greed

“Welcome to AshleyMadison Stadium!”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In an inspired bit of P.R. wizardry, the adultery-facilitating website AshleyMadison.com has made a serious bid for “naming rights” for New Meadowlands Stadium, the just-completed new home of the N.F.L.’s Jets and Giants. The site’s founder, Noel Biderman, has sent a letter to the CEO of New Meadowlands stating that they “are prepared to make a preliminary offer … of $25,000,000 for the Naming Rights for a five-year term” and would match any higher offer by other parties.

The N.F.L. isn’t going to let one of its stadiums be named after an adultery website, as Biderman well knows. But maybe Biderman has done the N.F.L. a favor by slapping it across the face and giving it a chance to avoid the venal, values-abandoning path that Major League Baseball adopted more than a decade ago when it allowed teams to sell naming rights of its new parks and stadiums to the highest corporate bidder, turning venues for classic sporting contest into billboard for banks, fly-by-night dotcoms and worse. Continue reading →

“Google Tried to Kill Me!”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Personal injury lawyers, along with their close trial lawyer cousins, the medical malpractice and product liability lawyers, have an unjust reputation. The American tort system is the fairest in the world, and the work of trial lawyers saves lives while it is getting compensation and damages for people who have been injured by the careless, negligent, reckless or malicious acts of others.

Unfortunately, rare cases like that of Lauren Rosenberg overshadow all of this, which is just one of the reasons her lawsuit against Google is objectionable. When you walk down the middle of a highway and get hit by a car, you may have some justification for suing the driver of the car. But suing the website that suggested that you walk on the road? That’s the theory of Laura and her lawyer. According to PC World, Rosenberg was trying to get from 96 Daly Street, Park City, Utah, to 1710 Prospector Avenue, Park City, Utah, and looked up the walking directions on her Blackberry using Google Maps . Google suggested a half-mile walk down “Deer Valley Drive,”  also known as “Utah State Route 224,” which should have been a clue. But Google-trusting Laura started walking down the middle of the highway, and sure enough,  a car hit her.  Her complaint says: 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 →

CBS: Nostalgia Spoilsport

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

For many years, I’ve been trying to track down a recording of the theme song from the wonderful 1963-64 TV anthology “The Great Adventure.” A critically praised, largely forgotten dramatic series that portrayed stories from American history, “The Great Adventure” began with a spirited march written by composer Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein fame.

Now I can play the show’s intro on my computer any time I feel like being inspired, thanks to a wonderful web resource, televisiontunes.com. The site has collected over 15,000 songs and instrumental pieces from the entire expanse of television history, and it is a magic doorway to instant nostalgia, not to mention some fun and excellent music, like the Rodgers composition, that is difficult to find anywhere else. Want to hear, for example, “Interjections!”, the cleverest and catchiest of all ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” creations? It’s there…or rather, here.

But if you want to listen to the “Twilight Zone” theme, or the iconic intro to “Perry Mason,” or, most tragically of all, the opening strains of “Hawaii Five-O,” perhaps the best TV theme ever, you are out of luck. You are out of luck because CBS, alone among the networks, has had its lawyers start pulling off the best-known themes from the CBS shows, as is CBS’s right as the owners of them. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: Eater.com

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I would not have been able to resist giving the the Unethical Website title to Gizmodo [see previous post] unless there was a more typical candidate (as in “not criminal”) available. Thanks to a tip from Ethics Alarms quote-maven Tom Fuller, I give you Eater.com. It hasn’t stolen anything. It just sold out the interest of its own readers—lovers of fine foods and patrons of excellent restaurants—for a splashy feature destined to attract a flood of traffic, and to stick a knife in the backs of its competition. Continue reading →

Gizmodo and Gawker: Guilty, Greedy, and Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Count Ethics Alarms with those who hope Gawker and its affiliated gadget site Gizmodo get as many books thrown at them as possible if the iPhone theft case gets to court.

As is always the case with Gawker, a completely ethics-free operation that has snickered about its participation in other outrages—such as its “Gawker Stalker” feature allowing people to alert the world to the exact location of any celebrity who is out, you know, trying to live—the sites management is crowing about doing wrong. “Yes, we’re proud practitioners of checkbook journalism,” tweeted Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media. “Anything for the story!” Anything including fencing stolen goods, it seems. Nicely, the law often has a way of making unethical people wish they were more ethical, and this should be an example of that.

If you have somehow missed the story all the gadget geeks are tweeting about, Gawker released a scoop photo spread on Apple’s yet-to-be-released iPhone after an Apple engineer stupidly, carelessly and unethically left a prototype that he was entrusted with in a bar. It was found by someone who understood its value and who it belonged to, and who also had no more scruples than, well, Gawker. That meant that this California law applied… Continue reading →

When Blind Justice Blinds Love: the Saga of the Gambling Grannies

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I’m sure you, like me, are eagerly anticipating the resolution of the case in New Britain Connecticut, in which one elderly sister is suing the other for a share of a 2005 Powerball jackpot of a half million dollars. The result, however, will be determined by technical legal issues, such as whether thee was there a valid contract between the sisters to split all gambling winnings, as the suing sis insists. There has already been one interesting wrinkle: gambling contracts are typically unenforceable, and so was this one until it applied to Powerball, which is state lottery and therefore, unlike other gambling in Connecticut, legal…just one more little bonus from of state governments taking over the numbers racket.

Yet the more important question, for those of us other than the sisters, Rose Bakaysa and her younger sister Theresa Sokaitis, is why some application of ethical values didn’t stop the lawsuit from getting to court. The situation is this: Rose and Theresa were always close,  and in their retirement, the two began gambling regularly, taking trips to casinos and playing the lottery. They made a deal, years ago (Rose is 87 and Theresa is 84) that if either of them won anything, they would split it 50-50.

In 2004, right before Rose hit the jackpot, the sisters had an argument over–what else?—some money, and stopped speaking to each other. Rose tore up the notorized contract, but Theresa kept it safe, just in case. This is why they are in court. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce Revisted: Jay McGwire

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

About a year ago, over on the Ethics Scoreboard, I made former baseball slugger Mark McGwire’s brother, Jay McGwire, an Ethics Dunce. At that time Mark McGwire was still mum about his widely-suspected steroid use, and his brother was  peddling a book proposal that supposedly exposed his home run-hitting bro’s cheating ways. I then wrote…

“… Brother Jay says he has written the book “out of love” for his brother, who no longer sees, speaks to him, nor, presumably, gives him hand-outs. Right. Jay McGwire is selling out his brother for cash. This is not a courageous whistleblower alerting a company to crime in its ranks. This is not a family member doing the right thing by refusing to help a parent, sibling, or offspring get away with child abuse, treason, fraud or murder. There is nothing admirable, selfless or courageous here. Jay McGwire wants money, and he is willing to embarrass and exploit his brother to get it.” Continue reading →

An Unethical Ethics Conference

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Fourth International Legal Ethics Conference at Stanford Law School has lined up  over 100 speakers. It is giving them no honorarium, hotel, meals or travel expenses, and despite the fact that they are providing the content and attraction for the event, the Conference still requires them to pay  registration fee of $350. Stanford is also charging its students a registration fee to attend, generously reduced to “only” $250.  But the conference can afford to be so generous, because it will also be getting registration fees from lawyers who are required to fulfill bar-mandated Continuing Legal Education requirements.

I have argued, and behavioral science suggests, that thinking about ethics helps one’s ethics alarms work well and often. The Stanford Conference suggests that either this is not as certain as I believed, or that the people running the ethics conference don’t actually think about ethics, which, if true, adds fraud to their list of ethical outrages.

The unfair and irresponsible requirements of the Stanford event has prompted least one prominent legal ethicist, Prof Monroe Freedman, to abandon plans to attend, saying, “I’m a card-carrying capitalist, but this kind of exploitation in the name of ethics could turn me into a Marxist, or a cynic.”

We should be concerned about a culture whose those in the ethics business are increasingly unethical. The sad lesson seems to be that when there is a conflict between commerce and ethics, commerce wins.

Michael Steele: G.O.P. Ethics as Usual

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It wasn’t George Bush, the Iraq War, John McCain or even the economy that made the GOP a minority party. It was arrogance, corruption and sliminess. The smug Machiavellian tactics of Tom DeLay; the just-look-the-other-way tolerance for the Mark Foleys and the Duke Cunninghams;  the hypocrisy of Bill Frist and Ralph Reed; the widespread affection for crooked lobbyists like Jack Abramoff; the Bizarro World ethics of Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez…the bottom line was that you just couldn’t trust these people not to lie, sell favors, abuse their power, or dive head first into conflicts of interest. Continue reading →