Everything You Might Possibly Want to Know About Abramoff
In this Wikipedia article with a gazillion hotlinks.
A Spy Victim Dies; A Lobbyist Confesses
Some historical perspective on spying, as recorded in the New York times obit for Frank Wilkinson, McCarthyite scapegoat and First Amendment activist who went to jail to defend his principles
But
Mr. Wilkinson was not finished with the federal government. When he
discovered, in 1986, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been
compiling files on him, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request
for their release.He was sent 4,500 documents. But he sued for
more, and the next year the F.B.I. released an additional 30,000
documents, and then 70,000 two years later. Eventually, there were
132,000 documents covering 38 years of surveillance, including detailed
reports of Mr. Wilkinson’s travel arrangements and speaking schedules,
and vague and mysterious accusations of an assassination attempt
against Mr. Wilkinson in 1964.
Meanwhile, yet
another right-wing extremist, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has entered a
plea bargain and promised to implicate a number of his buddies in
Congress. He admits to influence peddling–and former Republican
Senator Ben Knighthorse Campbell accuses him of trying to rig elections
on Indian reservations, as well. Abramoff has close ties to former
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, current House Speaker Dennis Hastert,
Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and other ultra-right honchos. The Wall
Street Journal has said the number of US Representatives implicated
could be as high as 60, most of them on the Republican side, but so
far, only Robert Ney of Ohio has been specifically named. (Sorry, WSJ’s
website structure doesn’t allow me to copy the link)
A Year in the Blogosphere
​​​​This blog was launched on December 29, 2004, which means it just
turned one year old. So allow me to wallow in a bit of reflection,
please.
I’d delayed blogging for a long time, because I’d
thought that to be taken seriously, a blogger needed to post daily. I
even tried to organize a group of non-blogging marketing pundits to
each take a day of the week in a communal blog. That effort went
nowhere, but I think at least three of us now blog regularly. Once I
realized that many bloggers post once a week or less, I knew I could
handle it.
I started the blog with a few agendas. I wanted to:
And
in fact, in the spring, I went through my blog entries, selected seven
or so, polished them, and submitted them to four different newspaper
syndicates–all of whom turned me down. But I’ll keep trying.
The
blog has veered away more often than I’d have expected from what I’d
originally thought of as its core topic: business ethics. But I already
have a platform to talk about that: my newsletter, Positive Power of Principled Profit.
It’s
also hard to tell what impact it has, or where people are learning
about it. I get very few comments, and many of them are from people
I’ve steered to the blog via a post to a discussion list or one of my
newsletters.
So, this year, one of my goals is to build more traffic to the blog, which will be mirrored both at blogger.com and on my own PrincipledProfit.com site.
There
have been a few signers of the Pledge that I believe found me via the
blog, and a few useful contacts. Hopefully, over the next 12 months,
I’ll be able to know for certain that the blog is helping to shape the
discourse.
And meanwhile, there’s revamping the PrinProfit site,
hosting my radio show (which I hope to syndicate as well), getting
publicity for the Pledge, selling more foreign rights, and tons of
other stuff. somehow, I find time to do at least some of it, between
client copywriting and consulting projects.
Ken Lay a Victim? Only of His Own Greed
Ken Lay has always had chutzpah; now he’s trying to paint himself as a victim.
The St. Petersburg Times rightly says that won’t wash:
Lay
said the villains in the Enron case are federal prosecutors, who have
hidden the truth in a “wave of terror.” Lay apparently equates the
deaths of innocent people at the hands of suicide bombers with his
indictment in the corporate scandal. Such hubris takes a lot of nerve,
but then Ken has plenty of that.
To which all I can
add is they are absolutely right. This man caused financial harship for
his loyal employees. I hope they make him pay back every penny of his
ill-gotten gains.
If the actions of Ken Lay disgust you, consider signing the Business Ethics Pledge to make a public (and marketable) stand for business ethics.
The Spying Scandal is the Least of It
​​​​The big dustup over GWB’s admission that he broke the law in having
the NSA spy on American citizens has gotten even a lot of prominent
Republicans upset. Columnist George Will, about as conservative as they come, called it a “mistake” the other day. And several GOP Senators (Spector, McCain, Hagel, and Snowe, among them) are saying, “hey, wait a minute!”
Oh
yes, and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) quotes no less an authority on
presidential misconduct than John Dean, Nixon’s counsel during the
Watergate affair, as saying GWB is the first president to actually admit to an impeachable offense.
And
yes, I think it’s appalling that Bush not only condones illegal spying,
but does so enthusiastically and repeatedly. To show just how much they
don’t get it:
At the White House, spokesman Scott
McClellan was asked to explain why Bush last year said, “Any time you
hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires —
a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When
we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about
getting a court order before we do so.” McClellan said the quote
referred only to the USA Patriot Act.
(The above quote is from a Washington Post story by Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer, dated Wednesday, December 21)
But…I think there are far more serious high crimes and misdemeanors that are worth going after.
Congressman John Conyers points some of them out in his just-released report, “The
Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception,
Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War.”
With over 2000 US soldiers dead, by some estimates much more than
100,000 Iraqis in fresh graves, and countless wounded, that’s where I’d
start the impeachment proceedings, if it were up to me. And continue
through corporate corruption, election rigging, shredding the
environmental and economic safety nets, and a bunch of other stuff. In
the context of all this, the spying scandal is the least of it.
New York Times Complicity in Bush Spy Scandal
To me, the most scandalous part of this latest Bush administration scandal–that GWB personally authorized and oversaw illegal spying on American citizens–is
not event he spying itself, though that’s certainly bad enough (and one
more reason why these dangerous and immoral people ought to be
impeached). This program is so “out there” that a lot of prominent
Republicans, including Arlen Spector and John McCain, are deeply
concerned.
But what’s really shocking to me is that the New York
Times apparently knew at least a year ago, and chose to hold back on
the story. Yes, of course, they’d need to thoroughly check their facts,
in case it was another attempt to entrap and discredit journalists, a
la the Dan Rather situation. But once they were sure, I would think the
story of a US President knowingly and deliberately breaking the law
would be considered news.
It’s unclear to me whether the story
was in the Times’ hands before the 2004 election–but surely, if they
knew, going public with that data might have changed the course of
history, given that the results were already not only close but highly
questionable.
The Times utterly failed in its responsibility to
its readers and the world. Is this the same newspaper that was so
active in reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate?
Moral
choices in business lead to business success, says Shel Horowitz in his
award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People
First.
More Payola in the News Biz
I suppose we should be grateful: this time, it’s not the government who’s paying pundits being. Still, it is disturbing to find out from both Business Week and the NY Times’ Paul Krugman that Tom DeLay’s good friend Jack Abramoff has been paying off think-tankers at the Cato Institute and elsewhere to spin op-eds that benefit his clients. And once again, there was no disclosure. Cato op-ed writer Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley, took payments of up to $2000 for each of at least 12 and as many as 24 columns promoting Abramoff’s clients.
At least he has the good sense to say he made a mistake, as does his boss. What’s truly disturbing is the statement by another of Abramoff’s beneficiaries, Peter Ferrara (a noted architect of Social Security policy), who is completely shameless: “I do that all the time. I’ve done that in the past, and I’ll do it in the future.”
Oh, and Ferrara’s boss at the Institute for Policy Innovation, Tom Giovanetti, hasn’t figured out the problem either. Giovanetti accuses critics of a “naive purity standard…I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements.”
Ugly, ugly, ugly.
Two Stories of Corporate Compensation: One to a Bad CEO, One to the Workers
Call me old-fashioned, but when I read stuff like this quote from Business Week’s Talk Show column (November 14, 2005)
After
the Securities & Exchange Commission launched a probe of accounting
irregularities at Dollar General, Cal Turner Jr. in 2002 returned $6.8
million that he had been paid for results that were eventually
restated; he then stepped down as CEO. The gesture was lauded by
BusinessWeek and others. But in the two years since, Turner has
remained employed by — and paid by — Dollar General, based in
Goodlettsville, Tenn. After retiring as chairman in June, 2003, Turner
stayed on as an adviser to the board: In 2004 he received $275,000 plus
$113,000 in perks.On Oct. 18, Turner fully retired and got
another big payout. In an SEC filing reported on the Web site
Footnoted.org, Dollar General disclosed that Turner is getting a
lump-sum retirement payment of $1 million, access to the company’s box
suite at Tennessee Titans games, title to a company-owned 2004 Audi A8
that he drives, and up to $100,000 to cover legal and consulting
expenses. Dollar General also is making a “gross up” payment to cover
taxes on the package. Turner directly owns 3.3% of its shares, worth
$200 million.
I get pretty disgusted. Why do corporate boards persist in rewarding
ethically questionable and/or poor management decisions? Is this the
model we want to present to the next generation? I don’t think so, and
I think he should give any penny of the cash and gifts back to the
stockholders, and the board that allowed this should all resign.
My thanks to David Batstone for calling my attention to this.
Interestingly,
the same Business Week column notes that every Ecuadorian employee at
Occidental Petroleum’s Ecuadorian facilities got a bonus of $130,000 to
$150,000, thanks to that country’s profit-sharing law. Yes, the
janitors, the secretaries, the field technicians. With an average
annual income of just $2180 nationwide, these 350 individuals could
make a significant dent in the quality of life in their families and
villages.
And don’t feel sorry for Oxy; its $464 million in
locally-generated profits can easily fund the 15 percent payment to its
workers. The US, with its rampant overpayment of poorly-producing CEOs
(as cited above), could learn some lessons here.
Shel Horowitz’s Business Ethics Pledge models a different–and healthier–way to conduct business.
Moyers: The Lies of Tonkin vs. The Lies of Iraq, and What's Up with PBS
Another must-read speech by Bill Moyers, one journalist who is not afraid to tell the truth and doesn’t try to hide it under “nice.”
Moyers
notes that, like the run-up to Iraq, intelligence leading to the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution (that opened the way to massive escalation of the
Vietnam war) was faked–but not, he said, with LBJ’s knowledge. Moyers
was working in the White House at the time.
But then he looks at
the Bush II administration’s penchant for secrecy, for deception, for
rewarding its corporate cronies–and for interfering with the few
remaining institutions in journalism that have any backbone left–and
the results aren’t pretty.
Ethics in both business and government is crucial–and achievable. Visit Shel’s site, https://www.principledprofit.com, to learn more.
One Good Bit of News from the Tyco Debacle
The State of New Hampshire gets a $5 million settlement from Tyco–and it’s using it to start a business ethics education program.
The program will be administered by Myron Kandel, who has many
connections in media (especially CNN, which he co-founded), government,
and business. Kandel has already announced that he’ll use the program
to help focus political candidates on questions of ethics as the
barnstorm through the state during the run=up to the presidential
primaries.
Seems like a win all around.
Ethics expert and ward-wining author Shel Horowitz is the initiator of the Business Ethics Pledge campaign.