Integrity and Accountability Under Attack – Do You Believe America Will Care About the Truth Again?
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Taking a look at the government and politics can pull out a lot of dirt. With everything that’s happening in the country right now, do you believe that America will care about the truth again? Bill Stierle and Tom get in a hot discussion about the issues surrounding the country and how disconnected the government and businesses are to integrity and accountability. Both would rather protect the brand name and the company, than to be held accountable for something they didn’t do right. Along with the different areas in society, Bill and Tom believe that we are not learning from past issues and that we’re seeing the same things happen again, people saying and doing something out of alignment with integrity. If all of this continues, what type of values do you think America is trying to step into?
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There are many things happening in our country right now that certainly make me question if America really cares about truth or is going to care about the truth. There is a lot to discuss about this and it's very unsettling.
The biggest trouble with what America is stepping into is what values would we like to be at the top of the list? Everybody wants to feel good about the thing they are doing, what they are up, what the country is, their sports teams, their local communities. I feel proud about, inspired about. We tell ourselves a positive narrative story, even though we know that there are mistakes, we tend to not want to talk about or deal with, or even face the mistakes that we make. That is where two important values of ours go onto the bus. Those values are integrity and accountability. Both in business and in government, we need to communicate better about what integrity is going to look like and communicate better about accountability. That accountability is more even than it is because now accountability is clearly not even.
There are multiple examples about how it's not even. For example, if I'm a business and I have been making a product, as I'm making this product, it's discovered that the pollutant or the solvent that I'm using all of a sudden has damaging to the environment. What am I going to do with that solvent? All of a sudden, I got to get rid of it, then I've got to pay for getting rid of a solvent that to be used as a part of my manufacturing, and I now have to get rid of it. It's going to cost me a lot of money to get rid of it, so I dump it over here, and then I dump it over there. All of a sudden, it becomes a Superfund site because the company doesn't have enough money to pay for it. They would rather pay the fines at a lower rate rather than paying how much money it would cost to clean up the thing that they meant. The need for integrity and accountability becomes very difficult when it's a financial security piece.
How does the society carry the burden of that is the government steps in and says, "We are going to take a little bit of money from everybody in taxes to help this company out, even though they made this product, and we are going to help them clean it up in a super fund account?" Not just leave it there to pollute the environment or pollute the land that we have. Some companies, the need for integrity and accountability versus financial security means they put the barrels of DDT and they drag them out into the middle of the ocean. They throw these barrels of DDT off into the Santa Monica Bay or into the Deep Well of Santa Monica. After 40 or 50 years, they start decaying. How do you clean up this mess that has been dumped into the ocean? Again, accountability, integrity and there is nobody around to fix it, no one around to pay for it. Who is going to do it now? "I don't want to. I do now." It's something that we didn't regulate, or we didn't moderate in the past, so now it becomes a huge problem.
Both in business and in government, there is a very big trouble with truth because you have to stare truth down a bit and go, "That was us. That was on us. By the way, if we were to fix this, to clean it up, to do something about it, it would bankrupt us, and all these people would be unemployed, or it would cause this company to shut down. I would rather protect the company and protect the brand name than to clean it up and do what I need to do." This is why "Will America Care About Truth Again?" It's important because then when you start telling the truth, and you have to do things like integrity and accountability, which is hard. Some people are having a hard time with truth because they don't want to do accountability and integrity. They don't want to do that. It's very difficult to take a look at it.
We see this in so many different areas of our society. We saw it in Wall Street with the 2008 financial crisis, where you had these big firms that were responsible for getting us into that crisis, selling the mortgage-backed securities that were loans that had terms and gave to people that they shouldn't have given them. When it came down to being accountable for that, it didn't happen. Nobody on Wall Street was held to any standard of integrity or investigation even that you did this and you are going to be responsible. All we were told is, if these big companies go bankrupt, it's going to bring down the whole financial system. Therefore, the government needs to bail them out, but there was no accountability.
I think one single person was charged with a crime during that whole thing. Many people are saying we are headed back down that same path again. Clearly, there is not a sense of integrity or accountability that is happening. We are seeing it in more ways in our government with our politicians and some of the things that are going on regarding truth, integrity, and accountability. The January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol is a big one that we are seeing. There are not a lot of politicians interested in truth.
What I would like to tell the readers is that it's difficult to step into this kind of communication even though I have been encouraged not to get into these kinds of messages. My job is to get myself into these messages. That's the job. The job is how do you step into a difficult message where somebody is going to have a little bit of egg on their face because they said or they did something that was out of alignment with integrity. Someone said or did something that was out of alignment with accountability. One of the things that came out of that experience, the economic downturn, is that accountability and integrity were not held to those executives of those businesses. Now we are seeing the same thing happening in government where accountability, integrity, will it be held with the people that said and did things to allow people to come into the capital and hurt so many law enforcement people.
I empathize with the amount of furiousness and anger that was stirred up about the belief that has been fostered about the election and how angry you could be if you were to believe that fully. Our beliefs drive a lot of our emotions, affect our needs, and cause us to feel angry. The pursuit of what is the best course for civil society to act. If one person in that insurrection, in that group of people, if one person started shooting with any of the bigger rifles, or if they did get a hold of Mike Pence and did take him out, or if Mike Pence walked out there instead, you guys get back. He had the opportunity to do leadership, but it was not safe for him to do leadership.
They weren't going after him because he was the guy that presided over or that was to preside over the certification of the election results.
All President Trump at the time say, "I hope Mike Pence does the right thing." That language pattern, that vibration of the right thing from leadership, is unsettling. It's, I care about this one point of view. I am not necessarily caring about the truth or the greater truths of what it takes to run a country. There are many people that have taken advantage of the goodwill and have lied, cheated, and steeled all those particular words, but at the expense of the nation, there have been many things that we have done just to have been horrific. People are going like, "I got to look the other way on that. I've got to let that go because the greater good is that we have to land on some form of truth and some form of integrity, but we can't go quite that far." That is when it becomes very unsettling. If we don't look at or measure things how many deaths are caused by guns and what are the things to protect ourselves and our fellow Americans from violence, suicide, child injury, we are going to continue to see that the need for choice and freedom with guns is outweighing the need for safety and protection for other Americans.
That framing of things helps to say how can we get both rather than saying full-out freedom. If you did full-out freedom, for example, on car safety, there would be a 50% increase of deaths from car accidents if we didn't have all the safety features. People are still going to get in car wrecks. There is not going to die over it. Why? There is an airbag, a seatbelt, a retractable bumper, a cascading front hood where the thing brings in, but it pushes in this way. It pushes right into the middle. What is happens is the person most likely will not be crushed in the middle of this car accident at X miles per hour. If we took the car apart, it would be amazing how many different pieces that would come off the car that is required to be on the car as something that protects the consumer that is inside the car?
I remember having a discussion with my father-in-law. He was talking about the cost of buying a new car and how it has increased so much since the early '70s where he was looking at. It's like the inflation that represents is huge. I said to him, "Certainly, you can compare the value of the dollar now to the value of the dollar then, but if you look at the cars that you bought in the '70s, they didn't have computers in them. They didn't have airbags, antilock brakes. They didn't have backup cameras and LCD screens. They didn't have so many things that they are required to have now that are very good health and safety preservation devices, but they add a lot of costs to the price of a car also."
You can't just look at cars that are so much more expensive now than they were then, and at what percentage of your income is a car, and used to buy that car, maybe with cash and then get alone, now you always have to get along. All those things may be true. We have side curtain airbags. What is that? In 1970, that was a dream. I think Jimmy Carter was the one in the first administration that advocated for research in airbags and started to get those into cars. At the time, that was seen as a pipe dream. Look at the '90s, every car had them.
Car seats for kids, my mom threw a playpen. I swear to God. She did this. A playpen in the back of a red station wagon, that is where she put the baby in a playpen. As if the baby wasn't rolling back and forth in this playpen.
Especially if it's in the way back of a six wagon where these G forces are going this way. My parents had a two-seater Firebird when I was born. There is no place to put a baby in the car. They put me in a child safety seat. Do you know where that child safety seat was? It was on the center console between the two bucket seats, and the Firebird not belted into anything had a front-end accident. I would have been launched through that windshield, maybe in the car seat, but still to think about the perspective and how things have changed.
We need to care about the truth. We need to investigate things. We need to make sure that we do scary honesty. It's not going to be comfortable. Truth isn't particularly comfortable. Some of the things that I used to believe in, I'm going like, I was taken by, I bought the cigarette propaganda, it was not that bad and unsettling. I get to choose what I want. I get to find my things like that part's great, but not great for your own health or your wellbeing. It's challenging because of protection, the identity, the veneer, the respect that all the tobacco companies had at one time. It was the unbreakable wall that you couldn't get the tobacco industry to have any accountability or any integrity until one of them said, "Here is all the research. We are guilty. Let's start paying the things. We will be the first ones in if we get to pay this amount of money and they got to pay in." The last ones are like, "You just started all this stuff." That's what happened. All of those various different economies of that product or that service did not go well. It's difficult for a CEO or a business owner to take that level of accountability and truth when they are going to go like, "This is what's going to do to my shareholders."
I'm remembering now another good analogy to bring into this discussion about truth in business like that, and maybe we could do that before we get into anything in our government because I know that content to be divisive. Do you remember back around the late '90s, this vehicle called the EV1 that GM put out? Because in California, we have most of them, I think. The State of California was encouraged to create vehicles that didn't pollute the environment. If you live in California in the '80s or '90s, there was a whole lot more smog in our skies and a lot more unhealthy air days that they would announce on the news, and then in high school, we wouldn't go out for PE because of the smog alert. That doesn't happen very much now, but the GM came out with this fully electric vehicle called the EV1 in response to the State of California pushing it.
The people loved it that GM would only let you lease it. They wouldn't let you buy it at that time. They had charging stations to say to California made it like our local malls. I remember I lived in Northern California in Pleasanton, California, and our local mall in 2004, 2005, still had some of those charging stations for the EV1, which now are just museum pieces because they won't charge any other electric car. Maybe they have taken them out by now, but when I was there, they still had them. These charging stations were built so people could charge their EV1's. The oil industry conspired with the auto industry to kill the electric car at that time. There is an interesting documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? That goes into this in detail.
The truth around electric cars was being purchased away by the fossil fuel industry and by the auto industry. Now, fast forward many years, electric cars are real. They are here. Ford announced they are coming out with an electric Ford F-150 truck, which looks amazing in terms of its technical capabilities and specifications as well as its appearance. Did you know that vehicle is the number one selling vehicle in the United States, representing $42 billion worth of automobile sales, one vehicle, the Ford F-150 truck? I have read all about this. It is fascinating.
If that vehicle goes electric, which it's now going, passenger vehicles, even trucks, we are reaching a tipping point, whereas the truth is undeniable, and we are going to see the auto industry or the auto industry shifts. More importantly, the fossil fuel industry is going to wane and be a lot less relevant and not going to be in the same growth mode it has been in for many years. It's some interesting things around truth there that are eliminating. We always say in America, we vote with our wallets. The consumer is going to vote on this and is voting on electric cars. Going in that direction, which is interesting, but we don't have the same kind of relationship with the truth in our politics and government. Do we?
The hard part in the government space is that the politician can say something, and it might be true for them, but then they realize that they need to change their point of view somewhere. For example, if Barack Obama gets elected and doesn't do anything about gay marriage, he says, "No, I'm not for that." During his second term, "I am for that." The cost is how we engage in beliefs are if a person has a moral or religious belief regarding gay marriage, and they are not considering that their fellow Americans are in favor of whatever that belief is that they are against, many times, the old belief will stay in place. The old belief stays in place in such a way that people then still want to believe it.
Trickle-down economics is a good example of that. This is what wealthy Americans are going to do when we give them tax money because they know how to handle money. Poor people don't know how to handle money, but rich people do know how to handle money, and this is what they will do with the money that they have, and they trickle the money down through this. Once a belief gets codified and shrunk into a person's brain, it's a branded belief. As soon as I say, Coca Cola, an image will show up in your head, as soon as I say, Pepsi, an image will show up in your head, as soon as I said, Tide detergent. We can go on and on about that, but the brand mapping of the brain has to do with repetitive messaging. They will be a politician in the next five years that will come up and try to resell, repackage, trickle-down economics. They will say, "Yes, it did work." Of course, it worked.
Remember the Trump economy, how good it was? Meanwhile, the numbers weren't there from a trickle-down perspective. It didn't trickle down anywhere unless the company just bought back their shares and was able to do something with their stock prices. That was helpful to a certain group of Americans, but not necessarily the overall America, which is how do you get a functioning capitalist subsystem to be self-sustainable? You have got to get certain things paid for from a public perspective because the private perspective is too expensive to do. We do struggle with truth because we are not very good in dealing with truth in references to beliefs, biases and fallacies, which is something we have talked about in the past. All of a sudden, your brain is clicking off like thirteen different stories.
It's not just the stories. The relationship that our politicians have with the truth is not healthy. They are not interested in the truth. They are interested, it seems, in identity and other values that are not true. If you take, for instance, this whole January 6th attack on the Capitol, this was one of the watershed moments of our country's history. Nothing like this had ever happened before it, and it's very scary. After that, there was probably the most bipartisan call for, "We need to have an investigation," like the 9/11 commission, but then you have people like Representative Andrew Clyde from Georgia who was having to barricade the door in the House chamber during the insurrection. Coming out and saying that he compared the protestors, the insurrectionists on that day at the Capitol, what they were doing to a normal tourist visit. He called it a normal tourist visit. Truth is being purchased away from what happened here by many members of Congress to the point which they don't even want to find out what happened if they think it's going to hurt their team. We can't even agree in the truth of what took place.
All of a sudden, a story came back into my mind about a post-day Major League baseball game that two fan groups got in a fight in a parking lot. It was in the Los Angeles Dodger Stadium. Somebody died over it.
Was that a pre-season game? I think I remember that.
It was after the game. Two groups of loyal fans were fighting and yelling at each other about whatever it was, whatever team lost. If you are angry about something and your adrenaline is up, and you have such an identity and such loyalty to a sports team, you can imagine how, I'm not going to say easily, their brains were hijacked, but I'll do it the other way, which is how passionate the Trump followers were to be there on January 6th to then listen to those speeches by those different people around Trump, and then go do the march. Literally, it was like saying to the sports team, “We know where the referees' houses are. You go and take it out on the referee because the referee is making the wrong call. You got to prevent them from making the wrong call. Therefore, it's time for you to go and do that."
It's like, "Yes. My team can't be cheated out of this. If you don't fight for it, you are going to lose your country." Lose your country? The country is made up of people. You are not losing the country. It's a play into the belief of loss and the uncertainty about the country. It's like, that's not what's happening from a bigger perspective. There are certain things that we choose to do in society that we don't want a private business to be anywhere near. For me personally, private businesses and prisons don't go well together. The numbers are in if I'm looking at truth and numbers and incarcerations and there are some efficiencies, but you're driving profit, you're not looking for the wellbeing of a society of this person coming out. That's not what the function is.
It’s rehabilitation or whatever it might be.
Why would I do that? I'm not getting paid to rehabilitate. I get paid for filling beds and holding people captive here. I wanted them in jail, make a mistake so I can add more to their time. That is not a good formula. We do struggle with integrity and accountability whereas, an identity or protection is the reason why people are going to not face the truth. They are not going to want to do that.
It's scary. A couple of examples to highlight for the readers, which are relevant to this January 6th thing is immediately after that insurrection, we had people like McConnell and McCarthy talking about how bad it was that the president at the time, President Trump, put responsibility for it, then they had the second impeachment trial. They were arguing this impeachment is a waste of time. There are other mechanisms to hold the president accountable and anybody accountable who was responsible for the insurrection on January 6th. They proposed this idea of a bipartisan commission which then was negotiated. McCarthy, in particular, in the House, sent a Republican to the negotiating table with three key demands. One, there is an equal number of Democrats and Republicans on the commission. Two, they all have equal subpoena power, and three, it gets completed before the end of 2021 because the Republicans didn't want it dragging into the next election year.
The Democrats agreed to all of those terms and they have voted on this commission, and the House passed it with 35 Republicans voting for it. McCarthy was not one of them. He has said he doesn't support it. Now coming up with other reasons why he didn't support it. Not having the integrity of, "This is what we, as Republicans won if we are going to agree to of our bipartisan commission." You get that. Now, you don't want the commission, probably because you don't want the light of day to be shed on everything that was behind the insurrection, or don't want the full truth to come out about it. McConnell did the same thing. He is saying he is not going to back it, even though he is the one that said, "There are other means to hold the president accountable or anybody accountable." This lack of integrity and lack of interest in the truth is scary for our country.
A human being can hold two truths at the same time. The two truths can be completely opposite of each other. The truth is, anytime anybody asks, he will say yes. I did send somebody over there in good faith, and we did do things. We have been trying to do things in a bipartisan way and then dead stop. Why did you say this way? "I just discovered that these other things are also important to me, and we were working, but the Democrats that want to hear those." In other words, I get to move where, and I get to have two different truths, and I get to speak in a way that has two different truths rather than staying for what the bigger truth is. Do you want to testify under oath? McCarthy does not.
How could that guy vote for him being subpoenaed and then having to say, where are you on a phone with President Trump? Yes. Did you ask him to send people? Yes. Did he do it? No. He said he's going to do something better. What did he do better? Hours later, he said, "Go home. We love you." That is what he said next. That is what he did hours later. I'm saying all of this stuff from what I have seen from the news media. I am ready and interested in discovering the deeper truth or the deeper integrity and be ready to rewrite my belief about it. I'm okay with rewriting the story I said, but I need a commission to do that because otherwise, I'm running this story that I'm running.
That is where the danger comes in because other people don't have that story, and they are being influenced by other news, media, and other marks. I'm the person that's copping to it. I don't have any research. I haven't looked at it fully. I am working off of the little bit of truth that I'm holding on to, and I've crafted a story about that. That's what I've done while other people are crafting the opposite story that Mike Pence should have done this, and McCarthy did talk, but he wasn't that urgent on the phone. President Trump didn't think it was all that urgent so he didn't send anybody. They could create it all worked out anyway, and only a couple of people died, and only I'll only 100 people got hurt. It's very unsettling because they are creating a different story.
What you are saying is that they are moving the goalpost. The goalpost was at a certain place when the Democrats agreed to their demands. They say, "That is not enough. I want this," What is unsettling is the lack of integrity because McCarthy was there at the same House of Representatives way back in the Obama administration launched an investigation into Benghazi, that was not a bipartisan commission, that was purely a Republican-led House of Representatives that held hearings and went after that. Why did they say they needed to go after that? Did they need to get to the bottom of it? Because four people died in Libya when the attack on the embassy in Benghazi happened. I heard 5 or 6 people died on January 6th at the Capitol, and they don't want to get to the bottom of that.
Even the name Benghazi brings up pain and suffering for us as a nation because they put us through that exercise. It was looking for, they wound up getting one talking point that they could use from an election standpoint, and it's not proportional. It's not to say Democrats don't have similar strategies to try to get messages to stick because it's a race to brand. Trump is doing something significant right now that everybody needs to be aware of. He is calling old Conservatives rhinos and he is branding people that are fiscally responsible Republicans as outdated Republicans. Those people are no longer viable in the party. That is problematic from a branding standpoint. If the Republicans want to reclaim the idea of conservativism. They can't do it every time he launches the phrase and then cast doubt upon the phrase. He says some people are calling them rhinos, whatever they call them.
That is a sales branding strategy to get the person to anchor that this type of Republican is a bad Republican now and the new type of Republican is this other type of Republican. The one that follows me on leadership and follows this type of mindset and leadership. It’s very challenging for us as a nation. We have got to do a better job of cultivating and anchoring truth in a brand-new way based on solid investigation and then solid messaging about here's what happened, here's why this is important, here's what's going to make a difference for us as a nation, and is this the best thing for the nation. I would wish even the liberal media would say to turn the narrative instead of those bad people. I wish the liberal media would say, "Is this best for the nation?" That's what I would like them to do. I'd say, is this message that America wants to stand for moving forward? Because this is the message that they are delivering.
It’s not the media, but I also think the Democrats. I think the Democrats were doing a terrible job in how they are talking about these things that are happening. There are such opportunities for them to point out the lack of integrity. Is this best for the nation? My goodness, if there was ever a slow pitch, softball served up to the Democrats, it's happened with negotiating in bad faith on what it's been at the end of the day, moving the goalposts on the commission for January 6th among other things.
An empathetic sentence would have been like this because having empathy and compassion to help us reclaim truth is a big part of this show. An empathetic sentence is called state the obvious. It looks like Speaker McCarthy said this and sent this person. "Here is what the agreement was. We feel appreciative and have gratitude that these are the things that we are offering. It was a great step in his direction to be able to take a step regrettably." He might be feeling torn because another part of his constituents is struggling with cooperation and collaboration. He also needs to deliver a different message. Regrettably, he is giving his voters two different messages so that he can cover his basis. We would like to find out what truth would look like. We are hoping that he would go along with the first agreement, but it doesn't seem like that because he is giving another message to the other part of his vote voters that don't like the message of cooperation.
All of a sudden, what happens from the Democrat is you are communicating as a statesman. You are not communicating as a politician. You are saying, "Great job. I'm acknowledging McCarthy for taking the step. I'm acknowledging the person for being in the room. I'm acknowledging the person to make agreements." Clearly, they and their party are trying to message in two different directions so that they can be safe. They can get marketing and messaging to a diverse group inside their party. It's calling them on their strategy in a compassionate way. They are not interested in cooperation, collaboration because they are more interested in protection and identity politics. It's very troublesome because if we are not seeing communication done that way, and we are going to get pushback from, "You guys are picking aside." It's like, "No, we are trying to pick messaging."
We have called out the Democrats on things in the past and we will continue to. I am interested quite honestly, in truth and integrity, and if there is a problem on the left side, I'm going to point that one out too. It's dangerous for us when, as a nation, we can't come together and agree on truth over something, each side is going to spin something their way. After any presidential debate, each side is going to spin it and say, he won, he won, or she won. This is more than that. This is the insurrection of our capital, but this was such a jaw-dropping moment in our history. It is very troubling for our future. The reason we are so divided is that we can't agree on where the truth lies for anything, whether it's QAnon or it's Antifa or whatever these extreme conspiracy theorist groups or other things are. If we can agree on the truth, that is very hard to move forward as a nation.
It's very hard to do that. I feel a general sense of confidence that there are things that both businesses and governments hide from the public. A lot of confidence that there is some business and somewhere there is some government where something I don't like has been hidden from me. It might have been in the best interest of the government, the country, or the society to do that hiding because the beliefs were too fragile to go in and go through. Our beliefs regrettably have a certain amount of stuckness to them. They don't like changing. Changing our beliefs are a tough thing for us to do as human beings.
A big part of this discussion is trying to take an adult breath to go. We are not going to know things. New things are going to be discovered. Things that are going to happen, that somebody is developing, that we would say, "I don't know if I like that because I'm too uncomfortable to deal with that. It might be something that I can't get done in my lifetime to fix. Going back, it doesn't sound like a great idea either. I might want to figure out how to entrust and make my point clear to who is going forward. At the same time, realize unless I'm willing to work for and do some things that are helpful for that cause in a nonviolent way. It's something that I may not get in my lifetime and may not do." Human beings don't like that sentence.
No, we don't.
I might not get to that one. I'm going to put up my best narrative to do that in a nonviolent way and try to create as much awareness I can around that, but I may not get that one. It's a big part of the process of learning how to communicate more compassionately and empathetic to both sides, to talk honestly about certain experiences. We have got to do a better job and that's hard.
That's why we are here, to try to talk about language and communication and offer some ways we can communicate better with each other, with people we disagree with. Bill, I appreciate spending this time with you and talking about that. It's one thing to be frustrated about things that are happening, but it's nice to see that when something looks very disheartening, maybe even hopeless at times, Bill Stierle is able to point out, here is how I would say that, here is what I'd talk about that. If people would learn how to do it, we would make more progress. We would be working together more.
The adage, this is going to drive the math people a little bit nutty, but it is 1 plus 1 equal 3. It is, I've got these two people, and they are collaborating, cooperating, and then there's this third thing that shows up. The third thing is where the value is. It's addictive. It doesn't make mathematical sense, but there is something when you get two people together. You are looking at something and you are going like, "Here is the middle ground that gets us to move forward." It makes a big difference.
Thank you, Bill. I have enjoyed that.
Thanks, everybody, for reading. I’m looking forward to the next conversation. We will keep bringing tools, tips, and perspectives forward as we continue down our road towards finding the truth.
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