Category: Business Ethics

The Fatwa Hotline Edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics2 Comments

Today, we discuss the fact that it is better to understand than not specifically in regard to Islam.

The Fatwa Hotline Edition

Ignorance can kill you. It can also hurt a business and lead to unethical content. One kind of ignorance is the simple unwillingness of men to get it, to realize that women have a different experience of the workplace than they do. The idea that your experience is typical is one we have trouble shaking. We devote considerable mental energy to finding ourselves “normal” even mundane.

014-1But the facts are otherwise. We live in bubbles of meaning. Don’t believe me? How about this? A recent poll shows that 63% of Republican men believe sexism is over.  That’s a real bubble. Hopefully, you don’t need me to reiterate the grim statistics on women in the workplace to find the idea that sexism exploded in a bubble of political correctness to be nonsense.

Of course, we can’t know everything but we can try to learn essential things like “how to cross the street” and “what indicates someone is angry.” Knowing that different sexes, races and belief systems are treated differently is important knowledge to both employer and fellow employee. A little sensitivity  and knowledge is good.

While I begin by discussing women in the workplace, my focus today is on religion.

I came across this article in the Guardian. It is called –

The fatwa hotline: ‘We have heard everything’

It can be read in its entirety here.

I think it is one of the best reads I’ve seen in many days. For one thing, it clarified my understanding of what a fatwa is and how hard followers of Islam work at their religion. And I often found it humorous and fascinating.

In the UAE, they have a hotline to answer questions about what should and should not be done as Muslims. There is one for women and a much more elaborate one for men.

What’s a fatwa and where does it come from?

(from the article)

A fatwa is not merely an opinion, however. It must be based on the verses of the Qur’an or the hadith, or the opinions of previous generations of Muslim scholars across 1,400 years of history, or, in the rare cases when those sources do not provide an answer, well-argued logic, to come up with a completely new ruling. These complexities tend to be missing from many self-styled Islamic experts, whose opinions are just a quick Google search away. You can find fatwas giving permission to behead captives or, in the case of Isis, take women as sex slaves. This free-for-all is why the Emiratis have taken steps to direct people towards approved scholars.

“On the internet, not everything is correct,” Zaidi says. “You ask a simple question and get many opinions. I believe it is better to go to a specialist if you have a problem.”

“Most questions from Muslims will have to do with their relationship with the divine and their ability to fulfil that for which they will be rewarded not in this world but in the world to come,” says Justin Stearns, an American associate professor and head of the Arab Crossroads Studies programme at New York University Abu Dhabi. I meet Stearns in a cafe in the sprawling pale stone campus surrounded by miles of sand on Saadiyat Island on the north side of Abu Dhabi. He has a short, greying beard and peppers his speech with fluent Arabic as he types on a silver MacBook. “In the marketplace of religious opinion, if you are just an average Muslim out there, you’d look to someone who can separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to religious authority,” he says. “Here you have the state doing that.”

What you should do.

I recommend you read this. One of the issues in the current election is the status of the followers of Islam in the United States, and, of course, all of us are likely at some point in the future to encounter other religions and it is better to have actual knowledge than the lurid fantasies of the Internet or talk radio.

As a matter of business ethics, an understanding of different religions, their ethical systems and beliefs on business is critical and should be part of every four year business degree although currently it is not a requirement. That we have a separation of church and state does not imply a separation of business and religion (although several of my students have claimed just that). The different ethical systems in play in society affect how we think and act. Business should pay attention.

James Pilant

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The Private Prisons Edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics4 Comments

Today we talk about a milestone in the saga of privatization.

The Private Prison Edition

The Federal government announced a gradual phase out of the use of private prisons. It turns out that studies show that the government run prisons do a much better job, a much, much better job, as the investigative report cited below conclusively proves.

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The Private Prison Edition

This may be a turning point in the neo-liberal privatization story. For years, decades, we’ve been told that everything the government does can be done better by private business. Usually this discussion centers around quasi-religious claims of the free-marketers, you know, some Ayn Rand stuff with scary collectivists and greed being the greatest and most wonderful human impulse of all time. It gives you a sense of how awful it would be to be trapped on a long flight trapped against the window with a free market zealot sitting right next to you.

This may be it, the turning points – the place where people say, “Hey, these private companies promised us the moon and we got worse what they wanted to replace – what gives?”

“What gives?” is the simple lie that private industry can always outperform the government. That’s nonsense. Sometimes, you have subjects that don’t lend themselves well to the profit motive like war and health care. The private sector moves in, scoops up the money and the you’re left with a disaster. Probably, a private company might make a better uniform or provide a service but the government does not always seek to make a profit, sometimes it needs to win a war or make sick people well. For profit making both war and sickness need to last as long as possible but for the sake of the nation we need victory and health.

But in spite of the economic disasters of the last decade, neo-liberalism’s adherents are not discouraged. They’ll be back. They’ll have a think tank make up some studies, hire a couple of ivy league economists to explain the beauty and purity of the free market and how the government must in theory not work well. They’ll say, “Just give us a few billion dollars and watch the money roll in.” Just like they always do.

And we need to be there to say no.

James Pilant

Feds Done with Private Prisons

Yates said in her memo that research had found private prisons “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources” and “do not save substantially on costs” either. Essential government education and training programs for prisoners “have proved difficult to replicate and outsource” in the private sector, she said.

The decision was announced days after the Department of Justice’s inspector general released a damning investigation report. It found instances of inmate-on-inmate assaults were 28% higher in contract prisons than in government-run facilities, and that the confiscation of contraband mobile phones occurred eight times more frequently.

Federal inmates in private prisons were found to be nine times more likely to be placed on lockdown than those at other federal prisons, and were frequently subjected to arbitrary solitary confinement.

The Feds run prisons better than private companies. 

For the most part, however, the report lays out a much more mundane case against private prisons. The private facilities failed, in large part, not because of high profile incidents — but because, compared to their government-run counterparts, they simply weren’t good at running a correctional facility. In this battle between socialism and the free market, socialism clearly won.

After the Inspector General’s office evaluated prisons along eight different categories, it found that private facilities underperformed government-run prisons in six of them. “Contract prisons,” the report explains, “had more frequent incidents per capita of contraband finds, assaults, uses of force, lockdowns, guilty findings on inmate discipline charges, and selected categories of grievances.”

Mother Jones article on CCA

Private prisons pose serious problems 

Still, where private prisons do exist, they seem to pose extraordinary problems.

The OIG report isn’t the first to indicate that private prisons are worse off, although it is the most recent one. A 2001 report from the Department of Justice found the rate of inmate-on-inmate violence at private prisons was 38 percent higher than the rate at public prisons. And in a four-month undercover investigation, reporter Shane Bauerwitnessed high levels of violence — particularly stabbings, which seemingly went underreported in official numbers — and lockdowns at a private prison in Louisiana.

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The Deceptive Politics Edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

The Deceptive Politics Edition

The best thing I’ve read on the Internet today is from the “History Chick in AZ.” It looks like a major paper on the subject of the misuse of history by advocacy groups in particular, The Federalist Society, although it talks about quite a few others.

These days, if you wander the Internet, it seems there are tidal waves of made up history from Black regiments fighting for the confederacy, to white people being most of the slaves, to Puritans seeking religious freedom, all of them running a muck at all times.

But the paper is talking not about just made up history but made up with a purpose. And the purpose is to change the law by creating an impression of a scholarly take on American history.

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The Deceptive Politics Edition

My first encounter with the phenomenon was an article extolling the idea that the Old West was a paradise of tranquility since everybody carried a gun and it mentioned prominently that Tombstone, Arizona only had two or three murders a year during that wonderful period. Except that Tombstone never had more than 7,000 people in it and the average modern American city of 10,000 has one murder every ten years. I wasn’t impressed by those claims then and I’m not impressed now.

When you don’t have any government and no legal avenues for justice, people get killed and not just a few. The Old West was a time of chaos and crime in American history, and all the spin you can slap on it isn’t going to change what happened.

But there are many other areas where history and simple factual data are under attack – one of them is climate change.

Here’s an excerpt from the article –

One of the more visible examples of the power of these groups to shape policy and public perceptions has been the issue of climate change. Flush with money from oil and gas companies, several political advocacy groups were able to wage a public battle against scientists to successfully create the perception of doubt, when there was none within the scientific community. With public confusion and cowed politicians, they were able to bring any legislation meant to deal with the problem to a halt. (19) The media, sadly concerned more with the appearance of neutrality than with the truth helped create this perception of doubt. In addition, reporters have been too trusting of experts without checking their affiliations and potential conflicts of interest. Realizing the problem the ProPublica reporterRobert Faturechi states, “Reporters and editors need to be more skeptical of experts, and the false sense of security that their name brand affiliations provide. Before we quote them or their studies, or publish their op-eds, we have to ask harder questions about their funding and their outside employment.” (20) We are now all paying the price for this mischief, and it will only get worse.

I recommend to got the “history chick’s” blog and have a good read. The article I’m referring to can be read here.

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James Pilant

The Larry Wilmore Edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

The Larry Wilmore Edition

I’m very sad to report that The Nightly Show has been cancelled with Thursday being its last day. 

And this cancellation carries business ethics implications. What is a network trying to do when it creates television programs? The current Neoliberal answer is maximise revenue but there are also question of talent, art and public comment that also need to be addressed. 

In my judgment Wilmore’s show shouldn’t have been cancelled. I believe this is one of those situations in which the long term benefits outweighed the losses. Wilmore was a powerful and distinctive voice and he said a lot of things that needed to be said. That he spoke from a minority perspective and used powerful discussion formats to convey idea were critical to the intellectual weight of the show. 

Caroline Framke (quoted below) discusses how the show was not designed to produce clips for You-Tube but was apparently expected to. Both she and I agree this is unfair. Comedy Central understood the show’s format from the beginning. There was never going to be any drive along sing along segments for multi-media distribution. 

And Josef Adalian writing for Vulture says Wilmore’s firing calls into question whether or not Trevor Noah’s lead role at The Daily Show is a success. 

James Pilant

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The Larry Wilmore Edition

Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show Ends

Comedy Central has canceled The Nightly Show, which will end its run on Thursday, with a re-slotted @Midnight taking its place until a permanent option is determined. The move effectively cuts ties with host Larry Wilmore, who gained notoriety back in 2006 on the network’s Daily Show as its “Senior Black Correspondent” and then segued into a late-night series of his own. However, his Nightly Show—which featured sharp political commentary and roundtable discussions—was never a strong ratings performer over its year-and-a-half run, with Wilmore vocally preferring substantive content to more viral-friendly, “pure comic” fodder such as James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke or Jimmy Fallon’s Lip Sync Battle.

Caroline Framke writing for Vox

Comedy Central had high hopes for The Nightly Show, which premiered alongside the final days of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in early 2015, in the high-profile spot formerly occupied by Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report. But Comedy Central president Kent Altermantold the Hollywood Reporter that the show never quite “connected with our audience in ways that we need it to, both in the linear channel and in terms of multi-platform outlets and with shareable content and on social platforms as well.”

Read that statement again. If you saw a Jimmy Fallon Lip Sync Battle or a James Corden Carpool Karaoke session flash before your eyes, congratulations, you’re basically an expert on how network executives view late-night TV in 2016.

I don’t mean to suggest that Comedy Central necessarily wanted Wilmore to start playing party games with celebrities in a bid to attract more attention online. That’s still not the network’s style, and besides, Trevor Noah’s version of The Daily Show (as well as John Oliver’s HBO series Last Week Tonight) have proved that it’s possible to get viral traction out of political breakdowns and bits that address serious topics and themes.

But it’s significant that Alterman cited a lack of “shareable content” from The Nightly Showas part of the reason the show can’t work, because The Nightly Show was never built to produce shareable content in the first place.

Joseph Adalian Writing for Vulture

Still, as confident as Alterman is in the 2016 version of The Daily Show, the cancellation of The Nightly Show will once again bring into question whether Noah’s takeover of Stewart’s franchise has been a success. There may be signs of growth, and reason for hope, but with just three months left in the 2016 election cycle, Noah’s voice seems weak compared to rivals such as Samantha Bee, John Oliver, and Seth Meyers, and nowhere in the same league, influence-wise, as Stewart. Two years ago, the Stewart and Stephen Colbert lineup was sort of the late-night equivalent of NBC’s Must-See TV lineup, particularly among cultural and political elites. Now? The network’s shows often seem an afterthought compared to the aforementioned hosts.

Pilant’s Business Ethics Blog Links 8-15-2016 The Decision Making Edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics2 Comments

The Decision Making Edition

Today, we have five blogs we’re looking at. The first is Steve Keating’s blog where we have his thoughts on decision making. Then the site, Dear Kitty, Some Blog, has a video on DuPont and a court case. 

Can students in poverty by measured by who qualifies for free school lunches. Well, the data is useful but how useful? Read below and see what you think. A postal carrier saves a life and we conclude with a bit of fun with a Doctor Who link. 

James Pilant

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The Decision Making Edition

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Steve Keating’s Thoughts on Decision Making

(This is a short excerpt – please take the opportunity to go to his site and read the whole thing! jp) 

You need to make your own decisions because ultimately it’s the decisions you make that make you who you are. There are outcomes, results, and consequences, both positive and negative, to every decision. Everything you say, do, and even think plays a role in determining who you really are. It’s worth investing a moment or two in deciding what’s best for you.

 

From the web site, Dear Kitty, Some Blog – a video! 

Counting the numbers of free and reduced school lunches is not a good metric of student poverty

Then, using data from Michigan she examined the student performance on tests more closely and determined that “…the achievement gap between persistently disadvantaged children— those who qualified for free and reduced lunch throughout their elementary school years– and those who were never disadvantaged is about a third larger than the gap that is typically measured.” Dynarski found that by eight grade these persistently poor children were three grade levels behind their peers… and on closer examination she found that they almost consistently begin Kindergarten behind their peers and, worse yet from a policy perspective, the persistently poor could be identified very early.

Postal Carrier Saves Boy’s Life

A Doctor Who Link (Just for fun!) 

Reign of Terror (1964) remains very watchable , despite missing a couple of episodes which are replaced by animations. The set design, costumes, script, music and acting are all up to snuff, demonstrating that the essentially theatrical frame of reference that prevailed at the BBC during the 60s and 70s could have very satisfying results.

Sanders is Right about Prescription Drugs

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics2 Comments

Sanders is Right about Prescription Drugs

(This quote is from Sander’s Facebook Site.) 

Provided by the Sanders Campaign web site. jp
Provided by the Sanders Campaign web site. jp

In 1999, I took a busload of Vermonters – mostly women, many of them dealing with breast cancer – over the Canadian border into Montreal. As long as I live, I will never forget the looks on their faces when they bought the same medicine they were buying in Vermont, in the U.S.A., for one-tenth of the price – one-tenth of the price. These were working-class women who were struggling with breast cancer and who didn’t have a whole lot of money. They were able to purchase the exact same medicine for 10 percent of the price in Montreal. That makes no sense to me, and it only speaks to the power of the pharmaceutical industry over the Congress that we have Members here who vote for all kinds of free-trade agreements – they just love free trade. We can bring in any product we want from China. We can have lettuce and tomatoes coming in from farms in Mexico. But for some strange reason we cannot bring in brand name drugs from Canada. We just can’t do it. We can’t figure out how to do it. And everybody here knows what the reason is – it is the power of the pharmaceutical industry, their campaign donations, and their lobbying efforts.

This is hardcore business ethics. Rigging the game so that Americans are forced to pay premium prices is wrong. This kind of thing and it is an American constant, a continuous cycle of political spending and favors designed to enrich a tiny number while impoverishing the rest, is key to understanding the appeal of Donald Trump. Those voters are so angry that it doesn’t matter what he says or does as long as he is clearly not part of a political system that rigs the game against them on a regular basis.

Americans bear much of the burden of medical research through their tax dollars but are subjected to the agony of hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for drugs whose actual costs are measured in pennies. This is an enormous transfer of wealth from the vast majority of Americans to the bank accounts of a few. Why should we Americans pay twice, first to develop the drugs and then, once again, when we need them?

Who designed this? – the drug companies and their allies in the government. Heads, they win, tails you lose. Every single time.

This isn’t right.

We can do better that this.

James Pilant

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Pilant’s Business Ethics Links 8-14-2016 Ghostbusters Busted Edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Ghostbusters Busted Edition

We start with the claim that the new all-female Ghostbusters movie is a box office bomb and then move on into the much more serious waters of who gets to fire our nukes and should we even be having Olympic Games. I would ask you to pay particular attention to the Justice Department report on Baltimore – it is an alarming and disgusting analysis of a police department badly off the tracks. 

As always, please share and like this post!!

James Pilant

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Ghostbusters Busted Edition

The New Ghostbusters Film a disaster? 

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie is heading for a loss of around $70 million. Maybe more. As of right now, the movie has only made $180 million worldwide, with a reported production budget of more than $140 million. That, coupled with a massive marketing budget almost ensures that the movie is going to take a pretty big hit. However, a studio rep disputed the high figure in THR’s report.

Maybe the President shouldn’t be able to launch nuclear weapons? 

The possibility of Donald Trump winning the presidential election this November has renewed media and public interest in one of the most important responsibilities of the president: commanding America’s massive nuclear arsenal and averting nuclear war.

Yet what has been lost in the angst that Mr. Trump might soon have the authority to launch nuclear weapons is the equally unnerving reality that the U.S. nuclear posture is already unnecessarily dangerous and redundant. Neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton have explained how they would seek to put U.S. doctrine on a safer footing and reduce global nuclear weapons risks.
Should the Olympic continue? 
Although hosting the Olympic Games is prestigious, it’s rarely lucrative — the 1984 Games in Los Angeles is often described as the first since 1932 to turn a profit. Many countries, meanwhile, have taken years to pay back their debts — and often at the taxpayers’ expense. The 1976 Games in Montreal ended up costing far more than originally planned, while the summer Games in Athens in 2004 — which cost the country about $11 billion by some estimates — was widely seen as symptomatic of the kind of economic mismanagement that led to Greece’s subsequent economic collapse.
The implications of the Justice Department’s report on Baltimore
The criminal justice system’s denigration and dehumanization of black life represents the great moral crisis of our times. The report’s unspoken context is the nation’s painful history of slavery, Jim Crow and racial violence that contours contemporary American social, political and civic life. Black life in America continues to be subject to racist, institutional forces that deny access to citizenship and the rule of law and then, in an outrageous rhetorical sleight of hand, criminalize African-Americans as being undeserving of citizenship or legal protection.
We are a long way from being a color blind nation – a long way from a nation in which being White is penalized. This is an example of long term institutional racism and for the residents of Baltimore, a day to day experience. 
In my mind, the most alarming part of the report is the “good ole boys” network in the sex crimes division where all rapes are false charges or the woman’s fault or both. It takes a cold and heartless mind to arrive at those conclusions. jp
Trump voters vary from portrayal? 
The study also suggests that while blue-collar workers with low levels of education are significantly more likely to support Trump, those workers are not, for the most part, factory workers who have been hit by trade and the decline of American manufacturing. “The Gallup analysis shows that Americans who live in places where employment in manufacturing has declined since 1990 are not more favorable to Trump,” the Washington Post’s Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo write. “Rothwell did not find a relationship when he focused only on white respondents, either, or even specifically on white Republicans.” In fact, Rothwell writes in the study that Trump attracts less support in regions where trade has had a greater impact on manufacturing. “Surprisingly, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign,” he says.

Guns are a potent tool for males to maintain dominance

“Megan Short, who died alongside her husband, Mark, and the couple’s three children in an apparent murder-suicide over the weekend, had been planning to leave her husband, ” read the follow-up report at NBC 10. The story went on to detail that the couple had started dating when Megan was only 17 years old and Mark was 24, and that Megan had been communicating with friends about her desire to leave and her belief that her husband was abusive.

While there’s no way to confirm for sure what happened here, the entire story is a potent reminder that while mass shootings where madmen attack strangers grab the most headlines, the much larger problem in this country is people, mostly men, killing partners and family members — and then often themselves — in a desperate act to maintain dominance and control.

“In approximately 70% of domestic violence homicides (current or ex-intimate partners) there has been prior domestic violence against the female (not necessarily reported to police) ,” Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell, a domestic violence researcher at Johns Hopkins University explained over email, adding that “leaving the abusive relationship increases risk” of domestic homicide occurring.

Do the Democrats need White Working Class Males? 

In fact, in the last three presidential races the Democratic candidate lost among non-college educated whites by an average of 22 points. In 2012 it was a record 26 points. However, you’ll notice that the Democratic candidate won those last two races pretty handily. Nonetheless, despite their winning record and a diverse coalition that looks like 2016 America, the Democrats are still seen to have a big “problem” because they are allegedly ignoring the plight of the white working class and failing to attract their votes. This season, with Trump electrifying this cohort with his calls for deporting Mexicans and banning Muslims, the genre is especially plentiful.

Free markets and dictators?

Yet it is not just contempt for democracy that one will find in some libertarian literature. Even more troubling is how leading free-market thinkers have actively upheld authoritarian countries as positive examples of governance.

The so-called “economic miracles” that took place since the rise of neoliberalism in countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, Chile and China are often admired. In 2015, libertarian economist John C. Goodman published an article in Forbes warning that democracy could threaten the free-market economies of Hong Kong and Singapore.

“The right dictator — one who appreciates the power of free markets to lift all boats — seems to outperform democratic government in what we might consider the most enlightened parts of the world,” he said.

CHAUNCEY DEVEGA gives his opinion on Trump’s Assassination remarks. 

During a political rally in North Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump told his followers that:

“Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish — the 2nd Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the 2nd Amendment people —  maybe there is, I don’t know.

But — but I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day…”

Despite efforts by his minions to deflect and spin Trump’s comments to some other meaning, his intent was clear: Hillary Clinton should be targeted for gun violence if she dares to nominate judges who would properly interpret the 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The meaning of a given speech act is heavily dependent on context. Donald Trump’s rallies routinely feature misogynist and sexist language where Hillary Clinton is described as a “bitch.” Hillary Clinton has also been threatened with death by Donald Trump’s adviser Roger Stone. At Trump’s political rallies, people have also shouted that Hillary Clinton should be “hung” and put in jail. To deny that Donald Trump’s comments were incitements of violence against Hillary Clinton is to ignore the facts.

 

Business Ethics Blog Posts 8-10-2016 The Corporate Teaching Edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

The Corporate Teaching Edition

We start with a description of teaching at a charter school, feature a contribution from the invaluable David Yamada and discuss a variety of cutting edge business ethics issues in the news.

Welcome!

James Pilant

Teaching at a Charter middle school

“You are there to produce results, specifically test results; you are there to provide structure; you are not there to think; you are there to obey; you shall follow the curriculum; you shall train students for future careers and colleges; you need to enforce the rules and procedures; if students do not follow the rules and procedures, they need to go.

“White men in suits will watch your classes and nitpick your every move; every mistake and negative outcome is your fault. There is no excuse- there are never any excuses. Arrive earlier, stay later, care more, think less; others will go, maybe you will go; students will go; others will take your places. More structure- more discipline- take away recess- make the students sit in classrooms silently at lunch. Force students to march on the blue line all through the school- they need to obey. But don’t ask why all of this happens- never ask.

The past is past, let’s move on.

This is David Yamada’s site. He a dedicated blogger and a public treasure to all of us for his work. jp

This pattern occurs over and again at lousy organizations in every sector — public, private, and non-profit. It is the tactical refuge of bad leaders who somehow get repeated chances to screw up. Sadly, it also appeals to the words of philosopher George Santayana quoted above, for organizations that cannot remember their past are surely doomed to repeat it, typically with recurring negative consequences.

Place Blame Fairly

I just heard Donald Trump, in his speech about economic policy, blame Hillary Clinton for creating this crisis, with nary a word of clarification raised by commentators on his speech about the fact that this collapse in Detroit and elsewhere had nothing to do with the Clintons.  It occurred during Ronald Reagan’s watch.  

Nine Hundred Million a Year

There are students graduating from high school today who only know of schools as places where doors are locked, guards are on duty, and cameras are recording their every move. The next generation of students will know of schools where fingerprint or retinal recognition systems are needed to get into class or to borrow from the library or use the school computer… where bullet proof backpacks and i-pad covers will be mandatory… and where someone will read every entry on their computer and listen to every word they utter. Parents may lament this development like one of the parents in Utah who said that he wished his child had more freedom. But like that same parent, they might be willing to trade that freedom for safety. Here’s his quote:

I’d love to let her spread her wings a little bit more. But we do keep our thumbs on her. There’s always the fear of a kidnap, a traffic accident. Turn on the news at night—we watch the news while we eat dinner. The media loves to create a sense of panic. They love bad news.”

The media over bad news… and gun manufacturers love it too… and so do school safety “experts”.

When industry off loads its responsibilities onto the public

Taxpayers, not industry, will have to pay for environmental monitoring at a pulp mill in Dryden, Ont., infamous for its poisoning of people in two northern Ontario First Nations, according to a recent ruling by an Ontario court.

Ontario was attempting to get two former owners of the mill to pay for ongoing monitoring at the mills former disposal site where 9,000 kilograms of mercury was dumped into the English-Wabigoon River system in the 1960s and 70s.

But a deal struck by Ontario to facilitate the sale of the mill in 1979, helped protect the future owners of the mill, according to a ruling by the Ontario Superior Court in July.

The marketing is a set of lies

“The rise of consumerism led the body image industries to develop a sure-fire formula for success: promote a thin ideal of beauty that the majority of women can never attain and thereby create virtually infinite demand among consumers. The irony of the weight loss industry is that its very existence depends on the failure of its products. In what other industry would customers repeatedly pay large sums of money for products and services that do not work? The weight loss industry has been clever enough to sustain its market share by placing the blame on the consumer, with caveats that their products will only work if used in combination with ‘a sensible diet and regular exercise’.” (Williams and Germov 2008: 345)

Healthcare going the wrong way

What we’re seeing—in this pattern of sharply rising spending on healthcare by the wealthy and flat or slow growth for everyone else—is what the authors consider to be “a shift from need-based to income-based receipt of spending growth.” In other words, it represents a return to the unequal consequences of the pre-Medicaid, pre-Medicare financing of healthcare in the United Staes.

That’s the last straw. Do we really need any more arguments for universal healthcare, aka, Medicare for everyone?

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Business Ethics Links 8-10-2016 Trump Statement Backlash Edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics1 Comment

Trump Statement Backlash Edition

This one is all on one topic, Donald Trump. Most of these are various takes and opinions on his statement yesterday suggesting that “second amendment people” could stop Hilary appointing judges they don’t like. 

There are some arguing that meant he wanted gun owners to vote. No, I’m sorry. I’ve been an English speaker my whole life and as an attorney can spot the implications of a remark. And if it was meant as a joke, it was in incredibly poor taste. When a politician gets shot, our choices become more limited and thousands who might run for office are deterred from doing so. 

It’s not funny and it’s incredibly reckless. 

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Trump Statement Backlash Edition

So, today is all Donald. 

James Pilant

History is watching

What does Trump think about gun owners? 

It’s been suggested that what Trump actually said was “Although the Second Amendment, people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” From the tape, this is plausible. But it’s not likely. For one thing, the Trump campaign itself used the phrase “2nd Amendment people” in its press release defending the comments, and for another, the rest of the quote makes clear that Trump’s remark was less a stirring call to arms for gun lovers than a casual crack at their expense. Where the rest of us might feel like we have no options in a Hillary Clinton presidency, the subtext goes, they’re so insane that they might shoot a judge. That’s what his “I don’t know” means. Who knows what those loons are capable of?

The contempt Trump feels for supporters of the Second Amendment may seem out of step with the Republican platform he’s ostensibly running on. But it’s not at all inconsistent with who Trump is: a city slicker from Manhattan who has, over the years, held all kinds of liberal positions on issues such as abortion; universal health care; and, oh yeah, the assault weapons ban. In 1999, as seen in this amusing videoposted by Boing Boing, Trump even said in an interview that “the Republicans are just too crazy right. What’s going on is just nuts.”

Trump Campaign in Freefall? 

Barely 24 hours after Donald Trump delivered a speech intended to reset his staggering presidential campaign, his off-the-cuff suggestion that people resort to violence against his opponent has him right back in the ditch.

At a rally in North Carolina on Tuesday, Trump applied his signature sarcasm to a political third rail, stating that “the Second Amendment” may be the only way to stop Clinton from getting to appoint federal judges if she defeats him in November.

RNC bleeding staffers because of Trump

Scarborough Says Dump Trump

And the political ride will only get rockier for Trump in the coming days after he suggested that one way to keep a conservative Supreme Court after Hillary Clinton got elected would be to assassinate her or federal judges. Trump and his supporters have been scrambling wildly all day to explain away the inexplicable, but they can stop wasting their time. The GOP nominee was clearly suggesting that some of the “Second Amendment people” among his supporters could kill his Democratic opponent were she to be elected.

Can we get a real medical report on Trump? 

In the latest twist on the weirdest campaign ever, Donald Trump seems to have encouraged supporters to kill Hillary Clinton.  Trump said, “By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although, the Second Amendment people maybe there is. I don’t know.”  Of course in the immediate aftermath of the loony homicidal comment, the Trump campaign is now saying that the “dishonest media” is misreading his claim.  That might hold water if it weren’t actually the second time that his campaign has supported killing Trump’s competition in the last month.

What did Trump mean? Was it a joke? 

McClatchy Decides That it is all a matter of Perspective!!

The BBC Take on all this!

Business Ethics Links 8-9-2016 Trump has gone too far edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Sounds like incitement to violence to me

Addressing a rally in Wilmington, the Republican presidential nominee said: “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.

“But the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Trump hints at need for assassination of Hilary Clinton

Donald Trump has hinted at the assassination of Hillary Clinton by supporters of gun rights.

The Republican nominee was speaking at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, about the next president’s power to appoint supreme court justices. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he said, adding: “Although the second amendment people – maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Donald Trump’s full remarks

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially, the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno. But I tell you what, that will be a horrible day. If Hillary gets to put her judges in, right now we’re tied. You see what’s going on. We’re tied ‘cause Scalia, this was not supposed to happen. Justice Scalia was going to be around for ten more years, at least, and this is what happened. That was a horrible thing, So now look at it. So Hillary essentially wants to abolish the second amendment.

Now speaking to the NRA folks, who are great: when you, when you, and I tell you, so they endorsed me. They endorsed me very early. My sons are members. I’m a member. If you, we can add, I think the National Rifle Association, we can add the Second Amendment to the justices, they almost go, in a certain way, hand and hand. Now the justices are going to do things that are so important. And we have such great justices. You saw my list of eleven that have been vetted and respected and have gotten great, and they, a little bit, equate.

But if you don’t do what’s the right thing, you’re not going to have – either you’re not going to have a Second Amendment or you’re not going to have much of it left. And you’re not going to be able to protect yourselves, which you need. Which you need! When the bad guys burst into your hours, they’re not looking about Second Amendments and ‘do I have the right to do this.’ The bad guys aren’t going to be giving up their weapons. But the good people will say, ‘oh, well, that’s the law.’ No, no. Not going to happen. We can’t let it happen. We can’t let it happen.

New Charges Against Roger Ailes

005-1Mark Singer on Trump

Singer blames Fox News and the web for what seems to be a growing disregard for the truth, but also acknowledges that widening inequality, leaving a large swathe of Americans essentially abandoned by the two main parties, has helped account for Trump’s rise – along with “the haters”, racists and xenophobes excited by this promises to keep Mexicans and Muslims out of America.

Half of All Americans

“Half of all Americans are backing away from the net due to fears regarding security and privacy,” longtime tech security guru Dan Kaminsky said in his Black Hat keynote speech, citing a July 2015 study by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. “We need to go ahead and get the internet fixed or risk losing this engine of beauty.”

Self Driving Car delivers man to hospital

This might be the wave of the future. Every car could be programmed to deliver itself to the nearest hospital if the driver become impaired. The car could also communicate with the hospital telling the facility its arrival time while transmitting data about the driver. jp

Joshua Neally’s brand-new Tesla Model X didn’t exactly save his life when he started having severe chest pains, but it helped him get most of the way to a hospital.

The 37-year-old was driving in his electric car from his law office in Springfield,Missouri, when the air was sucked from his lungs and he felt a sudden biting pain in his chest – a blocked artery in his lungs. Distracted by the pain and still in traffic, he let the car’s controversial autopilot carry him down the road toward a hospital.

“It was the most excruciating pain I’ve ever had,” he later told local KY3 news. “It was kinda getting scary. I called my wife and just said, ‘Something’s wrong.’”

“I just knew I had to get there, to the ER,” he said.

The Failure of Corporate News Coverage

To bracket out the racism, bigotry, and hateful behavior at Donald Trump’s rallies also requires a high amount of willful denial regarding the type of poison he represents in the American body politic. Here, The New York Times is ignoring their own excellent reporting on Donald Trump’s rallies by writers such as Jared Yates Sexton.  The New York Times is also somehow separating the violence inside Trump’s rallies where Black Lives Matter and other protesters have been threatened with being burned alive—an ominous allusion to America’s horrific and unique history of spectacular lynchings against its black citizens—from what is taking place outside. Most troubling, The New York Times, in now “discovering” the racism and bigotry among Trump’s supporters, has chosen to transform the mountains of public opinion and other social science research that has consistently demonstrated the role of racism, white racial animus, and authoritarianism in driving support for Donald Trump into mere curiosities and outliers, the equivalent of empirical anthills. This is intellectually dishonest.

Empathy and Schools

We all know what a Danish pastry is — that delightful caloric bomb of glazed breakfast deliciousness. But what about a Danish classroom cake? And moreover, how can this help teach empathy?

While researching our book “The Danish Way of Parenting; What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids,” my co-author and I interviewed numerous teachers and students across Denmark to learn how they incorporate empathy in schools and at home. Notably, in the Danish education system empathy is considered as important as teaching math and literature, and it is woven into the school’s curriculum from pre-school through high school.

The Danes’ highly developed sense of empathy is one of the main reasons that Denmark is consistently voted one of the happiest countries in the world (this year it is once again number one). Empathy plays a key role in improving our social connections, which is a major factor in our overall happiness.