This is a well written, thoughtful article. (The title is great by itself.) Journalists are confronted by thorny ethical issues on a continuous basis. He discusses this in very much a reality based manner while still hanging on to virtue.
I liked it. By the way, the site is beautiful. A lot of thought went into the design and it’s visually stunning. So, go and read the article but if you don’t want to, click over just to have a look at the site.
James Pilant
via Mythbroakia
Mike LaMonica calls us to look at a single home, a beautiful home. I would guess another mortgage foreclosure. I’ve seen houses around here that have been for sale so long, that one of the two word supports has rotted and left the for sale sign in the grass.
I love houses. I like the old ones, brick and sturdy. The mid-sixties ranch house designs are my favorite. It’s a tragedy when a beautiful house goes empty.
LaMonica is right. It is sad.
James Pilant
(A reprint of a previous column)
I search for people talking and writing about ethics and reform. Since we are discussing business ethics, a good place for me to hunt for these kinds of writers is on the business pages of large circulation newspapers. It’s not much fun. Fortunately not all business writers live in a cartoon like version of our world where noble business men are limited by government regulation from making us all rich and happy, where the chief problem with the stock market is pessimism, and where stupid home buyers ruined the economy, but many perhaps most do.
Look, I believe in free enterprise. I think a business man should be able to make a profit. But a lot of what got us into the current mess had more to do with gambling with other people’s money that it did with investing. Further, I have a strong prejudice in favor of actually making stuff and investing in this nation’s future instead of moving money around as if that was “God’s work.” And if you think, that after seeing how derivatives work, watching the colossal failure of the rating agencies, the incredible passivity of the SEC and other government regulators, and the inability of the government, various huge corporations and the business publications to predict, prevent or ameliorate the current crisis, that I am going to blame individual home buyers for this mess, you just aren’t getting me.
If we just remain optimistic the recovery will continue is a regular thought for many business pages. Jim Gallagher writing in St. Louis Today says that the principal danger from the Greek bail out and the crisis for the Euro is that investors fearing bad things will happen will behave irrationally and damage the market by selling. He provides reams of data to support his thesis. But in spite of all of his data, I have doubts. The European Common Market is a larger economy than the United States and many of their members are more question marks or problems than we like to acknowledge. I think fear is appropriate.
It’s all that home buying that brought us into this mess is an almost constant refrain. I can’t help but notice it was the collapse of a part of the derivatives market (a 600 trillion dollar gambling casino masquerading as an investment) that destroyed much of America’s economy. I also feel obligated to point out that those nasty, demented, foolish home buyers never seem to have figured out they could package their mortgages as securities, get them triple A status from compliant rating agencies, and then sell all over the world as if they were good investments relieving lenders of any responsibility for their decisions.
They say regulation is a bad idea. There is too much now. Golly Gee, looking over the ruins of the world economy and the thirty million American unemployed, you might think somebody did something wrong. But no, if anything bad happened it was not the fault of the huge investment banks (who got into a little trouble requiring trillions of dollars of bailout money), it was the fault of over regulation. Here’s Thomas Oliver from Atlanta Business News.
Well, so much for my pain. I have found in my searches many authors who inform, enlighten and motivate me.That makes it worthwhile.
James Pilant
From Yahoo News –
Courtney Love’s settlement of a case sparked by online attacks on a fashion designer show that while Twitter posts may be short, they can also be costly.
The singer has agreed to pay Dawn Simorangkir $430,000, plus interest, to settle a lawsuit the designer filed in March 2009 over comments Love made on Twitter and her MySpace blog.
Many users assume that because the comments or brief or similar to casual conversation, that a lawsuit for libel is unlikely. No, it’s just as likely as for any other media. It’s hard to think of defamation in terms of a newspaper with a 20,000 circulation being similar to a twitter post, but that twitter post could go viral and be seen by 20,000,000 people.
Here’s more from the article.
“People are getting in trouble for Twitter postings on an almost daily basis,” said First Amendment Attorney Doug Mirell, a partner at Loeb and Loeb who did not handle the case.
“The laws controlling what is and isn’t libelous are the same regardless of the medium in which the statements appear,” he said.
From further down in the article –
“The fact is that this case shows that the forum upon which you communicate makes no difference in terms of potential legal exposure,” Freedman said. “Disparaging someone on Twitter does not excuse one from liability.”
When you communicate with Twitter or Facebook, pretend you are editorializing in a newspaper because legally, it’s very similar.
James Pilant
From the Times of India
A group of workers Thursday set ablaze the vehicle of R.S. Ray, deputy general manager of a private steel company Powmex Steels near Titilagarh town, about 400 km from here when he was on his way home for lunch.
The irate workers allegedly first asked the driver and another company employee who were in the same vehicle to come out. When they came out, the workers poured petrol and kerosene on the vehicle and set it on fire with Ray inside.
Employer – employee relations appear to be more contentious in India. I am curious about how collective bargaining is done there and how extreme executive pay fairs as an issue.
I’ll have to look into it.
James Pilant
I teach people who want to be in law enforcement.
According to some of what I have read in the past few days, police officers are all greedy freeloaders, whose call to duty is a fraud while they exercise their narcissistic self interest.
You can look here, here and here.
Now, you might object that the writers and speakers here did not directly attack police but attacked public employee unions.
Seventy-three percent of all sworn police officers are in unions.
No, they are not going to say police or the word, fireman. But that’s what they mean.
These attacks on unions and collective bargaining hit the police just as hard as any other public union.
I’m not going to get into, whether or not unions are good ideas for police. I am more interested in another issue.
Police work is motivated in many cases by the idealism of the young and the status of the job in the eyes of the public. How are we supposed to recruit good people to be police officers with this kind of talk going on? And what if it continues? Month after month, year after year, the words, “Greedy public employees are destroying the nation!” How do you deal with that? What kind of police are we going to get?
Does this hammer idealism until only those who become policemen gravitated to it as kind of a last chance employment?
What in the hell have we become here?
If most Americans don’t have good pensions or good medical benefits, the police shouldn’t have them either?
At two o’clock in the morning, when somebody is trying to jimmy your window, do you want a highly motivated police officer whose idealism and commitment to duty made him want to be a police officer? Or would you rather have someone who couldn’t do anything else?
I wouldn’t worry about it. You see, it takes motivation and guts to confront a robber outside a house, so the unmotivated uncaring policeman will just ignore the call.
Probably a lot of you don’t care one way or the other. Or you won’t until your law enforcement agencies have started taking damage.
I’m not waiting for that to happen.
Law enforcement is not a lucrative job. It’s not always a pleasant or easy job. But my heart is with those people, who do a job that must be done and deserve better than insults.
James Pilant
This is a good article about multi-national corporations and corporate social responsibility. In fact, it’s excellent. I really enjoyed it.
It’s from the web site, hinaumer. I recommend you read it.
James Pilant
via hinaumer
Ethics Alarms is a web site I read regularly. (You should too) This post is excellent. Marshall calls down his wrath on Texas hypocrisy. I am fully in agreement with everything he says. It’s hard for me to believe that people could write legislation like this. But they do.
Put Ethics Alarms in your favorites and read today’s article.
James Pilant
via Ethics Alarms
Frankly, the New Testament has not given me many distinct policy points that Christ might want to take a position on. I think the author feels about the same way that I do.
I am a devoted to the idea of net neutrality. At the very least, I am devoted to it because I want to keep blogging and if my site is downgraded, everyone down to my relatives will stop looking at it.
The author has strong political views and I am fine with that. Bring on the political views! We need some serious discussions about what we should be doing in this country and what I usually hear was canned for public consumption about 80 years ago.
Read the article. Enjoy. There’s good stuff being said here.
James Pilant
via Strategic Mac
The World of Warcraft charges with the force of a thousand screaming Orcs into the subject of ethics. And not just any ole ethics, business ethics.
Please give a read to a thoroughly original topic of ethical concern.
James Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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