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

How much more evidence to we need? Every time I turn around, it seems there’s another revelation about lies told to the American public by this corrupt and incompetent administration. Now, the Washington Post reports that the government knew all along that those two trailers it found in Iraq, and used to belatedly justify the invasion, had nothing to do with biological weapons production.

If ever there was an argument to be made for a parliamentary style of government, where a crisis forces new elections, it would be this administration. With its lies, its finger pointing, its illegal and thuggish tactics (can you say “Valerie Plame”? It seems that GWB can and did when he gave the authorization to blow her cover, according to Scooter Libby), and its very scary politics, this administration has been an ethical and moral disgrace from the get-go.

What kind of scary politics?

  • Going to war without justification
  • Stonewalling the 9/11 Commission
  • Rushing through legislation, like the Patriot Act, that is a direct threat to freedom and democracy
  • Illegally spying on its own citizens, and then trying to make it legal after the fact when it got caught
  • Overturning so much of the progress made on environmental and social issues over the past fifty years
  • Oh, and let’s not forget the deliberate decisions to let New Orleaneans face their flooding city without meaningful assistance, and then to repeatedly deny that they had days of warning and chose to do nothing

    • And we won’t even discuss the whole passel of personal enrichment scandals that taint so many Bush allies

    Enough is enough, already. We don’t have a parliamentary democracy here–but we do have an impeachment process. It is time to impeach both GWB and Cheney.

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

    I do find it interesting that there’s so much attention to Bird Flu these days on the part of the government. Especially with all the news stories breaking out (82,600 of them) about Donald Rumsfeld’s extremely lucrative connection with the company that developed it. Rumsfeld has never impressed me as being particularly concerned about human life–certainly not in Iraq–or about doing the right thing (he seems remarkably unconcerned about the torture of prisoners that has occurred on his watch).

    But he took quite a bit of stock in Tamiflu developer Gilead Sciences when he left his position as Board Chairman to take his current job in the Bush cabinet. The stock had appreciated to $30 million worth, so he sold off some shares and took a $5 million capital gain.

    In this administration, one does have to ask if it’s a coincidence that this firm gets to develop the virus drug and sell it to the government.

    And I further submit that this gang of rich rogues is completely out of touch with the needs of working Americans who don’t have a few extra million around with which to wheel and deal.

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

    Why do these people think for a moment that they can pull this crap and not get caught? Once again, we see proof that unethical behavior not only gives you a guilty conscience, but when (not if) you get caught, it’ll blow up in your face. Even if it doesn’t seem to be working in the scandal-ridden US government at the moment, it will. Meanwhile, Japan’s opposition party has just shot itself in the foot, big time, by faking an e-mail alleging connection to a corporation under investigation.

    Party leader Seiji Maehara and his lieutenants stepped down after the party’s credibility was torpedoed by one of its own lawmakers, who used a fraudulent e-mail in an apparent attempt to discredit Koizumi’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

    The funny thing is I’m sure they could have found some real dirt–no need to make any up. then the scandal would have played their way.

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Business Ethics, Uncategorized

    Business Ethics magazine’s e-mail edition reports that the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre is doing three plays on business ethics this year!

    The trilogy features Garson Kanin’s 1946 comedy “Born Yesterday,” about an uncouth business tycoon going to Washington, D.C., to buy political favors; David Mamet’s comedy “Glengarry Glen Ross,” about a “shark tank that masquerades as a real estate sales office”; and “The Voysey Inheritance,” a 1905 drama that looks at a family’s lucrative business and the attempts by a member of the younger generation to reform the company’s dishonest practices.

    I couldn’t find this on the magazine’s site, so far.

    But is that cool, or what?

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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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