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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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

The February 06 issue of Business Ethics Magazine’s online edition includes this shocking note: A business lobbying firm called the Free Enterprise Forum has joined with an unnamed Nevada accounting firm to attack the Public Accounting Oversight Board, a key provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform law of 2002.

SarbOx is pretty mild stuff, compared to the laws I might have written. But corporations do find it burdensome, with all the reporting requirements, etc. Still, they’ve had four years to get used to it, and it’s pretty amazing to come across remarks like this, from FEF chair Mallory Factor:

“It’s a bad law and we’ll get rid of it any way we can.”

Oh, and guess who’s on their legal team: Ken “Monica Lewinsky” Starr, and one of GWB’s former U.S. assistant attorneys general for legal policy, Viet Dinh.

Starr spent millions of our tax dollars chasing down Clinton’s apparent inability to keep his pants zipped (or to tell the truth about it)–and now he’s attacking the ethics watchdogs. Hmmm.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Found a very interesting blog examining the issue of Dick Cheney having an ambulance always at the ready:

That the nation’s vice president and de-facto leader is so frail and so close to death’s door…should surely have been a major topic of conversation during the 2004 election.

But nobody mentioned it.

It’s also worth pointing out that this same administration that is spending what must be millions of dollars on a mobile cardiac unit to travel with the vice president is calling for cuts in Medicare and Medicaid that will force poor Americans and the elderly to make do with second-tier medications for such things as heart conditions.

This blog is not set up with blog software. At the moment this is the second post. Or search for
Ambulance Chasing and the Veep

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Now they’re reclassifying ancient once-classified documents, many of them with no secrecy value anymore and some of them widely published, The New York Times reports.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid [a researcher] found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Does this really need to be a secret? It’s been over 15 years since there even was an Iron Curtain!

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office.

Surely, there are more effective ways of deploying our anti-terrorism resources.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government

This article from Maclean’s covers many of the ethics issues involving business and China–not just the current controversy over Chinese censorship of the Internet (and the horrible fact that “Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist recently sentenced to 10 years in prison for divulging state secrets over the Net. Tao anonymously posted details of the government’s plans to limit coverage of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on a pro-democracy website, and Yahoo handed over his identity to Chinese authorities”)–but also looks at a wide range of issues involving western companies in China, from the making of clothing to the environmental and human rights nightmare of the Three Gorges Dam.

The article also compliments Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who “is sponsoring a draft bill that would require Web companies to establish a code of conduct for operating in repressive regimes, prohibiting them from facilitating unreasonable censorship or co-operating in the abuse of human rights.”

And the article has a very illuminating comparison of how the international business community helped force the end of apartheid in South Africa, and what is not being done in China–or, for that matter, in Sudan.

Go read it.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

Two days ago, I wrote about the CEO of Radio Shack, who somehow didn’t notice that he hadn’t actually gotten the college degree he’d been claiming to have.

Now, I’ve discovered that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (a Democrat, I’ll point out to those who think I only attack Republicans) somehow didn’t notice that he hadn’t been drafted by the Kansas City (now Oakland) Atheltics major league baseball team.

I don’t believe this any more than I believed the guy from Radio shack. Sheesh! What’s with these people?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

You’d think people would know by now not to lie on their resume. Apparently not, however. Reuters reports that Radio Shack’s CEO, David Edmondson, lied about his degree. Here’s the story as reported in USA Today. Plus he’s had at least three rounds of court proceedings for drunk driving.

Two things astonish me about this article.

First, his utter shameless chutzpah:

Edmondson issued a statement Wednesday admitting that he erroneously said he received a Bachelor of Science degree, a four-year college degree.

The CEO said he now believes he received a ThG diploma, which is awarded for completing a three-year degree in theology.

Uhh, hello–you don’t erroneously claim a degree. An error implies an honest mistake. This was a lie, plain and simple, and please let’s not try to pretend otherwise. the article goes on to speculate about whether he even receive the ThG, and also noted that he claimed a degree his school didn’t offer, and that the school has no record of his graduation at all. Not pretty! This is the sort of ducking of responsibility you expect from an irresponsible teenager raised by incompetent parents–not the CEO of one of the largest electronics retailers in the world.

Second, the amazing statement at the end of the article:

The resume issues and DWI issues raised speculation about whether Edmondson would survive as RadioShack’s CEO.

Speculation? Speculation! Any company that doesn’t instantly demand the resignation of a CEO caught lying on his resume should have its collective head examined. If ethics means anything anymore, that should be a zero-tolerance, one-strike-and-you’re-out, no-severance package offense. Followed by a lawsuit for fraud.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News

Unlike the GoDaddy valentine I wrote about last week, this one was not cheap. But it’s promoting a movie so they probably had a lot of the footage.

A set of three trailers for “The Secret.” After seeing the intro and the first trailer, I signed up for their mailing list–I’m ready to see this movie! The second and third trailers were significantly less impressive.

One particular thing that shows these people really understand marketing: once you’ve viewed any of the trailers, the finish screen gives you several viral tools I hadn’t even come across before: Furl, Blogmark, and Delicious. I think we’ll be seeing not only more really classy high-end videos like this (it even looked good on Windows Media Player, at both high and low bandwidth–while most WMP files look pretty jerky and crude on my system–they also offer Quciktime and Flash). Oddly enough, there were a lot more captions on the low-bandwidth version.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Even George Will thinks Bush has gone too far with his illegal spying.

If the Bush doctrine holds, he writes, future administrations won’t even bother consulting Congress even before going to war:

Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration’s stance…

And derides Bush for a double standard on new interpretations of the law.

Worth reading.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

OK, it’s starting: the sworn testimony under oath that tells us what we knew all along.

Here it is: Enron’s top executives were directly ordering their cooked books.

In this story on the BBC, Convicted executive Ken Rice, who ran Enron’s EBS Internet business subsidiary, testifies that Jeffrey Skilling himself told him, “this is what the number is going to be.”

A number, of course, that had no relation to the real number. Rice said this division was actually selling future revenues, becuase there were no current ones.

And Skilling was involved at every level. “Mr. Skilling was very engaged in the business, he was very hands-on,” Mr Rice said. “Almost any transaction of any size we would bring to Mr Skilling to get his approval.”

Why am I not surprised?

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