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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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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