OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — KMBC.com
Costco has given an Overland Park family a miniature ox and donkey to replace the ones stolen from nativity set while they were at church.
Wendy Connelly said her children, Wendy, Lorelei and Gryffin, were disappointed when the animals were taken from their yard. The nativity set was a gift from their grandma.
“They’ve been praying and praying for this, and they even said a prayer again last night and on our way to school. So, it was really exciting to see it happen,” Connelly said.
Connelly said they called Costco headquarters to find the replacement and there was only one display left in the country.
Connelly said her daughter, Lorelei, was heartbroken when the animals disappeared.
“It’s very heartwarming to see her now with her animals back and taking good care of them as usual,” Connelly said.
The family told KMBC’s Kerri Stowell said they’ve rigged a special system so the new pieces don’t wander off.
This is the kind of business philosophy we need, the kind of thing you can show as an example to others.
Something About Business is subtitled, The Pursuit of Ethically Successful Business. The blog has been up since September. Below is a representative selection. There are a good number of postings there now. September is fairly new, at least, to me. So, let us all welcome Wes Connolly by visiting it and reading some of his stuff! May he post a thousand times and make the business world a better place! Good luck, Mr. Connolly.
James Pilant
We have to learn from the mistakes of our past. In looking back in history, we are witnesses to the destructive effects of unethical leadership from companies like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and various banks. These companies not only brought a mess to their own businesses but to our whole country as well. So how did this happen? And what can we do? Well what we have to do is be more ethical. This basically means just doing the right thing. In a busin … Read More
Ministers from 10 European countries bordering the North Sea have agreed the construction of a new offshore electricity grid.
The grid will link countries across Europe and make it much easier for member states to trade energy.
It will also simplify the exploitation of the 140 Gigawatt offshore windfarm currently being planned in the North Sea.
By comparison, Hoover Dam generates about 2 Gigawatts.
Think of the enormous coastline of the United States and the possibilities of offshore windpower, and then note that no matter what happens giant windmills can’t destroy the gulf coast.
The future of the Middle Class - ruins. From the BBC –
A presidential panel set up to help trim the US budget deficit has called for steep spending cuts and tax rises.
The proposal would cut defence, social security and other spending, slashing a total of $4.1tn (£2.62tn) from the budget deficit by 2020.
But analysts say the panel is unlikely to ratify the plan with a vote, calling into question whether the US Congress will act on its recommendations.
“The solution will be painful,” the plan reads. “There is no easy way out.”
The US had a budget deficit of $1.3tn in the year to September, and critics have said the government should do more to narrow the gap.
Social Security pays for itself for another twenty years and its surplus is used in the U.S. to fund things like defense. Social Security taxes are only taken out of the first, 100,000 dollars or so out of income. If we raised the limit even slightly the fund would be intact for many decades.
Why is social security under attack? It’s doctrinal. Friedman economics says that government can do nothing right. Therefore, social security must by its very government nature be a failure. The numbers, the facts, the experience, – mean nothing. It’s very similar to a religion.
It’s why instead of the military rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure, we used private firms. By the Friedman doctrines, this colossal incompetence and theft of government funds would have been much worse if the government had done the job.
Private and public means to accomplish ends are choices. There is no complete superiority of one over another. There never will be. There are just tools to accomplish things, no more.
That people are able to build a strange worshipful doctrine toward “free enterprise” is a symptom of larger moral and ethical problems. But above all, it’s the result of a successful sales job paid for over decades with millions and billions of dollars and preached by dozens of well financed foundations and other advocacy organizations.
Let’s read another section from the BBC coverage –
The panel’s chairman, Mr Bowles, said the panel’s work had – at the very least – made America engage in substantive debate on the deficit issue.
“The era of debt denial and the denial of its consequences is over,” he said. “We have started an adult conversation that will dominate the debate until the elected leadership in Washington does something real.”
This is nonsense. These measures have been preached for decades by “free market” conservatives.
Besides the real issues aren’t even on the table. Why do we allow companies based and operating in the United States to offshore their tax burden? What is fair tax code and what do we need to do to enforce it? I could go on.
But if you want to quickly discover the intellectual and moral absence in the committee’s recommendations, you only have to examine the question of a bank tax.
Formerly, the United States was a manufacturing giant, so it gathered its taxes from a well paid middle class and by taxes on goods. Now we live in a nation based on finance and “play” money. Financial speculation is the rule of the day. Since our economy is now based on finance, doesn’t it make sense to change the nature of our tax structure to reflect our current realities? What we have now is a shrinking manufacturing base and a deteriorating middle class. We also have a banking and financial industry wedded at the hip to tax rescues and government guarantees. That merits taxation. Yet, a tax to raise a mere twenty billion dollars to help pay for another bailout was defeated in the middle of this year.
No one seems to talk about this one either. Did the debt commission talk about this for page after page? You’re going to read more about it here.
A report on this kind of tax suggests that even a small, simple tax will produce 100 billion dollars in revenue each. Obviously, a trillion in a decade.
That’s deficit reduction.
There is much more to talk about. But there seems little likelihood of a genuine discussion outside of the limits established by the beltway pundits. We can only talk about Medicare, Social Security and a PR campaign of little significance to rein in defense spending. I see nothing else in the proposals likely of actual action except the mortgage deduction.
President Obama stacked the committee with those who had long wanted to attack social programs. Those programs that benefit the middle class are those that will be successfully attacked. The middle class has been targeted for four decades with continued success. There is no reason for Washington to stop now.
Ireland’s international bailout boosted its bank stocks Monday, but outraged many hard-pressed taxpayers, who questioned why the government’s pension reserves must be ravaged as part of a deal that burdens the whole country with the mistakes of a rich elite.
Shares in Ireland’s banks rose sharply as markets were encouraged by the bailout’s immediate focus on injecting €10 billion into the cash-strapped lenders out of a total of €67.5 billion ($89 billion) in loans.
But the Irish were shocked by a key condition for the rescue — that the government use €17.5 billion of its own cash and pension reserves to shore up its public finances, which have been overwhelmed by recession and exceptional costs of a runaway bank-bailout effort.
Opposition leaders and economists warned that the EU-IMF credit line’s average interest rate of 5.8 percent would be too high to repay. They also questioned why senior bondholders of Ireland’s struggling banks — chiefly other banks in Britain, Germany and the U.S. — still weren’t being asked to bear some costs.
Here’s what’s been happening. About twenty years ago, the Irish bought in to the Friedman Economic Theories (FREE MARKET) and freed their system from the chains of regulation. After that, the economy took off like a rocket. Actually the economy did take off but only for certain sectors of the economy particularly the financial industry. All that rocket climb was just a bubble of speculation and when the cloud of dust settled the state banks were deep in the hole. The Irish nationalized the banks and have since bailed them out to the tune of 100 billion dollars. This is smaller than the the U.S. bailout (TARP) but from a very, very much smaller nation (4.5 million people).
They are getting to a loan to keep their economy afloat from other European nations. To get it, they have to put the nation’s pensions funds up as a guarantee. People are unhappy about this.
But here’s the kicker. This is what is really making people mad. The bondholders of these banks are not required to pay for any portion of this at all. Zero!
If they had turned away the huge profits made during the “Celtic Lion” period like a benevolent aristocracy, I might cut them some slack but they didn’t quibble about taking the money. And now the Irish people, in particular, the ones that never profited from the whole economic de-regulation, speculation nightmare, are going to pay for it.
The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis — and, of course, in capitalism we’re not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let’s mention it anyway — shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. The monster in the foreclosure crisis has no face and no brain. The mortgages that are being foreclosed upon have no real owners. The lawyers bringing the cases to evict the humans have no real clients. It is complete and absolute legal and economic chaos. No single limb of this vast man-eating thing knows what the other is doing, which makes it nearly impossible to combat — and scary as hell to watch.
Excellent, exactly. This is not a moral crisis where six million Americans suddenly decided to buy too much house. This is a moral crisis where the biggest financial institutions in the world decided to take the home owners of America on a little trip into world finance. The banks had a hell of a vacation. The home owners never made it back.
As usual, our good friend, Rortybomb does not let a day go by (even a holiday) without staying on top of the mortgage foreclosure crisis.
My compliments!
James Pilant
If you are not reading Rortybomb, let me ask you, “Why not and how soon can you start?”
Like you were going to get any work done today. Chris Hayes has really been on the foreclosure crisis over at MSNBC. Here he is, substituting for Lawrence O'Donnell, interviews noted foreclosure defense attorney Bubba Grimsley about servicer abuse. I can't embed the video, but the link is here (also here). Here he is on Rachel Maddow also interviewing Matt Taibbi on the recent foreclosure fraud … Read More
Dan’s flow chart is both masterful and scary at the same time. It makes you wonder whether anyone really knows who owns a mortgage. When one party sells it to another as a securitized asset, it transfers the risk to that party. Given that the original holder of the mortgage no longer bears the risk of default, it can make unsupportable mortgages to undeserving parties and not worry about the probability of repayment. Multiply that by the number of times a mortgage is sold and you have a chaotic system that encourages bad behavior.
(The “Ethics Sage,” aka Steven Mintz, has been writing, speaking out, and blogging about a lack of ethics in business and society by attacking the decline of moral values in society, a vanishing work ethic, pursuit of self-interests mentality, and a tone at the top of organizations that tolerates and even encourages wrongdoing.
Dr. Mintz enjoys an international reputation for research, teaching, and speaking on ethics in business and accounting. He has published two textbooks and dozens of research papers on business and accounting ethics, and corporate governance. He teaches a course on accounting ethics at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo.
Dr. Mintz is a widely sought out speaker at ethics, professional and academic meetings. He has presented at: The Board of Director and Corporate Governance Research Conference in Henley, England; Global Finance & Research Conference in London; The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Trinidad & Tobago; Association of Asian-Pacific Accountants in Bangkok, Thailand; and the Asian International Business Association in Shanghai, China.
Dr. Mintz has his own blog on ethics issues under the name of Ethics Sage. The website address is: http://www.ethicssage.com.)
I’ll just let this speak for itself, although the temptation to speculate of what happens to a child that hears sitar music in the womb is difficult to overcome.
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — KMBC.com
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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