Tag Archives: ethics

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.

First, They Came for our Guns

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Then they came for our freedom of speech.  Now they’re after our freedom of religion.  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke has made the attack on the core of our Bill of Rights open and explicit.  After having promised to take our guns (and his Bestie, Eric Swalwell (D, CA) presaged him by threatening to nuke us if we didn’t give up our guns), and after Party has pressured social media to censor speech of which Party disapproves, we get this from O’Rourke at the CNN town hall meeting which it held with a number of Party Presidential candidates last Thursday:

…religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.
“There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights or the full civil rights of every single one of us,” the former Texas congressman said at CNN‘s Equality Town Hall in Los Angeles.
He added: “And so as president, we are going to make that a priority, and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

Never mind the human rights of believers.  Religious institutions will be punished by the state if they don’t destroy their religions by violating their religions’ fundamental tenets in favor of state diktats.  Our religious institutions must surrender themselves into instruments of the state.

The 1st Amendment, along with the 2nd, have no place in the lives of modern Americans.

The Constitution, having been written more than 100 years ago isn’t, as that sage philosopher Ezra Klein has said, binding on anything.

After all, no less a light than Woodrow Wilson, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement and the first Progressive-Democrat President, said this of our Constitution:

This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

We the People—us ignorant voter-citizens—have no role in the life of our Constitution; Article V is just a bunch of pretty words.  No, our Constitution, the very fabric of our nation, is to be modified at will according to whatever our Progressive-Democrat Betters determine to be the relevant pressures of life.

Keep this in mind in the summer and fall of 2020.

First-Name Interactions

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The familiarity of business’ personnel charged with interacting with members of the public conducting those interactions on a first-name basis is unwarranted and unwanted.  Those business personnel don’t know me (for instance) well enough for the uninvited closeness.

Tunku Varadarajan touched on that in his recent Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview, which centered on a different subject. In response to that peripheral matter, a letter writer to a subsequent WSJ Letters column described an incident involving his and a judge’s interaction with a hospital clerk wherein the clerk addressed each of these, in their separate interactions, by their first name, strangers to the clerk though they were:

“Puzzled by the first name?” I asked [the judge]. “Now that you mention it, yes I am.” “HIPAA” I explained, which we both knew as the acronym for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
So you see, Mr Theroux, what you observed wasn’t youth obsession at all. It was your government protecting your privacy.

Really? HIPAA applies to my interactions with my cable provider? My cell phone company? My interactions with the grocer’s checkout clerk? My calls to tech support? The teller at the bank (which already keeps the line separate from the teller-customer interaction)?

Wow. What an amusing thought.

Lies of a Progressive-Democrat

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) now is claiming that when she became pregnant at a teaching job early in her career, she was let go from that teaching job.

I loved it, and I would probably still be doing it today but back in the day, before unions, the principal, by the time we got to the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant. And the principal did what principals did in those days: they wished you luck, showed you the door, and hired someone else for the job. And there went my dream.

We’ve seen that her lie has been contradicted by her own earlier words: “As I became pregnant, I realized this just wasn’t working for me.”

…my first year post-graduation I worked in a public school system with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an “emergency certificate,” it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me.” I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years….

Now we learn that her lie also is contradicted by the public record of that school district.

The Riverdale Board of Education approved a second-year teaching contract [as a substitute teacher] for a young Elizabeth Warren, documents show, contradicting the Democratic presidential candidate’s repeated claims that she was asked not to return to teaching after a single year because she was “visibly pregnant.”

The minutes of that Riverdale school district meeting can be seen here.

And this bit. A couple months after that contract offer, the Board had this:

“The resignation of Mrs. Elizabeth Warren, speech correctionist effective June 30, 1971 was accepted with regret,” the June 16, 1971, minutes say.

Those minutes can be reviewed here (scroll to near the bottom).

This is the level of integrity we can expect from this Progressive-Democrat, were she to get elected President. Indeed, given Warren’s constant flow of lies, from her claim of being part Native American, through this sequence, her lie about being the first nursing mother to take a bar exam in the state of New Jersey, I have to wonder whether she can discriminate reality from fantasy at all.

 

h/t Dana Loesch via Eliana Johnson