Political correctness doesn’t have the best reputation.  It’s gotten old, has led to ridiculous policies in all sorts of places, and has had a chilling effect on being able to speak your mind according to free speech advocates. 

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I’m not an economist. I’m not running for anything. I’ve never been on Wall Street. But I’ve been thinking again.

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It seems to me that we’re suffering from a dearth of leadership almost everywhere we turn: government, business, law.  Without leadership, we’re not going anywhere.

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Here’s the Corporate BS for September 21-27:

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One thing to keep an eye on during the coming year is what your state legislature is doing with gun legislation introduced as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s relatively recent Heller decision.  It’s likely that there will be a passel of proposals designed to give gun owners more discretion as to where they can carry those guns.

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You may be surprised to find Billy Bragg’s labor anthem on this blog, but you should know what they’re singing on the other side of the street.

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The tragic collision between a commuter train and a freight train in Los Angeles (killing 25 people) has led California’s rail safety regulators to temporarily ban train operators from using cellphones on duty.  It’s been widely reported that the engineer of the commuter train, one of the dead, had been sending text messages shortly before the crash occurred.  The cause of the accident has yet to be determined, but safety authorities didn’t want to take any more chances while the matter is being investigated.

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Our cartoon this week was about a version of offboarding, the euphemism for firing employees.  Take a look at this YouTube clip for another, even more humiliating version of offboarding.

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We all know that racial inequality exists in all of life’s compartments, including the workplace.  To most of us, ”racial inequality” means whites having unfair advantages over African-Americans.  The Civil Rights Act was passed to correct this inequality, and it has made a difference.  Race discrimination still exists–as traditionally defined–but the nomination of Barack Obama for President is evidence that meaningful progress has been made.

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Given what we’ve been going through with our economy lately, I thought J. P. Morgan, one of the most influential bankers in history, might have said something that would be relevant, if not helpful.  I found a quote that says a lot about why we find ourselves where we are right now and that provides good advice, no matter what our job happens to be.

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I haven’t been shy about criticizing executives for making too much money. We’ve seen one example after another for a long time. Lately, we’ve seen the results of what this kind of out-of-balance executive comp can have. The current economic crisis isn’t due entirely, of course, to executives’ greed and boards of directors’ failure to grasp reality, but these things are all part of the toxic mixture of what led us, we are told, to the brink of financial disaster and what puts workplaces of all kinds and their employees in a continuing precarious situation.

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I’ve been thinking.  And I’ve concluded that there are just a lot of things that don’t make sense.

Politics — Millions of dollars are being raised and spent for politicians to get elected.  I think I read the other day that Senator Barak Obama had raised $66 million in August, a new monthly record. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.  All the candidates, presidential and otherwise, talk about what they’re going to do for the middle class, the working class, the poor. How about just giving to them what has to be, in total, the billions of dollars they’ve raise for attack ads? Does anyone else think it’s a little screwy for all these candidates to be raising the kind of money they’re raising to help themselves, while merely talking about helping others.

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During the coming week, I’ll be moderating the 13th annual Advanced Employment Issues Symposium in Las Vegas.  Human resources professionals from all over the country will assemble at Caesar’s Palace for in-depth presentations from some of the top labor and employment lawyers and consultants on the biggest employment law issues facing employers today.  I know many of you are attending, and I look forward to seeing you there.

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