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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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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