Donald Sterling – Sometimes Business Ethics Means Shutting Up

Self awareness is an important skill. Sometimes, individuals lack any perspective on themselves. The advantage of this is that you feel good about yourself with little or no justification. You have a golden and continuous opportunity to project all of your inferiority and weaknesses on everyone else. Thus it is for Donald Sterling who is undoubtedly wondering out loud to his wealthy friends even as you read this how unfair all this news coverage is. He is no doubt explaining to his friends that the media just won’t stop saying he’s a racist when everybody who knows him, anyone with half a brain knows he’s no more a racist than Martin Luther King.

If you think I’m being cruel – watch the interview, the level of self-deceit is incredible. In his mind, his beliefs are “factual.”

And that in the end is the benefit of being a member of the .01 percent, you have the privilege of being stupid. Because in that comfortable world, there is no countervailing reality to have to deal with. You can believe any set of comforting nonsense. It is a pity that Anderson Cooper didn’t ask him about voting rights or taxes.

Before business ethics can be exercised there has to be an understanding of facts and reasoning. There has to be a firm connection to reality. That is harder than it sounds. There are many individuals who have a difficulty telling opinion from facts, and many more who don’t understand how logic and reasoning are exercised.

When I was very young man, I worked at a store. One day the owner explained to me that doctors had told her that black people were arranged differently on the inside – their organs were in different places. When I appeared surprised, she was surprised that I didn’t understand something so obvious. It has been more than thirty years now and I have not yet ran into a “black” physiology textbook. I’m not expecting it to happen soon.

Her “facts” were different from reality, and when such is the case, business ethics are often irrelevant.

James Pilant

Donald Sterling’s interview disaster: Rich old racist self-destructs to Anderson Cooper – Salon.com

Donald Sterling, in all his reprehensible anti-glory, is officially representative of only one person, Donald Sterling. But it was hard not to think about the insularity and cossetting the super-wealthy enjoy, once they get super-wealthy, watching the maligned Los Angeles Clippers owner self-destruct with Anderson Cooper Monday night.

Sterling is a man who is obviously used to holding forth on his mind-blowingly prejudiced views without challenge. He wants us to think V. Stiviano entrapped him with her magic lady parts — “I don’t know why the girl had me say those things,” he told Cooper — and got him to launch a paranoid racist rant out of lust. But clearly that is not true, unless he’s lusting after Anderson Cooper.

“I’m not a racist,” Sterling told Cooper. “I made a terrible, terrible mistake. And I’m here with you today to apologize and to ask for forgiveness for all the people that I’ve hurt. When I listen to that tape, I don’t even know how I can say words like that…. I mean, that’s not the way I talk.” Actually, it seems to be exactly the way Sterling talks.

It’s hard to know where to start with the NBA franchise owner’s outrageous remarks. He called Stiviano “a street person” and said Magic Johnson “ought to be ashamed of himself.” No, that doesn’t do Sterling justice. This is what he said about Johnson:

Here is a man, he acts so holy. He made love to every girl in America in every city and he had AIDS. When he had those AIDS, I went to my synagogue and I prayed for him.

“Those AIDS”? (For the record, Johnson has HIV, not AIDS). But it got worse:

What has Magic Johnson done? He’s got AIDS. Did he do any business? Did he help anybody in south L.A.? I think he should be ashamed of himself. What does he do for the black people? I’m telling you he does nothing. It’s all talk.

I spent millions on giving away and helping minorities. Does he do that? That’s one problem I have. Jews, when they get successful, they will help their people.

And some of the African-Americans, maybe I’ll get in trouble again. They don’t want to help anybody. What has Magic Johnson really done for Children’s Hospital which kids are lying in the hallways. They are sick. They need a bed. What has he done for any hospital? What has he done for any group?

via Donald Sterling’s interview disaster: Rich old racist self-destructs to Anderson Cooper – Salon.com.

From Around the Web.

From the web site, Abagond.

http://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/donald-sterling/

Donald Sterling (1934- ), an American billionaire, is best known as the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, a basketball team. It accounts for a third of his wealth. On April 25th 2014, a recording of what seems to be him talking to his girlfriend, Vanessa Stiviano, was made public on the Internet. In it he tells her not to be seen in public with Black people.

We do not know where the recording came from, when it was made or whether it has been edited. But it is probably all too true: In 2009, for example, Sterling was made to pay $2.725 million for discriminating against Blacks and Latinos at his apartment buildings in metropolitan Los Angeles. It is a matter of public record that he has said stuff like this:

Is she one of those black people that stink? […] Just evict the bitch.

…

On racism:

Sterling: It’s the world! You go to Israel, the blacks are just treated like dogs.

Stiviano: So do you have to treat them like that too?

Sterling: The white Jews, there’s white Jews and black Jews, do you understand?

Stiviano: And are the black Jews less than the white Jews?

Sterling: A 100%, 50, a 100%.

Stiviano: And is that right?

Sterling: It isn’t a question – we don’t evaluate what’s right and wrong, we live in a society. We live in a culture. We have to live within that culture.