Category Archives: ethics

A House Impeachment Vote

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), as soon as she returned from the House’s vacation this week, announced that she would not hold a floor vote on whether President Donald Trump should be impeached and the associated investigation should begin forthwith.  Many pundits say Pelosi’s refusal flows from her desire to protect some number of Progressive-Democrats purported to be vulnerable in the 2020 elections.  This is naïve.

Neither Pelosi nor the Progressive-Democrat House caucus that she leads are interested in the slightest in any actual impeachment.  Nor does that disinterest have anything to do with whether there’s a realistic expectation of getting a conviction in the Senate, with the effort’s failure constituting vindication for Trump.

No, the reason Pelosi won’t have the vote is because, her Party having failed to invalidate the 2016 election and canceling American voters’ decision, she’s now bent on prejudicing the 2020 election by extending the smear campaign that the Progressive-Democrats began the day after Trump’s election: Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) in her election victory speech promising to “impeach the mother**.” The move gained steam with Progressive-Democrats’ formally announced invalidation effort made shortly after Trump’s inauguration: Congressmen Al Green (D, TX) and Brad Sherman (D, CA) circulating their Impeaching Donald Trump Resolution that May, and Congressman Steve Cohen (D, TN), along with six other Progressive-Democratic Congressmen, formally introducing Articles of Impeachment.

The smear has continued with Congressman Adam Schiff’s (D, CA) promise of incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s guilt…of something…until the Mueller report disappointed Party, continues with Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s (D, NY, Chairman, House Judiciary Committee), Schiff’s (Chairman, House Intelligence Committee), and Congressman Elijah Cummings’ (D, MD, Chairman, House Oversight Committee) secret Star Chamber inquisitions, from which Schiff has been leaking strategic tidbits, and Wednesday evening with Congressman Eric Swalwell’s (D, CA) announcement on Fox News‘ The Story that Trump is guilty and the hearings are just procedural, a claim of already determined guilt that he’s made several times over the last couple of weeks.

Floor vote for an impeachment proceeding?  Not for a baker’s dozen of months.

Hearings

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As some of you are aware, there are three committees in the House of Representatives that are conducting…hearings…purporting to investigate President Donald Trump with a view to impeach him over this or that Progressive-Democrat-perceived peccadillo, or simply to keep the smear alive after the failure of the Mueller investigation in order to prejudice the 2020 Presidential and Congressional (and down ballot) elections.

As you also are aware, these committees are conducting their hearings in secret, behind closed doors, doors that are so tightly sealed that Republican members of one of the three committees are barred from any of the other committees’ hearings.

But they’re not that tightly sealed; varied news outlets routinely publish what they claim are excerpts from those hearings.  That brings me to a couple of questions.

One is, what are the sources for those things the news outlets publish? The hearings are, after all, secret. Or so the Progressive-Democrat committee chairmen claim.  No news outlet will identify any of its sources.  This is an old question.

Another question is why the news outlets are so incurious about the existence of the leaks? Do they really not care about the lack of integrity the Progressive-Democrat-controlled committees demonstrate with their leaks?

These committees seem to be running Star Chamber inquisitions rather than serious investigations.

Yes and No

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) wants to break up Facebook, and in the meantime, she wants Facebook to shut down free speech the speech of those of whom she disapproves—especially political ads posted to Facebook (for a fee charged by Facebook) by Republicans and Conservatives.  Zuckerberg’s response?

Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications Nick Clegg wrote that the company does not believe its role is to “prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.”

Warren is, of course, angrified that a mere business won’t submit to her bidding, and so she tried to expose Facebook’s arrogance:

She taunted the company by submitting a false ad of her own claiming that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Mr. Trump “to see if it’d be approved.” It was.

Of course it was. It was a political ad, by Warren’s design.  It also was not a false ad; it told the truth. The truth wasn’t that Zuckerberg had become a Trump supporter; that was obvious parody.  No, the thing that made the ad a true one was Warren’s own statement, early on in her parody, that her claim regarding the new Zuckerberg-Trump palsiness was itself false, its purpose being to show Facebook’s penchant for running false political advertisements solely to take money to promote lies.

(Given Warren’s own penchant for lying for her personal gain, that last is especially parodical.)

It’s too bad that Facebook’s position here is contaminated by its penchant for censoring conservative speech that isn’t part of overt political ads.

Lack of Understanding

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This is demonstrated in the lead paragraph of a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Chief executives are taking vocal stands on issues like gun control, climate change, and immigration, but global affairs bring a different complexity and calculation, especially for companies doing business in China*.

After all,

In the aftermath of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s now-deleted tweet, the National Basketball Association has found the consequences of even implicitly criticizing Chinese policy can be swift and sizable.

Not to pick on the NBA in particular (although its behavior has been especially public, cowardly, and so reprehensible), Apple and Alphabet, among lots of others, also have sacrificed principle for company “security” in the PRC, while favoring yuan, also, over principle.

No, taking principled positions don’t get complexified by the environment in which they’re taken. The fundamental tenets of ethics, of morality, are universal and constant; the only adjustments are in the manner of their implementation.  There’s nothing at all complex about that. Company personnel are either principled, ethical, moral, or they are not. These are not matters of situation or convenience.

And this:

Executives have to thread a needle when a company’s commercial and financial interests clash with the CEO’s personal values and the cultural values of an enterprise and its home country, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a leadership expert at the Yale School of Management. “One of the rarely discussed downsides of globalization is you get caught in those crosscurrents,” he said.

Those “cross-currents” are irrelevant. Either the CEO or the enterprise have principles worth standing by and sacrificing for, or the CEO or the enterprise have no principles. It’s that simple.

Another misunderstanding is this one by Paul Argenti, Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Professor of Corporate Communication:

The job of a CEO is not to save the world or make the world safe for democracy[.]

No, but it is a core part of his job to be, at all times and in all circumstances, ethical, moral, and not hypocritical.  An example of business’ glaring hypocrisy: the Business Roundtable. That group is carefully and with deliberation silent on the NBA’s, et al., meek acquiescence to the PRC’s tyrants.

One last misunderstanding, this one by Rick Wartzman, Drucker Institute’s Director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society [paraphrased by WSJ]:

The fracas sparked by ephemeral statements can distract from more substantive questions of social responsibility[.]

And

“What concerns me is whether statements, while important, become a substitute for the more meaningful work around what it means to be a responsible company and take care of all your stakeholders[.]”

Again, no. The only way such things can distract is if the statement maker chooses to be distracted. Staying focused on the business of the company in such a circumstance may be hard to do, but being hard means it’s eminently possible.

 

*The WSJ, like most of the NLMSM, refers to the People’s Republic of China as though it were the one and only. They ignore the nation just across a narrow straight from the mainland, the Republic of China that sits on the island of Taiwan.

A Senate Impeachment Trial

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Against the possibility that articles of impeachment might pass out of the Progressive-Democrat House, The Wall Street Journal wondered whether the Senate should—or could, given a handful of Republican Senators’ misgivings over the Trump-Zelenskiy telecon—simply vote to dismiss the articles “without a trial.”

The path to a successful dismissal vote is uncertain but eminently possible, even somewhat more likely than not.  I’m not convinced, though, that a successful vote to dismiss actually would be a success: dismissing the articles out of hand would do nothing but feed the Progressive-Democrats’ and the NLMSM’s conspiracy theories.

No, the Senate with (especially with) its Republican majority, should hold the trial. That way they can examine the Progressive-Democrats’ witnesses and call their own, which would let the Progressive-Democrats examine those witnesses in their turn.

Such an obviously balanced approach, which I believe would lead to a bipartisan acquittal on all articles (not all of the Senate Progressive-Democrats are in Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s hip pocket), would greatly mitigate the Progressive-Democrats’ and NLMSM’s efforts to delegitimize the 2016 election and to interfere with the 2020 elections up and down the ballot.

That last, after all, is the real purpose of the House Progressive-Democrat caucus. That’s why Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is refusing to put the question of a formal impeachment proceeding to a House floor vote and why the chairmen of the three Committees are holding, instead, their secret inquisitions in their separate Star Chamber hearings.  The Star Chambers and the’ selective leaks emitted by them are solely intended to keep the smear going in a naked attempt to prejudice those irredeemably deplorable and amazingly ignorant Americans who will be voting.

On acquittal, the remaining objectors, and there will be some both in Party and in NLMSM, would be (further) exposed for the TDS-ridden personages that they are, to the politicians’ detriment in a few months.  Ordinary Americans, in the end, aren’t what Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM project onto them.