Police Ignoring Laws in Florida: A Case of Systemic Corruption

Systemic corruption means not only that a department or agency has an organizational culture that allows for and may even laud corruption, but also that a city hall, as well as larger jurisdictions such as member-states and even federal agencies may be enabling the corruption by looking the other way and even lying to cover-up the lower-level corruption. A study at Florida Atlantic University published in the Journal of Criminal Justice identifies 24 categories of police misconduct in Florida from 2012 to 2023. Even though it is tempting to highlight violent illegal acts by police employees, lying regarding criminal law and refusing to take reports of criminal activity may be more detrimental because such misconduct is probably more common than is the violent sort. If so, the extent of corruption and the underlying false sense of entitlement by police patrol-employees and even their supervisors may be vastly understated in the United States.

The full essay is at "Local Police Enabled in Florida."

Corporate Ethics Codes: A Waste of Time?

Ethics codes are not enough; that is to say, making applications of ethical principles explicit is not sufficient, even where they are grilled into employees in recurrent training sessions. Indeed, individuals or a dominant coalition can use a code’s existence as window-dressing. For example, in his letter on July 1, 2000 announcing Enron’s new and improved 65 page Code of Ethics, Ken Lay wrote, “Relations with the Company’s many publics . . . will be conducted in honesty, candor, and fairness.” If Ken Lay could get away with trumpeting a code of ethics, who’s to say who is out there now acting unethically in business under the cover of an effervescent code?

The full essay is at "Corporate Ethics Codes: Oxymorons?"

Burn Baby Burn: Moral Hazard & Fairness

On a call with another of the company’s traders when a wildfire in California was putting some electric wires at risk, an energy-desk trader at Enron quipped, “Burn Baby Burn!”  The loss of the electricity wires would have decreased supply, thus jacking up the price of electricity, which Enron was only too glad to provide.  Similarly, “Burn Baby Burn!” can be put in the mouth of any one of the firefighters of the South Fulton fire department in Tennessee who watched Gene Cranick’s home burn to the ground because he had not paid the $75 annual fee that residents outside of city limits had to pay in order to receive the “service.”  When Cranick called 911 as his house was on fire, he was essentially told, “I’m sorry, sir, but you are not on the list for that service. Have a nice day.” 

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available at Amazon.com.

Halliburton: Organizational Culture and Ethics

Human beings are moral agents. Generally speaking, we have consciences and a sense of ought, which according to David Hume is not derived from what is. In other words, ethical principles are not obtained from describing some object or situation. Organizations consisting of human beings do not have consciences; nor are companies able to have a sense of ought that is not reduced to monetary terms. Such terms being empirical, they cannot get to ought anyway. The illusion that corporations are themselves moral agents comes from the failure to distinguish an organization itself from not only its human members, but also its culture. While it may seem that an organizational culture is distant from the people who inhabit the organization, as if culture were somehow based at the organizational level, culture is simply a way of saying that most people in a group share certain basic beliefs, values and ways of behaving. Beliefs, values and conduct pertain to persons. Physiologically, the brain thinks, values, and conducts the rest of the body. There is no “organizational brain.” Rather, culture refers to a critical mass proportion of persons having something in common. This does not mean that the “something” exists apart from, or "above," the persons.

The full essay is in The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.

Conflicts of Interest: Relying on a Wall Street Bank’s Safeguards

In October 2012 the Wall Street Journal reported, “the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is examining how major investment banks and brokerage firms define and manage conflicts of interest between themselves and their clients.” Prime facie, defining and managing such conflicts between oneself and others can be regarded as itself a conflict of interest. It is perhaps a bit like the wolf negotiating with itself on its new job guarding the hen-house. I suspect that the regulators were going too far in attempting to translate “regulating” into managerial terms. The Journal goes on to ponder, “Will the first systematic look at conflicts on Wall Street in years make a difference for investors?” In my view, investors have good reason to be skeptical of the FIRA’s “manageralizing” approach.

The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon.