trust

Teacher Manuael Ernest Dillow: An Ethics Dunce, But, Of Course, An Aberration

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“THIS will teach you lousy kids not to disrupt class….KIDDING!!!”

We don’t have to belabor this one. Manuael Ernest Dillow, a welding teacher at a vocational school in Abingdon, Virginia, wanted to get the attention of his students, so he lined up twelve of them against a wall, took out a pistol, and fired at them multiple times. The gun was loaded with blanks.

Oh! Well that’s all right, then!

This idiot was arrested, and it looks like there is a good chance he’ll get serious jail time. Obviously he is an aberration in the great, essential and honored field of teaching. Continue reading →

The Donald’s Dangerous Ethics: Loyalty Trumps Honesty On “Celebrity Apprentice”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Your ethics ignorance makes me angry, Donald. You won't like me when I'm angry...

The original version of Donald Trump’s self-promoting  reality show competition “The Apprentice” occasionally created a useful business ethics scenario. Once The Donald started using B-list celebrities instead of real aspiring executives, however, the show deteriorated into ego insanity and the kind of freak show conflicts one would expect with participants like Jose Canseco, Joan Rivers and Dennis Rodman.

Surprisingly, last week’s episode blundered into a substantive, if confusing, ethics lesson. It was Donald Trump’s ethical priorities that were exposed, and as should surprise no one, they are as warped as Trump himself.

I can spare you all the details of the episode, which involved the weird assortment of celebs breaking into two teams to see who could devise the better commercial for Entertainment.com, as judged by the website’s execs. As usual, the losing team’s leader and the two team members fingered by her (in this case) had to have a show-down with Trump in “the Board Room” to determine who would be on the receiving end of Trump’s trademark line, “You’re fired!” This time one of the three potential firees was none other that  old Incredible Hulk himself, Lou Ferrigno, who has distinguished himself this season as a perpetual whiner, especially adept at blaming the members of his teams rather than accepting responsibility himself. He was richly deserving of the Trump pink slip in this episode, especially for the over-the-top violent and disparaging language he leveled at a female team mate, comedian Lisa Lampanelli. In the eyes of Trump, however, Lou clinched his demise not by being an unprofessional boor, but by being…honest.

“Who do you think had the better commercial?” Trump asked the former green alter-ego of the late Bill Bixby. It sure didn’t sound like a trick question. Ferrigno responded that the winning team’s commercial was better, an eminently reasonable response given that he and the other two celebrities on the hot seat were there because the commercial they had crafted had been judged as inferior. This, however, was seen by The Donald as a rank betrayal. He fired Lou, in part for his slug-like performance on the assigned task, but mostly, he said, for Ferrigno’s “great disloyalty” to his team.

Whaa? Continue reading →

Mirlande Wilson Is My Favorite Ethics Dunce of All Time!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

When we last left Mirlande Wilson, she was claiming, improbably, that although she had bought Mega Millions lottery tickets for her workplace pool at McDonald’s, the ticket she bought giving her over $250 million in jackpot winnings was hers alone.

This made her an Ethics Alarms Ethics Dunce. Now she says she has lost the ticket. This opens so many possibilities, all with their own ethical implications:

  • She is lying, and never had the ticket, meaning that she is willing to make her co-workers think she cheated them to try to pull off an audacious scam. Dishonest and shameless.
  • She did lose the ticket, but it was the pool ticket, and she is lying about that part of it. In this case, she was spectacularly irresponsible to lose a ticket worth millions to the persons who collectively bought it. And a liar. Dishonest, careless, greedy, irresponsible and untrustworthy.
  • She did buy the ticket with her own money, and did lose it, and is just telling the truth, hoping to get a little sympathy. In that case, she deserves some. But buying a ticket for a mega-jackpot and losing it is still prima facie evidence that you shouldn’t live alone, or be left in the presence of pointy objects. Honest, careless and pathetic.
  • She bought the ticket with the pool’s money, and knows that she won’t find it and can’t get the cash. She’s saying that the lost ticket was hers alone, hoping that her fellow workers won’t feel as terrible as she does, since it would be pretty terrible to gor back to a fast food job when you know you should be joining country clubs. She’s trying to spare them. Yes, that must be it. Noble, kind, and self-sacrificing.
  • She bought the ticket with the pool’s money, and knows that she won’t find it and can’t get the cash. She’s saying that the lost ticket was hers alone, hoping that her fellow workers won’t try to kill her. Irresponsible, careless, dishonest, but understandable.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Senator Vitter Thinks Bribery and Extortion Are Ethical

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"...and U.S. Senators..."

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was initially restricted to a lower salary than other Cabinet members because he was a U.S. Senator when the salaries were raised. The Constitution bars members of the House and Senate from appointment to any U.S. office where compensation was increased during the lawmaker’s term. (Did you know that? I didn’t.)  President George W. Bush in 2008 signed legislation rolling back the Interior Secretary’s salary so that President Obama Salazar could appoint Salazar.

Once Salazar joined the Obama Cabinet, however, he was eligible for a raise. But Senator David Vitter (R-La.) saw a chance for some leverage. He wrote Salazar to inform him that he would place a hold on the bill to raise his salary until Salazar agreed to approve six new deep-water oil drilling permits every month. In effect, Vitter threatened to withhold over $19,000 in salary that Salazar had every right to receive in order to force him to take the actions Vitter favored. How does Vitter’s conduct differ from offering a bribe? No at all, as far as I can see. How does it differ from extortion? Not much. Vitter was trying to force a Cabinet officer make decisions motivated by his own financial interest rather than what he believed was in the best interest of the nation. He was creating an unethical conflict of interest. Continue reading →

It’s You, Keith.

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The news that The Angry Man of the Self-Righteous Left, Keith Olbermann, was fired by Al Gore’s Current TV was hardly news at all, since most of us had entered a pool on when Olbermann would get jettisoned from his latest gig. The predictable episode does have an ethics lesson for all of us, however, that involves the virtues of accountability, humility, honesty and contrition.

Olbermann, true to form, attacked his former employers and blamed them for his exit, writing  via Twitter…

“…I’d like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV. Editorially, Countdown had never been better. But for more than a year I have been imploring Al Gore and Joel Hyatt to resolve our issues internally, while I’ve been not publicizing my complaints, and keeping the show alive for the sake of its loyal viewers and even more loyal staff. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract. It goes almost without saying that the claims against me in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently. To understand Mr. Hyatt’s “values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,” I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain. In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.”

This, of course, is not really an apology. It’s not an apology when your message is, “I’m sorry my employers are unethical slobs who didn’t appreciate the excellent job I was doing.

Keith Olbermann has either been fired or quit under acrimonious circumstances in engagements with, count them, five broadcast organizations: ESPN, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and now Current TV. This, despite being obviously talented and often getting excellent ratings. Olbermann is a smart guy, and yet even now, his reaction seems to be, “Why, oh, why, do people keep treating me so badly?”

It’s you, Keith! Continue reading →

Our Untrusted Professions: Another One Bites The Dust…Or Should.

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Come to think of it, Mr. Gower would have put poison in a boy's medicine if it hadn't been for George Bailey...

America’s trust crisis, which has seen virtually all its institutions decline precipitously in public trust, hasn’t left the professions unscathed. Far from it: Gallups’ annual poll of the public’s regard for the professions, the most recent of which was released last December, showed accountants trusted by only 43% of the public (abysmal for a profession whose only mission is to accurately determine the truth and to relay it—funeral directors are trusted more), journalists at just 26% (which is more than they deserve), bankers at 25%, lawyers at an insulting 19% (for a profession that includes honesty as a core ethical requirement), business executives slightly less at 18% (but no lower than those champions of the 99%, labor leaders, also at 18%). Stockbrokers, who figure to have fallen even lower after Greg Smith’s anti-Goldman Sachs diatribe, came in at a “can’t be trusted to deliver the water bill payment” 12%, and then we’re really in the pits of utter distrust, with lobbyists, used car salesmen, and members of Congress, all tied for last place at 7%.

In contrast, one of the professions that always is on top of the list or near it is pharmacists. In 2011, the friendly neighborhood druggist scored a trust rate of 73%, better than doctors and second only to the perennial champs of the last decade, nurses.

Well, all that trust in pharmacists appears to be misplaced. Continue reading →

A Question For President Obama and His Campaign: Why Lie?

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

I have an iron-clad rule for all Presidents, regardless of party, ideology and political philosophy: Don’t use deception as a tool of governance. I have a related rule for Presidents who get elected by pledging honesty and transparency in government: Especially you!

The President’s health care law, a.k.a. “Obamacare,” whatever its merits, was probably the most dishonestly sold, packaged and passed major law in U.S. history (if someone has another candidate, please submit it.) Not all of the dishonesty was due to President Obama’s personal efforts–he didn’t tell its House and Senate not to bother to read the various versions of the bill, for example, or submit to the CBO patently manipulated assumptions to ensure its projection of a net budget surplus from the law immediately prior to its passage, assumptions that were substantially revised later. He is the one who pledged over and over again that if you liked your current coverage, nothing the law did would stop you from keeping it, a promise that seemed dubious at the time and that has in fact proven to be either mistaken or deliberately misleading.

Still…the law was passed. Utilitarian justifications and rationalizations for various tactics and maneuvers to get it passed are unnecessary now. So why does the President and his campaign team feel that they have to skirt the truth in their public relations and re-election efforts?

The Tom Hanks-narrated Obama campaign film “The Road We’ve Traveled” has already been charged with truth fouls by objective analysts on many points, including Obamacare. In the assessment of FactCheck.org, the best and most objective of the various political fact-checking websites, the film dissembles regarding, among other things... Continue reading →

More Public School Political Indoctrination

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Here is what’s scary to me: a teacher considers giving his middle school students the assignment of doing opposition research on the Republican presidential candidates, and no ethics alarms go off for him at all. Fairness? Objectivity? Abuse of power? Prudence? Bias?

Not a ding.

Michael Denman assigned his 8th grade students at Liberty Middle School in Fairfax County the task of researching the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the four presidential hopefuls looking to challenge President Obama and forward them to the Obama campaign. The students were told to research the backgrounds and positions of each of the candidates ,find their “weaknesses,” and  to prepare strategy papers to exploit them in the campaign. Then they were told to find a contact in the Obama campaign to send them to. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Eric Fehrnstrom

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

—-Top Mitt Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom, answering a CNN interviewer’s query about whether the leading GOP presidential hopeful’s increasingly conservative campaigning positions will hurt him with more moderate voters in he is his party’s nominee.

Translation: “Mitt Romney is a liar, and has no integrity, so he will continue to say whatever is necessary to persuade naive and inattentive voters—you know…most of them— into believing that his policies will please them.  This is why he has no respect for voters at all, and will lie to their faces. Hey, this is politics–that’s how the game is played! My boss is like President Obama, like George W. Bush, like all politicians, really–except nut-cases like Santorum, Paul and Gingrich, who keep saying the same crazy things they believe in no matter how unelectable it makes them. Mitt’s a realist. He hit reset when he was Governor of Massachusetts, then he hit reset when he decided to run for the nomination. He’ll hit reset again when he’s nominated, and you can be damn sure he’ll hit reset after he’s elected. Come on…anyone who believes what a political candidate says has to be an idiot, right?”

Start the countdown. Every day that passes without Fehrnstrom resigning—or better yet, being fired— is an additional reason not to trust Mitt Romney…in addition, that is, to the fact that he’d hire a cynical, incompetent jerk like this in the first place.

Here’s a Proposal: Republicans Stop Saying That Obama’s a Muslim, and Democrats Stop Saying that The Supreme Court “Stole” The Presidency For Bush

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Law professor/blogger Ann Althouse properly chastises The National Review’s Jonathan Cohn for designating “Bush v. Gore” as the most earth-shattering case of the 21st Century, and not just because the case, decided in December of 2000, occurred in the 20th Century.

“Ridiculous! I can’t believe Cohn doesn’t know that if the case had gone the other way Gore would still have lost in the end!”, Althouse writes, reminding her readers of the results of the objective, meticulous and multiple recounts performed by journalists in 2001, which showed—much to the surprise of the counters, who were dying to be able to report that Gore had been robbed—that “George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida’s disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used.”

I can believe Cohn wrote what he wrote, because the claim that Bush’s presidency was “stolen” has been a cornerstone of Democratic political warfare and unscrupulous hard Left activists since the chad-counting stopped. It stoked the base, misled the public, increased partisan anger, divided the country and undermined Bush’s presidency, all good things from a partisan perspective (and the truth be damned), just as Republicans have been happy to allow the unjustified doubts about President Obama’s loyalty and citizenship linger among its most fanatic partisans. Continue reading →