pay-offs

Ethics Q & A On Obama’s Speaking Fees

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Former President Barack Obama received a $400,000 speaking fee for an appearance at an A&E Network event  yesterday, just as controversy was building over Obama accepting the same fee to appear at a Wall Street firm’s conference.

What’s going on here?

The ex-President is cashing in, that’s what’s going on here. This has become standard operating procedure for former POTUSes, beginning with Gerald Ford, who was showered with criticism by Democrats and the news media for signing with the William Morris agency and picking up what was at the time considered obscene speaking fees from corporations and foreign governments. Ford’s fees are dwarfed by Obama’s, but then Barack is a much better speaker than the late President Ford was. (Almost anyone is.)

Jimmy Carter showed admirable restraint by not devoting his post-Presidency to enriching himself off of his years in office, but Ronald Reagan took some mega-fees to speak abroad. The Clintons, as we know too well, instantly went from rags to riches by selling their celebrity, an exercise that was especially dubious because Hillary was on the rise. Obama’s speaking fees are just one more step along the cashing-in path that both he and Michelle had already begun traveling with the astounding 65 million dollar deal the couple signed to write their biographies.

Some questions and answers on the ethics of Obama’s payday:

1.  Is Obama ‘s acceptance of all this money ethical?

In a vacuum, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t. He set a fee, and someone is willing to pay it. Hillary’s fee was $250,000; if she can get that much for her dry-as-toast delivery as a former Senator, Secretary of State and First Lady, Obama’s a bargain at $400,000. As a private citizen, he has the same right any of us do to sell his books and speeches at whatever the market will bear.

I, for example, get $37.56 for an hour long speech, and am glad to get it..

2. But it isn’t in a vacuum, right?

Right. Obama still has power and influence; he still promises to be a voice in the Democratic party. He’s not exactly a private citizen, and no ex-President is. Taking such a large payment from a Wall Street firm, after all of Obama’s rhetoric (and that of Bernie Sanders, the non-Democrat now being paraded as a leader of the Democratic party) condemning Wall Street has the decided whiff of hypocrisy about it. Not only, that, but as with Hillary Clinton and Bill, the payment of such jaw-dropping amounts for minimal service natural raises questions of pay-offs. Obama’s administration famously sought no criminal sanctions for Wall Street executives despite their  role in what Obama called “driving the economy into a ditch.” How do we know this wasn’t part of an installment payment to Obama for services already rendered, a quid pro quo? We don’t.

It is also hard to make sense out of those fees if they aren’t paying for something more than an hour long speech.

3. So these fees create “the appearance of impropriety?” Continue reading →

Trump’s First Hire—And Already An Ethics Breach!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
Hmmmmmm...

Hmmmmmm…

From NBC:

Donald Trump Names RNC Chair Reince Priebus Chief of Staff: Sources

It looks like a pay-off to me. This is why “the appearance of impropriety” needs to be avoided at all levels of government.

Priebus, of course, was the Republican National Committee chair who blocked any organized effort to refuse Trump the GOP nomination, as a responsible party was obligated to do. That might have been a principled, if wrong, independent decision on his part, or it could have been a deal. After all, Hillary Clinton immediately hired deposed DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after it was revealed that she was unethically assisting Clinton’s nomination efforts. When she was put on Clinton’s staff, it was widely interpreted as a pay-off for Wasserman Schultz putting Clinton’s ambitions ahead of her duty to the nation and the party. How is Trump hiring Priebus any less suspicious?

For my part, I couldn’t understand why Priebus didn’t lead the party to reject Trump on several occasions.  Now, maybe I know the answer.

Priebus is a lawyer, and a professional Republican. He’s from Wisconsin, and presumably close to Speaker Paul Ryan. He’s never held elected office. Does he have the strength to say “no” to Donald Trump? Very doubtful. Trump needs a strong Chief of Staff, not a toady.

On the optimistic side, Priebus is a great improvement over some of the really vile characters in his inner circle, like this guy, the slimy Roger Stone, Omarosa, or Corey Lewandowki.  He’s also far from as diabolical as some of the Clinton acolytes, like John Podesta. He’s not H.R. Haldeman, Don Regan, John Sununu or Rahm Emanuel. Priebus is a standard issue Republican political insider. It could be worse.

That’s not much consolation though. The raw fact is that right out of the gate, Trump is showing complete disregard for for ethics,and that erodes trust. He doesn’t that much trust to erode.

I wonder if Trump has an ethics advisor.

I doubt it.

Oh…I should mention that the fact that Trump won and somehow managed to spearhead an astounding GOP top-to-bottom romp over the Democrats, leaving that party is disarray, doesn’t alter the verdict that the Republicans should have rejected Trump. It was an unethical decision not to, and at least in the short term, it worked, if you call making someone like Donald Trump President of the U.S. “working.” It was moral luck, that’s all.

Selfie Ethics: Yes, Big Papi Exploited The President

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Ortiz-Obama-Selfie.jpg

I wrote about this ethical breach when Ellen DeGeneris did it at the Oscars. The short version is this:

“It’s unethical to pretend that a selfie is a spontaneous  gesture of fun and friendship when you have a commercial agreement in place to use the photograph in a way that promotes the cell phone manufacturer.”

This is exploitation for commercial gain, and it’s wrong. It’s wrong when the victims are movie stars, and it’s wrong when the exploited party is President of the United States. Continue reading →

Darling Ellen’s Deceptive Tweet For Samsung

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Taken completely spontaneously using a

Taken completely spontaneously using a Galaxy S5 by Samsung. Get yours today!

Ellen DeGeneris is adorable, and as ideal a public face to place on the image of gay acceptance and same-sex marriage as you could concoct in a marketing strategy meeting. She’s funny, she’s friendly, she’s nice: to be threatened in any way by Ellen is to be the epitome of an irrational homophobe.. Her accumulated good  largely insulated her from the negative criticism she earned with a shockingly inept performance as this year’s host of the Academy Awards ceremony. She didn’t exactly make one long for Seth (“We saw your boobs!”) McFarland, last year’s oppressive MC,but watching her—any experienced performer could see the signs of a comic who knew she was bombing and had no idea what to do about it—was uncomfortable when it wasn’t deadly boring.

The one routine that seemed successful was DeGeneris’s successful effort to create the “most re-tweeted tweet of all time,” which she accomplished by dragooning Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence  Lupita Nyong’o, Kevin Spacey and Jared Leto in to take a selfie with her. It garnered over 3 million retweets at last count. But it was a set-up. This was not just a fun party stunt with friends, which is how it was represented to the audience and indeed to the stars themselves. No, the selfie was part of a very pricey deal between the Academy and Samsung, which sells the recently enhanced Galaxy S5 Ellen used to take the picture.

From the Wall Street Journal: Continue reading →

Ethics Tales Of Three Governors, As Hope Slowly Dwindles

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

McAuliffe-Christie-Cuomo

The U.S.’s recent experiment with a Senator-President has been disheartening—persuasive words unhinged to action and actual principles. There was a remarkable example of this in the President’s NSA speech, in fact, in a quote that would have been the Ethics Quote of the Month had it not been so cynical coming from him. The President said…

“Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those in power.”

Wonderful! If only this had been uttered by a leader with credibility and integrity, rather than one who has shrugged off, firing no one, interference with the federal election process by the IRS, illegal spying by the NSA, and the intentional facilitation of illegal firearms coming into the murderous hands of drug cartels by his Justice Department, after bombing Libya illegally in defiance of law, selectively enforcing immigration laws, using drones to kill American citizens abroad without due process, making recess appointments when the Senate wasn’t in recess, and more recently, unconstitutionally amending the ACA on his own after it was signed into law.

This was all foretold, however. Community organizers and senators make speeches and inspire people, but unfortunately seldom have a clue how to actually govern unless, as Obama himself has wistfully noted, they have absolute power. This is why, in theory, at least, state governors, who at least have experience governing, now seem like a better recruitment field for the next occupant of the Oval Office. It sounds good in the abstract, but the recent news from the state houses  is like ice water in the face—-

Conflict of Interest, Lack of Integrity, Appearance of Impropriety…Other Than That, Gov. Walker, It’s A Great Hire!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

"Why, no, his father's financial support played absolutely no part in his landing this plum job...I mean, just LOOK at him! He blew the competition away!"

Politics involves deals and trade-offs, quid pro quos and mutual back-scratching. The trick is to be a politician without undermining the public trust, and using those deals to benefit, not harm, the public interest. That means that certain deals, even relatively typical ones, may be unforgivable under certain circumstances. A prime example: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s hiring of Brian Deschane to oversee environmental and regulatory matters and a large staff at the Wisconsin Department of Commerce. Continue reading →

Eroding Public Trust: Obama and General Electric’s “Appearance of Impropriety”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The fact that an official act appears to be sensible and fair does not necessarily mean that it is ethical.

Consider the EPA’s waiver of the new global warming regulations for a stalled power plant project in California. Officials reviewed EPA policies and decided it was appropriate to “grandfather” projects such as the Avenal Power Center, a proposed 600-megawatt power plant in the San Joaquin Valley, and thus exempt them from new federal limits on greenhouse gases and conventional air pollution. The Avenal Energy project, explains Environment and Energy News, is a combined-cycle generating plant consisting of two natural gas-fired General Electric 7FA Gas Turbines with Heat Recovery Steam Generators (HRSG) and one General Electric Steam Turbine.

Translation: It is a huge G.E. contract.

Hmmmm. Continue reading →