On July 5th, a two hour lecture was give at a University in Italy. It was part of a course in criminology and forensic science. The talk concerned the management of panic control. It’s not unusual to have a guest speaker. I’ve had guest speakers and have heard them in the classes I took when I was in college.
But this was different. The expert, Francesco Schettino, is famous but not for his academic expertise.
Francesco Schettino, formerly, Captain Fransesco Schettino, commanded the cruise liner, the Costa Concordia.
On January 13, 2012, the ship suffered a mishap. That night, the Captain took manual control of his vessel. Taking manual control of a 114,000 ton ship with a highly computerized navigation system may be considered unwise. He ran his ship too close to shore striking a rock which cut a gash in the hull across so many watertight compartments that saving the ship was impossible. Schettino declined to order abandon ship for about an hour even though it was obvious that the ship was sinking. As time passed, some officers and crew disobeyed the Captain and began loading life boats and evacuating passengers. This is called mutiny.
After an hour, the Captain notified port authorities that the ship was sinking and after a few more minutes ordered an evacuation. By then the ship was listing badly and it was very difficult to launch lifeboats. While the evacuation was ongoing, he abandoned ship and refused to reboard in spite of being ordered back aboard by the Coast Guard. Six hours later the evacuation was largely complete.
Thirty-two passengers and crew were killed. Sixty-four were injured and a member of the salvage team died later. However, it should be noted that the wind drove the ship back on shore where it grounded. If it had capsized and sank in the main channel, a high proportion of the more than 4,000 passengers and crew would have perished making the Titanic a distant second for loss of life.
Schettino is currently awaiting trial for manslaughter and causing the loss of the ship. He is seeking a plea deal.
The Expert, Francesco Shettino?
Is this incident ethical. It can be assumed that using those awaiting trial for severe moral failings and incompetence as an enriching experience for the young and impressionable is wrong. Why use bad examples when there a so many good, kind and successful people who could provide a better presentation? Teachers like myself have a responsibility to attend to the moral and ethical development of our students.
So, we can safely conclude that this may not have been the best person to give a lecture on panic management. Of course, it might be said that he is “experienced.” But it appears to be the wrong kind of experience.
I’m sure there are those who would treat this optimistically. I prefer satirically – like this:
There are many, many failures in many walks of life. The prisons and sometimes, asylums, are full of them. This might be considered (certainly by the instructor who invited Schettino) as an under utilized resource.
Bernie Madoff could lecture on securities and protecting your money.
Jeff Skilling could explain financial accountability.
It is a pity that this idea did not originate earlier as entire generations of criminal and financial failures have been lost to us without ever having delivered a single guest appearance before a college class.
I, too, am unhappy with the recent decisions of the FCC. However, I did not use the F word or any obscenities in my written comments to the regulatory commission. Whether or not this is an effective means of persuasion in this case remains to be seen. But ladies and gentlemen do not use this word outside of the bedroom or during exciting events like a car accident. So, I would counsel my dear readers to avoid such melodramatic choices when writing to the Commission.
The website, SingleHop, has what they call “A Neutral Guide to Net Neutrality.” I prefer hotter blood when writing but it is an accurate view of the facts and if you are a student writing on the subject, it would be a good starting point if only for the good references.
I can’t but believe that this is a major business ethics issue. Giving an oligarchy of companies the ability to charge for different speeds is unfair. And as a practical matter, it makes it more profitable to not expand internet speed and band width. The United States is 12th in the world in internet speed. I have complete confidence that with the end of net neutrality we can descend down the ladder a long ways.
At this moment, a free market absolutist is reading this and thinking, “That ridiculous, if anything it is an incentive to increase services. This author is a crude leftist with no understanding of economics.” How about a little history of market manipulation? Here, here, and here, are examples of electric utilities cutting supply to push up prices. For simple price manipulation, I can easily pull up hundreds of citations. I believe in the lessons of history. If historically people have limited supply to make more money, it will be done again. The only way to stop that kind of exploitation is through regulation and in this case, that regulation’s name is net neutrality.
This is not just a business ethics violation, it is a failure of judgment. This act is petty and vindictive.
Adriana’s Insurance Service agreed to a settlement but following the letter rather than the spirit of the law acted with the maturity of a seven year old. They delivered the money in buckets of small change.
Besides being simply foolish and a failure of civil behavior, the act calls into question the business judgment of those running the company.
I tell my students that if they act as reasonable people and bend over backwards to conciliate those few clients whose reaction to a business problem is overwrought, they are virtually never going to be sued. I tell them that this may involve apologizing when you’re not wrong and returning money when you don’t have to. But avoiding conflict is a good long term strategy for a business, and besides, shouldn’t at the very least businesses act reasonably? And you are not in business to make enemies, you are in business to build trust and make friends and allies who cooperate with you in a quest for mutual advantage.
This organization obviously doesn’t mind conflict even at the most childish level. Are they making other decisions using this kind of judgment? Would you feel comfortable as a client knowing that if you have a dispute with the company, this is how they are going to act?
Bad business ethics, poor judgment and a failure to act as ladies and gentlemen is poor business practice. It is a failure of that common duty of civility we owe all other citizens.
Reading the business news and political commentary over time clues you see certain controversies over and over again. In time, you begin to see the relationships between those controversies. Below are listed six links to stories about the economy. They cover different subjects in different ways sometimes in different formats. For instance the lead article on median household income is a statistics based economics analysis, while the second item is a professional discussing what attitude he should take in encouraging his students to pursue higher education. Nevertheless, they all tie together. They tie together evidencing the crisis of capitalism. And by this I mean capitalism as practiced in the United States. Let me explain how. ( The essay will pick up after the six links.)
Middle-Class Death Watch: The Median Household Is Now Poorer Than in 1984
The first story is a economic tragedy, an incredible one. The middle class wealth of Americans has fallen below the level of 1984. And it didn’t fall a little bit, it is twenty percent less, one fifth.
That means that this nation increased the amount and value of its good and services roughly by a factor of four and during that time of growth, the middle class actually lost ground. Where did all that money go? And why did the bedrock producers of wealth, the American worker, get less and less of it?
Well obviously, it must be that the one percent produce enormous economic gains while what workers produce is worth less and less. Do they really? Between 1979 and 2007, worker productivity in the United States went up 240 percent. American workers more than doubled their productivity and were rewarded by declining income.
So, from the first story we can conclude that the middle class is becoming poorer while the wealthy accumulate more and more wealth.
Is College Worth It?
The second story is by Larry Strauss. He’s a teacher and he begins the essay talking about his family coming to America in years past believing in the American dream and through hard work and brains made it into the middle class. But now he finds himself in a quandary. Is a college education a road to the middle class for his economically disadvantaged students? It’s hard to encourage a student from that background to take on an incredible amount of student loan debt on a promise of economic advantage when the job market is so hideous and whole idea of economic advancement may be questionable. His students from four or five years back talk abut owing massive student loans while being lucky if they can find any job at all. Some have moved back in with their parents.
He is confronting with courage and commitment a new conundrum of our age. While college becomes more and more expensive while becoming more and more a corporate form based on profit and dubious numbers, the promise of upward mobility may be overblown if not a mirage. It is entirely possible that large groups of Americans will in the future be permanently consigned to the class they were born in.
Poverty in Suburbia
A new phenomenon, the urban slum, is appearing all over America. First reported during the dot.com burst, by about the year 2000, there were significant numbers. But now their population outnumbers those in the inner city slums. Poverty has moved from the underclass to the middle class.
If the news that urban poverty had increased dramatically wasn’t bad enough, that it is in the suburbs is a human tragedy in itself. An inner city can get services to people easily by comparison with an urban environment. In an inner city, you can walk from one place to another, public transportation is common and facilities such as soup kitchens, government offices, etc., can be centralized for greatest access. The urban landscape was designed around the automobile. Housing developments were laid out between broad sweeping roads with access to home with lots of parking and big garages.
Poor people have trouble keeping cars and if they have a car, the cost of maintenance, insurance and fuel will often make it unusable. So, the urban often go without food and government services. And the scattered community and its implied culture of success makes the support of neighbors and even friends difficult. It’s hard to maintain self-respect in a culture which even in the darkest of economic times blames unemployment and poverty on defects of character.
The Intellectual Poverty of the Ruling Class
The response of the government in the United States and Europe to the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression was austerity. This was an odd response. The great body of economic thought in both the United States and Europe was that in a time of economic calamity the government should step in and stimulate economic activity while alleviating the suffering of the people. This was ignored. A handful of economic studies and a privileged band of economists gave credence to the idea that austerity promoted growth. It was a bizarre theory now and after its continued disastrous failings, even more bizarre now.
Look at the problem from the perspective of the people. The collapse was caused by a relatively small group of banks on Wall Street. Once this catastrophe happened, millions of people lost their jobs and the businesses that served those people perished as well. They suffered while having no responsibility for what happened, and when it might be expected that the government well aware and having aided and abetted the actions of these investment bankers would take some pity on their plight, they were thrust from the concerns of the government, abandoned to the invisible hand of the market which was intent on preserving and maintaining their suffering. Many unemployed people felt that it was strange that the banks did not suffer while they were considered to have failed in a fundamental way, that if only they were more ambitious, more careful and displayed more grit, they could lift themselves out of the economic crisis, and thus shift from “takers to makers.”
In the United States, the cash strapped local and state governments cuts services, while the President created a stimulus package half the size of what was necessary. After that the President began making cuts joined by Congress. Nevertheless, the United States has done better than the European Union which intent on punishing the “unworthy” imposed draconian cuts on its weaker members, many of which have suffered terrible economic losses. Meanwhile, the so extravagantly promised wonder growth from austerity has failed to materialize.
Why did a doctrine contrary to basic economic theory gain such traction? It was convenient. In the United States, the “very serious people” as well as the economic elites had wanted to cut benefits such as social security for many years. They wanted to impose discipline on the people. Newspapers, in particular the Washington Post and to a lesser extent the New York Times provided (and still do) a constant diet of horror stories about deficits and the costs of benefits. For elites, disaster, catastrophe, human suffering, even calamities caused by or enabled by their actions are opportunities to enact their agendas. And they saw the economic disaster as an opportunity. So, on fragile but well publicized evidence, they proceeded to impose austerity. Their actions produced human suffering on a vast scale while crippling the recovery.
Facts, evidence and expertise are not important in Washington. When facts and evidence prove inconvenient, they are ruthlessly attacked. The attacks often verge on the hysterical.
The ruling classes in the United States place little importance on objective evidence and reasoning when creating public policy. Their disregard has produced great human suffering and bodes ill for the continued existence of the middle class.
The Wages of Sin are almost a Billion Dollars
The next story concerns the movement of American companies’ headquarters overseas to avoid taxes. It’s called inversion. A large American company purchases a small foreign company and then takes on their tax identity and from then it does the same things it did before just without paying taxes in America.
Here we have corporations, created in the United States, its employees trained in American institutions, its rights protected by the laws of the United States, moving to foreign country not actually but symbolically – just enough to avoid taxes. Millions of Americans have suffered and died for this nation. Millions more have paid taxes to support the legal and physical structures (like roads and schools) that made these corporations possible. Their profits are often subsidized by government contracts and by a myriad of laws that support established businesses.
And yet they abandon any responsibility to the United States, to simple morality and the demands of patriotism.
This is a tragedy, perhaps in a real way, the first direct evidence of nation in the throes of self destruction. But the greater tragedy right now, is that no one is going to do anything about this. There has been a bill submitted to Congress to end the practice but it is dead on arrival in the House of Representatives. No one is going to do anything about this, the people who are evading these taxes are more important than the interests of the American people.
Right now, a compliant press is busy churning out pro-tax evasion articles. Because no matter what a business does in the United States, it has stalwart defenders in the press if only in the business press.
A Dollar Menu, it depends how you count.
Many workers in the United States make little money. A full time worker on minimum wage gets 290 dollars a week. The United States has the highest proportion of low paid workers in the developed world. Seventy-three percent of those on food stamps are working Americans. And of these working Americans a good number work in fast food. Since their salary is insufficient to support a family they have to resort to state and federal aid. This is in a real way a subsidy paid by the taxpayer to companies paying the minimum wage. If the workers had little chance of meeting basic human needs while working at one of these places, they are hardly likely to stay. Fast food businesses as well as big box retailers are able to maintain their work force through federal and state benefits for the poor and their children.
So, what does a dollar hamburger cost? And what would it cost if the worker were paid enough and given enough hours to not need benefits to have a decent life?
Summing Up
Those are the stories I found in one day on the web
Here are the factors we seen in the stories:
1. The middle class has been denied a share of the growth in production and profits from 1984 to the present time.
2. The traditional route of social and economic advancement, education, is losing its capacity to generate social mobility, and the crushing burden of student loans calls into question, whether or not higher education is worth pursuing.
3. The traditional middle class environment, the suburbs, once a symbol of economic success, are now suffering the same blight as the inner city.
4. The governing elites no longer concern themselves with issues related to the population at large but focus their concern on the “wealth producers.” And in that pursuit, facts and ideas that contradict their goals are simply ignored.
5. The corporate movement to avoid taxes is organized, profitable and continuing.
6. Many corporations are paying such low wages that government benefits are necessary to provide basic necessities to their workers, and that this constitutes a massive de facto transfer of money from the government to these corporations.
This adds up to a bleak picture of the future. We have a middle class declining in numbers and wealth while the means of upward mobility increase in expense while becoming less useful. The leadership we have is unconcerned with these problems and in fact, these kinds of issues are peripheral to their interests. Corporations are no longer content with their privileges and power but have abdicated all responsibility for participation in an organized society. These organizations now live by the philosophy, “It’s just business.” And that justifies any crime and any breach of duty with the nation that sired you.
In conclusion I believe that the crisis of capitalism is upon us. I believe that capitalism as practiced in the United States is concentrating wealth and income among a very small group of people while diminishing wages and opportunities gradually diminish the middle class resulting in a huge permanent underclass locked into permanent income insecurity.
The Ethics Sage and the Ethics of Affirmative Action
The Ethics Sage and the Ethics of Affirmative Action
Ethics of Affirmative Action
(A Guest Blog by My Colleague, Steven Mintz. Visit his site here!)
University of Texas Affirmative-Action Program is upheld by a Federal Appeals Court
Are considerations of affirmative action ethical policies for a university to follow? This is the overriding question to be addressed in evaluating race-based decisions about admission to colleges and universities. I raise the issue because a federal appeals-court panel handed at least a temporary setback to critics of affirmative action last Tuesday by ruling that a race-conscious admissions policy at the University of Texas at Austin had passed a strict-scrutiny analysis ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Critics of the ruling might believe that the ethical principles of justice and fairness work against race-based policies because people should not be treated differently because of race. The ethical support for this kind of opinion holds that equals should be treated equally and unequals should be treated unequally. In other words if there are legitimate reasons to treat one group differently than another, then such treatment is justified.
The problem with this argument is by saying one group (i.e. minorities) should be given preference over another group (i.e. whites) we give credence to the idea that certain groups are inferior because we then assume that the favored groups cannot reach the required level of achievement through their own efforts. Moreover, affirmative action policies lead to lower standards since some less qualified candidates will be admitted if race is allowed to override general standards applied to all.
Opponents of race-based policies hold such views because they value the equal treatment of every person on the basis of common standards. It’s hard to argue this position from a fairness point of view. On the other hand, I believe a diverse population in colleges and universities add to all students’ experiences as they learn in their classes how some groups historically have been discriminated against. I believe the motivation for affirmative action is to right a past wrong and not to give one group preference over another in admissions decisions.
The federal appeals court decision that brought to the fore the affirmative action policies of the University of Texas means that consideration of some applicants’ race are necessary to achieve sufficiently diverse enrollments there. In a 2-to-1 decision revealing continued disagreement among the judges over the appropriate standard for evaluating such policies, the panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit In response to an overwhelming Supreme Court decision Supreme Court decision that faulted the Fifth Circuit’s previous endorsement previous endorsement of the undergraduate admissions policy as too deferential to the university, the two judges in the majority said the policy withstood stricter scrutiny than applied before.
The appeals-court panel affirmed, for a second time, a 2009 summary judgment by a U.S. District Court dismissing the lawsuit brought by Abigail Noel Fisher, a white applicant who had accused the Austin campus of illegal discrimination after being denied admission as a freshman the previous year.
The ruling Tuesday’s ruling in the case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, almost certainly does not mark an end to the legal battle over the policy. the legal battle over the policy. The Project on Fair Representation, an advocacy group that brought the lawsuit on Ms. Fisher’s behalf, said it expected to appeal the decision all the way back to the Supreme Court, if necessary.
“This panel was proven wrong last year by the Supreme Court, and we believe it will be proven wrong once again on appeal,” said Edward Blum, the organization’s director.
Judge Emilio M. Garza, the dissenting member of the Fifth Circuit panel appeared to lay some of the groundwork for an appeal with an opinion arguing that the majority had again failed to treat the university’s assertions with sufficient skepticism.
“By holding that the university’s use of racial classifications is narrowly tailored, the majority continues to defer impermissibly to the university’s claims,” he wrote, adding that such deference “is squarely at odds with the central lesson” of last year’s Supreme Court ruling in the case.
In that ruling the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 6-2, that Michigan voters have a right to amend their state Constitution to ban racial preferences in admissions at public universities. In so doing, the court affirmed laws in eight states that have 29 percent of America’s high-school population and more than 40 percent of its Hispanic residents.
In the case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the court’s only Hispanic member, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote a widely acclaimed dissent, in which she challenged Chief Justice John Roberts’s colorblind approach to college admissions as “out of touch with reality.”
A new report by the Century Foundation and the Lumina Foundation, suggests, however, that the concerns of both justices can be met: Alternatives to race-conscious affirmative-action, if properly structured, would produce more diversity than just concentrating on race.
According to a chapter by Anthony P. Carnevale and his colleagues at Georgetown University in the new report, The Future of Affirmative Action: New Paths to Higher Education Diversity After Fisher v. University of Texas, using socioeconomic preferences and/or plans that admit a top percentage of students from every high school, if structured properly, could produce even higher levels of black and Hispanic representation at the most selective colleges than racial preferences now achieve. That approach would work because it reflects economic disadvantages that are often shaped by racial discrimination.
Sotomayor’s dissent in Schuette is a strong reminder of the importance of race. “Race matters to a young man’s view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes, no matter the neighborhood where he grew up,” she wrote. “Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’ ”
In Schuette, Sotomayor wrote that preferences provide the only realistic path to racial inclusion in higher education, correctly noting that race-neutral alternatives have failed to produce adequate diversity at three high-profile institutions—the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Los Angeles.
The question of whether affirmative action policies, whether based on racial differences, to right past wrongs, or socio-economic considerations, is a complicated issue from an ethical perspective. Like most contentious issues each position can be argued from different points of view in part, I believe, because the motivation for such preferences underlies the issue of ethical ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness.’
In virtue ethics, motivations are an integral part of the ethical equation. If we can say the motivation for race-based decisions is the inherent goodness of such policies, then the Fisher ruling is ethically supportable. On the other hand, doesn’t Fisher have an ethical right to be given preference based on higher achievement of admissions criteria (i.e. SAT scores)? Doesn’t the University of Texas have an obligation to Fisher to admit her because she was more qualified and denied admission based on socio-economic factors that enabled less qualified candidates to be admitted?
These are difficult questions to answer. I am conflicted because each argument has some merit. As a college professor I have seen first-hand how having a diverse population in my ethics class adds value to the learning experience of all students. On the other hand I can understand the position of a student denied admission because other considerations allowed another student to be given preference for whatever reason.
Blog posted by Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage, on July 22, 2014. Dr. Mintz is a professor in the Orfalea College of Business at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He also blogs at: http://www.workplaceethicsadvice.com.
Whether or not vitamin E should be taken or avoided is a continuing discussion. From what I see, there is no clear answer. Below I have listed three articles, one a study and two news articles reporting studies, that report negatively on the effects of vitamin E.
This article from Yahoo news discusses a Japanese study showing vitamin E increased the rate of osteoporosis in mice.
Are Vitamins Useless?
In my last post – Are Vitamins Useless? – I discussed whether or not selling a product like vitamins whose main effect seems to some authorities as being nothing more than a placebo is ethical. My primary interest was in the business ethics implications. I freely admit that it is obvious that well supported arguments can be made for and against vitamins. There are countless studies on the subject.
However, supplements are a 12 billion dollar a year industry. They sponsor research and buy enormous ad time and quantity. There is little incentive to study from the opposite angle and no money at all in any commercial sense in opposing the sales. If this were a sponsored site with paid advertising, it might well have been a subject I would have been advised to avoid.
Under these circumstances, I am going to lean toward the skeptics. When there is an incredible amount of profit to be realized, I become suspicious. I am also well aware that selling a good and effective product is difficult, and by implication a useless and ineffective product is much easier to generate a profit from as long as you can keep the science confused and governmental regulators at a safe distance.
Taking supplements is dangerous. You can overdose many vitamins with health effects ranging from discomfort to death. But at least vitamins have a long track record (however varied). The other supplements can be placed on the market without pre-clearance by any agency. Generally speaking, if they don’t cause harm, they don’t get investigated. So, how do you tell which one works and which one doesn’t? You could use yourself or your family as guinea pigs, and hope you can reason out the placebo effect. And since there are thousands of these product, it will take you several lifetimes and careful record keeping to come to some conclusions – although your sample size is too small to count as scientific evidence.
We should not be buying products based on the chance that the seller is telling us the truth about its contents and effects. We should buy products where there is some proof offered of usefulness and safety.
Vitamins and other supplements should be pre-cleared by the Food and Drug Administration before they can be sold.
A recent long-term study of more than 400,000 people concluded that “most vitamin supplements [have] no clear benefit” and warned that excess vitamin E and beta-carotene may actually weaken the immune system’s ability to kill cancer cells. “The case is closed,” the study authors wrote. “Enough is enough.”
Is it ethical to sell a product which is in general a simple placebo?
In the Wizard of Oz, the fake wizard gives the Cowardly Lion, a horrible tasting concoction. He tells the lion that this “formula” will give him courage. The lion drinks the horrible drink and the wizard asks him how he feels. The lion replies, “Full of courage.”
So, we who spend from a few to hundreds of dollars on vitamins may also be said to be full of it.
How did a literate modern population fall into the same black hole of ignorance that afflicted Americans during the golden age of patent medicine, when laudanum and alcohol laden brews were sold to the masses for incredible profits?
But did we learn anything from this as a culture? How come we still hope that some spurious product will make us all better? Is the need for medicine, in a real sense, magic, a human craving?
I’m uncomfortable writing about this. So many people have bragged to me about the vitamins they take and the benefits they experienced. How do you argue with people who experienced real progress because they believed? Placebo effects are in a sense real, in that confidence often has us acting in our own behalf when otherwise we might not.
But is encouraging a placebo effect, a ethical rationale for selling an otherwise useless product?
The Rational Consumer?
In economics, we have the idea of the rational buyer, the human who bases his purchases on knowledge, facts. The idea is that this paragon will always choose the best product. I make fun of this concept all the time since it disregards the very real irrationality that afflicts humanity. But assuming the theory has validity how does the rational human choose the best product when there is an absence of knowledge? – A deliberate absence of knowledge in this case.
The FDA’s permission is not required for the sale of supplements. The Food and Drug Administration can and does regulate the products after they have entered the market. However, the agency has limited resources and is essentially playing the game of “whack a mole” with the sellers.
Let me give you an idea of the problems the FDA uncovers with these products –
How is a consumer supposed to understand the dangers of these products when there are literally thousands of them and the regulators can only react to problems?
The vitamin industry sells 12 billion dollars worth of product to Americans each year. The advertisements are everywhere. But no matter how clever the ads, the claims of benefits so convincing, and the assurances of “science,” the majority of these products are useless.
It is wrong to sell products that do not live up to their claims. It’s lying and fraud.
Let’s regulate the industry fully and find out what few items work and throw the rest to the wind.
My perception is that a good number of people get drunk all the time and generally, it’s not worth much discussion. Hopefully, they do it privately and avoid harming themselves or others. But there are circumstances when my business ethics radar senses a blip.
What is Justin Lookadoo’s job? What does he sell? He sells morality and a particularly twisted sort of “Christian” morality. Lookadoo lectures on males being wild and untamed while females should be as domesticated as possible. Having read some of the content, that he believes women should be subservient would be an accurate summation. He goes to high schools and explains to the students such nuggets of wisdom as – “Dateable girls know how to shut up.” Schools pay him for this. From what I can ascertain he makes a living from tax money that was given to schools for abstinence programs. You might assume that he is a Texas phenomenon because of the recent press. Don’t believe that. He sells his “motivational message” all over the United States. His web site suggests thousands of presentations.
A major idea in American culture is usually phrased, “You can talk the talk but can you walk the walk.” Hypocrisy is a common malady. We all have beliefs that we are not able to always live up to. But most of the time our hypocrisy is limited. Few of us are willing to sell things that we would not use ourselves. Few of us practice a profession out of alignment with our own beliefs. And it’s not so much that he was drunk but that he was scheduled to speak. His hypocrisy directly affected his performance.
But that’s not the big issue here. This man is hired to give messages to teens in schools across the country. It would appear that his “Christian” misogynistic presentations of powerful males and dutiful females are much approved by school boards and administrators.
I have no objection to Christians or motivational speakers in school. Nevertheless, a school system has a responsibility to vet these people before they hire them. Where was the process in this case? There were already red flags raised about this man on the internet before the drinking incident. And yet he was scheduled to speak to middle school students on that same day. I find it hard to think of a more impressionable group of young people than middle school students being told by the adults that this is an important speaker with an important message.
How hard would it have been to check him out online? It took me according to my computer, .28 seconds to Google him and it pulled up such cautionary tales as this one back in 2013.
But the thing that troubles me most is the labeling here. Put the word, Christian, in front of a speaker or high school presenter and for thousands of school administrators and school boards, that is all they need to hear. That’s wrong. You vet all the speakers. You check out the internet and call the schools where whoever it was gave their last presentation. Because using the adjective, Christian, does not make it so.
Our children deserve the same basic precautions for every speaker advertised as Christian or not.
The school hasn’t yet said how it paid Lookadoo’s speaking fees, but a PDF on his Web site offers the following helpful advice.
Justin has a variety of programs suitable for all age groups and all kinds of schools.He is covered under many federal programs, including Safe and Drug Free Schools, Campus Improvement, Title I, Title IV, Character Education, Abstinence Education, Pregnancy Prevention, Tobacco Prevention, and many others.
Why in the world would any public school have a man in to teach the students about dating and relationships whose book comes down to, men are the architects of their own lives and women are the furnishings. Please excuse me while I bang my head against the wall.
As mothers, university professors, specialists in the field of psychology, mental health, sexuality and gender for almost 20 years, and yes, Christians, we are taken aback by and incredibly disappointed in your message.
Massachusetts SWAT Teams Insist They’re Private Corporations With No Public Accountability
At a time where our police force is better armed than the actual armies of small countries, the idea of a “corporate” police force that has the ability to arrest, detain or kill American citizens with no oversight is absolutely horrifying.
SWAT teams in Massachusetts are claiming that because they are incorporated, they’re immune to the state’s open records law. “The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.”
Some departments in Massachusetts are not able to form their own SWAT teams so several departments would get together and organize a “law enforcement council.” These can be incorporated as a non-profit.
One such organization is NEMLEC, the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, it claim 3975 members: 3275 sworn officers and 700+ Sheriff’s officers. According to their web site, they cover 930 square miles and a population of 1.6 million people.
These organizations have existed for many years. Their original purpose was to promote cooperation among police and sheriff’s departments. That role has expanded significantly. They now apply for government grans, maintain military vehicles, run SWAT teams and other kinds of rapid response units.
Let’s be clear. These are public agencies, government employees, and clearly by the current rules, any LEC acts under color of state law.
Is this a Business Ethics Issue?
Yes, by organizing supra- corporations over their individual law enforcement agencies have clearly moved from the public to the private. By denying access to their records on the ground of their incorporation, they are exerting corporate rights.
As a 501C’s, they are incorporated non-profits. This transforms these law enforcement agencies into hybrid public/private organizations able to act as public agencies, for instance, in exerting their immunities while acting under state authority and as a private corporation when wishing to evade their responsibilities as servants of the public interest. For the agencies, it is an ideal situation. For a democratic society, it has definite downsides. A large organization composed of thousands of armed personnel, equipped with armored cars, automatic weapons and secure bases are claiming the right to escape state supervision.
And if their claim to immunity from the state open meetings law is upheld, what other rights can they claim? What keeps them from making policy both formal and informal? What stops them from collecting revenue or “encouraging” the cooperation of public officials, other state agencies or the citizens? What about shared information, Internet, city and municipal surveillance cameras as well as license plate scanners?
There is nothing inherently wrong with police departments sharing information, building common resources or perform civic activities like annual golf tournaments. But we expect in a government by the people that public organizations be subject to the rule of law. A private police force has a different set of goals than a public one.
It is to be hoped in this country that those who serve in the defense of the public have the interest of the public in mind.
Costa Rica president ends ‘worship’ of his office | Al Jazeera America
Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solis, a month into his first tem in office, doesn’t want his name on plaques at public works or his portrait hung in public offices.
In a decree, Solis prohibited his name from being used on plaques inaugurating bridges, roads and buildings, as had been the custom in previous administrations. From now on, plaques will carry only the year the project was inaugurated, according to the BBC.
They are everywhere, in public buildings, state offices and any other public edifice. The pictures and the plaques of the men and women “responsible” for their construction and continuation. They are a muted form of immortality, at least as long as our civilization continues.
And yet, Luis Guillermo Solis, the President of Costa Rico, has dispensed with this. He says, “The works are from the country and not from a government or a particular official.” In this he is very much correct, yet his stand against such things is very much the exception.
Vanity or vainglory or self-idolatry has been recognized as a fault for much of history. However, we in the United States are very much taken with it. We like to think of ourselves in grandiose ways. We tell ourselves that our electronic devices make us more than human and many look forward to cyborgs and trans-humanity.
The Greeks believed that hubris or overweening pride was a major fault but not us. We put chief executive officers on magazine covers and lionize them as “job creators.” I have watched in astonishment as disgraced CEO’s are showered with attention and allowed to recover their reputations. Jordan Belfort is now a motivational speaker. After a disastrous tenure at Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina has been appointed to numerous corporate boards and travels the country dispensing advice. Corporate predators who destroyed thousands of jobs are consulted about issues of public important, as if their very notoriety meant expertise.
We would do better in this nation and practice virtue ethics and exalt in public the characteristics that make for good and great citizens, leaders and Americans. And not just exalt the good but diminish the bad, we should be cruel to the corrupt and incompetent. They be publicly shamed for their crimes whether prosecuted or not. How much virtue can you have if wickedness is not punished?
Hubris according to Merriam Webster is a great or foolish amount of pride or confidence. I meet and talk to a number of entrepreneurs and investors, I am always on the lookout for characteristics of Hubris. I am not being judgemental, but what hubris does is it gets in the way of learning.
Owen, who trained as a neurologist/psychiatrist before going into politics, coined the term “Hubris Syndrome” to describe how power can change the personality of power-holders, not just in politics, but in every realm of life ranging from business to the media.
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