Did the title drive that point home enough?
Yes, there’s more than beer brewing in St. Louis and – surprise, surprise! – it’s an ethics scandal.
While it may be hard to process the idea of anything unethical going down in the Midwest bastion of political ethics (emphasis on the sarcasm), St. Louis County has mandated that their employees take an ethics course, followed by an ethics test.
But, of course, there’s a (very ethical) catch:
St. Louis County distributed a new ethics guide to employees on Friday, along with a notice on ethics training that will include a quiz that the employees can't fail.
Someday government will implode in on itself because of this kind of BS. A quiz you can’t fail is like a car you can’t crash: there’s no incentive to pay attention.
Taking a test that everyone passes regardless of their performance is unethical enough. But applying this unethical system to a test on actual ethics?
Yes, St. Louis has done the impossible: they’ve created a double-unethical test on ethics.
In their own words:
Employees will also be required to take a 10-question quiz. "Everyone will score 100% because the correct answer will be given immediately if the first attempt is incorrect," [Director of Personnel Kirk] McCarley stated…
You can’t spin a turd (for a variety of metaphorical and literal reasons), and they didn’t even give it a shot.
How seriously are employees expected to take the “ethics course” in the first place when they know going in that the worst score they can get is an A+?
Even better, they provide guidelines for those A-plussers to administer a “self test” if they are conflicted about whether they’re in an unethical situation or not.
The guide also includes a "self-test" for gauging an action's ethical quotient that includes this question: "How would the action and the ramifications of it read in the newspaper, sound on the radio, or look on the internet?"
They could boil this entire phony course, self-test included, into one sentence: “If it will make you and/or the county look stupid, don’t do it.”
And that could fit on a fortune cookie. Instead they’re holding courses and “quizzes” for thousands of government employees and charging the farce to the taxpayers.
This is the state of American politics today: The government will pat you on the back not for your success, but instead for your mediocrity and flat-out failures… not just if you’re a slave to their entitlements, but even if you're their employee.
And they wonder why the people have lost faith in the government...
- B.H.
(Check back tomorrow for more, and a sample quiz.)
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