Atlanta Sportswriter Steve Hummer takes a look at the career of Michael Vick. I am no sports buff but apparently Vick was a part of the real effort to make the Atlanta Falcons a contender team. Now what? As you surely are aware Vick has plead guilty to dog fighting. And the details of the sadism and torture are even worse. Apparently poor performing dogs were hung and if not dead then drowned. Ugh.
Sports figures have been behaving badly for some time now. One third of NBA players have been convicted for a crime. Now an NBA referee has been charged with gambling if not fixing games and no doubt more wil come out. The sports and entertainment culture has looked the other way at all sorts violent or suggestive of violence behavior. The justice system has been sending the Fastows, Skillings, et al to jail for crimes against shareholders. I bring this all up as ethics will be a topic we discuss in all our classes this and every semester. What is amazing about Vick is that surely he did not engage in this for the money, the bets were in the thousands. He had a $130 M contract! The answer has to be elsewhere, this is about savagery and power, cruelty and the whole gangsta rap culture of violence.
And so what is the ethical answer here? Jeff Skilling of Enron sits in jail for dealing in derivatives that took the employees and shareholders down. Yet Bear Stearns did the same thing in their hedge funds with the same result, everyone lost their money, and yet no one from BS is going to jail. Is that ethically fair? Hmmm I would be Jeff has some ideas on that one, wonder if we can call him?
Your thoughts?
8/23/07 Would the Falcons fiddle with the news to get the season tickets sold? Read the hyperlink to learn how a lot of buyers now have remorse and worse, some are charging the team with mamipulating the news on Vick. Hmm, actions have consequences.
Professor Elam 
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