English: The Tudor period carrack Mary Rose in its specially designed building at the Historic Dockyard in Portsmouth, United Kingdom. Svenska: Karracken Mary Rose i sin specialkonstruerade byggnad vid Historic Dockyard i Portsmouth i Storbritannien. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Forensic Historical Findings
This post is, in particular, for my criminal justice students.
Forensic science is now being used to interpret the past. The BBC has several programs devoted to the subject, but here is a documentary about a single subject, the Mary Rose.
This ship was the largest ship in King Henry the VIII’s fleet. It capsized while he watched from shore.
In the program, they study the crew’s remains to gain insight into the causes of the sinking.
Jerry Stahl: Government has a “fascist-adjacent” devotion to business – Salon.com
Hard to pick one thing – but of late the delusional nature of the American psyche can get to me. The America is No. 1 insanity, as likely to be perpetrated by Chris Matthews as Sean Hannity. I mean, No. 1 at what? Domestic spying? Fascist-adjacent governmental devotion to banks and business? Stripping its citizens of dignity, hope and food stamps? Letting industry poison the water and air? (Though that title might to go China, too.) I get particularly angry – now that I have a baby in the house again – about drones. Don’t the people who keep blowing up grandmothers in Afghanistan and Yemen and God knows where else realize that, one of these days, those poor bastards are going to start sending drones in our direction? And if they’re as random and inaccurate as ours, it’s not going to be pretty.
CRIME Suicidal Tendencies by Yaia (Photo credit: YAIAGIFT™)
Ban the Box Picking Up Momentum?
“Ban the Box” is a movement in States and communities to have employers eliminate questions about whether or not an applicant has a criminal background. These questions keep millions of people from even being considered for employment.
America’s passion for imprisonment driven by the “war on drugs” has resulted in a truly incredible proportion of the population with a criminal background.
So, we as a nation are confronted with a policy decision, “Do we make them unemployable as former criminals with all the costs that entails or do we facilitate re-entry into society?” It’s an important decision. The productivity, the potential, of millions of Americans is huge. Equally, the loss in tax money and social disruption of creating a permanent underclass is also huge.
I worked in criminal justice for some years. When I’m teaching my classes, I tell my students that it’s okay to tell me if they have committed a crime but never tell their classmates. I get that people who commit crimes have to re-enter or be some kind of pariah. Most people don’t. Media stoked fear of the other is a vicious ratings builder.
If someone has done their time and paid their penalty, they should have a second chance. Second chances are in a real way what America is about.
James Pilant
Target Will Stop Asking People Their Criminal Histories On Job Applications | ThinkProgress
The big box retailer Target will stop asking prospective employees about their criminal records on job applications, the company announced over the weekend. The decision signals an important move toward helping former inmates who struggle to find work because of employment discrimination.
Advocacy groups for ex-offenders’ rights have pushed for years to “Ban the Box,” a phrase referring to the box on an employment application that asks about someone’s criminal past. The question, administered before a person has a chance to even land an interview, can disqualify otherwise eligible candidates off the bat.
But, starting at the beginning of next year, Target will wait until making a provisional job offer before inquiring about a prospective employee’s criminal record, giving candidates the chance to make their case before an employer passes judgement. The company’s decision comes just a few months after Minnesota — where Target is headquartered — approved a “Ban the Box” statute.
“The Box” can be one of the main barriers of re-entry for people with a criminal past. When an employer sees that box checked, it can be an automatic disqualifier. And the practice is so widespread that it can really hurt the chances for employment for ex-offenders. Surveys show that%
As I noted in my last post, this week is devoted to checking on the status of legislation affecting ex-offenders.
One of the more effective strategies — and one that seems to be gaining steam — is the ”Ban the Box”
grassroots campaign. The box, of course, is that section of the
employment application that asks about whether you have a criminal
record. The question can come in a variety of forms as blogger James Walker notes in his very comprehensive post. Sometimes
it’s even a series of questions, as I discovered when my son recently
applied at our local grocery store for a job as a bag boy. These are
usually yes/no questions, typically followed by a space where you’re
asked to explain any charges in further detail.
The problem is that once you check ”Yes,” your application often
goes no further. One human resources professional recently told me
that in cases where someone answered yes in an online application at
his former employer, the application was automatically deleted.
Since 2003, some 30 cities states and counties have eliminated the box and the question from applications.
Are we scraping the bottom of the barrel of Anti Obamacare arguments? Is that all that’s left? Too many people are going to have insurance (and doctors may be paid less?)?
“There’s too much health insurance.” He says. Where? When?
I myself have been denied benefits in circumstances I would have not thought possible. And my friends have as good or better stories than mine.
It must be nice to live in his world and get up in the morning and be outraged by people getting “too much health insurance.”
James Pilant
Fox News’ Dr. Siegel: Too Many People Have Health Insurance Under Obamacare
On The Hannity show last night, yet another in a zillion Fox News segments designed to trash the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare”, Fox News contributor Dr. Marc Siegel revealed that his number one concern was not how well the ACA covers his patients or even how affordable it is but that too many people will wind up with health insurance. And that inconveniences him and the “haves” he treats.Siegel said:Before they started this, we were all in trouble with insurance to begin with. There’s too much health insurance. It covers too much. Too many people have it and they can’t in my office to see me. I’m full. …I can’t see all these people.There’s a shortage of doctors. So what do they do? They’re going to pay us less.So the answer is less health care? So Dr. Siegel won’t be inconvenienced and/or get paid less? Doesn’t this violate the Hippocratic Oath?
The Fox News article then goes on to claim that jobs are being hurt by the ACA. By the “employer mandate” specifically. A mandate that will not even go into effect until 2015 and may be significantly changed before then. The Obama administration and others know it is a flawed portion of the law. This is widely agreed upon. Which is why it has been delayed. To claim that anyone lost a job or job hours due to a mandate that doesn’t yet exist is ludicrous. In fact, the Investor’s Business Daily “study” that claims that over 300 employers cut employees or employee hours due to the mandate is either based on hearsay OR has links that actually admit that no work hours have been cut BECAUSE the mandate has been delayed (for example, the so-called evidence provided for Biola University cutting employee hours. Which it has not. Because the mandate has been delayed).
And Fox News AGAIN inadvertently reiterates the argument that insurance should not be tied to employment.
We will be sure to reference this FoxNews.com article frequently to show why we need Single-Payer in California and beyond.
English: The Globe House, headquarters of British American Tobacco in London, as seen from River Thames Deutsch: Das Globe House, die Zentrale der British American Tobacco in London, von der Themse aus gesehen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Industry Buys Its Own Facts?
I read once that you are entitled to your opinion but not your own facts. Apparently, an industry funded “science” group produces whatever “facts” are necessary when they’re needed.
So, let’s look at this from a business ethics standpoint. We have a public controversy in which an industry is doing something that may cause the public harm. Scientific evidence appears to suggest that some regulatory action is necessary. Business ethics would seem to dictate a rational and intelligent approach where we weigh evidence, perhaps do a cost-benefit analysis. Then we an enlightened civilized group decide what’s best for people in a democracy. That’s ethics.
But wait, certain companies have decided that when that scientific evidence appears and could cost them money, that it be branded junk science, and what’s more they have an organization that produces their very own private “facts.” Thus, we short circuit the whole system and stymie action necessary for people to live in health and peace.
Using a tissue of lies, and let’s not be tender about what this is, is unethical, a catastrophic failure of business ethics. It is the model developed by the tobacco industry to stop regulation of second hand smoke. It is designed to confuse and complicate the public debate over what should be done. It has been very successful in demonizing science and crippling democracy.
Lies kill, and these kinds of lies are particularly pernicious.
James Pilant
“Impartial” science group funded by Big Oil, soda and tobacco – Salon.com
Mother Jones has blown the lid off the American Council on Science and Health, a pro-industry research and advocacy organization known to defend everything from fracking to the potential harms of BPA from what it calls the “junk science” that’d have you think such things could pose a danger to public health. The group says all of its conclusions are driven by science, but its funding, leaked documents reveal, come from industry groups and corporations, to a greater extent than ACSH has acknowledged:
According to the ACSH documents, from July 1, 2012, to December 20, 2012, 58 percent of donations to the council came from corporations and large private foundations. ACSH’s donors and the potential backers the group has been targeting comprise a who’s-who of energy, agriculture, cosmetics, food, soda, chemical, pharmaceutical, and tobacco corporations. ACSH donors in the second half of 2012 included Chevron ($18,500), Coca-Cola ($50,000), the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation ($15,000), Dr. Pepper/Snapple ($5,000), Bayer Cropscience ($30,000), Procter and Gamble ($6,000), agribusiness giant Syngenta ($22,500), 3M ($30,000), McDonald’s ($30,000), and tobacco conglomerate Altria ($25,000). Among the corporations and foundations that ACSH has pursued for financial support since July 2012 are Pepsi, Monsanto, British American Tobacco, DowAgro, ExxonMobil Foundation, Phillip Morris International, Reynolds American, the Koch family-controlled Claude R. Lambe Foundation, the Dow-linked Gerstacker Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust.
companies in industries such as oil and tobacco often give generous
financial donations to organizations funding research that work to
discredit peer-reviewed, scientific studies indicating that climate
change is a real phenomenon caused by humans.
The reason? If the government were to increase regulations
on environmental issues in general, tobacco companies, too, could see a
negative effect to their bank accounts, considering their products’ environmental impact – not to mention potential smoking bans that could negatively affect sales of tobacco products.
While the tobacco industry is not commonly associated with
dispelling the existence of climate change, the industry has been
funding organizations that attempt to cast doubts on the validity of
climate change studies since the early 1990s.
As the English writer and environmental and political activist George Monbiot wrote
in his book “Death Denial,” “the corporate funding of lobby groups
denying that manmade climate change is taking place was initiated not by
Exxon, or by any other firm directly involved in the fossil fuel
industry. It was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.”
“Practice big words!!” – when do you say that to an attorney and it not sound insulting?
Business ethics would seem to suggest equal treatment for equal work but there just must be something about women in the workplace that drives men to stupidity? I don’t get it. By the time, you have gotten through law school, that big words problem is done. The rest sound like some male with supervisory status gets his education on women’s conduct from old reruns of Ally McBeal. Surely, there is some actual experience in the firm of supervision that doesn’t depend on insults to keep people in line? Or maybe this is just based in the firms collective mind in the concept that women have many child-like immature characteristics and need a different management touch?
I don’t think you need any deep business ethics analysis. Don’t insult your workers. If there is a conduct problem, deal with it intelligently and don’t firebomb the staff with a badly thought out memo.
And from my own personal thought, it may be time for the outdated concept that women are just larger children to die, to go away, to run off into the wilderness of failed and mindless ideas and starve there alone.
James Pilant
Giggles (Photo credit: Walt Stoneburner)
Sexist Law Firm Memo Tells Women Lawyers ‘Don’t Giggle,’ ‘Don’t Squirm,’ And ‘Practice Hard Words’ | ThinkProgress
Clifford Chance, a massive, international law firm employing thousands of elite attorneys, distributed a memo entitled “Presentation Tips for Women” that was better suited for a middle school forensics class than for graduates of the world’s leading law schools. Worse, interspersed between rudimentary pieces of advice such as “Stand up” and “Don’t wave your arms” are a series of often-gendered suggestions that call into question whether one of the world’s largest law firms understands that professional women are fully capable of dressing themselves.
Among the words of advice offered to every single female associate at Clifford Chance are “Don’t dress like a mortician,” “Wear a suit, not your party outfit,” “If wearing a skirt, make sure audience can’t see up it when sitting on the dias,” and — in an odd reference to six year-old sexist news coverage of then-Senator Hillary Clinton — “No one heard Hillary the day she showed cleavage.”
I don’t want to fall into the trap of blaming all men for this crap, because I do happen to know some decent fellows who, for the most part, don’t buy into it, and when they do, are pretty good at giving themselves a slap upside the head and realizing they’re being kind of piggish. And I do think women, myself included, have become very, very good at playing the male chauvinist game, and we need to stop being complicit in destroying ourselves to keep it going. So, yeah, it takes two to tango and other related truisms, but goddammit, it’s becoming more and more impossible for me to remain calm and logical in the face of the increasingly Sisyphean task of bearing the responsibility for all things dull and ugly while taking none of the credit for their opposite.
A police car in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Challenges and Changes in Police Work
I recommend reading the whole article. This police officer has gone through the last twenty years, some of the most turbulent years in the history of policing. His observations are enlightening and intelligent.
James Pilant
A Frontline Officer on Challenges and Changes
Entering my third decade in policing, I had an epiphany about how much my profession has changed since I learned to write reports on manual typewriters in my 1989 recruit class. Like every other industry, policing has seen such dramatic changes that what we imagine for the next 20 years is as surreal as the idea of people travelling to space on paid space shuttles was two decades ago. Two decades ago society would not have tolerated the idea of conducting business from home and having meetings as avatars in virtual environments, yet many businesses now operate this way.
Law enforcement has evolved from paper reports and filing cabinets, to body worn cameras and global positioning in a digitally connected universe. Most North Americans use smart phones that connect them immediately with information that we could not have imagined in previous decades. Police officers now must assume that an action they take in the street may be replaying in the media before they get back to the office to write a report about it.
In the 24 years of my own policing career, I’ve had a front-row seat to the changes that have occurred and have witnessed how these changes present challenges that cross every industry and confront administrators in both the public and private sectors. Two decades ago administrators made decisions about what information to release, whereas now they must manage information that is already out there.
There has been much anger in the financial press about JPMorgan having to pay a multi-billion dollar fine. It has been strangely charged that this is a government attack on capitalism. No, actually the bank broke the law and failed over and over again to act in an intelligent manner about its investments or its clients. But Gretchen Morgenson is absolutely right. This kind of fine isn’t really getting tough with the banks. It’s merely carrying on the long tradition of banks paying some proportion of the losses they caused while criminal prosecution as individuals is off the table.
There is no real penalty here. The billions are just the cost of doing business. The bank has paid out fines before. The bank will pay out fines again. The fun and enormous profits of reckless speculation will remain.
There will only be an effective deterrent when wrongdoers are punished personally by fine and imprisonment.
You can’t attack prevent crime by attacking organizations with minor financial penalties. You could effectively if you were willing to pull the corporate charter from the bank and destroy it, or seize all of its assets. But I see no willingness to do that. The only effective tool present is the power to prosecute individuals.
It is bizarre to tell students to act with business ethics when they can read everyday in the news of the incredible money being made by individuals under the cover of banks deliberately, knowingly breaking the law. But even that is eclipsed by the simple and horrible fact that we do not impose penalties on individuals.
Without justice, how we expect people less favored than bank executives to believe in the law?
James Pilant
Why JPMorgan May be Getting off Easy
In a criminal investigation, JPMorgan Chase is facing action from federal authorities who suspect that the bank turned a blind eye to Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. That’s yet another headache in a week of migraines for America’s largest bank; last Friday JPMorgan Chase reached a tentative $13 billion settlement with federal prosecutors for its alleged manipulation of mortgage securities, which helped trigger the Great Recession. There may be more pain to come as the megabank faces litigation on a number of fronts.
And JPMorgan Chase is not alone – it is one of several banks being investigated by the government for mortgage fraud. While many headlines in the financial press accuse the government of conducting a witch hunt, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson offers a different perspective: “If the Justice Department were being tough on Wall Street they would be talking about bringing criminal cases against individuals who helped to perpetrate this immense crisis.” she said. Morgenson adds that the investigations into JPMorgan Chase show that it and many other financial institutions are still ‘too big to fail,’ which means taxpayers could once again be forced to bail them out.
A cat and dog, the two most popular animals kept as pets. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Stakeholder Pets?
Are pets stakeholders under business ethics analysis? Yes. Why is that? Theoretically a pet cannot buy a product. However, a pet does express preferences in products, particularly what they eat. So, pets do exercise choices as consumers as pet owners all know.
But they are stakeholders in another sense, by their existence they establish a need. So, when a manufacturer of pet treats kills pets, he kills his market.
I do not believe a rational argument can be made on behalf of pet killing by purchased treat. It might be a Friedman type thing where profit is foremost and you don’t kill enough of the market to mar your income. Of course, once again, that would suggest that businesses are not any good at or are very bad at self-regulation.
Simple business ethics, and I’m talking very simple here, very basic says, “Don’t kill the client.”
When businesses fail this basic test, and do not act to fix the problem, then the government has to step in. While this government action is late, it is welcome. I hope it works.
James Pilant
Amid pet deaths, FDA finally proposes new food safety rules – Salon.com
As the Food and Drug Administration continues to come up short on a possible explanation for the deaths of nearly 600 pets nearly six years after they were first linked to imported jerky treats, the federal agency is at last getting around to passing rules for pet and animal feed that would help prevent contamination before it begins. The Associated Press reports:
The proposed rules would require those who sell pet food and animal feed in the United States — including importers — to follow certain sanitation practices and have detailed food safety plans. All of the manufacturers would have to put individual procedures in place to prevent their food from becoming contaminated.
The rules would also help human health by aiming to prevent foodborne illnesses in pet food that can be transferred to humans. People can become sick by handling contaminated pet food or animal feed.
On Sunday, Senator Brown held another news conference at the Ohio Humane Society in Hilliard Ohio about tainted chicken jerky treats from China. It was Brown’s second public statement to the Food and Drug Administration regarding the treats that are reported to have been causing illness and death in pets across the country.
The conference on February 19 came in the wake of 400 new complaints to the FDA about pets becoming ill after eating the treats. Although the FDA has been trying to find the contaminant causing the illnesses, they have been unable to pinpoint the specific toxicant. As a result, manufacturers have not been required by law to remove the products from store shelves, keeping the potentially dangerous treats readily available to the public.
In December of 2008, when pets began falling ill in Australia, University of Sydney researchers made an epidemiological connection linking the illnesses to the consumption of chicken treats imported from China. Australian dog treat importer KraMar withdrew its Supa Naturals Chicken breast strips from the Australian market as a precaution, even though a specific toxicant wasn’t pinpointed.
Picture taken at Georgia Aquarium, pictured is one of the two resident male whale sharks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
TV Goes Downhill
The lowest common denominator. That apparently is the demographic television programming is looking for if these reinventions are to make any sense. Of course, maybe doing real programming is hard. After all, how much brains does it take to do “Shark Week?”
I have some old VHS tapes with programming from the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, powerful learned television shows with meaning. Now, my college students complain about the low quality of the programming and how little science or history is being covered.
Is there a business ethics issue here? Well, there is something wrong about advertising yourself as dealing with serious scientific, cultural or historical matters, and then producing junk designed for the inquisitive mind of, “Well, nobody.” Inquisitive minds aren’t wanted there.
And there is the lost opportunity of appealing to what is best in humanity, thrown away endlessly seeking higher ratings or a younger demographic. Whether that is a business ethics problem depends on your interpretation.
I don’t watch those programs anymore. I don’t think anybody should.
All across the dial, cable networks have shed their identities in order to become things far stranger — and, often, a bit less highbrow — than they’d been initially. The network formerly known as History Channel (now it’s just History) has defined the academic subject as including ancient aliens and truckers; TV Land’s reruns have gone from old-school classics to stuff from 10 years ago; just about every fine-arts channel broadcasts reality TV now.
It makes sense — in a crowded market, no one’s going to subsidize a network that does something unpopular. All these networks once did slightly different things, but now many have shifted toward the same model: broadcasting unscripted shows depicting a particular corner of the American experience (trucking, pawnbroking, being a pampered wife of one variety or another). Still, there’s something a bit wistful about imagining each of these cable networks’ original iterations frozen in amber — rather than a dial full of similar-looking broadcasts, we could have a gleefully out-of-step Bravo and A&E doing British costume drama, and medical oddities all over TLC. Oh well–there’s always reading!
While there may be a debate about what “sightings” may be, there is one thing that scientists are sure of: Megalodon is extinct.
Part of me is furious with you, Discovery, for doing this. But mostly, I’m just deeply saddened. It’s inexplicably depressing that you’ve gone from “the world’s #1 nonfiction media company” to peddling lies and faking stories for ratings. You’ve compromised your integrity so completely with this special, and that breaks my heart. I loved you, Discovery, ever since I was a child. I grew up watching you. It was partly because of you that I became transfixed by the natural world and pursued a career in science. I once dreamed of having my own Discovery Channel special, following in the footsteps of people like Jeff Corwin. Not anymore. This is inexcusable. You have an obligation to your viewers to hold to your non-fiction claims. You used to expose the beautiful, magical, wonderful sides of the world around us. Now, you just make shit up for profit. It’s depressing. It’s disgusting. It’s wrong.
I won’t be watching the rest of Shark Week. I simply can’t.
From the web site, From New York to San Francisco.
I’m not even going to bother sliding into my regular shtick about how far the network has fallen, or how I would take the 24/7 Hitler and Nazi Germany program broadcasting of the 90′s any day over this garbage, because it is a fruitless effort. Apparently, I am in the minority when it comes to opinion on programming. I guess I should feel silly for wanting the History Channel to stop putting on shows where toothless red-necks blast alligator brains out with shotguns and then jump up and down in their little boats hootin’ n’ hollerin’ with unintelligible grunts like they just won the lottery. I am amazed, after seeing shows like that, at how surprised people from the Deep South are when they are looked at as being backwards hicks. Do not blame northern ignorance, my friends, blame the media and popular culture that has turned your society into a hole of filth and slime. At least Chasing Tail is going to do something to repair the damage done: it will show that northerners can be hicks too!
I do not know what is even left anymore. H2 used to always be the safe haven when the History Channel started going to hell, but even that is being corrupted with asinine, pseudo-historical shows like America Unearthed, where the host, Scott Wolter, can make an entire episode centered around a microscopic carving on a rock and lead the viewer on a baseless quest around the country to misrepresent far-reaching theories as fact, and then find absolutely no concrete evidence to back anything up. This show, in format and principle, is identical to Ancient Aliens. The latter attempts to say that everything the ancients built on earth was really built by aliens, while the former attempts to say that everything ancient Americans built on this continent was really built by foreigners. Is there a difference? I acknowledge that the history books are wrong and there is more than meets the eye, but without actual evidence, the shows are absolutely useless. Maybe if I carved a cross onto the tree in my backyard I could get the crew to come down to try to prove that the Knights Templar hid the Holy Grail in Hazlet, New Jersey. Maybe if I find a really big squirrel climbing that same tree I can get Monsterquest to come out of retirement and have a double whammy!
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.