Month: March 2006

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government

I’m not used to nodding yes when US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales speaks. But his remarks to a business group in Portland, Oregon definitely resonate:

But our dream can also be tarnished and diminished by government and corporate scandal.

I’ve told Department prosecutors to operate with one principle in mind: No one is above the law-not a city councilman, a CEO, or a Member of Congress.

The role of the Department is not to discourage business risks that are rewarded or punished in the marketplace. Rather, we seek to prosecute those who engage in lawless practices. In this same spirit, we will protect intellectual property rights as well against domestic and international piracy.

The protection of the civil rights of all Americans is an historic mission of the Department of Justice and an essential element of realizing the American Dream.

We will continue to aggressively combat discrimination wherever it is found. For example, we recently announced Operation Home Sweet Home, an expansion of our Fair Housing Act testing program.

This mission includes protecting the rights of those with disabilities and institutionalized persons. We’re also vigorously working to end the modern-day slavery of human trafficking.

Let me reflect for a moment on one major right, the key political right, the right to vote. Three years ago, when I was White House Counsel to President Bush, my then 72-year-old mother visited Washington, DC and the Oval Office for the first time. My mom never voted until she was 50. She explained that it had become a different time for people of color in America.

Laudable sentiments, all. I hope this means we can count on Mr. Gonzales to support and vigorously enforce laws that provide consequences for business ethics violations, as well as for HR 550 — The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and co-sponsored by a number of Representatives on both sides of the aisle.

This would provide for voter-verifiable, auditable paper trails in conjunction with the electronic voting screens so common these days–and thus would prevent the scandalously unverifiable questionable results we’ve seen in the last few elections.

The e-mail I received about it (from TrueMajority.org) notes,

It already has the bipartisan support of 1/3 of the House of Representatives, and has been endorsed by VoteTrustUSA and VerifiedVoting.org as the “gold standard” in verifiability legislation. Not only would it mandate a voter verified paper record for every vote cast, it would also:

(1) establish a mandatory uniform national standard that states that the voter verified paper ballot — the only record verified by the voter rather than the voting machine — is the vote of record in the case of any inconsistency with electronic records;

(2) provide Federal funding to pay for implementation of voter verified paper balloting;

(3) require a percentage of mandatory manual (by hand count) random audits of actual election results in every state, and in each county, for every Federal election;

(4) prohibit the use at any time of undisclosed software, wireless communication devices, and Internet connections in voting machines;

(5) require full implementation by 2006; and

(6) protect the accessibility mandates of the Help America Vote Act.

The language in this bill was carefully written with input from computer scientists, disabilities organizations, and election reform advocates. It should be passed as written and in time to protect the 2006 elections.

There are many politically contentious election reform issues mentioned in the report but making sure that votes are counted accurately is not one of them. Elections are the foundation of a representative democracy, and representative democracy lives or dies based on the integrity of its elections. HR 550 will help restore voters’ confidence and ensure the accuracy and integrity of America’s elections.

Attorney General Gonzales, I look forward to your public support o this important legislation.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

Unbelievable! The goon squad is going after veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, one of the few people in the White House Press Corps who actually still remembers how to ask an intelligent question or engage in critical thought.

Earth to Planet Bill O’Reilly: do you and your “colleagues” need a refresher course in the First Amendment?

It goes like this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

You say we’re in Iraq to to fight for democracy–well, how about a little democracy at home?

Thomas was absolutely in line to ask why GWB took us to war in Iraq. After all, nobody’s found any weapons of mass destruction, Al Queda had no significant presence there until after the US attacked (though it certainly has one now, thanks to the predictably myopic policies of the Bush administration), and the enemy that had attacked us was thousands of miles away in Afghanistan.

Bush, who almost never calls on Thomas and rarely calls on other reporters he can expect to ask hard questions (such as NPR’s Don Gonyea), gave a rambling, unfocused, and materially incorrect answer, and then patted himself on the back for taking a question from Thomas. Did he get attacked for this shameful, embarrassing performance? No–the attacks were against Helen Thomas.

O’Reilly:”I would have laid into that woman, and I don’t care how old she is,”
Don Imus: “The old bag should shut up and get out. I’m sick of her.”
Ticker Carlson: “Propagandist.”

Hey, pundits–the reason we have a First Amendment is that our Founding Fathers recognized the importance of an open press wiling to examine critically the actions of those in power whether in government or in the private sector. Questioning a policy based on lies and foggy vision is a high act of patriotism, IMHO.

Or perhaps the O’Reillys and Imuses of the world think that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were unpatriotic scum. King George would have agreed with them, but he had some reasons. the ability to criticize was written into the Constitution by these true American heroes over 200 years ago, and thank goodness for their foresight.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

We all thought this was going to change in the fall. That’s when a spate of stories hit the news about the no-bid contracts on Katrina reconstruction, mostly awarded to large enterprises with close ties to the Bush administration and the military establishment, such as Halliburton and Bechtel.

Here, among many examples, is a Washington Post story from September 29, in which…

The officials responsible for monitoring more than $60 billion in federal Hurricane Katrina spending promised yesterday to take a hard look at every no-bid contract awarded since the storm and to investigate the adequacy of contracts the government had in place before disaster struck.

Yet, here we are, six months later. And the government has reneged. Today’s Associated Press wire story shows FEMA’s dismal failure to keep its word.

And not only that, but the usual percentages set aside for small (as the government laughably defines them–far bigger than most of the businesses I deal with) and minority-owned businesses aren’t even close to being achieved.

Whether it’s incompetence or malfeasance, it looks might funky from here.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

Here’s some good news to start the weekend: The Austin Business Journal reports on surveys conducted among 5000 business leaders in 1985, 1993 and 2001. Looking at 16 different ethics scenarios, both the 1985 and 2001 surveys showed “increasingly positive” reactions.

There was a negative blip in 1993, interestingly enough. And that was before the big run up on dotcoms, and before the advent of the ethically challenged GWB administration.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Uncategorized

If you follow business scandals, as I do, you’ll notice that a good many of the largest take place outside the US. There are constant reports from Japan, China, Africa, and elsewhere. In Europe, Italy’s Parmalat scandal got a fair bit of attention, among others.

So it was rather a shock to read this Newsweek article about the dramatic collapse of a large state-owned bank due to poorly chosen investments in real estate deals that went ahead without the usual scrutiny.

What’s really disturbing is that people knew about this all the way back to 2000. German taxpayers are left holding the bag underneath the rubble of Bankgesellschaft Berlin (BGB). The first trials of the company’s executives began last month.

Noting that the Enron debacle helped push through Sarbanes-Oxley and other reforms, Newsweek expresses its surprise that…

In Germany the response has been almost the opposite—public indifference and an official response that, at best, has been tepid and, at worst, amounts to a deliberate effort to enshroud the case in “extreme secrecy,” according to corruption watchdog group Transparency International.

We had our own bank scandal based on “handshake” approvals for real estate deals here in Western Massachusetts about 15 years ago, and it took down one of the largest regional banks. The beautiful Northampton main branch, once the corporate headquarters, still remains vacant after more than a decade. But there was no shortage of reporting about it, and I think that made the banking community stronger—because the community wanted to protect itself from such a thing happening again.

The article goes on to criticize the secretive German business structure that makes it hard to investigate or reform. Something German citizens who care about these things may want to change.

Interestingly enough, I haven’t had a single signer of the Business Ethics Pledge from Germany. Any Germans want to step up and be first?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Shel's Personal Life

Since I launched the Business Ethics Pledge movement a year and a half ago, it has been housed on a page of my PrincipledProfit.com site: a commercial site designed primarily to encourage sales of my award-winning business ethics book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

And we decided a couple of months ago that this was holding back the growth of the Pledge. And we did something about it.

With site design generously donated by my assistant, Michelle Shaeffer of Elemental Muse, we’ve now launched Business-Ethics-Pledge.org–my first-ever .org site.

Please take a look and let me know what you think. Of course, if you choose to sign, I’ll be truly delighted–but let me know your opinion even if you don’t participate.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

Just in case you have any illusions that massive business scandals are uniquely American, look at what’s going on in Singapore at the moment.

Sometimes I feel like voice crying in the wilderness.

But I still believe that more and more consumers are seeking out ethical companies, and that ethics is a key driver of profit. As more people become convinced, I also believe that the Business Ethics Pledge will help companies tell their customers, “do business with us because we’re ethical, and that means we care about you, and don’t just see you as a temporary revenue stream.”

For more on the pledge, please see the post immediately above this one.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics

Once again, that line between paid PR and actual journalism is getting kind of blurry. This time, the New York Times reports, the culprit is Wal-Mart.

At least Wal-Mart does not appear to be paying the bloggers who are spouting its press releases and pretending to raise independent voices of indignation–and to my mind, that’s an important distinction compared to the “news” people planted and paid for by the white House (e.g., Armstrong Williams)–but still, it’s deeply disturbing

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