Business Ethics Blog Posts 9-10-2016
We start with a post from “Secret Eyes Everywhere” about what you should do if you think Wells Fargo embroiled you in its system of forced enrollment for bank accounts, credit cards, etc. It’s very good advice. Lynn Stout takes on the banking idea of virtue and demolishes it – very nice work. David Yamada in his blog, Minding the Workplace gets reflective on us. “Hello Kitty, Some Blog” has some more on induced earthquakes and we have two good posts from the blog, “The Net Economy.” Last we have a post from “A Philosopher’s Blog,” a site I talked about at length about a week ago.
Best Wishes!!
Please Share, Subscribe and Like — Not just me, but these people are my colleagues and in my mind I see them as soldiers in the good fight and we need as many good hearted souls as we can get in these difficult times. Show some support!
James Pilant
From Secret Eyes Everywhere, Your Customer Service Advocate–
Get all of your accounts listed
According to The Los Angeles Times, the bank has 90 days to provide federal regulators with a plan to compensate all its customers. Go into a branch or call the customer service line and get a full list of all your accounts in your name. Should you close any or all accounts, be sure to get a receipt showing the account was closed. If there is something on them you don’t understand, be sure to raise hell about it to get it resolved. If a refund of fees is not given, do the next step.
Seek legal assistance (please go to the web site and read the rest! If I include all the good parts I’ll be posting the whole thing instead of an excerpt. jp)
Lynn Stout writing for The Net Economy
(If you read anything today, go to the link and read this. jp)
In the wake of the 2008 crisis, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously told a reporter that bankers are “doing God’s work.”
This is, of course, an important part of the Wall Street mantra: it’s standard operating procedure for bank executives to frequently and loudly proclaim that Wall Street is vital to the nation’s economy and performs socially valuable services by raising capital, providing liquidity to investors, and ensuring that securities are priced accurately so that money flows to where it will be most productive.
There’s just one problem: the Wall Street mantra isn’t true.
From Minding the Workplace and the invaluable David Yamada!
On this Saturday morning, I’m enjoying some reflective moments that midlife sometimes invites — or requires. And although I don’t have the means to do a demographic survey of this blog’s readership, my best intelligent guess is that a good chunk of you have crossed the 40 year mark. I thought I’d collect a group of previous posts that enable some of that healthy reflection, especially for those who identify as being in midlife, but also hopefully useful to anyone who wants to live meaningfully. In these posts you’ll find some of my own commentary, as well as recommendations of books and articles for further inquiry. (He has a wonderful list – please follow the link to see. jp)
From Hello Kitty, Some Blog –
From one of my very favorite blogs, Warrior Publications!
Mounted Lakota warriors, their horses resplendent in traditional regalia, charge a line of law enforcement. They gallop headlong, push back the police, pull up only at the last moment, and then circle back for more.
The scene could be the Battle of the Little Bighorn, circa 1876. But it’s not. Here, along the banks of the Missouri River, just beyond the boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, indigenous land and water defenders are standing together to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatens their land, water, ancestral burial grounds, and future generations. They are part of a decades-long struggle to assert and reclaim indigenous lands, jurisdictions, and sovereignties. And they are doing so on ground that has given rise to indigenous resistance for centuries.
For the average American, it’s easy to mistake the resistance at Standing Rock for a one-time re-run: indigenous warriors emerge from the wild, put up a brief, fierce, but ultimately tragic fight before succumbing to progress and providence. Cowboys and Indians II: Pipeline edition.
From the web site, The Net Economy.
In a post-scarcity society, everyone would be guaranteed an income that yielded a standard of living significantly better than poverty, and this guarantee would be unconditional. The move from a near-poverty benefit subject to eligibility conditions to a livable, guaranteed minimum income would require both an increase in productivity, such that a smaller number of workers could produce an adequate income for all, and some fairly radical changes in social attitudes.
It seems clear enough that technological progress can generate the necessary productivity gains, so what is needed most is a change in attitudes to work that would make a guaranteed minimum income socially sustainable.
And another post from The Net Economy
Yet, ordinary people have not accepted this self-evident, ‘common sense’ knowledge shared by trade experts. They have not only challenged trade expertise by mobilizing counter-expertise (for instance, economic analyses that refute the Commission’s numbers), but they have also mobilized many people in order to make their epistemic claim more vociferously: what the trade experts hold true is wrong, false knowledge. The quarter of a million protesting in Berlin had posited: No, we do not believe that the world is going to be better off due to the TTIP; each and every family will not be 540 euros per year richer; and, no, we do not think that the regulations coming out of the TTIP bodies are going to respect the environment.
Trade experts are not seen here as neutral arbitrators of public policy but rather as representing a particular stance as to public policy or public interest.
My adopted state of Florida was just hit by a category one hurricane; my adopted city of Tallahassee sustained considerable damage. A week after the storm hit, there are still people in the city without power. There are also people who suffered considerable property damage. Fortunately, there seems to be only one death attributed to the storm here.
I was rather lucky; though my power was out from Friday to Monday, my house sustained no damage and I was well-prepared. I also had the good fortune of leaving the city on Sunday morning on an already scheduled program review at St. Francis University. While I normally dislike airports, it was great having access to AC and electricity again. While I waited for my first flight out, I enjoyed the cool air and recharged my laptop.
Two who spoke out in behalf of Roger Ailes express regret.
The Business Ethics Debacle at Fox News
Management’s role is to keep the playing field level, professional and fair. As society evolved from the “Mad Men” era of the 1950-60’s, giant steps have been taken to protect subordinate employees from harassment and unwelcome advances, particularly by superiors. Sure, there is far to go, but as the seismic response to Gretchen and the other purported victims makes clear, the news business will no longer tolerate boorish conduct by anyone, however powerful. Strict policies including sensitivity training are in place. Perpetrators do so at tremendous peril to their careers and families.
But I have regrets beyond Geraldo’s and beyond not believing a civil complaint written by lawyers.
It has to be difficult for anyone with any knowledge of journalism to watch the Matt Lauer disaster entitled the “Commander in Chief Forum” without suffering immense pain. 
One commentator said that she had not believed that Trump could be elected President until she saw this program. 
We used to have journalists. Where are they now that we need them?
Now right now, the earthquakes are small and it is believed in some quarters that the size will be limited to perhaps a seven on the Richter Scale. But no one knows for sure and since we didn’t know that humanity could achieve “fluid-injected induced earthquakes” until the last few years I have to wonder if that consensus is going to hold up.
T
Was this week a turning point? It has certainly been expensive for the biggest stock-market listed company on the planet.
Ireland (the government plus the private sector) has by far the largest net international debt of all EU countries (measured as a % of GDP). To an extent this is caused because the Irish state was pressured, by its EU friends, to borrow money from other countries to bail out (the creditors of) Irish banks. The large and fast deterioration of the Irish position in 2014 and 2015 might be caused because large international companies finance their Irish headquarters with inter company international debt. But whatever the cause – it is ridiculous that a country like Greece, which is in a much better state when it comes to its net international investment position, is pressured (among others: by Ireland!) to cut pensions, sell government assets and raise taxes – while the Irish government even refuses to collect taxes due.
Earlier the European Commission said Ireland had enabled Apple to pay substantially less than other businesses, in effect paying a corporate tax rate of no more than 1%.
U.S. Army researchers have found that soldiers coming home from war suffer from chronic pain and use prescription opioids at far higher rates than civilians.
Research Universities encouraging inequality
Here it is important to understand how, exactly, Americans ‘become white’. The history of Polish-Americans is an illuminating example. Upon arriving in the U.S. en masse in the late 19th and early 20th century, Poles endured discrimination based on their appearance, religion and culture.In 1903, theNew England Magazine decried the Poles’ “expressionless Slavic faces” and “stunted figures” as well as their inherent “ignorance” and “propensity to violence”. Working for terrible wages, Polish workers were renamed things like “Thomas Jefferson” by their bigoted Anglo-Saxon bosses who refused to utter Polish names.
From the Blog – 
Are actors a product or art?
Value for Value?
Robot Babies are Creepy
Could we just do sex ed instead? 
Apparently promotes pregnancy
Robo baby moms
Do We Want Rapists, Robbers and Murderers Voting?
In a state that professes to be a democracy, the right of citizens to vote is the bedrock right. As Locke and other philosophers have argued, the foundation of political legitimacy in a democracy is the consent of the governed. As such, to unjustly deny a citizen the right to vote is to attack the foundation of democracy and to erode the legitimacy of the state. Because of this, the only crimes that should disenfranchise are those that would warrant taking away the person’s citizenship. In general, the crime would need to be such that it constitutes a rejection of citizenship. The most obvious example would be treason against the country.
One of the oldest problems in philosophy is that of the external world. It present an epistemic challenge forged by the skeptics: how do I know that what I seem to be experiencing as the external world is really real for real? Early skeptics often claimed that what seems real might be just a dream. Descartes upgraded the problem through his evil genius/demon which used either psionic or supernatural powers to befuddle its victim. As technology progressed, philosophers presented the brain-in-a-vat scenarios and then moved on to more impressive virtual reality scenarios. One recent variation on this problem has been made famous by Elon Musk: the idea that we are characters within a video game and merely think we are in a real world. This is, of course, a variation on the idea that this apparent reality is just a simulation. There is, interestingly enough, a logically strong inductive argument for the claim that this is a virtual world.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.