ethics corrupters

Toronto’s Pathetic Mayor: What’s The Question?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
If Chris Farley had been elected mayor....

If Chris Farley had been elected mayor….

I’ve received a wave of emails from helpful readers, with links to news reports about Canada’s shame,  drunk, crack-smoking, lying Toronto mayor, Rob Ford. “Write about this!” they suggest.

Write what?

The mayor of a major Canadian city is a law-breaker, a substance abuser, an addict, and ill. When your defense to a video showing you smoking crack is “I was so drunk, I don’t remember it,” that should say it all. He initially lied about the allegations of his crack use. He calls up radio stations in a drunken state. He is caught on tape drunkenly screaming that he want to murder someone. His various public stances to keep his job have ranged from shameless appeals to pity— “I hope none of you ever find yourself” in such a state, a reverse Golden Rule tactic that amounts to arguing “Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you if you were the irresponsible, addict mayor who will do and say anything to stay in office”—to that old stand-by, Bill Clinton’s “I’m just going to concentrate on doing my job and accomplishing what the voters elected me to do,” as if they elected Ford to embarrass the city. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: ARod-Plunking Red Sox Pitcher Ryan Dempster

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’ll admit it: I came thiiiiis close to designating Red Sox pitcher Ryan Dempster an Ethics Hero. Right after he intentionally threw a fastball  into Alex Rodriguez’s ribs on what would have been ball four, I was ready to write the post. Good for Dempster, I thought, making a statement for all the players who deplore steroids and the cheats who use them and for all the fans who feel that sociopathic, lying, greedy players who have debased the greatest game on earth with their use of PEDs. I continued to think that even after the Red Sox lost last night’s game against the Yankees, in no small part because Dempster put the Yankee third baseman, who continues to play while he appeals Major League Baseball’s suspension of him for this season and next, on base.

I was not, however, thinking clearly or ethically at the time.

Now, I am. Continue reading →

Ethics Corrupter: Yankee Third Baseman Alex Rodriquez; Ethics Dunce: Yankee Manager Joe Girardi; Disgraced: The New York Yankees

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments
Corrupted!

Corrupted!

Today, Major League Baseball announced that it was suspending Alex Rodriquez, the New York Yankees aging superstar, for the remainder of the 2013 season and the 2014 season for  using banned performance enhancing drugs, and impeding baseball’s investigation of his cheating. This was the climax (but not the end) of a long, drawn out, messy process and investigation involving a sleazy Miami drug lab, called Biogenesis, now closed down, which had records indicating that many professional baseball players had obtained banned substances.

Former National League MVP Ryan Braun (who I keep calling “Steve”) has already been banned for the rest of the year by the evidence obtained from Biogenesis records. The process has been marred by serial leaks from MLB  (unfair to the players involved, including Rodriquez) and ugly maneuvering between Rodriguez, who has been recovering from a serious hip issue, and the Yankees, who owe him approximately a gazillion dollars (thanks to an idiotic career contract signed in 2007 after he had already admitted to using steroids once), would like nothing more than for him to vanish in a puff of smoke and sulfur.

To explain the baroque ins and outs of baseball’s steroid wars, its player union relations, and the various intersecting agreements, special clauses and other things that have an impact on Rodriquez’s suspension would take too long here and would even bore the baseball fans. What you need to know now is this: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The “Breastaurants”

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

Playboy bunnies

All right, class…put away your books.

This quiz will count toward your final grade in Ethics 101.

Please watch the following video…about the growing culinary trend of so-called “breastaurants,” Hooters wannabe establishments that sell food service and ogling rights.

Now here is your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for today, a multiple choice. Choose as many of the following to describe the trend as you feel is appropriate:

a. This is entertainment, that’s all. Nothing ethically or culturally objectionable at all.

 

b. If you thought Playboy Clubs and their “Bunnies” were sexist and demeaning to women, you can’t regard these places as harmless. Same thing, different packages, and more unethical now than then, because we supposed  have learned since then.

 

c. It’s legal and nobody is making the women do anything they don’t want to do. There’s no offense here. If you don’t like it, don’t eat there.

 

d. Women desperate for a job in a bad market are being forced to debase themselves. They are victims of exploitation and sexism, that is wrong, and anyone who patronizes such a place is encouraging and endorsing unethical conduct.

 

e.  The very existence of these establishments encourages sexual harassment and discrimination. There is way to legally prevent them, but no ethical person would own or operate such a place.

 

f. The “Breastaurants” encourage attitudes and conduct that society is trying to discourage, disapprove, and eliminate. They are ethics corrupters.

 

g. Allowing children in these places is irresponsible.

 

h. Voluntarily patronizing any of these places is unethical, as it encourages damaging attitudes toward women.

 

i. All those cheap breast double-entendres in the ABC story were unprofessional and sleazy.

 

j. Oh, lighten up! Look at movies. Look at TV. Look at cheerleaders. Look at how high school children dress. It’s just sex, that’s all. Weenie!

 

k. ARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Good luck.

—————————————————

Facts:ABC

Graphic: Betseyj

Ethics Catch-Up: The Revolting Hillary Clinton Testimony

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
No wonder she's laughing.

No wonder she’s laughing.

I know I neglected my duty to highlight a truly nauseating example of American political shams at their worst with last week’s dual appearances by outgoing Sec. of State Hillary Clinton on the Hill, where she was ostensibly going to inform Americans what really happened in Benghazi, and why. I apologize. I was preoccupied with the earth-shattering matter of  Beyonce’s lip-syncing, and also, I admit, was having a hard time enduring both Lance Armstrong’s act and a Clinton performance in such close proximity. I’m only human, after all. Still, I need to go back a week and examine, if briefly, the ethics stinker that was Hillary on the Hill:

1. Members of this administration keep using the word “responsibility,” but to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I don’t think the word means what they think it does. Clinton had stated unequivocally that she “accepted full responsibility” for the Benghazi tragedy in October, reiterated that statement last week, and then repeatedly shifted the blame to others or otherwise denied responsibility. She wasn’t responsible for the decisions regarding security, she said. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know about cables from Ambassador Stevens’ a month earlier requesting more protection, because “1.43 million cables come to my office. They’re all addressed to me.” Well, who’s “responsible” for a system in which urgent, perhaps life and death messages not addressed to the Secretary of State never reach her desk? She blamed a lack of funding ( a claim that appears to be untrue) was also responsible for the tragedy, and naturally, she can’t be held responsible for that. Clinton’s definition of “responsibility” reveals itself during her testimony as meaning responsible for fixing the problems and systemic failures that led to the deaths of the four Americans, but not really accepting responsibility for what happened–responsibility, in other words, without accountability. Continue reading →

Hyundai: Ethics Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

As we try to build an ethical culture, it doesn’t help to have amoral corporations employing ethics-challenged advertising flacks to send America toxic messages about honesty and trust. Hyundai, in its campaign for the 2013 Santa Fe, represents family members keeping secrets from each other and parents enlisting their children as accomplices in lies as funny, normal and cute. “Don’t tell mom,” a father orders, in the midst of a movie that will give his young children nightmares, and other misadventures (including one incident of father-led vandalism.). “Don’t tell Dad,” says Mom, after taking her son parasailing. I’m presuming she’ll have to tell him when her son breaks his neck on their next flight. Continue reading →

The Ethics Corrupter-In-Chief

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I wanted to stay far, far away from commenting on the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, because I knew that the double standard of media scrutiny of the deceit and dishonesty there ( in contrast to the media’s adversary stance during the Republican convention) would drive me to drink if I thought about it long enough to write coherently. And so I shall stay away, except for this one infuriating topic, which is broader and more significant than the convention itself.

No political party that cares sufficiently about the ethical values of integrity and honesty, as well as responsible leadership, would feature Bill Clinton as its “rock star” speaker. That the Democrats did, and that the media and the public generally gave them a pass for doing so, confirms that Clinton’s corrupting influence on the American culture continues. Recent polls indicate that he is the most popular political figure in the country today, and Democrats will no doubt cite that as justification for inviting him to speak. To the contrary, it shows the damage that he has done to the values of the nation, and how wrong the Democratic party has been to aid and abet that damage.

Bill gave a good speech, as he usually does. There is no way to know how much of it he believes or meant, for Clinton is a recreational liar: he likes lying. He’s good at it, and he does it at every opportunity. In 2008, on The Ethics Scoreboard, the slower and more formal predecessor to this blog, I made Clinton the first (and as it turned out, sole) admittee to the David Manning Liar of the Month Hall of Fame, writing in part that… Continue reading →

Unethical Ethics: How Business and Government Encourage Unethical Thinking In Their Ethics Training

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Show us the way, O Wise and Ethical One!

Jack Abramoff, the corrupt lobbyist turned federal prisoner, then author and now ethics expert, will be giving a lecture on government and personal ethics at The University of Texas at Austin’s business school on May 2. This is not as unusual as it seems. My biggest competitors are felons and disbarred lawyers—they literally step right out of professional disgrace, and sometimes jail, into the lecture circuit. They are draws, and in a field like ethics, which is often prescribed as substitute for barbiturates, this is irresistible to professional development programmers and conference organizers. It also attracts the participants that most need real ethics training, but who seek what these fake ethics presenter usually have to offer:  real life-based advice on what you can’t get away with. This lesson has about as much to do with ethics as it does with Parcheesi, but unfortunately, that’s what is generally regarded as practical ethics.

Characters like Abramoff don’t have ethics alarms; they have survival alarms.  Business schools, politicians and the media still believe that aiming reforms at those alarms, in the form of tougher rules and enforcement, will make business and government more ethical. Think about it: the cultures will still be unethical; the people in them will be just as unethical, but because proven scofflaws and ethics corrupters like  Jack Abramoff will explain where they went wrong, all these people with dead ethics alarms, further deadened by absorbing  the wisdom of the most corrupt of a corrupt breed, will stop behaving unethically.

Good plan. Continue reading →

Sexual Predator Teachers: 1) Not Funny 2) Epidemic 3) Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Child rapist teachers! LOL!

Two nights ago, Tonight Show host Jay Leno included in his monologue a joke about Christine McCallum, the Brockton, Mass. teacher convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old boy over 300 times. Jay can make jokes about whatever he wants, but the fact that we are laughing about this kind of conduct by teachers rather than asking hard questions and insisting on some accountability for the schools shows how tolerant our society is of a supposedly essential institution and a once respectable profession that have both fallen into rot and ruin.

In 1996, when Mary Kay LeTourneau was revealed to have made an undereage student her lover and fathered a child by him, it was national news. For me, it was the first I had ever heard of a teacher abusing her power and profession to that extent. This month alone, March 2012, I have counted thirteen such cases making the local news across the country, including McCallum, and I’m sure I missed some. I’m also reasonably sure that for every one of these cases that get prosecuted, many more are covered up or never discovered at all. Continue reading →

JFK, Ethics Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

The new memoir by Mimi Alford, the former White House intern whom President Kennedy made his sex toy (though not his only one), hardly comes as a surprise to anyone who didn’t accept the fabricated, idealized version of JFK sold to the public by the likes of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Chris Matthews. Still, her account of Kennedy’s revolting conduct is infuriating, because it continues his corruption of American ethics and leadership standards, the real legacy of his presidency.

Kennedy was a thoroughly fraudulent human being, a cynical and arrogant leader who used soaring prose about freedom, aspiration and the human spirit while masquerading as a devoted father and husband, betraying his wife, abusing his power for selfish personal gratification, and in the process, putting his country at risk during the height of the Cold War. Only moral luck, combined with the failure of a complicit media to tell the public what they really had a right to know—that their President was a sexist, reckless, ruthless, SOB—allowed Kennedy to escape with his myth intact long enough to be regarded as a heroic figure. Now, as the truth relentlessly emerges, the product of his devoted image-makers collides with the ugliness of JFK’s behavior, creating cognitive dissonance of the most destructive sort.  After all, if the great John F. Kennedy abused drugs in the White House, used his office and power to lure employees into illicit sexual relationships, degraded and pimped-out women devoted to him, and did all of this with the full knowledge that it would bring down his administration and his party if anyone ever revealed his secrets, then this must mean that character doesn’t matter in our leaders, that we should tolerate a wide range of misconduct, and that the abuse of the power of the President is just a traditional perk. Continue reading →