fairness

Pop Ethics Quiz: Showdown At Starbucks

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Florida Governor Rick Scott just wanted to get a cup of coffee during a visit to a Starbucks in downtown Gainesville, but instead was ambushed by former Lake Worth City Commissioner Cara Jennings, who was already at a table, just by coincidence, of course.

“You cut Medicaid so I couldn’t get Obamacare,” she yelled at Scott, as a man who, also by coincidence, happened to have a political YouTube channel and just happened to be ready with his camera recorded everything to post online. “You’re an asshole. You don’t care about working people. You should be ashamed to show your face around here.”

The surprised Governor retorted  that he had created a million jobs, and his tormenter mocked,“A million jobs? Great, who here has a great job? I was looking forward to finishing school. You really feel you have a job coming up?”

“Shame on you Rick Scott,” she added. “We depend on those services. Rich people like you don’t know what to do.”

Scott left without his coffee.

Now quick, in three seconds: what was the most unethical conduct on display here?

I have checked the comment threads in conservative and left-leaning blogs and news sources, and no commenter has mentioned it. Continue reading →

HUD: Landlords Beware! Not Renting To Criminals Is Presumptively Racist

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
More Bizarro World reasoning from The Obama Administration...

More Bizarro World reasoning from the Obama Administration…

The disparate impact doctrine is unfair and illogical, as well as destructive. It has been used to invalidate exams for professional advancement that result in a racial imbalance in police force brass, for example, even when no actual discriminatory practices have been identified. It has been used to eliminate school discipline for classroom disruptions, because more black students than white students are being suspended, even though no bias has been shown in enforcement. Disparate impact has allowed incompetent teachers to keep teaching, and recently, its has become an rationale  for not imprisoning convicted felons, because the current prison population is disproportionately black.

The Obama administration, being addicted to a race-biased view of American society in which all, or almost all, problems within the black community are ascribed to forces outside that community’s control, now has decreed that landlords risk federal investigations if they reject rental applicants based on the applicant’s undisputed criminal record. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s newly-released guidelines state…

“The Fair Housing Act prohibits both intentional housing discrimination and housing practices that have an unjustified discriminatory effect because of race, national origin, or other protected characteristics. Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African-Americans and Hispanics. While the Act does not prohibit housing providers from appropriately considering criminal history information when making housing decisions, arbitrary and overbroad criminal history-related bans are likely to lack a legally sufficient justification.”

Sinister as this is, I’m sure it is sincere. The Obama Administration, obviously programed by the man who bears its name, is consumed by a bias in favor of non-whites, based on the assumption that they are inevitably victimized in U.S. society. Disparate impact could be properly used as a clue to uncovering actual bias and discrimination, but the presumption that disparate impact must be based on bias is itself a bias, and leads to intrusive and unfair regulations and  Big Brother-style “Be Careful! We’re Watching!” warnings like this one. Continue reading →

Unethical Website Of The Month: “Vote Trump Get Dumped”

/ Jack Marshall / 123 Comments

 

votetrumpgetdumped

Ugh.

See, ladies, “Lysistrata” was a satire, and its charms and political wisdom have long escaped me anyway. Threatening to withhold sex to force men to vote for who you want is neither fair, smart or democratic, and is exactly as ethical as trading sex for votes, which is a particularly weird form of prostitution.

Today’s unethical website calls itself “Vote Trump Get Dumped,” and it argues…

Those who vote Trump should understand this: No sex. No dates. No chance.

To cast a vote for Trump is to agree with his sexist, perverted, demeaning, backwards, offensive treatment of women. Learn what’s at stake.

Join us by wielding your influence. Until Trump is defeated, we don’t date, sleep with, or canoodle with Trump supporters.

The Greeks did it. Women during the temperance movement did it. This is a tried and true method of getting men’s attention when they’re being dumb.

Actually the Greeks didn’t do it, it’s not “tried and true,” and it is itself dumb, as well as undemocratic. Citizens have the right to vote as they see fit, badly reasoned or not. Using any form of coercion to take away what should be a free choice is irresponsible, disrespectful and unfair, not to mention a breach of democratic principles and process.

This kind of divisive political tactic, punishing citizens for their political views, tears at the fabric of society and threatens human relationships and communities. It is akin to bars that only serve Republicans,  Facebook users who defriend Hillary supporters, and mayors who set out to punish states that pass laws they don’t agree with.

Our political choices, like our sexual choices, should not be subject to extortion and coercion. The Golden Rule applies.

__________________

Pointer: Fred

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

hedge funds

Among her almost infinite flaws, Hillary Clinton is stunningly lacking in self awareness, and her statements often—astoundingly often—point to her own misconduct and ethical bankruptcy without her comprehending the self-indictment. She has tweeted, more than once, this sentiment, for example:

“To every survivor of sexual assault…You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We’re with you.”

…though Hillary was emphatically not “with” the women who credibly accused her husband of sexual assault, and still do. She will make statements to one group that are the exact opposite of what she recently said to another group, without batting an eye. Hillary actually committed the meta-lie of saying she never has lied, which is manifestly unbelievable. Then there was this Titanic-style gaffe…

“There should be no bank too big to fail and no individual too big to jail.”

…coming from someone who is, many legal experts believe, not already under indictment purely because she is “too big to jail.” (and then there is hubby Bill, who engaged in flat-out illegal election conduct in Massachusetts that you or I would have been arrested for, and didn’t even get a rap on the wrists.) Neither Clinton has any integrity at all, or shame either. It’s really quite stunning.

Last week, Hillary tweeted this howler:

Hillary Tweet 1

This is an example of a politician intentionally playing to class divisions, ignorance and bias, and worse, encouraging them. It is exactly like saying that it is “unacceptable” that Jimmy Fallon, who only hosts a silly late night show, makes more money than any cancer surgeon, special needs teacher or EMT alive. In some ways it is worse, because most people understand what those jobs are, and may  sort of comprehend the economic principles at work: if Jimmy Fallon drops dead, there is no replacement who will bring to the job exactly what Jimmy Fallon did. He is a unique commodity, and EMT’s are not. The statement is just an emotional attack on the fact that people value laughing over things that are objectively more practical, and entertainment salaries reflect that. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Salon And Old Donald Trump Date Lucy Klebanow

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Stop picking on this guy. He vanished long ago.

Stop picking on this guy. He vanished long ago.

I’m not even going to quote from the lower-than-low-blow kiss-and-tell article by Lucy Klebanow in in Salon titled “My awful date with Donald Trump: The real story of a nightmare evening with a callow but cash-less heir.” I couldn’t finish reading it, so quickly was it apparently that I, like you, didn’t need to start, so self-evidently unethical and inexcusable was its motive and topic.  There is nothing newsworthy within it, and while its unjustifiable incursion into the area of privacy that every human being, even celebrities, have a right to enjoy isn’t quite at the Hulk Hogan sex tape level, it is no less wrong.

This same, mean-spirited, essay could be written about me, or you, and definitely about Lucy Klebanow, by anyone who happened to have a one-time social encounter with us that didn’t show us at our best. What has Donald Trump done to exempt him from the basic human courtesy of keeping the details of such inevitable social disasters on the way to maturity and wisdom between the two participants? Nothing. Nothing, because nothing, not even Trump’s own indiscretions about others, can do this. The Golden Rule applies here like epoxy: we don’t do this disgusting thing, because nobody wants their own repulsed bad dates to do it to them. It’s a terrible thing to do. To anyone. Period. No exceptions. Continue reading →

Justice vs. Process: The Case Of The Final, Mandatory, Unjust Sentence

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

African American in Prison

A full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, fifteen judges in all, heard arguments this week  regarding whether they have the power to do anything about Raymond Surratt Jr.’s mandatory life sentence, which just about everybody—-the sentencing judge, Surratt’s defense lawyers and government prosecutors—agrees is unjust.

Until the Surratt case, no federal appellate court has faced the question of  whether a court it has a route to correcting a mistake of its own making when the error is as severe as a mandatory life sentence. The North Carolina father of two is incarcerated at a federal facility in Virginia for a 2005 cocaine conviction. If Surratt were sentenced today, he would face a mandatory minimum penalty of only ten years in prison. If he had been sentenced under current laws in 2005 rather than the laws then in effect, he would be out of jail by now.

Surratt pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiring to distribute at least 50 grams of cocaine in western North Carolina. The judge said he had no choice under sentencing guidelines other than  to give him a mandatory life sentence because of Surratt’s earlier drug convictions. The judge called the penalty “undeserved and unjust.”

The conviction and sentence were upheld after Surratt’s  appeals. Now he has no appeals left. But in 2011, the 4th Circuit, which includes North Carolina, overruled past practice, meaning that it held that prior convictions as in Surratt’s case should not trigger a mandatory life term.

Now, I know that non-lawyers react to this by thinking, “So what’s the problem? Let him out!” That’s in line with the reaction they have when they hear about a defense lawyer who knows his mad-dog killer defendant is guilty of a heinous, bloody crime (“So tell the judge!”). However, the law can’t be changed on the fly, and the fact that a result may be obviously wrong doesn’t change the importance of addressing it within existing procedures, rules and laws. In this case, no more appeals means no more appeals.

The Surratt case involves the important judicial principle of finality. Prof. Steven H. Goldblatt, who runs Georgetown Law Center’s  appellate litigation clinic, told the court that finality is of vital importance to the legal system. Agreeing, a majority of the Fourth Circuit panel said last year that… Continue reading →

The Great Texas Warrant Roundup

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

debtors prisons

If the news media did their job, somebody would have asked Ted Cruz about this by now.Something like, “Senator, what is your position on the growing use of debtors prisons in your state and other states around the U.S.?”

On March 5th, Texas commenced what is known as the Great Texas Warrant Roundup, an annual statewide collaboration of courts and law enforcement agencies to squeeze payment of overdue fines and fees from Texans. The Texans targeted are overwhelmingly poor citizens who have outstanding warrants for unpaid traffic tickets, many of which were dubious, the product of aggressive policing to meet budget quotas. The carrot is an amnesty period that precedes the “roundup;” the stick is the threat of arrest and jail for those who can’t pay.

In Texas, a ticket for failing to signal a lane change—a favorite way to start the process of bleeding vulnerable citizens to cover city and county budget shortfalls— will cost about $66. That’s just the beginning, though.  Texas adds $103 in court costs, a public defender fee,  a fee to put you on a payment plan if you can’t pay,  and the always versatile “administrative fee.” Writes the ACLU: “For people who are too poor to pay their tickets, that $66 fine can grow to over $500.”

Once the victim can’t pay the collective fines,Texas will suspend renewal of the driver’s license, adding the License Renewal Suspension Fee, another $30.  Now it’s illegal to drive to the work, and without work, it will be impossible to support a family and pay bills. Faced with that dilemma, many citizens drive anyway, and get eventually get pulled over, leading to more tickets, fines, fees…and more debt. Continue reading →

Ethics Lessons And Ethics Dunces: The Two Young Men Who Knocked On My Door

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

missionaries-men-mormon2I was exhausted yesterday after five hours teaching lawyers and accountants about ethics when there was a knock at my door. I could see through the window that the visitors were two young men wearing nametags, holding clipboards, forms and brochures, and I was in no mood for a sales pitch or to being asked to help some Mormons travel to Tangiers. I opened the door prepared to give them the bum’s rush.

They were good, though. Their pitch involved a free estimate and a discount for replacing our home’s casement windows. It was a local business using recent college grads, they explained. I explained in return, curtly, that I wasn’t interested, but they persisted, being personable and low key all the while. I decided that I admired their persistence and interpersonal skills—it helped that my dog liked them–and ultimately I agreed to let them give me an estimate on roof repairs, as our roof had sprung some small leaks and we might even need a new one.

They called their office as I listened and scheduled a free assessment and estimate for today at 10 AM. I gave them my phone numbers. I took their cards. Though I was exhausted and had planned on giving them less than five minutes of my time, I ended up talking to the two for twenty minutes. I felt good about it too: they were just starting out in the workplace jungle, and had done an excellent job. They were personable, professional, and determined, spoke well and had a pleasant demeanor. One was black, the other Hispanic. I thought they had earned some positive reinforcement.

Well, it’s 11: 22 AM the next day, and they haven’t shown up, and haven’t called. When they do, I’m going to tell them that they blew it: I’m not trusting a company that can’t keep its first appointment. I don’t know why they missed their promised time, and I don’t care. The key factor is that they missed it. Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: The Republicans Should Vote On (And Approve) Judge Merrick Garland

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Merrick Garland

For Senate Republicans, holding hearings on President Obama’s qualified and moderate nomination for the Supreme Court is both the ethical course and the politically smart course. It is also in the best interests of the nation.

In fact, the Byzantine political maneuverings by the President and the Republican leadership, by turns petty and ingenious, have handed Republicans a political chess victory, if only they are smart enough, responsible enough, and patriotic enough to grab it. Naturally, they aren’t.

It is infuriating, and all citizens should be infuriated.

A brief review of how we got to this point of looming GOP disgrace is in order:

  • Justice Scalia died, removing a towering conservative force from the Court. This meant that almost any replacement, and definitely one named by Obama, would make the Supreme Court more liberal than it has been in many years.
  • Seizing on the opportunity to make the election a referendum on the composition of the Court (which is was going to be anyway), Mich McConnell announced that no nominee named by Obama, an outgoing POTUS less than a year from leaving office, would be considered by the Senate.
  • Democrats and their allies in the punditry predictably pronounced this to be a breach of Senate duty. Embarrassingly, records surfaced of  Joe Biden asserting the same basic principle that McConnell was arguing for, when Bush was the President. Biden, I must duly note, is an idiot, but he’s still the current Vice President. Then again, all Biden has to do is say now, “I was wrong.” As he frequently is.
  • Though many predicted that Obama would name a transsexual, disabled black Jewish Latino judge with Socialist leanings to maximize the opportunity to politicize the process, he did the opposite. He named a qualified jurist.
  • The judge he named, Merrick Garland, is a white, veteran 63-year-old judge with a distinguished record, nothing flamboyant or controversial, who is as close to a non-ideological, non-partisan moderate as any Democratic President is likely to appoint from now until the stars turn cold.

Now, if Senate Republicans were interested in doing what is in the best interests of the nation—that is,  filling the Supreme Court vacancy as soon as possible, giving proper deference to a responsible and reasonable nomination by the President, avoiding a nasty and divisive partisan fight, and ensuring that the next Supreme Court Justice won’t be an intractable leftist firebrand determined to gut the Constitution or another “wise Latina” mediocrity who will pollute the record with touchy-feely ramblings—they would leap on this opportunity and unanimously confirm Garland, saying publicly that they reconsidered McConnell’s declaration in the interest of restoring the integrity of the nomination process and returning to the time before Democrats politicized the process beyond reason in the Bork hearings, giving the President his choice, regardless of philosophical bent, when the nominee is qualified, dignified, experienced and trustworthy. like Judge Garland Continue reading →

Ethic Quiz: “Springtime For Hitler” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

And speaking of Donald Trump…

In South Orangetown, New York, the school superintendent stepped in and cut the swastikas from Tappan Zee High School’s student production of “The Producers” less than a week before the production. Of course, the Mel Brooks musical satire based on his film “The Producers” employs swastikas on Nazi flags and armbands during its famous campy “Springtime For Hitler” number and at other points in the show. Before someone posted a picture of the swastikas on the stage on a Facebook page, this aspect of “The Producers” had somehow escaped the attention of school administrators.

Some parents were shocked, and complained. After checking out the stage, the superintendent cut the costume details and set dressing.“There is no context in a public high school where a swastika is appropriate,” South Orangetown Superintendent Bob Pritchard told CBS. Pritchard consulted with local rabbis before making his decision.

Rabbis, of course, would be a natural audience for “The Producers.” (Reports that the rabbis suggested a production of “Fiddler on the Roof” instead have not been confirmed.)

Your spring-is-in-the-air Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is this example of school censorship of the performing arts fair, responsible and ethical?

Continue reading →