Readers of this blog are familiar with the Starkman Approved Theory, which holds there is an inverse relationship between companies and individuals publicly professing superior ethics and morals and the practices they truly live by. I’m passionate calling attention to the theory as it could lead to a dramatic reduction in the spread of manure and educate the public to be instinctively wary of political and business leaders making grandiose claims. In recent weeks, there’s been a bumper crop of examples validating my hypocrisy maxim.
First up is the Big Four accounting firm EY, which reportedly fired dozens of U.S. employees for taking multiple online courses simultaneously, underscoring they didn’t perceive the training exercises as having much value. Rather than declining comment on an internal matter, EY gave this statement to the New York Post: “At EY, our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do. EY US has terminated individuals who, after thorough investigation, were found to have violated our Global Code of Conduct and US Learning Policy.”
The SEC would beg to differ about EY’s “core values of integrity and ethics.” Here’s a link to a news release the SEC issued about EY two years ago disclosing that the firm agreed to pay a $100 million penalty and “undertake extensive remedial measures to fix the firm’s ethical issues”. Here’s another example of alleged EY wrongdoing.
Next up is GM CEO Mary Barra, who Fortune recently deemed the world’s most powerful woman in business. Given Barra’s power, I was curious to see how she leveraged her influence to promote the sisterhood, particularly given her statement on GM’s website: “At GM, when we search for executive candidates, we require a diverse slate. If we find that a position has no diverse candidate, I ask the question, ‘What are we doing so that three years from now there will be a diverse candidate to consider?’”
Take a gander at Barra’s 20-person leadership team. Besides Barra, there are only two women – Arden Hoffman and Lin-Hua Wu — and neither of them have manufacturing or technology responsibilities. Adding insult to injury given Barra’s professed commitment that Detroit will always be GM’s headquarters, Hoffman, the company’s chief people officer, told employees when she joined in late 2022 that she’d be dividing her time between Detroit, San Francisco, and Montana. Lin-Hua Wu, who oversees PR, is based in San Francisco, where several critical GM software and battery executives are located at the company’s newly opened Silicon Valley office.
No longer part of Barra’s lineup is GM lifer Marrisa West, who in August inexplicably left the company only eight months after being named GM President North America. West, who was 42 when she departed, worked at GM for more than two decades. Mei Cai, who led the team responsible for developing the next-generation battery that was supposed to power GM’s electric vehicles, resigned in July after 24 years at the company.
Then there’s second “gentleman” Doug Emhoff, or Dougie as Kamala Harris affectionately calls her husband. Jen Psaki, the Democratic party operative and former Biden press secretary who masquerades as a journalist on the DNC’s MSNBC network, declared that Emhoff “has reshaped the perception of masculinity.” Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell gushed that Emhoff was a “progressive sex symbol.” The New York Times said Emhoff “can model a masculinity that embraces support.”
Never mind that Emhoff confirmed a Daily Mail report that he cheated on his first wife and impregnated his daughter’s nanny. The Daily Mail also reported that attorneys who worked with Emhoff when he oversaw the Los Angeles office of the Venable law firm said he yelled expletives, held a men-only cocktail hour in the office, revoked work perks from women who didn’t flirt with him, and took only young, attractive associates to a ball in a limousine.
The Daily Mail reported a few days ago that one of Emhoff’s former girlfriends, a “successful New York attorney” who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution from the Democratic machine, claims Emhoff slapped her so hard at a 2012 celebrity event in France that she spun around. The woman said she’s come forward because Emhoff is “being held out to be the antithesis of who he actually is. And that is utterly shocking.”
The Starkman Approved Theory has so far been proven irrefutable, something that voters who haven’t decided on their preferred presidential candidate would be wise to keep in mind. Kamala Harris, her surrogates, and their legacy media sycophants are warning that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, and that if he prevails on November 5, he will round up his enemies and those who opposed him, including reporters, and throw them in jail. Although I had intended to avoid writing about presidential politics, this NPR story by media reporter David Folkenflik about the Washington Post declining to endorse Harris stuck in my craw and cannot go unchallenged.
Folkenflik reported that “On the campaign trail, Trump has threatened to exact vengeance on journalists and media outlets should he win the presidency once more. In particular, he has promised to jail reporters who won’t identify the source of government leaks and to strip three big television networks of their licenses to broadcast.”
I’d prefer to judge Trump on his record rather than his rhetoric, which is invariably distorted when reported in the legacy media. Here’s a link to an AP story published on September 11, 2018, fact checking Obama on his denunciation of Trump for mistreating and disrespecting the legacy media.
From the AP’s article:
THE FACTS: Trump may use extraordinary rhetoric to undermine trust in the press, but Obama arguably went farther — using extraordinary actions to block the flow of information to the public.
The Obama administration used the 1917 Espionage Act with unprecedented vigor, prosecuting more people under that law for leaking sensitive information to the public than all previous administrations combined. Obama’s Justice Department dug into confidential communications between news organizations and their sources as part of that effort.
In 2013 the Obama administration obtained the records of 20 Associated Press office phone lines and reporters’ home and cell phones, seizing them without notice, as part of an investigation into the disclosure of information about a foiled al-Qaida terrorist plot.
AP was not the target of the investigation. But it called the seizure a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news-gathering activities, betraying information about its operations “that the government has no conceivable right to know.”
Obama’s Justice Department also secretly dogged Fox News journalist James Rosen, getting his phone records, tracking his arrivals and departures at the State Department through his security-badge use, obtaining a search warrant to see his personal emails and naming him as a possible criminal conspirator in the investigation of a news leak.
“The Obama administration,” The New York Times editorial board wrote at the time, “has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news.”
Then there’s the case of James A. Wolfe, 58, the former Director of Security for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), who leaked classified national security information to Ali Watkins, a reporter he was sleeping with when she worked for BuzzFeed and Politico. Watkins now works for the New York Times.
Wolfe pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement. Under the plea agreement, the Trump Justice Department moved to dismiss two remaining false statements counts at sentencing. In his proffer, Wolfe admitted to the conduct underlying one of the two dismissed counts.
Wolfe was sentenced to a mere two months in prison, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, then a D.C. District Court judge who President Biden later appointed to the Supreme Court, also imposed a paltry $7,500 fine and some community service. The Trump DOJ release announcing Wolfe’s sentencing made no mention of Watkins, sparing her and the Times reputational embarrassment.
When Trump first ran for president, he led his supporters in chants to “lock her up,” a reference to Hillary Clinton, who he called possibly “the most corrupt person ever” to run for president. Yet Trump never pursued any legal actions against her, despite Clinton personally approving leaking to the media the disproved Trump/Russia conspiracy hoax that derailed much of his presidency.
The legacy media for years called Trump a white supremacist and twisted comments that some might deem antisemitic. Yet Trump has been steadfast in his support for Israel and his administration brokered peace agreements between Israel and four countries. Trump nuked Iranian General Qassem Soleimani without waiting for him to orchestrate more terrorist acts against Israel, while Kamala Harris urged Israel to show restraint punishing Hamas for its Oct. 7 atrocities. Had Israel heeded Harris’s warnings, Yahya Sinwar, the monster responsible for the Oct. 7 atrocities, would still be alive.
As for being an antisemitic white supremacist, Trump doesn’t appear to have raised his children that way. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, married a Jew, converted to Judaism, and adheres to modern Orthodox traditions and practices. Meanwhile, Doug Emhoff, who says he takes great pride in his Jewish identity and his mother’s brisket, not only didn’t raise his daughter Jewish but she also supports anti-Israel causes.
Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, is married to the son of Lebanese immigrants who reportedly was raised in Lebanon and Lagos, Nigeria. Trump seemingly took great pride announcing that Tiffany is pregnant.
Harris, prominent Democrats, and the media are likening Trump to Hitler, who was responsible for killing six million Jews. A shoutout to the comedian Michael Rapaport for publicly calling out how despicable the comparison is. Jerry Wartski, a 94-year-old Auschwitz survivor who says he knows Trump, made the accompanying video for Trump’s campaign decrying those who liken the former president to Hitler for political gain.
Meanwhile, Harris running mate Tim Walz called a Muslim cleric who promoted a pro-Adolf Hitler film a “master teacher” for offering Walz lessons over the time they “spent together”. Democratic party darlings Rashida Tlaib and Illan Omar, respectively the recipients of the 2019 and 2023 Antisemite of the Year award by an organization that monitors Jew hatred, routinely promote tropes reminiscent of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Walz has repeatedly praised Omar.
In recent weeks I’ve been watching the few media and podcast interviews Kamala Harris has granted, and was aghast by her vacuous word salads, which not long ago was known as speaking gibberish. What encourages me though is the growing public awareness of Harris’s dubious past achievements and concerns about the decidedly undemocratic process under which Harris became the Democratic party nominee.
Americans were repeatedly assured by Harris and the legacy media that President Biden was “fit as a fiddle,” and any suggestion to the contrary was misinformation from the “right wing conspiracy media”. Then suddenly we were told that for the good of the country Biden had stepped aside and Harris, who for years the legacy media portrayed as a hopeless incompetent with alarming staff turnover, had altruistically stepped up to lead the country.
Trump haters will dismiss this post as a defense of him and his behaviors, when I’m only trying to set the record straight. The still unknown Democrats who forced Biden to step aside correctly banked that mainstream reporters would roll over and dutifully promote their Harris appointment, but didn’t appreciate the public’s growing disdain and distrust Americans have of the legacy media. Had a traditional Democratic nominating convention been held, no doubt a more compelling candidate than Harris would have emerged.
The election is reportedly close, and perhaps the gamble of the Democratic party Quislings will pay off. But if Trump prevails, the legions of Americans who despise him hopefully will come to appreciate the resulting harm America’s dishonest and corrupt corporate media continues to inflict on the country.