – they are like cattle, used for two percent milk and tenderloins until their services are exhausted. It’s the coaches that bother me – the See No Evil Hear No Evil Do No Evil Block/Charge No Evil shim sham flimflam riffraff sitting on the bench in those fine suits with their fat wallets.
Jim Boeheim? A bum. John Calipari? Bum. Rick Pitino? Bum. Roy Williams? Bum. If these fellas are earning big paychecks from institutions of higher learning, institutions of higher learning must be in a different business than they once were.
Boeheim and Co. run the whole shooting match, and no matter what they do, you can’t run ‘em out of town unless they miss March Madness three straight times. Which brings us to Larry Brown. He’s at his third college coaching stop – UCLA, Kansas and now SMU – and he’s three-for-three for NCAA infractions. If there were a Recruiting Violators Anonymous program, he’d be John Calipari’s sponsor!
Bingo. Continue reading
The Ethics Lesson Of Breitbart’s Implosion: Unethical Cultures Are Deadly, And So Is Donald Trump’s Touch
Nice job, Andrew! That’s some legacy!
The Breitbart conservative website empire is in the process of wrecking itself through its own corruption. Good. This is an invaluable lesson in the field of organizational culture, and perhaps it will prompt other unethical organizations to reform their cultures before it is too late.
I had the good sense to abandon Breitbart as a trustworthy news source long ago, after I was burned by the site’s doctored Shirley Sherrod video. Conservatives, like liberals, often hold on to their heroes long after they have proven themselves unworthy of reverence or even respect; Andrew Breitbart was an especially unfortunate example. He created a group of websites that really delivered news the way Fox is unfairly accused of reporting. They ignored stories that impugned the honesty, integrity or reliability of conservatives, and actively sought stories that showed the worst of progressives, and often slanted those stories to mislead readers, shamelessly appealing to their confirmation bias. The corrupt culture he built, cheered by prominent conservative pundits who should have known better like Glenn Reynolds (Breitbart was “punching back twice as hard,” you see: Rationalization #2 A. Sicilian Ethics, or “They had it coming”), predictably became worse after its architect’s untimely death. Nothing showed this more vividly than Breibart’s decision to become, as resigning editor Ben Shapiro called it today, “Donald Trump’s personal Pravda.” It attacked Trump’s critics and rationalized Trump’s outrages. I dissected a particularly disgraceful example here, but there were many others.
Then came, as almost always does, a chance event that has shattered Breitbart along its rotting fault lines. Continue reading
Apparently Hunter S. Thompson Was Nostradamus
This is only tangentially related to the post, but it may be my only chance to proudly note that my great uncle, actor George Coulouris (that’s the old Mercury Theater ensemble member in the upper left) played a Greek tycoon dying if brain cancer who reanimates the head of Nostradamus so he can get a transplant. The film is called “The Man Without a Body,” and consists of long scenes with Uncle George arguing with a rubber head.
This is going to cause me to reconsider a lot of assumptions.
Hunter Thompson is fading from cultural relevance now, and when he was alive, I would have said, “Good.” He was a classic product of the Sixties, contemptuous of American and the political system, relentlessly negative and cynical, habitually stoned and proud of it. He was also a very funny, witty, skilled writer, if you could stand being bombarded by Abie Hoffman/M*A*S*H/ drug glamorizing political propaganda, which cleverly satirical as it often was, I could not. Thompson was bitter, angry and nihilistic; I would label his a largely wasted life. It was no surprise to me that he committee suicide. I was surprised he didn’t do it sooner, but then, he had been killing himself slowly with drugs and alcohol for decades. Thompson’s legacy is preserved to some extent in the person of the gun-toting, drugged out, corrupt Uncle Duke character in Doonesbury.
Thompson’s observations in his two most famous books, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” seemed like typical criticism from the “drop-out, turn-on” set then. It never occurred to me that he had access to a crystal ball. In a thorough and wise analysis of today’s political upheaval deftly titled “Has Everyone Lost Their Freakin’ Minds?” (I cannot recommend it more highly), Tyler Durden begins with a series of Thompson’s quotes. Here they are… Continue reading
Encore! Presidents Day Ethics: The Presidents of the United States on Ethics and Leadership
It’s President’s Day, and I see that it has been five years since the most popular Ethics Alarms President’s Day post was published. That one, from 2011, reminds us of the ethics wisdom and leadership acumen of the remarkable men who have served their country in the most challenging, difficult, and ethically complicated of all jobs, the U.S. Presidency.
In the middle of a campaign season littered with some disturbingly unethical candidates, it seems especially appropriate to re-post that entry now….with some updates. In 2011, I left out three Presidents, including the current one. Now all are represented, most of them well.
So…
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Presidents of the United States of America:
George Washington: “I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”
John Adams: “Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.”
Thomas Jefferson: “On great occasions every good officer must be ready to risk himself in going beyond the strict line of law, when the public preservation requires it; his motives will be a justification…”
James Madison: “No government any more than any individual will long be respected without being truly respectable.”
James Monroe: “The best form of government is that which is most likely to prevent the greatest sum of evil.”
John Quincy Adams: “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”
Andrew Jackson: “One man with courage makes a majority.” (Attributed)
Martin Van Buren: “No evil can result from its inhibition more pernicious than its toleration.”
William Henry Harrison: “There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.” Continue reading
Ethics Quote Of The Day: Ann Althouse
“What’s to “look into”? Why not a straightforward “yes”? She said “I’ll look into it,” and the, opaquely, “I don’t know the status, but I will certainly look into it.” What “status”? Who even has an idea what that means? Does she not own the rights to her speeches?”
—-Law prof. and eccentric blogger Ann Althouse, reacting to Hillary Clinton’s evasive response “I will look into it,” when asked during the recent debate if she would release transcripts of her high-priced speeches to various corporations, like Goldman Sachs.
Two points before I discuss Althouse’s analysis:
1. Somehow I missed this in my review of the debate. I shouldn’t have, but I was so pummeled by the sheer awfulness of it all that my observation skills were obviously impaired. Not as badly as most, however: the number of journalists who have praised that festival of platitudes and lies as “the best debate so far” are every bit as pathetic as Donald Trump’s throng. There is no excuse for being that estranged from reality.
2. To anticipate the complaints: I’ll stop posting on Hillary Clinton’s lies, deceits and unethical machinations when she stops engaging in them. That is not only fair and responsible, it is the only way to foil the Clinton game, which consists of making everyone sick and tired of pointing out how corrupt they are.
Professor Althouse nailed Hillary on this. She continued in part… Continue reading
It’s Just One Small Episode In The Vast Accountability, Integrity And Competence Void That Is The Federal Government, But It May Answer Many Questions…
Kimberly Graves, appealing her VA demotion, not because she denies gaming the system and sucking up taxpayer money, but because she feels she should get away with it.
As essential background, please read this excerpt from the Veterans Administration’s inspector general’s report regarding “Inappropriate Use of Position and Misuse of Relocation Program and Incentives,” from last fall:
As part of our assessment of VA’s relocation expense program (PCS program), we reviewed records related to the Veterans Benefits Administration’s (VBA) reassignment of 7 General Schedule (GS) Grade 15 employees who were promoted to Senior Executive Service (SES) positions and 15 SES employees who moved to different SES positions in fiscal years (FYs) 2013, 2014, and 2015. VBA management used moves of senior executives as a method to justify annual salary increases and used VA’s PCS program to pay moving expenses for these employees. Annual salary increases totaled about $321,000, and PCS relocation expenses totaled about $1.3 million. Additionally, VBA paid $140,000 in unjustified relocation incentives. In total, VA spent about $1.8 million on the reassignments. While we do not question the need to reassign some staff to manage a national network of VAROs, we concluded that VBA inappropriately utilized VA’s PCS program for the benefit of its SES workforce.
Ms. Kimberly Graves was reassigned from her position as the Director of VBA’s Eastern Area Office to the position of Director, St. Paul VARO, effective October 19, 2014. VA paid $129,467.56 related to Ms. Graves’ PCS move. We determined that Ms. Graves also inappropriately used her position of authority for personal and financial benefit when she participated personally and substantially in creating the St. Paul VARO vacancy and then volunteering for the vacancy.
Mr. Antione Waller, former St. Paul VARO Director, told us Ms. Graves initiated discussion with him about relocating to the Philadelphia VARO. Once he expressed a willingness to accept the reassignment, she did an apparent “bait and switch.” She told him that the Philadelphia position was no longer available and he would be considered for the Baltimore VARO Director position. When he said he was not willing to move to Baltimore, Ms. Graves told him, “you will probably get another call, this probably won’t be the last conversation about Baltimore.” In an email, Ms. Beth McCoy, who at the time was the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Field Operations and Ms. Rubens’ subordinate, told Ms. Graves that she spoke to Mr. Waller and told him his name was already submitted to the VA Secretary for Baltimore, so “saying no now is not a clean or easy option.” Once the St. Paul Director position was vacant, Ms. Graves said she contacted Ms. Rubens and said, “I’d like to throw my name in for consideration for St. Paul … I feel like I’ve done my time and I’d like to put my name in.”
Ms. Rubens’ and Ms. Graves’ reassignments resulted in a significant decrease in job responsibilities, yet both retained their annual salaries—$181,497 and $173,949, respectively. Based on Federal regulations, we determined VA could not reduce their annual salaries upon reassignment despite the decrease in the scope of their responsibilities. However, a senior executive’s annual salary can be reduced if the individual receives a less than fully successful annual summary rating, fails to meet performance requirements for a critical element, or, as a disciplinary or adverse action resulting from conduct related activity.
We made criminal referrals to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia, regarding official actions orchestrated by Ms. Rubens and Ms. Graves. Formal decisions regarding prosecutorial merit are pending. We provided 12 recommendations to VA to increase oversight of VA’s PCS program and to determine the appropriate administrative actions to take, if any, against senior VBA officials.
Got that? Graves gamed the system to reduce her responsibilities while keeping her salary, and received almost $130,000 in taxpayer money as moving expenses, which, as the rest of the IG’s report documents, are routinely inflated by the VA. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 
Chris Marschner tackled the difficult issue of how we should regard the supporters of Donald Trump, in light of so much abuse and blame being heaped on them by pundits, the news media, and, yes, me. He chose a post to do so that discussed the cynical attitude of former Obama speechwriters regarding how easy it was to manipulate the public and the press. Chris has done as good a job at this as can be done, and thus earned his Comment of the Day distinction. I believe, however, that explaining the various factors activating Trump supporters, such as the arrogance of power-brokers like the Obama speechwriters, does not in any way excuse Trump voters, justify them, or relieve them from accusations of recklessness and ignorance.
I suppose I should be grateful to Trump and his supporters, because they have clinched two long-standing arguments in my favor. The first is one that has often surfaced on Ethics Alarms: does a responsible voter vote for the character of a leader, or the positions the candidate espouses? Trump proves my point in spectacular fashion. If the candidate doesn’t have a trustworthy character, it doesn’t matter what he or she says.
The second argument the Trumpites win for me is my opposition to those who decry the low rate of voting in the U.S. and want to “fix it.” My reaction to their complaint has always been: the low rate of voting is GOOD. If you are apathetic, lazy,badly informed, ignorant, hateful, stupid, gullible and naive, your vote interferes with democracy, it doesn’t advance it. The Founders believed that civic literacy was essential to a functioning republic. They were right. The Republican primaries illustrated what can happen when a large bloc of voters who are unfit to exercise the franchise suddenly decide they care, but lack the basic cognitive skills and abilities to translate their concern into intelligent and responsible civic participation. They become sitting ducks for con artists, liars and frauds to manipulate and exploit.
Here is Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Rueful Observations On Obama’s Speechwriters Laughing About Writing Lies To Pass Obamacare“: