I am a 53 year old teacher. I have double major in Speech and Criminal Justice resulting in a Bachelor's degree from Northeastern State University in Oklahoma and a law degree.
Frank Serpico was an American (New York) police officer who refused to go along with departmental corruption. He later received the Medal of Honor, the New York Police Department’s highest award. Serpico was less than popular with his superiors and his fellow officers. There are strong suspicions that his shooting while making a drug bust was a set up by other policemen to get him out of the way.
Manoje Nath
In India there is a policeman called Manoje Nath. He seems to upset his superiors as well.
As Bokaro SP in 1980, he arrested the then Bokaro Steel MD in a corruption case and was handed transfer order within 24 hours __ only after four months in office. While in vigilance, he again ended up fraying his superiors’ ego as he raided three engineers in a case of corruption. For the next ten months, the cop had to make do without a vehicle and a telephone as he was made to wait for a posting. A departmental proceeding for disobedience was also initiated which the Patna high court later quashed.
This guy investigates where the career minded officer will not go.
My understanding is that he is currently teaching.
I’m deeply impressed by his career choices and wish him well.
James Pilant
(By the way, Nath has a blog called Musings. He is witty and eloquent. I recommend it.)
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
Two kinds of justice? Is there one for you and I, and another for the great financial elites? Let’s say that I steal $100,000 dollars from my employer, if they press charges would I go to jail? Quite likely. What if I work for a giant investment bank and I commit fraud and other security violations to the tune of several hundred million dollars? Will I go to jail then? No.
What is going on here? This isn’t fair.
Why do we put people in jail or prison? To punish them and discourage others from committing the same offenses.
What message does this “two-tiered” system of “justice” send? It says that wrongdoing is okay if you are properly placed in the economy. If you are not placed in the right industry with the right friends and the right “law enforcement,” you can expect to be penalized when you commit crimes. The impact is clear, if you work in the financial industry you will not be punished for your financial crimes.
Do I have to tell you that giving sectors of the economy the right to commit crimes at will is bad policy? They will continue to do it.
In 2007, these crimes almost brought down the world economy. The damage done did through us into the Great Recession.
Why do we put up with unethical behavior in films and television?
Why do we laugh at the unethical and cruel in comedies? Are we released from moral responsibility because it’s all in fun? Comedies are a release from the tedium of our daily existence. One of the reasons they are funny and entertaining is that the rules that normally apply to us, temporarily have no effect. In real life, we don’t laugh at someone falling down. It’s a tragedy. but pratfalls have been a staple of comedies from the beginning.
It’s also an opportunity to humiliate the villain. And authority. From the Keystone cops to the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, we delight in seeing power humiliated and brought down. Kids vs. adults. Workers vs. Management. Husbands vs. wives. Children vs schools and parents. It’s a way of getting rid of conflict, dealing with it. Who cannot be punished in real life can be defeated in the world of fiction.
Corporations and the world of finance are major, constant villains in films and television. While in reality, the major figures in these powerful institutions are largely immune to prosecution, make enormous sums of money and are morally oblivious to their actions, in film after film they get their comeuppance. If there is little justice in reality, there is a great deal in fiction. It is a reflection of the powerlessness of the general public that justice has become a fictional concept like angels and wizards.
But what is to be done about our acceptance of cruelty and unethical behavior in film? Some of us can develop analysis skills that the brain can not turn off during the viewing of visual entertainment. Television and movies tend to go past the thinking parts of the brain and straight into the unconscious. We can learn to interfere with this process and think about what we are seeing with a critical eye but only a few will manage this. What is to be done?
Societies have to attack a lack of ethics in entertainment across long periods of time by a consensus view that change is necessary. Remember that fifty years ago most humor was ethnic full of degrading jokes about stupid Blacks, penny pinching Scots, drunk Irishmen, cat eating Chinese, etc. It took time and persistence but that kind of humor to pass away. In that sense, we have made ethical progress. Cigarette smoking and jokes about rape have largely disappeared from the media. That is also progress.
I would not go back to the film censorship of the twenties and thirties. I appreciate realism in films. But unethical behavior is portrayed so often as normal that I worry about the effect on thinking. Harming people or their possessions is not funny. Most people are able to make the distinction between reality and fiction, but not all. I believe we should take a more active role in deciding what is acceptable behavior in our media.
… The true source of this movie’s evil lies in what I can only, at the risk of sounding priggish, call its value system. Simply put, all of these people are horrible to each other, and only about 10 percent of that horribleness is ever acknowledged. Every relationship in the film is crassly transactional: When Danny takes Katherine shopping to outfit her for a single appearance as his wife, she exploits the opportunity to the hilt, loading him down with bags containing tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of purchases. Later, one of her children blackmails Danny into buying them all tickets to Hawaii; he complies resentfully. None of this angling for expensive presents is presented as greedy or materialistic in the least; it’s just the way people with less money get what they want from people with more. Danny, for his part, takes advantage of his position as sugar daddy to insult and abuse his whole entourage of traveling companions. He’s so consistently awful that, when he briefly manages to treat the children with mildly avuncular jollity, his harem (which is how I came to think of the Aniston/Decker dyad) coos over him as if he’s just cured polio.
Which brings us to the movie’s treatment of women: Hoo boy. Where to begin? Major plot points hinge on the understanding that Jennifer Aniston is a frumpy old hag who can only earn the longed-for prize of being leered at by creeps when she doffs her clothes to reveal an unexpectedly slammin’ bikini body. (The fact that said leering happens in the company of the Aniston character’s son adds an extra-unsavory twist.) In not one but two scenes, one scantily clad woman is explicitly and lengthily compared to another by an audience consisting mainly of men. The second of those scenes—in which Aniston competes in a hula contest with Kidman—also makes a point of casually insulting old or fat women, who are peremptorily booted off the stage for insufficient hotness. As for the movie’s treatment of race, suffice it to say that in those rare moments when Hawaiian and other nonwhite characters appear, they’re generally depicted as obese buffoons.
A high school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia who was suspended for a profanity-laced blog in which she called her young charges “disengaged, lazy whiners” is driving a sensation by daring to ask: Why are today’s students unmotivated — and what’s wrong with calling them out?
As she fights to keep her job at Central Bucks East High School, 30-year-old Natalie Munroe says she had no interest in becoming any sort of educational icon. The blog has been taken down, but its contents can still be found easily online.
Her comments and her suspension by the middle-class school district have clearly touched a nerve, with scores of online commenters applauding her for taking a tough love approach or excoriating her for verbal abuse. Media attention has rained down, and backers have started a Facebook group.
“My students are out of control,” Munroe, who has taught 10th, 11th and 12th grades, wrote in one post. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”
She should not have been suspended.
She should be immediately fired.
I have read some of her obscenity laden contempt for her students. I am not impressed. These are the immature rants we would expect of the least educated among us.
It is perfectly okay to criticize and severely criticize students for their attitudes and other problems. Her rants are not so much criticism as some form of primal scream therapy.
I teach as well. If a teacher doesn’t have any idea what she was up against, she wasn’t listening in all those teacher training classes.
If she has this level of contempt for her students, she should find a more attractive field.
My students deserve my best efforts and my respect. They live in a difficult world and are about to be sent into a devastating job market. I may not like some of the things they do. I may not approve of some of their beliefs and attitudes. But I can write or talk about it without descending into talk that would be a disgrace for the least of my students.
We have a right to expect more of someone claiming an education.
I was delighted to read this posting about the importance of the study of history. Our gallant author here is confronted with a problem I have faced many times: “I’m just here to study business. I’ll never use any of this other stuff.” There are many students who have that belief, the idea that anything not directly related to working is a waste of time.
A human with a job skill can work at a job. A human with an education can serve as a citizen and fully operating human being able to understand the forces surrounding him. Those forces being the historical, the literary, the other arts, and the beliefs that lay beneath our veneer of civilization. Work is important but it is only one factor is a life well lived.
This author writes a good essay. I recommend you visit the blog and see what else is said there.
James Pilant
The busy halls buzzed with activity, and hummed with the pressing weight of so many voices. I stood across from a new friend, a young man I met in one of my classes. “So, why do you dislike history so much?” I asked. My friend grimaced, and made a slightly exasperated sigh. “For the same reason I dislike Calculus so much. I’m just going in to business, I don’t need it. I will never use it in the real world. “That is ridiculous,” I said. “you will … Read More
I’ll be teaching Business Law in about an hour to a group of students who seem to like the subject or my lectures or both. I’m going to have a great time. I like this scholar thing. This is just a nice teaching picture.
Fear of being a “bag lady” is the secret worry of every older woman. I’ve written and talked about this before, and the subject always gets a nod or a grimace of recognition.
No woman wants to be a burden on her children – or grow old alone, worry about money.
With our President and the Congress and the beltway commentators all determined to cut Social Security, we can expect the situation to get worse, probably much worse as what’s left of the safety net is dismantled.
Read a little more –
*Women are likely to have a longer period of chronic disability and are more likely to need care in a long-term facility or from a paid caregiver. This is compounded by the fact that women are more likely to be alone in old age and less likely to have a family caregiver.
*Fifty-five percent of female retirees and 71 percent of female pre-retirees are concerned that they might not have enough money to pay for health care costs in retirement, compared to 42 percent of male retirees and 63 percent of male pre-retirees.
People, real people, not financial funds, not mortgage foreclosures companies, are supposed be looked after by our government. We are not supposed to be tossing grannies on to the fire of maximized profits. But we are.
Making every American regardless of circumstances rely totally on their own resources for virtually every contingency seems to be the philosophy of government. But a bank can navigate a depression better than a human being and a bank is unlikely to get a degenerative disease that bankrupts a family and destroys every vestige of financial security.
We should be looking out for each other not making sure of the highest possible return on investments.
A little Aristotle in the morning can’t hurt too much. This author has a good take on the subject. I enjoyed reading it and I’m sure you will too.
As my frequent readers will note I am a major fan of Aristotle, and I always appreciate another author’s take on the subject.
James Pilant
“Though we love the truth and our friends, reverence is due to the truth first.” -Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I have been reading Aristotle’s classic work Nicomachean Ethics for my Ancient and Medieval Ethics class. This is my second time through the work, though I am getting much more out of it on this read through. Aristotle makes many important distinctions even just in the first book of this work, but one sentence stood out and I decided to … Read More
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.