I currently follow the postings on the following blogs:
Chris MacDonald – The Business Ethics Blog
Gael O’Brien The Week in Ethics
Jonathon Tasini Working Life
Karen Fraser Ethical Reputations
Julian Friedland Business Ethics Memo
Jeffrey Seglin The Right Thing
Jeffrey Pfeffer Rational Rants
Richard Eskow Night Light
Karl Stephan Engineering Ethics Blog
Shel Horowitz Principled Profit
David Gebler Blog: Business Ethics
I am dividing my ethics round ups into sections, one for bloggers and one for newspaper columnists. I have four more sections developing, my favorite being a look at ethics writing in other parts of the world.
James Pilant
Tony Pugh in a new article he wrote for McClatchy cites a new report that calls for reorganization at the Food and Drug Administration, a new emphasis on enforcement and a focus on detecting food problems before they get into distribution.
McClatchy was kind enough to include links to two other reports, The Long-Term Health Outcomes of Selected Foodborne Pathogens and Enhancing Food Safety: The Role of the Food and Drug Administration.
Don Blankenship of Massey Energy goes on the offensive stopping just short of claiming that the federally mandated fan system for clearing methane gas caused the accident in the coal mine where 29 miners died. (The comments to this article are not friendly and as of this time, he has not a single supporter.) This is a pdf file of the letter Blankenship sent to four governors.
Mitchell Schnurman writing on McClatchy’s home page section commentary suggests that since this country is in budgetary trouble that we stop giving money to private corporations. (Sounds good to me.)
Loren Steffy writing in the Houston Chronicle discusses the probably bankruptcy and end game for British Petroleum.
Jon Talton discusses the effect a massive increase in city fees for a skyway might have on a department store. It’s business ethics at its most basic level. Who should pay taxes? How much? How should the amount be calculated?
Keith Crowstowski writing for the Kansas City Star explains the corrosive effect of crony capitalism. This is some fine writing. I strongly recommend it.
Ivory Coast – Toxic Waste Dumping.
South Africa – Rigged bidding on a soccer stadium results in cover up, assassination and devastation to the local community.
Egypt – African migrants work their way to Egypt in order to cross the border into Israel.
Australia – Australia is putting out advertising to tell people of its new, tough laws on sexual tourism. Australian citizens who commit crimes against children in other nations can still be prosecuted in Australia.
Australia – Australian government investigates Google for privacy breach.
China – The county of Qingshuihe in far Northern China decided to relocate a town. So they built a new one. At least they started. After spending about 880 million dollars (translating the expenditure into American money), they have a few empty buildings in the middle of nowhere.
Burma – There is some evidence Burma has embarked on the construction of a nuclear weapon.
Germany – Banned genetically modified corn has been planted on acreage in several southern German states.
France – Jerome Kerviel is going on trial soon for breach of trust, forgery and unauthorized computer use. He is blamed for the loss of 4.9 billion Euros in losses by a French bank. (That’s about 6 billion American dollars.)
Scandinavia and the Baltic – Nordic bank Nordea has sold all its shares in British Petroleum. (That’s right. The oil spill will never reach them and they have the sense to punish wrong doing.)
India – Courts in India have found 8 people guilty in the Bhopal disaster and sentenced them to 2 years in prison. The Bhopal disaster resulted in the deaths of up to 18,000 people (those injured number up to 600,000) and occurred in 1984. So, the wheels of justice have been grinding for 26 years. These are the first convictions they have and one of those sentenced is dead and presumably is not concerned about his conviction. While there is definitely a business ethic element to the story, even the most casual reader will find it fascinating from purely an entertainment perspective and a cautionary tale of a nation that does things “differently.” (India is a glorious nation with an incredible history but 26 years to get your first convictions and a two year sentence for destroying a small city’s worth of people is not a recommendation for your justice system.)
Josh Lipton writing on Minyanville discusses the major historical bills regulating Wall Street as compared to the current effort. (It’s got a video!)
Karl Stephan writing in the Engineering Ethics Blog (his blog) talks about the lessons of Nuremberg for engineers and everyone else. The Nuremberg trials were the war crimes trials held by the victorious Allies at the end of the second world war. Many prominent Nazi’s and other war criminals were sentenced to death or to long terms of imprisonment. Stephan believes that the primary lessons of Nuremberg were the reduction of human beings to objects to be manipulated. He says that culminated in abortion, euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research.
(I am quite familiar with the Nuremberg Trials and the death camps and many other Nazi not to mention Japanese and Italian war crimes. I in no way agree with Karl Stephan’s conclusions. Nevertheless, it’s a good read.)
Simon Propper writing on the web site, Ethical Corporation, discusses the corporate responsibility movement and British Petroleum. BP was an enthusiastic user of the CR model and things have not worked out well. Propper discusses the ramifications of these events.
Epic.org, the Electronic Privacy Center, wants it known that internet privacy has become a major issue in the California governor’s race.
Loren Steffy writing in the Houston Chronicle predicts a high likelihood of skyrocketing oil prices in the wake of British Petroleum’s disaster.
Chris MacDonald writing on his site, the Business Ethics Blog, discusses the phenomenon of “Greenwash.” (I recommended an article from the site, Ethical Corporation, which discusses some of the same issues. I recommend reading MacDonald’s take and then checking out Simon Propper’s views.) MacDonald’s perception is tough on BP and accurate.
David Gushee writes about marriage. Normally I would just have gone on by his article since its relevance to business ethics is very limited. But Gushee is excellent in his analysis of ethical issues from a Christian perspective and I want to encourage that. So I include it.
Jon Talton writes about a world in which “entire professions have been vaporized.” I boil with rage over off sourcing, temps instead of real jobs, – every kind of pain placed on the producers in this economy and it never stops. It has gotten worse every year that I have been alive and it shows no sign of improvement. Can we live in a country without well paying jobs and far too few of any kind of job? This is not a problem of personal initiative or re-training. This is a political problem only solvable by action at the national level. But even in Talton’s article he quotes another writer thusly,
“You have to stay on top of what’s changing, how that affects your industry and your specific job and how you’ll remain relevant and valuable. Most people don’t change until they feel the heat. Sometimes, that’s too late …” Also, “Prepare for ‘hurricanes, sinkholes and manana,’ which is all about what to do so you’re not caught off guard, but instead prepared.” As for older workers, “look for ways to demonstrate you’re ‘not old’ in your thinking, in your attitudes, in your skills and how you look.”
When whole professions have been vaporized, personal initiative is useless. When there is one job for every six applicants, there is no amount of personal drive and guts that can get more than one of those six that job. When the entire economy of the United States and the world has been severely damaged, telling everyone to tighten their belt and get tough is no cure. It’s just nonsense. At what point do you look at an international catastrophe and stop saying if we individually get tough enough we can ride it out. At what point does the nonsensical cure of personal initiative, of there’s always dawn after the darkness, light at the end of the tunnel, only thing left after you hit bottom is up, think and grow rich, have optimistic thoughts and opportunity will find you and this continuing empty drivel of self help, when the only thing that can make a difference is collective action. Is it just impossible to say that the government should implement policies to protect American jobs? It is too radical to suggest that shipping American jobs overseas is unpatriotic and counter productive? It is just plain bizarre to suggest that making the absolute last dime is not the most important thing for an individual, a company or a nation? Can we think seriously about the problem or just stay in a land of fantasy where the exercise of a mythical absolute free will makes us demi-gods upon the earth?
I ran across the Ethicsdaily web site while checking for new commentary from the Associated Baptist Press. (I mentioned this in an earlier posting.) I went to the web site and read many of the editorial content, sermons, etc. It’s a good site. Obviously, it is Christian advocacy. I have no trouble, whatsoever with this (being a Christian myself), but that’s not what I am doing here. I am dealing with business ethics. So, after careful search, I discovered that there is material on the site that applies Christian ethics to business. That is very important to me. I strongly, strongly believe that religion has a great deal to tell us about morality and to provide us with guidance to make good decisions. I believe there should be religious component to all business ethics textbooks.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want business ethics textbooks that attempt to convert people to one religion or another. What I do want is the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Islamic teachings on business ethics to be taught to business students as legitimate choices of moral guidance.
So, there will on this web site, discussions of and links to articles from Ethics Daily, but only those with a great deal of relevance to business. There is great number of articles on the site but I only think that four or five a month are likely to be on point.
I’m telling you this because I am trying to put the best stuff on business ethics I can find on this site. It is not a small task and I suspect that I will make many mistakes as to who should be talked about, etc. But, here I am, putting this right out in the open, so that you know that I do think about these things, that I do have to work at this and I do respect and appreciate the thoughts of others in making these decisions.
I want to make a better world. I think if I can collect good business ethics writing and put it on this site regularly that maybe, just maybe, more people will read it, think about it and use it. (I like to think I have significant things to say as well but you probably gathered that.)
I want to do the right thing. I want to do this as well as my powers of judgment allow. If you want to advise me and help me make these choices, charge right in. I don’t mind intelligent criticism.
Okay?
James Pilant
“When I was growing up in the shadow of the Edgar Thomson Works of U.S. Steel a half century ago, it was easy to tell the bookies from the bankers — and it wasn’t just by the clothes they were wearing. If you wanted to place a bet, you went to a bookie; if you wanted to invest, you went to a banker or stock broker.”
This is the lead paragraph from Tom Michlovic’s opinion piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
It’s a dead on call. The Wall Street of the day feels no responsibility to the “knowledgeable investor.” The corner bookie has a greater moral responsibility to his client than our modern investment bankers.
Michlovic calls for the requirement of a fiduciary duty for all investment brokers. It would solve a lot of problems and I strongly agree.
But I am more concerned with how we got here and why we got here. At what point did investment advice become a buyer beware game? And how do members of what we would like to think is a advanced civilized Western culture find that abandoning honor, duty, and any semblance of integrity was the proper move?
The ethical abyss we are looking into did not take place in a few days. We are dealing with a cultural and institutional ethos that is places the future of the nation in jeopardy. Whether we exist as a cooperative society able to meet the challenges of history or simply dissolve into suicidal islands of self interest is a real question.
James Pilant
Here’s one commentator’s, Bob Monks, ideas on the subject. (I agree with him on this issue.)
Could 300 to 400 banks be closed by the government this year? It’s likely. Currently 185 banks have been seized by the government. Another 300 would almost reach the halfway point to a thousand and it is highly unlikely that the current economic crisis will have significantly improved in a single year.
He believes as I do that the collapsing real estate market is going to produce serious losses in bank income. Those of you who take my classes are well aware of my predictions of a serious commercial real estate crisis and a further increase in the seriousness of our current economic plight.
The FDIC reports there are 702 banks on its problem bank list. Of course historically only a little more than a fourth of the banks on the list have failed. I believe we are in a far more serious economic crisis than we have seen before and I strongly agree with James Dunne’s numbers except that I think will be worse. I’ll predict 450 closures by the end of this year.
This is going to be a long, hard economic crisis and we have NOT encountered the worst.
James Pilant
And it’s about time. The corporation is supposed to be controlled by those who put money into the operation, the investors. Yet, as far as I can tell, the shareholders are marginalized and ignored almost all the time. Only when a single shareholder controls a large block of stock do we see any element of corporate democracy.
The federal government should act to make corporations accountable to the people that own them. It’s ridiculous to live in a nation that talks about democracy and preaches it to other countries continue the rank hypocrisy of ownership without power.
James Pilant
You can’t cheat an honest man. Right, you can’t shoot a defenseless man or rape a woman who defends herself. All the financial rip-offs that netted billions of dollars over the last decade couldn’t have worked if Americans weren’t greedy “mothers” without a twinge of conscience. Who invents this crap?
Matt is right to be outraged but how come the rest of us aren’t? What does the financial industry have to do, crucify us individually, before we get the idea that we’ve been had?
Where do the networks find people like Rick Santelli? What septic tank do you have to dive into? In 2008, retirement funds lost 2 trillion dollars. Apparently they are not honest men. Yet to the Rick Santelli’s of the world, it’s all the fault of the people who bought mortgages. In Santelli’s world, there is the elite that makes value and the besotted masses that slow them down. In the world of Santelli, unless you are a banker or a financial speculator, you’re like a vermin that needs extermination for slowing down the really talented people.
Yeah, the industry is innocent of wrong doing. – or is it?
You want a look at some of the individuals screwed out of their money? Let’s have a browse. Sometimes they get mad.
Don’t let it bother you. America is ONLY in trouble because some people can’t pay their mortgages. Some people got in over their heads.
If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. You have to want to believe that kind of perverted narrative because the fact that the great financial institutions of this country acting like predators with a subservient Congress protecting their every move is too hard to take.
James Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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