Empire-Scale Representative Democracy: The American Presidency

On the very day in which a health-care company’s executive collapsed in the Oval Office, with U.S. President Trump being the only person in the group standing and looking away in what looks like callous disregard instead of compassion or empathy, that president directed his Administration to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that the U.S. Government had to fund food-assistance, or SNAP (formerly “food stamps”) completely for the month in spite of the "government shutdown." On the next day, the Trump Administration demanded that the member-states that had just paid out full November benefits to SNAP recipients “’undo’ full SNAP benefits paid out under judges’ orders” because the U.S. Supreme Court “stayed those rulings.”[1] The photo of Trump literally looking the other way while everyone else in the Oval Office is bending over the collapsed man out of concern perfectly aligns with his lack of concern for Americans going without food due to the sudden stoppage of money for food without notice. That many employees of the U.S. Government who had been laid off without pay since earlier that November would be especially reliant on food-assistance money precisely because they were no longer obtaining income (or else they were receiving unemployment compensation at less than full pay) could be understood to be a matter of callousness rather than moral sentiments from Trump simply by looking at the photo.

The full essay is at "Empire-Scale Representative Democracy."

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1. Scott Bauer and Nicholas Riccardi, “Trump Administration Demands States ‘Undo’ Full SNAP Payouts as States Warn of ‘Catastrophic Impact,’” The Associated Press, November 9, 2025.

Accountability for the Rich and Famous: A Soft Landing for an Ex-Prince

In ancient Greek tragedy, it was not uncommon for a god or goddess to perform the function of a Greek (i.e., conscience) chorus at the end of a play while being pulled by pullies high above the stage. Deus ex machina is the Latin phrase, which meant, a deity out from pullies. We get machine, mechanism, and even engine from the Latin word, machina. A movie entitled Ex Machina is on an AI android that seems full of life, even miraculous, from “pullies” inside it’s “body.” Ex-Prince Andrew of the (seceded) sovereign state of UK, or “Britain” informally, seemed to fly about the other actors in being able to land, rent-free, fittingly around Christmas, 2025, at the monarch’s Sandringham estate in eastern Britain, still rent-free, and with King Charles funding his brother. Considering that Andrew Windsor should arguably been sent to prison for having sex with a 17 year-old prostitute in the employ of the infamous Epstein, and that a large settlement paid by Queen Elizabeth II made Giuffre’s charges go away, as if magically, Andrew not only landed on his feet, but without touching the ground where us mere mortals make our way through life to survive and perhaps prosper.

The full essay is at "Accountability for the Rich and Famous."

Eternal You: AI after Death

The documentary, Eternal You (2024), is one film that zeros in on the use of AI to contact loved ones who have died. As the marketing departments of the tech companies providing these products say, AI can deliver on what religion has only promised: to talk with people beyond the grave. Lest secular potential buyers be left out, AI can provide us with “a new form of transcendence.” Nevermind that the word, transcendence, like divinity and evil, is an inherently religious word. Nevermind, moreover, that the product is actually only a computer simulation of a person, rather than the actual person direct from heaven or hell. The marketing is thus misleading. In the film, a woman asks her dead husband if he is in heaven. “I’m in hell with the other addicts,” he answers. She is hysterical. Even though people who write computer algorithms cannot be expected to anticipate every possible question that AI could be asked and every response that it could give, government regulation keeping the marketing honest and accurate can significantly reduce the risk that is from AI’s use of inference (inductive) and probability that are beyond our control to predict and even understand. 

The full essay is at "Eternal You."

American Airlines: Caring for People

What is the purpose of a business? According to Aristotle, there are different kinds of purposes. The final cause of a tree seed, for example, is a tree; the material cause is whatever biochemistry went into the seed. The final cause of a human sperm entering a human egg is an adult human being—hence the question of the ethics of abortion. A human embryo is potentially an adult human being. The material cause of an embryo lies in the biochemistry of the seed and the egg. But I digress. As regards a company, we can distinguish different kinds of purposes. Somewhat crudely, the real purpose can be distinguished from the ostensible purpose. The former has to do with what can be thought of as the bottom-line purpose: maximizing revenue or profit. Any ostensible purpose, such as feeding people or transporting them, is functional in nature, and can be viewed as a means of achieving the real purpose. A third kind of purpose can be labeled as a marketing purpose, the promotion of which is merely to serve the real purpose. In terms of Shankara’s Hindu metaphysical framework, the real purpose is in the real, the ostensible purpose is in the realm of appearance, and a marketing purpose is in that of illusion. I contend that business managers, especially in marketing, are accustomed to conflating these three types of purposes in being oriented to the real purpose. Not being transparent about the differences between these three purposes is, I submit, unethical in nature. I have an incident involving American Airlines in mind.

The full essay is at "American Airlines."

Time Magazine’s Person of the Year: Taylor Swift

Time magazine named the singer Taylor Swift as its person of the year for 2023. Such a force of nature were her stadium-filled concerts during that summer that they triggered economic booms in the respective host cities. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for example, hotel rooms went for as much as $2,500 downtown on the night of the concert. In terms of American culture, the analogy of gravity waves may fit. During an interview for television at her home (or one of her homes), Swift’s savvy business acumen was very evident; her marketing prowess was extraordinary. She even re-released her own songs, resulting in a huge financial windfall for what are really the same songs merely re-sung. It is not as if she had grown a new voice. Swift personifies American culture, whose “movers and shakers” seem “happy go lucky” on stage yet, behind the scenes, they tend to be lazar-focused on the business end. In short, considerable distance may exist between the societal image and the private business practitioner, and the ethical element can get lost in the shuffle and excitement. 

The full essay is at "Taylor Swift." 

When Retail Marketing Goes Too Far

Marketing by retailers can go too far; this claim should be no surprise. That this has been so even when the marketing comes at the expense of existing customers may be less well-known and thus be in need of some elaboration. The underlying culprit, I submit, is psychological: difficulty with keeping within even societal and even self-imposed constraints. Put simply, the difficulty is with limits. The mentality is thus at the child-stage of development.

The full essay is at "When Retail Overreaches."

Managers Going too Far: Targeting Linguistic Over-Reaches

The practice of using words beyond their contexts such that the words’ meanings are tortured and yet are pretended not to be was a trend in modern America during the 2010’s. The business manager instigated the trend in order to “gild the lily,” which means to claim more than is warranted or merited. Astonishingly, people dismissed or perhaps even didn’t recognize such over-reaches. Perhaps as long as people have used language, egos gripped in the pursuit of gain have presumed that keeping to a word’s extant meanings in a language is somehow optional.

The full essay is at "Managerial Over-Reach."

Karl Lagerfeld: An Artistic (and Marketing) Genius

Weeks after Karl Lagerfeld’s death at 85 in February, 2019, I poured over interviews that the eternally-modern yet classic Renaissance man had given. “I only answer questions,” he had said an interview in at a WWD conference in 2013. His answers provide as inside as possible a look at l’homme extradinaire.  He considered himself a fashion designer, a book publisher (regular and picture books), and a photographer, though he did much more. I’m not sure whether his books, interior designs, architecture, and photography can be considered marks of genius, but that he extended his method of fashion-design and did so well is a testament to the man’s inner-workings. His answers remind me of Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect from Wisconsin whose work so revolutionized homes from the Victorian era. Essentially, he ushered in open homes from the closed roomed Victorian houses. Lagerfeld was also innovative, taking the classic Chanel look and adding bits of modernity, such as in combining a black dress with sneakers. Both men produced homes/dresses that were inexpensive and expensive. Neither was beyond reach, yet as visionaries so far above most other people. Lagerfeld, like Wright, saw things differently than most of their respective contemporaries did. This is perhaps their shared mark of genius: not be so tied to yesterday, combined with being inspired to use creative freedom then expanding its application. This is all based in the inner constitution of the two men, which I suspect was similar. As Lagerfeld said, “I am down to earth—just not this Earth.” This is actually quite telling of genius, for such minds typically think "outside the box" and so can easily see through even societal sacred cows and thus proffer very different perspectives. The thinking, intuition and/or artistic perspective, in other words, innately go beyond the societal and individual assumptions that most people do not even realize they live by or hold. I contend that Karl Lagerfeld's artistic, or visual genius went far beyond fashion-designing. 

The full essay is at "Karl Lagerfeld."

Johnson’s “Reinvention” of JC Penney: Too Much and Too Little

In April 2013, JC Penney’s board wished the CEO, Ron Johnson, “the best in his future endeavors.” His effort to “reinvent” the company had been “very close to a disaster,” according to the largest shareholder, William Ackman. During Johnson’s time at the company as its CEO, shares fell more than fifty percent. In February 2013, Johnson admitted to having made “big mistakes” in the turnaround. For one thing, he did not test-market the changes in product-line and pricing-points. The latter in particular drove away enough customers for the company’s sales to decline by 25 percent. Why did Johnson fail so miserably?

The full essay is at "JC Penny Reinvented?"

Ron Johnson's short tenure as CEO of JC Penney was disastrous, according to Altman.   Source: Reuters

On the Impact of Political Rhetoric: From “Global Warming” to “Climate Change”

Words matter in politics. The side that can frame a question by definitively naming it in the public mind enjoys a subtle though often decisive advantage in the debate and thus in any resulting public policy as well. For example, “pro-choice”privileges the pregnant woman, while “pro-life” defines the abortion debate around the fetus. Similarly, “global warming” implies a human impact, whereas“climate change” defines the issue around nature. Even though the shift from“global warming” to “climate change” is more in keeping with the evolving science and won’t be bumped off by a cold winter, political players have been the driving force—language hardly being immune to ideological pressure.

The full essay is at "Political Rhetoric on a Warming Atmosphere."

The Ministerial Exception: A Religious Right to Discriminate

In early 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized, for the first time ever, a “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws, saying that churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference. In his written opinion, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “The Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution] prevents the government from appointing ministers, and the Free Exercise Clause prevents it from interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own.” The wrench in the works here concerns the matter of delimiting the exception, given the inflation in what constitutes “ministerial” in terms of tasks.

The full essay is at "The Ministerial Exception."

Facebook Secretly Shared Users' Friend's Data with Business Partners: A Case of Betrayal

According to The New York Times at the end of 2018, internal documents generated at Facebook in 2017 showed that the company “gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify, and others far greater access to people’s data” even after having raised a privacy wall than Facebook had disclosed.[1] That is, Facebook effectively exempted some of its business partners from the company’s privacy rules without notifying users. In many quarters, this would be called lying, which in turn would suggest a sordid management at Facebook. The more subtle astonishment, I submit, is that 2.2 billion users had stayed with Facebook after the hidden use of personal data for political purposes. The partnership between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica had hardly been made in heaven. Why such enduring trust in spite of external data being clear grounds for losing trust and giving up using Facebook? How many betrayals would be necessary? In literal marriages, trust can be lost “like that!” Similarly, when a child even unconsciously loses trust for her parents, the solid basis of trust in a normal parent-child relationship is lost most likely forever. Why has Facebook—a distant business punctuated by lies—get a pass?

The full essay is at "Facebook Secretly Betrayed Users."

See also the booklet, Taking the Face Off Facebook, available at Amazon.

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1. Gabriel Dance, Michael LaForgia, and Nicholas Confessore, “As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants,” The New York Times, December 18, 2018.

Customers as Members and Guests: Retail Fakeness Infecting Society

“Are you a member of the store?”  A salesperson at a Barnes & Nobles’ café department once asked me the question as I was preparing to pay for the coffee drink I had just ordered. Apparently, customers who had registered for a discount card were considered  “members of the store.” The same thing happened to me at a Borders store before that chain went bankrupt. There, the salesperson refused to take my “No, I am not a member” for an answer—as per company policy.

The full essay is at "Retail Members and Guests."

More on this topic is in On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management, which is available at Amazon.

The American Media Went “Nuclear” on the U.S. Senate's Filibuster: A Case of Hyperactive Marketing?

Is ending the filibuster on appointments to executive-branch offices as well as judicial appointments below the U.S. Supreme Court really “the nuclear option”? Is this expression simply rhetoric gone horribly over the top? Journalists would undoubtedly demur, at least publically, yet without feeling an ounce of shame.

The full essay is at "Going Nuclear on the Filibuster: Journalistic Over-Kill?" 

The Underbelly of Corporate Charity as Corporate Social Responsibility

Why do corporate managements spend corporate money on charities? The obvious reason is to reduce the amount of corporate income tax due. Yet another motive, not as transparent, has to do with reputational capital, and that motive may also explain corporate social responsibility.

  Bernie Madoff, surrounded by police, after having been arrested. Wikimedia Commons

The full essay is at "Corporate Charity as Social Responsibility?"

How a Chairman of the Federal Reserve Made Strategic Use of the Media

Just as the US Senate was to take up the matter of Ben Bernanke’s re-appointment as Chair of the Federal Reserve in 2010, Time magazine came out with its announcement that he is to be its person of the year.  According to the magazine, “when turbulence in U.S. housing markets metastasized into the worst global financial crisis in more than 75 years, he conjured up trillions of new dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies; ratcheted down interest rates to zero; lent to mutual funds, hedge funds, foreign banks, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who had never dreamed of receiving Fed cash; jump-started stalled credit markets in everything from car loans to corporate paper; revolutionized housing finance with a breathtaking shopping spree for mortgage bonds; blew up the Fed’s balance sheet to three times its previous size; and generally transformed the staid arena of central banking into a stage for desperate improvisation. He didn’t just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy.”  Not to be outdone in service to the Chairman, CNN furnished its own reporters, who gave credit to Bernanke for these measures.  Interestingly, however, even though one reporter admitted that Bernanke had said in 2007 that the subprime market and its derivatives would not threaten the financial market and the banks, she attributed the fault there to the imperfections in the market rather than to Bernanke himself in being wrong.   So, he gets credit for having cleaned up the mess (ignoring the foreclosed homeowners) but not the blame for being wrong about the contagion (and not urging regulation of the derivatives).  

The full essay is at "How a Chairman of the Fed Used the Media."

The Increasing Decadence in American Business (and Society): The Case of On-Screen Distractions during Television Programs

While watching Lord of the Rings on TBS in 2010, I noticed that the network was posting not only its logo on the bottom right of the screen, but also advertising for its programming on the bottom left. Also, “more movie, less commercials” was written to accompany the logo. What really got to me during the movie was when pictures advertising a television show were shown. They took up almost an eighth of the screen and thus could not but distract the viewer from watching the movie. I decided I would not watch movies on networks that compromise or prostitute their own programing in order to sell themselves while "in progress." It is like sitting down at a restaurant and having the waitor sell me on other dishes while I am trying to enjoy the one that I'm eating. “I just want to enjoy this fine meal, thank you,” any discerning customer would be wont to say. Once at Starbucks, the customer in front of me at the register was paying $25 for a variety of products.  As I was thinking that the store had made a good sale, the clerk tried to sell the customer on a certain food item for the next visit--as if the present sale was not enough.  The same propensity wherein nothing is ever enough is evinced by the television networks that can't seem to restrain themselves from adding more and more self-promotions onto the screen during their own programming.  These networks are playing off the mitigated nature of the additions being incremental, and thus not objectionable to the average viewer. 

The full essay is at "Business Over-Reaching."

Advertisers Remove Ads on YouTube: Fair to YouTube and Video-Producers?

One day after Thanksgiving in 2017, “a fresh wave of advertisers suspended commercials on Youtube after their ads showed up next to videos that appeared to attract pedophile viewers.”[1] Youtube had removed ads from roughly 3 million videos, but the company’s use of human and AI checkers simply could not keep pace with the number of uploaded videos. Even so, Diageo, maker of Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker (alcohol drinks), announced it would hold off its ads until “appropriate safeguards are in place.”[2] Mars and Adidas took a similar line. The question is whether those advertisers were being fair to Youtube and even the producers of the videos.

The full essay is at Advertisers and YouTube.

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[1] Stu Woo and Sam Schehner, “YouTube Deals With Another Advertiser Backlash,” The Wall Street Journal, November 25-26, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

The Fiat 500: The American Taste for Convenience Revealed

One means of doing cross-cultural comparison is by contrasting consumer tastes; such proclivities tend to evince societal mores by which societies can be perceived to be distinctive. In the case of the E.U. and U.S., Fiat, a European auto company that controls Chrysler, an American company, is discovering some societal differences as it refashions the Fiat 500 for American customers.

The full essay is at "American Consumer Tastes."

Big Soda Campaigning against a Proposed Tax in San Francisco: A Vested Interest Thwarting Democracy?

With a proposed 1-cent per ounce tax on sweetened beverages such as soda-pop on the 2016 ballot in Oakland and San Francisco, the effected industry reserved about $9.5 million in television-ad time.[1] As of August 10^th, the American Beverage Association had already spent $747,267 on campaign consultants and advertisements against the proposed tax in Oakland, whereas supporters of the proposal had spent only $23,297.[2] The imbalance itself could mean that business was subverting democracy by overwhelming voters. If big-soda’s ads were unethical as the pro-tax camp contended, the subversion would be especially harmful.

The full essay is at "Big Soda Campaigning."

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1. Michael McLaughlin, “Big Soda Spends Millions on ‘Unethical’ San Francisco Area Ads Fighting Drink Taxes,” The Huffington Post, August 24, 2016.

2. Darwin Graham, “Big Soda Is Spending Big Money Against Oakland Surary Beverage Tax Proposal,” East Bay Express, August 10, 2016.