Author: southwerk

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.

Competition Takes It on the Chin in the Rental Car Market

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Hertz to buy car hire rival Dollar Thrifty for $2.3 billion | Reuters

Hertz Global Holdings (HTZ.N) agreed to buy rival Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group (DTG.N) for about $2.3 billion in a deal that puts about 95 percent of the U.S. car rental market in the hands of three companies.

The sale ends more than two years of on-off takeover talks for Dollar Thrifty involving Hertz, the No. 2. U.S. car rental company, and third-ranked Avis Group Inc (CAR.O) that have been plagued by disagreements over price and doubts about regulatory approval.

Avis could still make a further bid. The deal has no break-up fee and Dollar Thrifty is allowed to solicit another offer for 30 days, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

If it is confirmed, the deal will cement Hertz’s position as the number two and leaves Avis far behind in third. Privately held Enterprise Holdings, with its Alamo, National and Enterprise brands, is far and away the market leader.

Hertz to buy car hire rival Dollar Thrifty for $2.3 billion | Reuters

Isn’t buying out your competition and controlling most of the market moving toward a monopoly? Is that the free market in operation. No, but there will be many that claim it is. “Creative Destruction” is the rule – if you are a free market fundamentalist – religion without a God unless you can consider the filthy green, a deity.

Is it ethical? Well, it’s legal. For our corporate world that is quite enough.

Competing in terms of product or price or service is hard. Buying them out, easy.

James Pilant

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Thousands of Voters Kicked Off Rolls to Protect Against Nineteen Non-Citizen Voters

On By southwerkIn Politics
No-excuse early voting in U.S. states, as of S...

No-excuse early voting in U.S. states, as of September 2007. in-person and postal in-person only postal only none (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Voters Kicked Off The Rolls In New Mexico Include Voting Rights Activist, Wife Of State Representative | ThinkProgress

More than 170,000 people have been purged from New Mexico’s voter rolls — and among them are a prominent voting rights activist, as well as the wife of a Democratic state representative.

State Rep. Brian Egolf (D) told the AP that his wife received a letter saying that the state government considered her an inactive voter, and that she would need to, essentially, re-register before she could vote in the fall.

Voters Kicked Off The Rolls In New Mexico Include Voting Rights Activist, Wife Of State Representative | ThinkProgress

That 170,000 number is 14% of all the voters in the state. All this because of a handful of questionable votes. How few? Let’s take a look at an editorial from the Sante Fe New Mexican:

If nothing else, Secretary of State Dianna Duran deserves credit for getting to the bottom of that age-old, oft-repeated New Mexico folk tale about dead people voting. Not so much, it turns out.
And Duran can prove it, too. Once in office, she and her staff have taken the state’s voter list, torn it apart, put it back together and in the end, found almost no voter fraud in New Mexico. From the 64,000 voter registration records she once referred to state police as possible cases of voter fraud, we are down to 100-plus voters apparently registered illegally. Of those “illegally” registered, 19 possible non-citizens might have cast a ballot they should not have. Another 641 people, now believed to be deceased, remain on the rolls, although there is scant evidence they are voting. That’s out of 1.1 million registered voters, by the way.

Is something going on here that is not about voter fraud? I think I’ll just let the numbers speak for themselves.

James Pilant

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Is the Justice Department Gutless?

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics3 Comments
How do we make sense of this? Goldman Sachs emails call their own investments “junk” and “crap,” and Goldman Sachs salespeople refer to clients as “muppets” and “elephants.” Yet the Justice Department says there is not enough evidence to bring a case on behalf of Goldman Sachs investors who lost vast sums of money.Seal of the United States Department of Justice

Seal of the United States Department of Justice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Goldman Sachs prosecution fails: Why can’t the Justice Department fight Wall Steet?

Now that that’s out of the way, I can say what we are all thinking: Really? Are you kidding me? Wall Street continues to get away scot-free? The Justice Department prosecutes Roger Clemens for perjury—spends countless resources, hours, and energy worrying about steroids in baseball—yet seems incapable of making cases against the big Wall Street firms that engineered the greatest lies, frauds, and scams in our economic history. I am as outraged, disappointed, and furious as you are. Have they no backbone, shame, or sense of what justice is all about? It does nothing for my already waning faith in this Justice Department.

Goldman Sachs prosecution fails: Why can’t the Justice Department fight Wall Steet?

Apparently the great “vampire squid,” is immune to prosecution. In their e-mails they virtually admitted they were committing fraud. What does the Justice Department need in the way of evidence to prosecute? It seems to me if you are well connected enough and big enough, an infinite amount of evidence would still not be enough.

This is another example of America’s two tiered justice system – one for regular citizens and another for the privileged. There is a certain irony in the phrase, land of the free. It seems that some are apparently more free than others.

Business Ethics – Did that play any role here? You bet it did. By systematically breaking the rules, abusing it customers and blatantly lying, Goldman Sachs made billions of dollars. It is a pure lesson in why the phrase, business ethics, often evokes sneers or knowing giggles. I’ve seen and heard them.This is a lesson in negative business ethics, the other side of teaching what is right, teaching to do what is wrong.

We are systematically educating our young to be financial criminals, to reject the values of the righteous and embrace less than the moral minimum.

Our society has an opportunity here to create a society fit for no one but the predators.

Is that where you want to live?

James Pilant

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Cheerleading Used to Defund Women’s Sports

On By southwerkIn Opinion
Quinnipiac University

Quinnipiac University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cheerleading is not a sport says the U.S. Court of Appeals, but is it?

Rachael Larimore: The court made the right decision. This was a cynical plan by Quinnipiac to keep the school within Title IX compliance while cutting women’s volleyball (and, incidentally, men’s golf and men’s track and field).

Competitive cheering might be an evolving sport—the Washington Post notes that the “activity” is growing more organized and has various outfits, such as the National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association, working to make it a recognized sport. Cheerleading’s raison d’être is to root, root, root for the home team. If you take that element away, what’s all that yelling and cheering for, even during competitions?

Cheerleading is not a sport says the U.S. Court of Appeals, but is it?

This is pretty cynical. Title 9 says that colleges have to spend as much on women’s sports as on men’s. Quinnipiac is evading the rule by declaring Cheerleading a sport. Thus, they can count the money paid for it as money used for women’s sports and have more for the men.

I have no disagreement with the idea that it is tiring and a definite sign of social prestige but whether or not it’s a sport – well it seems it’s only considered a sport when you want to evade title 9 and that is not a good reason.

James Pilant

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Komen Charity Forgot Who Its Contributors Were

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Nancy Brinker resigns from Komen: Does the CEO’s departure even matter for the breast cancer organization?

Part of why Komen is likely to fail at picking up the pieces is that the entire battle exposed some tensions in its base of support—tensions that had largely been minimized by the genuine desire of a broad coalition to fight breast cancer. Part of what made the organization such a behemoth is that Komen was able to put together the traditional supporters of women’s health care, who are pro-choice and have feminist leanings, with more conservative women who had previously been afraid of the immodest implications of talking openly about breast health. They did this by pointedly desexualizing the issue in a sea of pink ribbons and teddy bears, something the more feminist supporters could ignore because of the greater good. Prior to the Planned Parenthood debacle, Komen seemed largely apolitical—not outwardly judging those of us who want comprehensive health care that includes an adult understanding that people are going to have sex. By crossing that line, they forced their supporters into a sluts vs. church ladies battle. Now the feminist side perceives the organization as swarming with prigs whose support for your health stops as soon as they know you’ve touched a penis, and a handful of prominent resignations can’t really do much to change that.

Nancy Brinker resigns from Komen: Does the CEO’s departure even matter for the breast cancer organization?

Was it ethical for Komen to embrace right wing politics and cut off funding to one of the most prominent sources of women’s health care? Apparently a great number of Komen’s event participants and contributors believe the organization’s decision was at odds with their own moral beliefs. What is interesting here is how Komen so misunderstood its base. Isn’t that one of the fundamental rules of any business organization – that you should understand who your “customers” are. By any measure, Komen failed this rule and the organization may never recover.

James Pilant

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Stock Market Increasingly More Casino Capitalism than Investment

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics1 Comment

Wall Street trading debacles raises fears | McClatchy

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, the top Democrat on the panel’s subcommittee that oversees capital markets, said she was very concerned about the volatility triggered by Knight. She supports hearings on the broader effects of the incident and other recent trading troubles.

“Like the problems with the Facebook initial public offering, events like this only further serve to undermine investor confidence in the markets,” Waters said. “Though we don’t yet know exactly what caused the problem with Knight Capital, with a drumbeat of financial market snafus continuing, it’s clear that the industry, with guidance from regulators, needs to strengthen their internal controls.”

Indeed, investors have stuck mostly to the sidelines after suffering crippling stock losses during the financial crisis. Many people have steered clear of sinking money into stocks, worried that big institutional investors and their high-speed tools can manipulate the market.

Knight’s losses reaffirmed Los Angeles retiree Robert Altman’s decision to pull nearly all of his investments out of stocks. Altman said his distaste for the market’s wild swings and technical glitches may confirm industry fears that recent Wall Street technical mishaps could scare off retail investors.

“I’m out of it,” said Altman, 73, who has plowed his savings into municipal bonds. “The little guy has no business in the market anymore.”

Wall Street trading debacle raises fears | McClatchy

Business ethics would seem to dictate that investors’ money should be handled with care. After all, the human beings  who invest have interests like long term returns to enable them to live a decent life. But as we can see from the headlines, stock market investment is more a matter of being sheared like a sheep than a fair deal . We’ve had enough scandals to call on the government to act. However, the interests that make money by these methods are well placed, very influential. If you want a safe investment, there are better places to go.

James Pilant

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Luke H. Lee Comments on the “Information Age”

On By southwerkIn Opinion

Realizing a better world

We have developed numerous “job-killing machines” in the real market (or supply chain process) through the use of IT and networking technology over the last 20 to 30 years of the Modern Information Age. These machines have significantly contributed to the shift to a more efficiency-oriented supply side environment by killing jobs and have altered the whole economic environment. Strangely, it seems nobody has recognized this yet, and no expert has considered this at all in his or her public ruminations about the economy.

Realizing a better world

 

It is always a pleasure to recommend my colleagues on the web and here I take another opportunity to do so. This is a very brief quotation from the article. Please go to Lee’s site and read in full.

James Pilant

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Ethics Bob Comments on the Penn State Sanctions and College Football

On By southwerkIn Opinion

I really enjoyed Ethics Bob’s concluding paragraph which I include below. Of course, for the real flavor of the article, you need to read it all and the link is just below the quoted section.

James Pilant

Penn State: do the sanctions punish the innocent? « Ethics Bob

What’s being taken away from the Penn State students is an illusion—the illusion that the quality of their college years depends on football championships. College years are a time for shedding childish illusions. Perhaps the innocent students aren’t being punished at all: they’re learning what’s important in the world. That’s a big part of what they are going to college for.

Penn State: do the sanctions punish the innocent? « Ethics Bob

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New York Police Hammered Occupy Wall Street Protestors

On By southwerkIn Economic Justice

14 Specific Allegations of NYPD Brutality During Occupy Wall Street – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic

Of the 14, I have selected this one for this posting. I would like all of you to read Mr. Friedersdorf’s full article.

A member of the Research Team witnessed officers arresting a protester. A number of officers took the protester to the ground, and restrained him as he lay face-first on the street. The Research Team member heard the protester cry out, and knelt down to observe the arrest. She then witnessed an officer pull back his leg and kick the protester hard in the face. Another witness also saw the incident. Efforts to obtain the badge number of the responsible officer were thwarted by police, who refused to identify the officer and then took him away in a police van.

14 Specific Allegations of NYPD Brutality During Occupy Wall Street – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic

 

 

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Americablog’s Author Suffers Health Care Loss

On By southwerkIn Politics

US Politics | AMERICAblog News: ObamaCare: A personal note

Without Obamacare 99% of the country is just one lost job, one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. And one frequently follows from the other.

Without insurance our family medical bill is in excess of $60,000 a year. That is a very large chunk of change even if you are a borderline 1%-er. It means that I have to continue to work just to keep our family health insurance. And not any job, it has to be a job with health care benefits.

US Politics | AMERICAblog News: ObamaCare: A personal note

I am in a similar position. My wife and I have separated and when our divorce goes through I will lose the health insurance I get from her job. Thus, I need to start looking for a job with health care benefits. I live in a nation where living without health care is considered by some to be a privilege. Great.

James Pilant

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