Category: business ethics

Steven Mintz Responds To My Post – $250,000 And Poor

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

Steven Mintz
Steven Mintz also known as The Ethics Sage commented on my earlier post about a Internet publication’s post about the difficulty of living on a quarter of a million a year.

James, I agree with your sentiments. The divide between rich and poor with a growing middle class is expanding rapidly. I wouldn’t classify all billionaires as greedy. The pursuit of self-interest is always a factor and often at the cost of others as too often occurs in corporations. There are, however, a few good people that either use their money to better society, improve our educational system, help those who can’t help themselves, and even fight world hunger and illiteracy. We know of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates in the business world who have started foundations for these purposes. They seem to be trying to do the right thing. The jury is still out on Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, who has pledged to donate a significant amount of his money. Oprah Winfrey comes to mind and her charitable efforts as well as using personal gravitas to improve conditions around the world. Perhaps we can include someone like Angelina Jolie who seems genuinely concerned about the unfortunate circumstances of way too many people in other countries. That said, you are absolutely right that the fabric of our nation has changed and not for the better. The middle class get squeezed more and more. The sad part is nothing has be done, even with the financial crisis, to address these issues and I fear nothing will be done because of the influence and desire of those with the billions to continue the trend and the willingness of our Congressional leaders, many of whom are already wealthy (or hope to be so after leaving office)to support the obsessively rich because they hope to join their ranks some day.

I recommend you add The Ethics Sage to your favorites.

James Pilant

Facebook And Goldman Sachs

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Steven Mintz, the Ethics Sage, has a new post about the Facebook deal with Goldman Sachs. Any transaction with the name, Goldman Sachs, in it should raise legitimate concerns. Professor Mintz provides detail on what is wrong with the deal. I suggest you read the full post.

James Pilant

From the Steven Mintz post, Facebook — Goldman Sachs Deal –

I am quite dubious about the Facebook — Goldman Sachs transaction because we’ve been there before. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s we heard about company’s such as Lucent Technologies, Sunbeam, Qwest, WorldCom and, off course, Enron that all had one thing in common — they cooked the books and fooled investors into thinking they were doing a lot better than the true numbers indicated. I hope that’s not the case with the Facebook deal for the sake of the investors and our fragile economy. Otherwise, there may be a sequel to the movie, The Social Network — The Demise of the Social Network!

Andrew Gates Comments On The Essay, “$250,000 And Poor”

On By southwerkIn business ethics

This is a comment from Andrew Gates who as always has some useful points.

James Pilant

Andrew Gates –

All I could think of while reading that article is “are these people serious?!”

I think the problem is that the accounting firm doing the study just assumed that many of these “burdens” were necessary for a four person family with a large income. Not having time to keep our houses immaculate is not just a burden for the upper class. I think thats a burden that families of every class (especially ones with children) face. The difference is that lower and middle class families FIND the time to keep their house in relatively livable condition.

Dry cleaning tab?! Are you serious? I guarantee you that our men and women in the armed services must keep their uniforms to a higher standard than corporate executives. How do they do this? They learn how to iron and starch a shirt after coming home from their watch. Something tells me that corporate executives probably don’t work as many hours either.

$4000 for kids activities? Ok, I understand that some childrens activities can be expensive. I am the oldest of 6 children. My father was able to allow all of us to play baseball, football, and/or soccer with our counties recreation department for just a few hundred dollars a season. I suppose the upper class children are too good to get their baseball uniform dirty with lowly middle class children?

Yeah, its SOOOOOO hard being them.

An Interesting Discussion On Modern Ethics, Education And Hope For The Future: Ed Deep, Steven Mintz, and Andrew Gates

On By southwerkIn business ethics

(Bank Of America Next WikiLeaks Target – Bank Digging For Dirt
by James Pilant on Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 10:39am)
The title above is the Facebook subject that began the discussion. I include it for perspective.

Ed Deep What Bofa is doing is pretty much PR 101, trying to state that the misconduct or “problem” is a person thing, not a corporate policy.
There are several problems, though. The executives from the bank are not recruited in Mars. They are recruited amongst ourselves. Their actions are reflexes from the acceptable conducts amongst ourselves. Our culture, the way we live in society. My take on this is: We must make clear that there are moral values, ethical conduct and moreover, there is the regulation from the market authorities and there is the Law. And there is punishment. There should be no witch hunt, but we can not forfeit fixes, malfeasance, unorthodox solutions or other euphemisms for crimes that are listed. For the crimes not listed, there is our values. A clear message from society that these practices are not condoned will change the attitude. We must educate our children to have moral values and ethical behaviour. Can not allow anyone else to do it. Much less the “media”.
Wednesday at 6:31am

Steven Mintz Ed: Well said. I fear, however, it’s almost too late too teach our children moral and ethical values because of the unethical, irresponsible culture in our society that permeates throughout. Also, who is to teach it? As a university professor I’ve seen instructors shy away from the topic and even have a counter-productive slant on what is ethics.
Wednesday at 6:41am

Ed Deep It is never too late.I would not give up. Humankind have gone a long way since slavery and serfdom as an example. Even Aristotle though slavery to be moral, so there is always a future. There will be a new Renaissance, a revolution of the mind. Never dispair. -Keep Reading ..,>

Mind Controlled Devices?

On By southwerkIn business ethics

From the Denver Post article entitled – Mind-controlled devices may be next, say experts at CES

I believe in mind control,” Xavier Lauwaert, worldwide marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard, said Thursday during a panel discussion about the future of user interfaces.

Such technology would be like voice control, only a user would simply need to think of what he wanted a device to do, rather than having to say anything.

“The next evolution of the HP PCs will be mind control,” Lauwaert predicted.

I can’t help but think this poses a whole new area of privacy concerns. I freely admit that if you use a device to turn things on and off, there is little to be concerned about but the ability to monitor how another person makes decisions (how their mind works) is not an area I want the government or private industry poking around in.

Look at it this way, if you use parts of your brain to maneuver through the internet or make financial decisions by paying your bills or investing on line, monitoring those kinds of transactions provides an intimate portrait of how one formulates thoughts and make decisions often on an unconscious level. A powerful computer can make sense of these of the minds patterns which can then be incorporated in music, videos, advertisements, scams and political campaigns.

Advertising campaigns are already designed to probe the unconscious but they have been limited by the occasional burst of rationality on the part of the public. Manipulation of thought patterns could devestate this last line of defense. They could short circuit the conscious mind bypassing it entirely.

It could be used as a limited but quite effective form of mind control depending on the power and detail of the monitoring equipment.

So, I have some concerns.

James Pilant

The Power Elite Abandon America

On By southwerkIn business ethics2 Comments

We now live in an age of the billionaire. They are American only by convenience. They are not really comfortable here. They are comfortable only with their own kind. When this nation becomes inconvenient, they will simply leave.

They know no bounds of patriotism, no civic responsibility (beyond a desire to destroy social security and public schools), and vicious antipathy toward taxes of any kind.

They are willing to spend billions to protect their interests which are largely financial.

Their contempt for the American middle class is almost unmeasurable. To them, Americans are overweight, greedy, overpaid, unambitious, a lumpen mass of losers, it is time history abandoned.

Globalization has left them abundant places to go that are not the United States, abundant ways to avoid taxes and an astonishing variety of way to vent their contempt for the unfortunate societies that spawned them.

Frankly, as a defender of the middle class, I feel woefully out gunned.

My strong suspicion is that if I am willing to forego my beliefs and embrace the coming new order, my life will improve materially.

By the standards of the new elite, I don’t even make fool.

I am a patriot. I believe in this nation and its future. I am disgusted by the strange sense of entitlement by those who have mercilessly exploited this nation and seem to intend the destruction of its economic base. So, I am not the right kind of person.

We are not as a nation fully abandoned yet. But the ties that bind the power elite to this country steadily weaken. The destruction of the public institutions of the United States will not end with Social Security but culminate in foreign owned roads, bridges, sewer systems, electricity and oil. This nation is valuable only for the money that can be squeezed out of it. The beliefs that created it and the sacrifices that maintain it are of no consideration.

I do not know if this can be changed. I have doubts that it is possible.

I fear for this nation’s future and not for just this nation but for many others around the globes who will be swept up in these changes.

Business ethics is not possible without law to support it. It is not possible with a sense of morals. It is not possible without consideration of other people and their rights.

So, in my mind, I am looking at the destruction of this field.

In fact, the whole concept of business ethics may become an idea only practiced at the bottom of the economic order.

I will continue to believe in this nation and its future but we are going to be sorely beset in the next decade.

James Pilant

The Average Stock Is Held For 22 Seconds!

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Michael Hudson
From Michael Hudson –

<em>Take any stock in the United States. The average time in which you hold a stock is–it’s gone up from 20 seconds to 22 seconds in the last year. Most trades are computerized. Most trades are short-term. The average foreign currency investment lasts–it’s up now to 30 seconds, up from 28 seconds last month.

Bank Of America Next WikiLeaks Target – Bank Digging For Dirt

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

The headline to my quoted article says that the bank is digging for dirt on itself. This is just PR. They know exactly what they don’t want people to know. Bank of America wants to give the impression that it’s such a hugh and confusing organization that nobody really had a handle on everything going on. Nonsense.

Frankly, I’m excited. This bank has been a key player in the mortgage foreclosure crisis and has just settled some buyback lawsuits. Let’s see exactly what they thought of the quality of their ownership chain. Let’s see what their internal memos said about the speed of the foreclosures, their refusals to renegotiate mortgages and their thoughts on the President’s plan to help homeowners.

I promise you a careful look at these documents as soon as I can get to them.

From The Lookout from Yahoo News –

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange recently confirmed that Bank of America will be his next target — so it’s not surprising that the nation’s largest bank is now in damage-control mode. Still, the megabank’s methods are a bit unorthodox. Instead of trying to frantically pin culpability elsewhere in the great chain of financial dealing, BofA executives are actually digging for dirt on the bank’s own operations, the New York Times reports. That way, the reasoning goes, the bank’s messaging team will be better positioned to spin any damaging revelations that surface from WikiLeaks.

Do people believe this stuff? Doesn’t this sound more like the plot for an episode of a television comedy?

James Pilant

Top Business Ethics Posts 1/4/11

On By southwerkIn business ethics

David Gebler on his blog, Business Ethics, calls attention to Johnson & Johnson’s legal problems.

Here’s an excerpt – Today’s business press reports that a lawsuit filed last week on behalf of Johnson & Johnson shareholders accused the company’s directors of ignoring “red flags” foreshadowing product recalls and government probes of manufacturing defects and marketing practices.

The Engineering Ethics Blog has a post about efficiency thusly, “Does Improving Efficiency Really Save Energy?”

Here’s an excerpt – Don’t get the idea I think efficiency is bad. If I did, I couldn’t very well call myself an engineer. However, Jevons reminds us that, like many other things in life, energy efficiency can be helpful in limited circumstances. But expecting it to solve all the world’s energy problems is not only unrealistic, but probably counterproductive as well.

Chris MacDonald writing in his blog, The Business Ethics Blog, discusses the topic, Greenpeace, Tar Sands and “Fighting Fire with Fire.”

Here’s an excerpt – Many people think companies deserve few or no protections against attacks. Some people, for example, think companies should not even be able to sue for slander or libel. Likewise, corporations (and other organizations) do not enjoy the same regulatory protections and ethical standards that protect individual humans when they are the subjects of university-based research.

Jack Marshall writing in Ethics Alarms had an interesting post about when e-mail posts cross the ethical line.

Here’s an excerpt – A lack of civility is considered a breach of professionalism in all jurisdictions, but not an ethical violation calling into question fitness to practice law—the standard for bar discipline—unless it is extreme, and usually not until there have been warnings issued. Apparently this particular spat was just too much for the Bar to take, perhaps because it reflects badly on the entire profession.

Julian Friedland in his blog, Business Ethics Memo, asks an excellent question, “Should American Business Protect American Jobs?”

Here’s an excerpt – Which is what I’ve been saying for sometime myself, arguing that it’s irrational on Rawlsian social-contract grounds for this nation to be shipping so many of its jobs overseas. But it’s not clear what can be done if corporations are unwilling to support regulations that would encourage American companies to keep jobs here.

Bank Of America Pays Two Billion Dollars To Settle Claims

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First, let’s be clear. This two billion dollars is a buyback of loans that were sold to other firms as good investments when in fact they were missing paperwork or had more serious problems. This case settles a small portion of the “handful,” the “tiny proportion” of loans in which there were mistakes that everybody was assuring us was the case six months ago. Well, there are hundreds of thousands of these loans. They border on or are loans based on deception and fraud.

This payout doesn’t make much sense. Bank of American shares actually went up after the agreement was announced. So, we have to figure they were expecting it to be much worse or suffered anxiety over the uncertainty.

What really surprises me was that Wikileaks is supposed to dump a ton of Bank of America files on the web and the opposition negotiators didn’t wait for it. I would have thought that the release of the documents would have put Bank of America in a poorer negotiating position while quite possibly providing new insights into the loans themselves.

I hate it when public financial events don’t make any sense. I hate it because it doesn’t make sense only because I don’t know some of the players or the deals. In a year or two, I’ll probably have some insight into what happened but by then it will make no difference in what has become “ancient” history.

James Pilant

From CBS Money Watch –

Bank of America Corp. will take an approximately $2 billion charge in its fourth quarter as it settles buyback claims on home loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The bank said Monday that it also expects to take a provision of about $3 billion in the quarter related to repurchase obligations on the home loans.

Bank of America shares jumped 4.4 percent in premarket trading on the news.

On Friday Bank of America, which is based in Charlotte, N.C., paid Fannie Mae $1.34 billion and Freddie Mac $1.28 billion as part of the settlements.

The deals with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are tied to Countrywide Financial Corp. residential mortgage loans. Bank of America bought Countrywide in July 2008.