Professor Elam

Title IX Gals in the Pit Crew What Next?

Monday Feb 18 2019

Gals in the Daytona Pit Crew

 

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/daytona-500s-first-female-tire-changers-history-150405067--abc-news-entertainment.html

Cop Leaves $100 tip on $8.75 bill

Monday Feb 18, 2019

Policeman surprises pregnant waitress with big tip.

An great ethical success.

Wonderful application of the Golden Rule.

op Leaves $100 tip on $8.75 bill

Monday Feb 18, 2019

Policeman surprises pregnant waitress with big tip.

An great ethical success.

The APA Takes on Emerson's Self Reliance

Friday Feb 8, 2019

I have assigned Ralph Emerson's famous essay on Self Reliance in my ACCT 5308 Ethics class.

A professor examines the American Psychological Association opinion that Self Reliance might be a Mental Illness.

This article appears on Page  A 13 to the Feb 9 WSJ.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance” is a statement of American values. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.” “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” “The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.”

The American Psychological Association regards these values as obsolete and pathological. “Western culture defines specific characteristics to fit the patriarchal ideal masculine construct,” writes an APA committee. “The socialization of masculine ideals starts at a young age and defines ideal masculinity as related to toughness, stoicism, heterosexism, self-sufficient attitudes and lack of emotional sensitivity and of connectedness.” Among those “components of traditional masculinity” is “self-reliance.”

 

 

How times have changed. When Emerson was writing, Americans like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Lucretia Mott were skeptical of authority and valued dissent and independence of thought. They understood that dependence makes you vulnerable, even though we all do depend on one another in various ways. If you rely on the government for food, clothing, and shelter, you are at its mercy—currently that of Donald Trump. And as Thoreau argued in “Civil Disobedience,” if you depend on the government, you are disabled from resisting it. Recognizing that relationship between freedom and self-reliance, many feminists—from Abigail Adams’s era through the 1970s—taught that women must become less dependent on men.

circa 1870: American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) who was among the leaders of the transcendental movement in Boston. (Photo by Otto Herschan Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Photo: Otto Herschan Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Emerson’s essay is about self-development and self-realization, values that the APA in another mood might praise. And it is about the importance, for each of us and for society, of independent thought. “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature,” writes Emerson. “A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you.”

Even more than in Emerson’s time, we tend to think in groups or as groups. Many of us vociferously express opinions we do not hold or came to hold through a process of self-deception. It turns us into tribes of warring, servile conformists. Perhaps without realizing it, the APA is articulating a set of moral norms. That is also what Emerson was up to in his essay, though he was aware of it. These systems of values are exquisitely incompatible, an additional sign that America, for better and worse, has become something like the opposite of what it was.

Mr. Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.

 

 

Chainsaw Al Dunlap Dies at 81

Monday Jan 28 2019

 

Chainsaw Al Dunlap, famous for cost cutting, and then for other reasons, passed at age 81.

Dunlap claimed he had turned around and saved appliance maker Sunbeam.  Two years later the Board fired him and Sunbeam was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and then sold to another company.   Al over produced letting ending inventory grow and using GAAP, profits apparently increased.  And he engaged in channel stuffing and other activities. He ended up paying substantial fines, like $15 M.

But Florida State has named entire facilities for Al Dunlap as he has donated money to the school.

What do you think of that as an ethical proposition?  Would you name your campus facilities for someone who bankrupted a major company and then paid millions in fines?  What message does that ethically send to your students?  I am all for redemption in the religious sense but I never heard much redemption from Al, just an attempt to re make his image with generous donations. I mean really see excerpt below, the Dunlap Student Success Center??????????

Mr. Dunlap and his wife, Judy, became donors to FSU after he was invited to speak at its business school in the 1990s, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. Funds donated by the couple have been used for such facilities as the Dunlap Student Success Center and the Albert J. Dunlap athletic training center.

 

Another Wells Fargo Screw Up

Tuesday Dec 4, 2018

As we say in the ethics class, the CEO sets the tone at the top.

And WFC just cannot seem to shake the never ending run of bad news and mismanagement.

Now WFC is blaming a computer glitch for paper work that resulted in hundreds of home foreclosures.

Read the link as one fellow describes how he and his  son ended up living in a friend's basement for three months.

Enough!  Someone at the FDIC or SEC should simply shut Wells Fargo down and distribute their branches to other banks. That might serve as a decent lesson. Warren Buffet is a big WFC investor, where is he in all this?

No Lack of New Material for ACCT Ethics 5308

Monday Nov 19, 2018

Carlos Ghosn CEO of Nissan

was arrested and jailed today for under reporting total compensation.Apparently Carlos broke some other rules as well

What a lousy way to end a career at age 64.

 

Meanwhile SA oil and gas fraudster Brian Alfaro had his Ferari and other toys seized under an $8 M judgement.

Emnerson on Gifts

Monday Nov 5, 2018

 

for many years I have posted Emerson's essay on gifts prior to Black Friday, the annual shopping extravaganza that officially kicks off retail insanity. It used to be that Christmas Season did not officially start until after Thanksgiving. Yet I already see electronic trees and other stuff at Costco. So in  a desperate plea for some sort of sanity I am posting the Essay in early November.   I will be asking my classes to reflect on this 1844 essay which is surely as relevant today as then.

 

An example of what I mean here

Jingle All the Way

 

Emerson's 1844 Essay on Gifts

https://www.bartleby.com/90/0305.html

 

 

An analysis of Gifts

https://thewolfereview.com/2017/10/09/the-meaning-and-symbolism-behind-gifts-ralph-waldo-emerson/

 

http://americanaejournal.hu/vol11no2/litwicki

Uresti Pleads Guilty in Bribery Case

Friday October  12, 2018

Former State Senator Carlos Uresti plead guilty in a bribery case.

He admitted receiving $10 K  a month from  the Lubbock business man who got a contract for medical services for Reeves county. Uresti then paid Jimmy Galindo the Reeves County Judge half that each month as a bribe for the contract.   Prosecutors will recommend this sentence run concurrently with the 12 year sentence in the Four Winds Cse.

Goldman Sachs CEO Assistant Commits Suicide, Admitted to $1.2 M Embezzlement

Wed Oct 10, 2018

A personal assistant to the Goldman CEO jumped to his death at the Carlyle Hotel.

 

Accused jumps to death when he was suposed to plead guilty.

 

The story here is that some people are so moved by their guilt they cannot face the consequences. David Solomon expressed regret

at the outcome noting De-Meyer had worked for his from  2008-2016.