Tag Archives: responsibilities

Fiddling While….

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg seems to be a modern day fiddler. During the…negotiations…with rail unions just concluded, Buttigieg chose to go haring off to Portugal on vacation. He also appears to have told no one of the public he was heading out: previously undisclosed trip, according to the Washington Free Beacon as cited by Fox News.

“The secretary took a long-planned personal trip from Aug. 29 to Sept. 5,” a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation told Fox News. “As usual, while traveling on personal time he remained available and engaged on urgent issues, which in this case meant multiple calls with staff and stakeholders to work on the topic of rail labor negotiations.”

“Long-planned.” Nothing so trivial as a looming transportation strike with national economic implications was to disturb his precious vacation. Phone calls, though. Because there’s no need to meet in person with the players. Vacation.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) noted the irony hypocrisy:

Rail workers just wanted a few days of paid sick leave. President Biden told them to pound sand and his Transportation Secretary vacationed in wine country[.]

And, of course, us taxpayers continued to pay Buttigieg’s his salary—he gets paid vacation, along with his paid sick leave.

WaPo Racism

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And by extension, much of journalism’s racism through their own silence regarding their colleague’s and their colleague’s employer’s refusal to condemn this racism.

MSNBC fired anchor Tiffany Cross last month, and The Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah called that racism. After all, that MSNBC anchor is a black woman. I’m frankly surprised that Attiah, and that WaPo through its columnist, didn’t cry “sexism,” too. MSNBC fired that anchor who was a woman.

This is yet another example of journalism’s racism: there are very few more insidious examples than to manufacture racism out of whole cloth. WaPo, Attiah—journalism—all know full well Cross was fired over her poor ratings and her own poor performance and that racism had nothing to do with it.

Financial Reporting

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A little bit in the weeds, here, but necessary for future understandings by some investors. The proximate matter is FTX’ collapse and bankruptcy (with possibly criminal activities associated).

In a footnote to the financial statements, the company said its “primary shareholder is also the primary shareholder of several related entities which do business with the company.” It didn’t say who the related parties were for any specific transaction it disclosed.
The standard accounting rules for disclosing related-party transactions are vague and have long been considered a weakness in the system. There is no clear-cut rule requiring companies to disclose the players in a related-party transaction. The rules do say, “If necessary to the understanding of the relationship, the name of the related party shall be disclosed.”

Some questions arise. Whose definitions of “necessary” and “understanding?” The way the rule is written, those definitions are left to the company—FTX, here—to determine, and what an investor or customer or client needs or wishes for his own understanding is unimportant.

FTX’s new CEO John Ray exposed part of the much larger problem in his FTX bankruptcy-court filing, in which he acknowledged that FTX’s financial information wasn’t trustworthy and that it was controlled by

 a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals.

That potentially compromised part is key. Compromised by whom? In what way? That would seem clearly related to who those “related parties” are.

There’s more, related to arm’s length transactions, which are statutorily required in many business arrangements. Here’s a working definition of arm’s length transactions that’s good enough for our purposes:

A transaction in which the buyer and the seller have no significant, prior relationship. In an arm’s length transaction, neither party has an incentive to act against his/her own interest. That is, the seller seeks to make the price as high as he/she can, and likewise the buyer seeks to make it as low as he/she can. The negotiations for an arm’s length transaction result in the arm’s length price, which is almost always close to the market value of the asset being sold.

That drive for each party to work toward his own interest, and especially the resulting essentially market price for the things being transacted, also is key. How can an investor or a customer or a client know that a particular transaction within an FTX is legitimate or problematic under arms’ length requirements if the investor or customer or client can’t know who the related party is that’s do[ing] business with the company? And why is the investor or customer or client being actively denied this information? What’s being hidden?

This is, as RG Associates founder and member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s Emerging Issues Task Force, Jack Ciesielski, said,

a hole that needs to be fixed. The auditors would have to know who the related party is. Why not just put that in there? How hard can it be? By keeping it purposely opaque it’s defeating the purposes of the footnote.

And so do investors, customers, and clients need to know—hence the footnote, even if carefully vague in the present case. And hence the need to plug that loophole: require the related parties to be explicitly identified. There’s no free speech question here, no political speech would be chilled by this. Documenting business arrangements in a purely investment environment has nothing to do with our 1st Amendment.

He Chose

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Alec Baldwin claims that he’s blameless when he fired his pistol, which shot led to the shooting death of Halyna Hutchins and the wounding of Joel Souza on the set of his movie, Rust. He’s suing a number of movie production personnel in his effort to duck his own responsibility.

Baldwin’s claim is that the movie production team’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed; assistant director, David Halls; an assistant armorer, Seth Kenney; and the team’s prop master, Sarah Zachry, are the only ones responsible for the shooting. Baldwin’s lawyer, Luke Nikas, enumerated what he claims is the fatal chain of events.

Gutierrez-Reed failed to check the bullets or the gun carefully, Halls failed to check the gun carefully and yet announced the gun was safe before handing it to Baldwin, and Zachry failed to disclose that Gutierrez-Reed had been acting recklessly off set.

Leave aside the irrelevance of Gutierrez-Reed’s alleged off-set behavior; that’s just smoke Nikas is blowing to distract from his larger, and utterly cynical, omission of the final link in the chain and the primary and proximate cause of the shooting.

Baldwin—any handler of a firearm, but especially the final handler, intending actually to use the firearm, whether in a real situation or in a movie scene—has a responsibility personally to check the firearm for its safety status, including—especially including—whether the firearm is loaded and, if so, with live rounds. The user doing that final check obviates all of the mistakes anyone earlier in the firearm’s chain of custody might have made.

It’s likely enough that one or more of the persons in Nikas’ abridged chain of events made their own safety check mistakes. That, though, does not at all absolve Baldwin of his own responsibility to do his own, personal, check of the pistol in his hand as soon as he accepted it.

He had the final responsibility, a Critical Item responsibility, to check his pistol as soon as he took possession of it. Baldwin chose to not exercise his responsibility.

What the Ratings Mean

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Viewpoint Diversity Score is a relatively new organization; it’s a project of Alliance Defending Freedom. VDS’ goal:

Through our Business Index and Resources we’re providing a roadmap for businesses to meaningfully respect customers, and other external stakeholders who hold diverse religious and ideological beliefs, foster viewpoint diversity in their workplaces, and reflect a commitment to the underlying principles of American democracy through their giving and political engagement.

This isn’t, though, a crowd pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion claptrap; it’s much more serious than that. They’re not demanding that everyone comport themselves in accordance with VDS’ viewpoints or be cancelled. Instead,

The Business Index evaluates corporate policies, practices, and activities to determine whether companies respect their stakeholders’ freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief as a standard part of doing business.

And from their Business Index report,

Viewpoint Diversity Score’s annual Business Index is the first comprehensive benchmark designed to measure corporate respect for religious and ideological diversity in the market, workplace, and public square. True diversity requires protecting freedom of expression and belief for employees, customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders.

VDS’ Business Index surveys companies, and based on their answers along with outside, publicly available information regarding what the surveyed companies actually do, the Business Index awards a Market Score, a Workplace Score, a Public Square Score, and a composite of the three. Each score and the composite could range from 0% (a terrible score) to 100% (and outstanding score).

Market-related questions for the survey include things like

  • Terms of Use/Service Avoid Unclear or Imprecise Terms
  • Harmful Conduct Policies Apply Equally
  • Terms of Use/Service Avoid Viewpoint Discrimination
  • Public Anti-Viewpoint Discrimination Policy
  • Notice of Content or Service Restrictions
  • CSR/ESG Reporting Includes Freedom of Expression and Belief

under Respecting Customers’ Freedom of Expression and Belief. There were similarly probing questions under Respecting Venders’ Freedom of Expression and Belief and Transparent Screening and Enforcement Practices.

Workplace-related categories included Religious and Ideological Diversity in the Workplace, Respecting Civil Rights and Promoting Viewpoint Diversity, Respecting Religious Diversity at Work, and Respecting Employee Charity Choice.

Public Square-related categories included Political Spending and Advocacy Reflects Diverse Views, Respecting Shareholder Support for Viewpoint Diversity, and Respect Diverse Views in Charity and Society.

The Business Index surveyed 50 companies in this first survey; it expects to expand the number surveyed in the coming years.

The results of this survey were…disappointing. The highest score any company achieved was 35%, and most of the scores were in the range of 18% or less, including 16 of the companies in single digits and 6 of the companies doing no better than 6%. One barely made it onto the board at 2%.

From the Executive Summary [emphasis in the original]:

Benchmarked companies scored an average of 12% overall on respecting religious and ideological diversity in the market, workplace, and public square. This poor performance is cause for concern, especially because these companies represent some of the largest businesses in America and provide essential services to millions of people and organizations every day. While no industry exhibited strong performance, there were a handful that scored particularly poorly. The two industries with the lowest overall scores were computer software at 6%, and internet services and retailing at 8%. The financial and data services industry also came in at a low overall average score of 11%. These subpar results paint a grim picture of Corporate America’s respect for religious and ideological diversity.

And [emphasis in the original]:

One finding of particular concern is that social media companies, which provide services critical to the freedom of individuals and groups to participate equally in the digital public square, are concentrated in an industry (internet services and retailing) with one of the lowest average overall scores. Not surprisingly, nearly all of those companies are also among the lowest performers across industries.

This is how far the Left’s Woke Culture has penetrated, and deprecated our society—it’s deeply into our businesses, especially those dominating our ability to speak and to debate the questions of concern to us.

The complete report, including a review of the survey’s outcome and details of how the scores were generated, can be found here or via Viewpoint Diversity Score’s site here.