Tag: News

Will African Courts “Fix” the Internet?

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Capitalism, corruption

(This picture is borrowed from dear friends at Wikipedia (they deserve donations and support!) and they got the picture from NASA which being a government agency places it in the public domain.)

Social media, the internet, broadcasts almost infinite amounts of lies, misinformation and abuse. It causes severe and lasting harm to our society. And yet our political system seems unable to cope in anyway, not even able to curb the international scams that plague the elderly and the young.

The other day I was reading Al Jazeera, probably the best source of information about the war in the Ukraine, (they have daily coverage), and noticed an interesting editorial. Mercy Mutemi is the managing partner at Nzili & Sumbi Advocates, a law firm. She wrote a very fine editorial about efforts in African Courts to rein in the abuses of the Internet.

Here is a link to the editorial:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/8/16/african-courts-may-pave-the-way-for-holding-social-media-giants-to-account

In April 2025, the Human Rights Court in Kenya issued an unprecedented ruling that it has the jurisdiction to hear a case about harmful content on one of Meta’s platforms. The lawsuit was filed in 2022 by Abraham Meareg, the son of an Ethiopian academic who was murdered after he was doxxed and threatened on Facebook, Fisseha Tekle, an Ethiopian human rights activist, who was also doxxed and threatened on Facebook, and Katiba Institute, a Kenyan non-profit that defends constitutionalism. They maintain that Facebook’s algorithm design and its content moderation decisions made in Kenya resulted in harm done to two of the claimants, fuelled the conflict in Ethiopia and led to widespread human rights violations within and outside Kenya.

Further down in the article she very eloquently explains the significance of the court’s decision thusly:

The ultimate goal of the Bill of Rights, a common feature in African constitutions, is to uphold and protect the inherent dignity of all people. Kenya’s Bill of Rights, for example, has as its sole mission to preserve the dignity of individuals and communities and to promote social justice and the realisation of the potential of all human beings. The supremacy of the Constitution also guarantees that, should there be safe harbour provisions in the laws of that country, they would not be a sufficient liability shield for platforms if their business decisions do not ultimately uphold human rights.

I would have liked to summarize the findings about this case but I unable to approach the level of her eloquence. She states the principle in question very well indeed.

The Internet is a world wide phenomenon and while we here in the United States suffer terribly from its abuses, we are only a small proportion of its victims.

And that means that justice systems all over the world have jurisdiction when their citizens are harmed. The argument here is that a internet provider has immunity provided its business decisions do not result in the diminishment of guaranteed human right.

Our enforcement in the United States has been lacking because of legal complexity and the horrible unsustainable influence of the Tech Bros, our wannabe Oligarchs.

Their time is coming.

We have to rise up as a nation and end this constant stream of bots, foreign influence, etc. It is an open decaying sewer of utter evil and it harms all of us.

We can do better.

James Alan Pilant

Newsmax Settles Lawsuit

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

The good guys, the guys in the white hats, our modern Hop-Along Cassidy’s, do not win many victories these days what with the scoundrels running the government but sometimes the good guys win one. And today is one of those days.

Here is the headline, the link and a quote.

Conservative network Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/newsmax-agrees-pay-67m-settlement-154603217.html

The conservative network Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of defaming a voting equipment company by spreading lies about President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, according to documents filed Monday.

The settlement comes after Fox News Channel paid $787.5 million to settle a similar lawsuit in 2023 and Newsmax paid what court papers describe as $40 million to settle a libel lawsuit from a different voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, which also was a target of pro-Trump conspiracy theories on the network.

If you have a genuine enjoyment of humor, go down further in the article and read how Newsmax claims that they did nothing wrong. “We stand by our coverage as fair, balanced, and conducted within professional standards of journalism.” I can’t help but think that paying sixty-seven million dollars certainly gives one the impression that someone did some wrong-doing.

Will the Right Wingers ever accept the 2020 elections as legitimate after an unbroken stream of court losses of which this one is just the latest? Not a chance. Their self identity demands victimhood and not just victimhood but giant international conspiracies to justify their foul language and overwrought histrionic emotions.

It is a real pity that the court results have a limited effect in this strange world of politics we live in.

But still a good win, a great victory.

You can make a strong argument that those who had to pay out all this money are being punished although Newsmax claims otherwise. I would bet you real money they are more judicious in their language in the future.

James Alan Pilant

Are CEO’s Paid Too Much?

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Capitalism

There appears to a be a considerable consensus on various web sites that indeed they are.

(That does look like corporate leadership, a daunting path, indeed!)

Let’s begin with the Guardian in an article by Michael Sainato talks about his pay.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/24/trump-bill-ceo-pay-starbucks

Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol, made 6,666 times more than his average worker last year, according to a report on the growing gap between top executives and their workers.

The inequality gap between CEOs’ pay and that of their median workers rose in 2024 to 285 to 1 from 268 to 1 in 2023, according to a report released this week by the largest federation of labor unions in the US, the AFL-CIO.

I will freely disclose that I find the CEO in question, Brian Niccol, reptilian and repulsive, and that is beside the fact that he is paid way too much.

But there’s more. Here’s an article from 2023 By Nik Popli. He writes about an investor advocacy group that calls out CEO’s who get generous pay packages while their companies suffer losses particularly in shareholder returns. I recommend you read the entire article.

https://time.com/6256076/most-overpaid-ceos-2022/

The typical CEO of a company listed on the S&P 500—a stock market index with 500 large publicly traded corporations—earned $18.8 million last year. That’s up roughly 21% from 2021, even though the S&P 500 index was down 20%. Company boards gave particularly big grants of stock to reward those in charge of navigating their companies through high inflation, continued supply chain problems, and rising wages—as well as meeting performance metrics.

But an investor advocacy group says some of the nation’s most well-known companies overpaid their chief executives. A new report from As You Sow listed 100 “overpaid” CEOs who received high compensation in 2022 despite mixed shareholder returns for their companies.

At the top of the list: Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav, who received $246 million in 2022 even though the company’s stock fell 60% in the same year and roughly 40% of shares voted against his pay package. The second most overpaid CEO was Estée Lauder’s Fabrizio Freda, who earned $66 million in 2022 while the company’s stock fell 33%. Penn National Gaming’s Jay Snowden, who was paid $65.9 million, comes in at no. 3 on the list; his company’s stock fell 42.7%.

And for the year before, we have the magazine Fortune in an article by Chris Morris, Maria Aspan entitled rather directly These are the 10 most overpaid CEOs in the 2022 Fortune 500. Once again, I liked the article and recommend you read it in full.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-most-overpaid-ceos-2022-175248791.html

Overall hourly U.S. wages fell 2.4% on average last year (after adjusting for inflation), but the median total compensation of CEOs Fortune studied as part of this year’s Fortune 500 ranking jumped 30% from a year earlier to $15.9 million.

That made us curious. Did those CEOs deserve the compensation packages they received? Fortune’s Maria Aspan and Scott DeCarlo analyzed the compensation and stock performance of the 280 Fortune 500 CEOs who have held their jobs for at least three years, ranking them on pay vs. performance.

Apparently factual analysis based on the statistics of market performance does not paint an appealing picture of CEO pay. I am not surprised. The media celebrates these figures as fearless leaders and innovative entrepreneurs with little actual examination of the facts. And the way corporate power is structured, an obedient board of directors is just a matter of time for an aggressive CEO.

The Progressive Shopper posts the “Overpaid CEO Score Card.”

Overpaid CEO Score Card

The list identifies the 100 Most Overpaid CEOs from the S&P 500 index, highlighting those CEOs deemed excessively compensated based on their performance. It specifically focuses on CEOs who were addressed at annual meetings held between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023. This year’s findings also incorporate insights from annual voting patterns and regression analysis conducted by HIP Investor.

Mentioned previously was the Shareholder Advocacy Group, “As You Sow.” This is a ten year study they published about CEO compensation entitled 10 Years of Study Shows Overpaid CEOs Underperform.

Listed below the link are its most damning conclusions.

https://www.asyousow.org/press-releases/2023/11/15-ten-year-study-overpaid-ceo-underperform

Key findings: 

  • Companies with the most overpaid CEOs have had lower returns to shareholders than the average S&P 500 company. The typical S&P 500 firm made 8.5% per year annualized from February 2015 to September 2023, the 100 Most Overpaid CEOs’ annual returns lagged at 7.9%, the worst 25 dragged at 6.0%, and the ten worst were behind at 6.5% per year.  As a group, over a decade, overpaid CEOs underperformed.
  • Total pay for the most overpaid CEOs continues to grow. When As You Sow compiled its first overpaid CEO list ten years ago, the average pay of the 10 Most Overpaid was $56 million. This year, the average of the top ten was $88 million, an increase over that time period of 59%. 

There were more articles and many opinion pieces. All these sources saying that CEO’s are over paid — and, yet, they continue to be overpaid!

But it seems likely that AI and an increasingly darkening economic horizon under our current regime’s bizarre decision making may very well diminish these payouts.

We can hope!

James Alan Pilant

Trump Demands Smithsonian Spread Lies and Misinformation about American History

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, corruption

That is exactly what Trump means when he talks about institutions aligning with his vision of American history.

Sanitizing American history of critical thinking and historical fact to make the right wing loonies happy is a six lane highway to a fraudulent account of American History.

It would be nice if peaceful Native Americans had not had their land stolen or been murdered. It would be just lovely if the savage crime of slavery and its associated murder, rape and theft of labor were not part of American history but it is.

It would be nice if American corporations hadn’t sold tobacco as a remedy for breathing disorders or put lead in gasoline poisoning tens of millions of Americans when they had better alternatives. It would be nice if there weren’t millions of miles of mining tunnels under the United States, unmaintained and unmapped or if we hadn’t annihilated a good number of plant and animal species but we did.

History is messy. It records the good and the bad.

We call that “telling the truth,” currently out of fashion with the current regime.

I have read a great deal of American history and I find and continue to find much that makes me proud. More and more I discover that people living their lives in communities all over the United States acted with courage and righteousness on behalf of their country.

But I am not so simple minded or foolish to believe that is the whole story. The truth marches on and we should march with it.

If we fail to act and do right as a people and a nation we deserve destruction. No amount of lies and misinformation will cover our crimes. It seems to me that currently the balance between righteousness and evil in America is in the positive zone but will that continue? It is easy to look at the wicked and self serving members of this administration and despair.

But let us have faith in the long arc of history and our nation even in this our lowest and worst point in history.

Let us do what is best and hope that history vindicates us.

Let us tell the truth and live by it.

And that means allowing our historical institutions to actively seek and present the truth.

Thomas Lecaque writing for the Bulwark has some strong words for what the Administration is demanding.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-demands-smithsonian-deliver-shiny-070329562.html

They sure do want “collaboration”—like Anton Mussert, or Philippe Pétain, or Vidkun Quisling. Because this is fascism, and the rewriting of history in service of a fascist mythology is part of the program, from censoring the Smithsonian and the National Park Service to gutting PBS and floating the idea of PragerU replacing it. From putting Jim Crow-era Confederate statues back up to pushing for the return of racist mascots and Confederate names to DHS’s use of manifest destiny and American fascist texts in its social media account.

I recommend you read the full article. He has a lot to say.

And here is the Huffpost talking about the chilling effect of this regimes attacks on our learning institutions. Read what Jennifer Bendery has to say:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/smithsonian-staff-scared-trump-censorship-art-history_n_689bb490e4b09184403f36c0

Staff are censoring content they fear could upset President Donald Trump. Volunteers are angry and mulling quitting, even as they work for free. Employees are repeatedly warned not to talk to the press.

And the message from on high is that if you care about the Smithsonian Institution and its 17 museums in Washington, D.C., and if you care about your colleagues keeping their jobs or keeping your own, you’ll keep your mouth shut about the chilling effects of Trump’s efforts to erase art and rewrite American history in the ways that he wants.

Here is a CNN report on the subject – but do not expect it to be up very long. They don’t like their video’s on other platforms – so read it while you can.

And here is MSMBC, take.

https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-smithsonian-institute-museum-library-services-rcna199331

Listen to the Victims of Epstein’s Abuse

On By southwerkIn corruption

(The picture is in the public domain and does seem to have some satirical impact at this time!)

The victims of Jeffrey Epstein should have their time now.

Jeffrey Epstein had powerful friends who protected him again and again. Only after many years was he tried and sentenced to prison.

And now the question remains, should we publicize the names of those who received favors from him, namely young women and rides on his plane.

Historically I must tell you the names in these types of scandals never seem to get disclosed. I have read of cases of famous womens’ diaries, bordello madams customer lists and many other such scandals. The names never make it out.

Many years ago, one of my instructors was an old law officer in the State of Oklahoma. He told me lots of stories. Before election days, they’d raid the brothels to appease the Baptist voters. He laughed about finding all kinds of city and state officials in those raids — but their names didn’t get disclosed either.

But time has passed and perhaps things are changing. We as a nation have been talking about victim’s rights for quite some time with very variable results. (I have been more than a little disappointed.)

It is only just and honorable that we pay attention to the women abused in this case. The fact that powerful men and women participated in their abuse makes their memories, their testimony, all the more important.

And it is not happening. We get the occasional minor story but when are we going to get a major network interviewing fifteen survivors in a group and putting those interviews on television. Maybe I’m an amateur when it comes to broadcasting but isn’t that what television news was designed to do?

Where’s the print media? Are those who victimized these women so powerful that fear and cowardice grips the entertainment industry, the news networks and the great mass of journalists?

I have to wonder.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/epstein-victims-growing-political-threat-040042411.html

(Quoted directly from the article linked to above.)The women whom Jeffrey Epstein abused demand to be heard.

And their voices — long suppressed, but now emerging powerfully and with courage — could further fuel the maelstrom around President Donald Trump and aides who dig the scandal deeper each time they try to end it.

These are women who’ve been let down for years, at multiple levels, by a government that was supposed to keep them safe. Their families are victims, too, since abuse sows trauma through generations. (End quote.)

The main fact before us is simple, very simple. We may not have the lists of those who participated in the abuse but we can always just ask the women abused.

Why don’t we do it?

James Alan Pilant

Who Exactly is a “Patriot Donor?”

On By southwerkIn corruption

Picture above By David Maiolo – Own work, CC BY-SA (Borrowed from my friends at Wikipedia with profound thanks!)

We are engulfed in a tsunami of White House lies and misinformation. Not only that but the White House itself, an American institution is being remade apparently in imitation of the President’s resort in Florida. Language is important. Let us discuss where and how the term, patriot donor, appears.

Take a look at this news article from the online magazine, Salon.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-sending-dark-signal-white-103011111.html

(Quoted from the article linked to above.)That was the premise of a White House announcement last week claiming that the president “and other patriot donors” would be financing the full, approximately $200 million cost of a gaudy, gold-tinged pseudo-classical addition to his current residence in Washington, DC. With renderings that look an awful lot like a wing at Mar-a-Lago, the so-called White House Ballroom would be a 90,000-square-foot party venue located where the “small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits,” suggesting that historical preservation is not top of mind. (End quote.)

Patriot donor? Just what is patriotic about giving the President money so he can create a Mar-A-Lagos on the Potomac in place or in addition to the current White House? It seems more like an opportunity to curry favor or gain favorable access to the current administration to me. Am I too cynical or is any level of cynicism up to the rapacious greed of our current “leadership?”

Patriotism in my definition does not involve coughing up enormous sums of money for the President’s pet project, the desecration of the American White House.

Patriotism is doing your duty as am American citizen, something being redefined here in a crude and dollar tinged way.

It is unethical to claim that patriotism motivates a donation to the current administration. It is unethical to use the White House in many ways, the peoples’ house, as an excuse once again to flatter and ingratiate money givers into a system of influence peddling.

And finally, it is wrong to cheapen the word, patriotism, which is so important when discussing the real virtues of America, shared sacrifice, moral values and a history of progress.

James Alan Pilant

Lies and Many More Lies

On By southwerkIn corruption

Business ethics are based on a bedrock of facts and reason, as true as we can make it perception of reality. But the leader of the current regime issues a constant stream of lies and misinformation and this is a constant danger to a common understanding of what is factual and what is not.

Let’s start with this story from The Daily Beast.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fbi-reveals-trump-crime-wave-164848654.html

(Quoted directly from the article linked to above) New FBI data contradicts President Donald Trump’s often-repeated claim that crime is surging in the U.S. and Democrats are to blame. Violent crime went down 4.5 percent in 2024, while property crime dropped 8.1 percent, according to the freshly released report. The trend was apparent across the board—every single one of the FBI’s reporting violent crime categories showed a significant drop: murder (-14.9 percent), rape (-5.2 percent), robbery (-8.9 percent), and aggravated assault (-3 percent). (End of quote.)

It is a fact that crime has been dropping in the United States for last forty years from its statistical high in the 1960’s. That fact and the data behind it does not exist in the President’s mind or the Right Wing media machine. Cities and blue states are portrayed as sinkholes of moral depravity while red states are bastions of tranquility. And factually?? I live in Oklahoma which is ranked 21st in intentional murder while New York is ranked 35th. It is more dangerous at night on the streets of Oklahoma than it is in New York.

But the lies benefit the President and his twisted view of the United States as battered hell hole he has come to save.

How about this story from The Maddow Blog?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/maddow-blog-u-economy-cools-150520471.html

(Quoted directly from the article linked to above)The question I haven’t heard him answer is why, exactly, he came to this conclusion. This went largely unasked because the answer was so obvious: Trump had some baseless assumptions about what the numbers should’ve been, based on what he perceives as the greatness of his economic agenda. And since job growth continues to fall far short, common sense (or at least a Trumpified version of common sense) led him to conclude that officials in his own Labor Department must be conspiring against him. Indeed, over the weekend, as part of the larger gaslighting campaign, the president insisted online that he’s responsible for “creating the greatest economy, where prices and Inflation have come way down,” despite the economy being demonstrably and quantifiably worse than when he took office, and neither prices nor inflation have “come way down.” (End of Quote.)

The economy is doing badly based on objective information, that is, the truth. However, the President believes and states the contrary based purely on how he feels the numbers should be and his historical reliance on his narrative of himself as a genius afflicted by constant conspiracies.

Now can anyone, anywhere explain to me how he is going to make intelligent and effective decisions on the American economy when he simply does not have a grasp of economic information? And what’s more he just makes stuff up. In Business, making up your own “facts” is not a formula for success. And it never will be.

How about this from Huffpost:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/cnn-data-chief-shuts-down-071445353.html

(Quoted from article.) Trump — in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” host Joe Kernen — urged viewers to watch “Harry Emden” on CNN, declaring that the data analyst “went crazy over how well” he was doing.

The president claimed his approval rating was at 71% and, among Republicans, bragged that the figure is around 94 to 95%.

It’s unclear where Trump was getting such figures, which seemingly don’t mirror reality and were swiftly fact-checked by Kernen on CNBC.

Enten quickly dismissed the president’s remarks on his numbers.

“You know, I give him a fair shake. I don’t give him a positive spin,” Enten told CNN’s John Berman. (End of quote.)

Here are the real numbers of approval and disapproval, in case you want to compare.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-approval-rating-right-now-heres-what-latest-presidential-poll-numbers-show/ar-AA1K6Ogm?ocid=BingNewsSerp

(direct quote) RealClear Polling which encompasses the average of different 14 different pollsters, including all those mentioned above, shows Trump’s overall favorability today at 45.9% that approve and 51.4% that disapprove. These numbers are nearing his lowest rating this term, when it reached a 52.4% disapproval rating and 45.1% favorable approval rating in late April. (End of quote.)

How does someone get such numbers where are publicized widely and constantly so wrong. I think his mind filters out facts and knowledge so that thoughts and opinions can give him good feelings about his performance and his image. One of the worst things about this is that he might learn and improve if he had to deal with reality but since he is unable to cope with facts, he is sentenced to his life of mediocrity.

Let me close this brief look into the President’s lies with a comment from Maggie Haberman possibly the greatest expert on our current “leader.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/maggie-haberman-flags-1-way-071911535.html

(Quoted from the article above.) New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman argued Tuesday that Donald Trump has somehow “convinced himself,” without evidence, that the July jobs report was manipulated for political reasons. (End of quote.)

This is truly terrible. It is not just that he lies. Is is that he believes the lies.

What kind of leader lies in such huge quantities of lies that it has been described as a fire hose of lies and then believes his own nonsense.

I’ll let you wrestle with the consequences although I may observe that facts and reality have an thoroughly dangerous habit of manifesting themselves over time.

James Alan Pilant

It is Here.

On By southwerkIn business ethics

We live in a profoundly unethical time under a profoundly unethical federal government which is in the process of becoming a totalitarian regime.

We are much of the way there and Rachel Maddow is telling us in the article listed below that a key part of the structure of that regime is already in place.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/rachel-maddow-warns-americans-1-134807335.html

(Directly quoted from the article above.) She then put it even more bluntly: “We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.” While the MSNBC host went on to acknowledge that this might sound “melodramatic,” Maddow noted the U.S. now seems to have its own “secret police,” which is commonplace across dictatorships, in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under Trump. “A massive, anonymous, unbadged — literally masked — totally unaccountable internal police force that apparently has infinite funding but no identifiable leadership,” said Maddow. “And they act in ways designed to instill maximum fear and use maximum force.” (End of quote.)

I agree with her on this point. And we should all be concerned.

But why am I, a writer on business ethics, taking up this subject. Isn’t it just politics?

I wish it were but as the regime spirals into more and more open criminality, it is having a dramatic effect on the economy. When I say criminality, I am talking about thinly discussed bribes and charges for access and many other illegal acts.

It may be soon that speaking as I am may carry civil or criminal penalties and I have noticed that many moral people have gone silent as they see the political apparatus being constructed. No doubt they consider silence better than risk but honor is more important than life itself and it is vital to live as human beings standing tall than to crawl like a worm before a hideously deformed government.

Business ethics relies on reason, logic and evidence. These are all becoming scarce commodities under the trash talk of our current regime.

So, I write about our political downfall and current crisis.

It is only right that I do so.

James Alan Pilant

The President and the Nobel Prize

On By southwerkIn business ethics

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/maddow-blog-white-house-lobbying-164641914.html

(From the Link above) Donald Trump’s desperate and yearslong desire for a Nobel prize is well documented. In fact, after his defeat in 2020, the Republican president released a weird, campaign-style video that suggested he’d already received a Nobel prize. But as pitiful as this has become, Trump isn’t lobbying by himself. Congressional Republicans have tried to please the president by nominating Trump for a Nobel prize, and foreign leaders eager to curry favor with the American leader have done the same thing.(End of quote.)

That the current leader of the United States is often delusional is readily apparent. He also craves praise and validation. His North Korean style cabinet meetings where his lickspittles thank him for his leadership and praise him to the skies are unprecedented in American history.

And he loves prizes and awards. His “amazing” string of club victories at his golf clubs are legendary. There is whole book about his golfing and what it says about him:

I have ordered a copy of the book for myself and it might be wise for you to do the same thing.

Returning to the subject of the Nobel Prize, I find it hard to believe that he would ever get one. If he did get one, how much value would any future Noble Prize have? Its value would be little more than a stuffed animal won at a carnival if that.

Newsweek Magazine commissioned a piece on Nobel Prize winners’ thoughts on the President’s chances. It’s a good piece of reporting. The hardest hitting and most acid drenched comments were those of William Nordhaus who won a Noble prize in 2018 in Economics. I have quoted him below.

https://www.newsweek.com/nobel-prize-winners-react-trump-economics-2107563

(Quoted directly from the link above.)“The way I understand Trump’s ‘successes’ is this: The United States has over the decades built up an enormous reservoir of soft and hard power as well as good will around most of the world—a vast amount of social capital,” said Nordhaus, who won the award in 2018 “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis.”

“Trump has drawn upon that social capital and is using it like a spendthrift teenager to achieve virtually nothing of value and to destroy many critical parts of the global institutional infrastructure,” Nordhaus said.(End of quote.)

There is some useful business ethics observations can be made here. Certainly competing for a prize for the best workplace, most effective innovation and many other things have led to positive good. But this is just another attempted reinforcement for a personality that craves attention and can never be filled. He is empty inside now and he will be empty inside no matter what awards and prizes he gets.

That’s just the way it is and his desperate need for it is more than a little unsettling.

James Alan Pilant

Thirty Dollars an Hour!

On By southwerkIn business ethics

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/la-passed-30-minimum-wage-085029075.html

Quoted directly from the link above.

Worker organizations, including hospitality union Unite Here Local 11, have been advocating for a citywide ordinance that would raise hospitality workers’ minimum wage to $30 by July 1, 2028, to accommodate rising costs of living as city hotels and airports serve an influx of tourists.

Though industry associations, including the American Hotel & Lodging Association, opposed it — claiming a higher wage could be disastrous for hotel owners and operators in the city — Mayor Karen Bass signed the Citywide Hotel Worker Minimum Wage Ordinance, sometimes called the Olympic Wage, into law May 27.

A minimum wage of thirty dollars an hour for many in the United States is unimaginable. And yet, we should be debating what is the right amount and should have been debating it for years. The current national level is seven dollars and twenty-five cents, a huge and incredible subsidy to businesses and corporations across the United States and an hourly insult to the American work force.

In normal times, this subject and ramifications would be the subject of business class discussions, written assignments and eventually published articles. But we don’t live in rational and intelligent times. We live in age of rampant stupidity, incompetence and corruption.

So, these kinds of academic discussion rarely take place. But we should try. The fact that expertise and science are derided and persecuted by the current proto-fascist administration does not mean that we who think and reason will obligingly disappear. I, for one, intend to put up a fight for wisdom, for intelligence and critical thinking. You can join me.

The issue of a thirty dollar minimum wage for hospitality workers is fascinating. The city of Los Angeles is hosting international events and the hotels and similar facilities make enormous profits. The city government thinks this largess should be shared with those doing the work. I find that argument very persuasive. The hotels argue that such a burden would be excessive and (I quote) cause an “economic tsunami”

I want you to understand that the “economic tsunami” line is a bit of attention getter and I might have wondered if they had a case. Except for already enacted twenty dollar minimum wage established for fast food workers. I regularly check on the right wing media portrayal of this act to amuse myself. If you believe their rhetoric, California is now a desert wasteland with ten dollar hamburgers and masses of unemployed wandering the streets in the form of hungry mobs.

Now, in California human beings are making decent salaries and can have good lives with recreation and housing even if they work in fast food and that is wonderful for everyone except the ideological warriors of the internet and the various conservative think tanks and astroturfed organizations they finance.

Anyone interested in trying to get rid of tips or get working Americans decent wages should wade through these hysterical screams of business agony. You’d think business owner were being set upon with hot irons inquisition style instead of facing a requirement to pay living wages. For the wealthy in the United States, the idea that they should pay people what they are worth is anathema.

Nevertheless, I say to business ethics and students that this would be a good class discussion topic and should be explored. There may come a time when we once again think and act intelligently as a nation. (It may take a bit.)

James Alan Pilant