Category: Ethics in Government

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government

Lest you think collusion between corrupt government and dubious business interests happens only in the US–read this article on the firing of Linda Keen, until recently the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

Keen was fired for having the temerity to insist that the 50-year-old Chalk river nuke in Ontario stay closed until safety concerns were fully addressed.

Now, let me disclose my biases. I’ve been studying about nuclear power going back to a college report I did in 1974–and my first book, in 1980, was an expose of the nuclear power industry. In my mind,

  • there is no such thing as a safe nuke (and a wide swatch of the Ukraine is still uninhabitable, more than two decades after the accident at Chernobyl)
  • waste storage will cause problems for thousands of years
  • counting the entire fuel cycle, nukes are a net consumer of energy–so we’re not actually gaining anything by using them
  • solar, wind, and other nonpolluting, renewable technologies make a lot more sense

    • Why was the plant ordered to stay shut?

    In the inspection process, the CPSC regulators found something at the 50-year-old reactor that was terrifying:

    …the reactor had been operating for 17 months without two cooling pumps hooked up to an additional emergency back-up power system capable of withstanding a severe earthquake.

    And yes, there have been earthquakes in the vicinity. And this plant is only two hours from Ottawa, Canada’s capital city.

    But still…here is a woman who was fired because she didn’t want this ancient and probably crumbling nuke to have an accident! Best of luck, Linda in your wrongful termination court case. And thanks for doing what’s right.

    (my thanks to The Weekly Spin for alerting me to this story).
    Business and government ethics violations that directly put life and property at risk are more than just crooked collusion. They are criminal acts.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Politics

    Well, it looks like McCain will be carrying the banner for the Republicans this fall, after so many previous tries, and after being essentially written off by the pundits just a few short months ago. That was when Giuliani was considered the front-runner.

    This is one among many reasons why we shouldn’t rely on pundits. Once the voters started speaking, it was clear that Giuliani was a non-starter. I heard one commentator say this week that he had the worst dollars-to-delegates ratio in the history of politics: $50 million to get one lone delegate. Ouch!

    McCain is much, much better than his competitors on some issues, notably torture and campaign finance reform. But on war (for me, the dealbreaker issue), he’s the worst of the lot–even more hawkish than GWB. Yikes! And his own shady past on ethics issues–he was one of the infamous Keating 5, after all–makes me wonder how sincere the reform really is.

    Still, he’s certainly less of a flip-flopper than Romney, who would have made a great used car salesman. And far less scary than our American Ayatollah Huckabee, whose election would make me seriously consider leaving the country; as a non-Christian with progressive politics, I’m not sure there would be room for me in a country governed by someone who equates homosexuality with necrophilia.

    Much less clarity on the Democrat side. For me, the real question now becomes who could beat McCain. For reasons I stated here, I believe that in a McCain-Clinton contest, McCain would win, although I think she might beat Romney. But some of my friends believe that Obama hasn’t yet shown he can attract enough white voters to prevail against any opponent in November.

    I know that I personally would not vote for Hilary Clinton–but I have the luxury of living in a state where my vote doesn’t count anyway: no matter what I do no matter who the candidate, Massachusetts will go for the Democrat.

    The real shame for me, yesterday, was standing with my ballot and looking at Dennis Kucinich’s name right next to Barack Obama’s, thinking about what might have been. Kucinich has withdrawn, of course, and I’m not going to waste my vote on a candidate who’s no longer interested. But I think it’s a crime that the media–the same media that annointed Giuliani–decided for itself that it would not let us hear the voices of any of the candidates whose positions actually represented progressive change, and gave us a media blackout on the candidates who should matter most. They refused to cover Kucinich, Gravel, Dodd, and Ron Paul, among others–all of those bringing forward substantive reforms on a host of issues. This, to me, is a serious ethical breach and somehow we need a mechanism to address this that doesn’t interfere with the First Amendment.

    For broadcast media, at least, the solution may lie with their licenses to use the public’s own airwaves for profit. For print media, the solution is probably intense public pressure in the form of letter-to-the-editor campaigns, pickets in front of their stockholder meetings, and so forth.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

    Note from Shel: This guest column by Paul Rogat Loeb, a writer whose work I like quite a bit, outlines many of the reasons why I chose Obama when Kucinich left the race.

    A Dozen Reasons Why This Edwards Voter Is Now Backing Obama

    Guest Column By Paul Rogat Loeb

    I gave John Edwards more money than I’ve given to any candidate in my life, and I’m glad I did. He raised critical issues about America’s economic divides, and got them on the Democratic agenda. He was the first major candidate to stake out strong comprehensive platforms on global warming and health care. He hammered away on the Iraq war, even using scarce campaign resources to run ads during recent key Senate votes. He’d have made a powerful nominee˜and president.

    I’ve been going through my mourning for a while for his campaign not getting more traction, so his withdrawal announcement didn’t shock me. But sad as I am about his departure, I feel good about being able to switch my support to Barack Obama, and will do all I can to help him win.

    I’ve actually been giving small donations to both since Iowa, while hoping that the Edwards campaign would belatedly catch fire, and e.html>exploring ways the two campaigns could work together. With Edwards gone, I think Obama is the natural choice for his supporters, and that Edwards should step up and endorse him as his preferred nominee. All three major Democratic candidates have their flaws and strengths˜they all have excellent global warming plans, for instance. But Edwards wasn’t just being rhetorical when he said that both he and Obama represent voices for change, versus Clinton’s embodiment of a Washington status quo joining money and power.

    Here are a dozen reasons why I feel proud to have my energy, dollars and vote now go to Obama:

    1. The Iraq war: Obviously, invading Iraq remains the most damaging single action of the Bush era. Obama spoke out against it at a public rally while Clinton was echoing Bush’s talking points and voting for it. Obama’s current advisors also consistently opposed the war, while Clinton’s consistently supported it. It’s appropriate that Clinton jumped to her feet to clap when Bush said in his recent State of the Union address that there was “no doubt” that “the surge is working.”

    2. Clinton’s Iran vote: The Kyl-Lieberman bill gave the Bush administration so wide an opening for war that Jim Webb called it “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream.” Hillary voted for it. Obama and Edwards opposed it.

    3. The youth vote: If a Party attracts new voters for their first few elections, they tend to stick for the rest of their lives. Obama is doing this on a level unseen in decades. By tearing down the candidate who inspires them, Clinton will so embitter many young voters they’ll stay home.

    4. Hope matters: When people join movements to realize raised hopes, our nation has a chance of changing. When they damp their hopes, as Clinton suggests, it doesn’t. Like Edwards, Obama has helped people feel they can participate in a powerful transformative narrative. That’s something to embrace, not mock.

    5. Follow the money: All the candidates have some problematic donors˜it’s the system–but Hillary’s the only one with money from Rupert Murdoch. Edwards and Obama refused money from lobbyists. Clinton claimed they were just citizens speaking out, and held a massive fundraising dinner with homeland security lobbyists. Obama spearheaded a public financing bill in the Illinois legislature, while Clinton had to be shamed by a full-page Common Cause ad in the Des Moines Register to join Obama and Edwards in taking that stand.

    6. John McCain: If McCain is indeed the Republican nominee, than as Frank Rich brilliantly points out, he’s perfectly primed to run as the war hero with independence, maturity and integrity, against the reckless, corrupt and utterly polarizing Clintons. Never mind that McCain’s integrity and independence is largely a media myth (think the Charles Keating scandal and his craven embrace of Bush in 2004), but Bill and Hillary heralding their two-for-one White House return will energize and unite an otherwise ambivalent and fractured Republican base.

    7. Mark Penn: Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, runs a PR firm that prepped the Blackwater CEO for his recent congressional testimony, is aggressively involved in anti-union efforts, and has represented villains from the Argentine military junta and Philip Morris to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster.

    8. Sleazy campaigning: Hillary stayed on the ballot in Michigan after Edwards and Obama pulled their names, then audaciously said the delegates she won unopposed should count retroactively. She, Bill and their surrogates have conducted a politics of personal attack that begins to echo Karl Rove, from distorting Obama’s position on Iraq and abortion choice, to dancing out surrogates to imply that the Republicans will tar him as a drug user.

    9. NAFTA: Hillary can’t have it both ways in stoking nostalgia for Bill. NAFTA damaged lives and communities and widened America’s economic divides. Edwards spoke out powerfully against it. Clinton now claims the agreement needs to be modified, but her husband staked all his political capital in ramming it through, helping to hollow out America’s economy and split the Democratic Party for the 1994 Gingrich sweep.

    10. Widening the circle: Obviously Obama spurs massive enthusiasm in the young and in the African-American community. I’m also impressed at the range of people turning out to support his campaign. At a Seattle rally I attended, the volunteer state campaign chair had started as Perot activist. The founding coordinator in the state’s second-largest county, a white female Iraq war vet, voted for Bush in 2000 and written in Colin Powell in 2004 before becoming outraged about Iraq “I’ve always leaned conservative,” she said, “but Obama’s announcement speech moved me to tears. The Audacity of Hope made me rethink my beliefs. He inspires me with his honesty and integrity.” As well as inspiring plenty of progressive activists, Obama is engaging people who haven’t come near progressive electoral politics in years.

    11. The story we tell: Obama captures people with a narrative about where he wants to take America. His personal story is powerful, but he keeps the emphasis on the ordinary citizens who need to take action to make change. Clinton, in contrast, focuses largely on her personal story, her presumed strengths and travails. Except for the symbolism of having a woman president, it’s a recipe that downplays the possibility of common action for change.

    12. Citizen movements matter: Edwards not only ran for president, but worked to build a citizen movement capable of working for change whatever his candidacy’s outcome. Obama has taken a similar approach, beginning when he first organized low-income Chicago communities and coordinated a still-legendary voter registration drive. His speeches consciously encourage his supporters to join together and constitute a force equivalent to the abolitionist, union, suffrage, and civil rights movements. Like Edwards, he’s working to build a movement capable of pushing his policies through the political resistance he will face (and probably of pushing him too if he fails to lead with enough courage). In this context, Clinton’s LBJ/Martin Luther King comparison, and her dismissal of the power of words to inspire people, is all too revealing. She really does believe change comes from knowing how to work the insider levers of power. Edwards and Obama know it takes more.

    That’s why this Edwards supporter is proud to do all I can to make Barack Obama the Democratic nominee and president.

    Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

    I don’t dip into Alternet as often as I should. But I did today, and I found the juxtaposition of two stories very interesting:

    1. The FBI agent in charge of interrogating Saddam Hussein for seven months says that not only was there no link between Saddam and Al Qaida, but Saddam saw Bin Laden as a dangerous and destablizing force.

    2. Months after the scandal first broke (or is it years), government honchos are still interfering with scientists who try to speak out on climate change.

    These two stories share a pattern: a White House administration that sees truth as an inconvenient obstacle, but one it can easily climb over. See my post earlier today about the 935 documented lies on just one issue, in just two years.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

    While I was still feeling nauseous after the smug hypocrisy and misleading statements that filled last night’s State of the Union address, I followed a link to a study released this week by the well-respected Center for Public Integrity.

    That study documents 935 false statements by the Bush administration just about Iraq, counting only the two years beginning 9/11/01. 259 of these lies were straight from the lips of George W. Bush. That means Bush lied about Iraq (either about WMDs or the imaginary Al Qaida connection) once every 2.8 days–and his administration lied more than once a day.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the last president impeached for telling one single lie, about a personal matter that affected only his immediate family and a few others. Yes, that was wrong. But how much worse is it to tell almost a thousand lies on just this one topic (who knows how many others?), and have on your conscience some 4000 dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, that country in ruins and our own a rogue state that can’t meet its own people’s basic needs, and our reputation as a great nation in tatters.

    Madame Speaker Nancy Pelosi, what will it take to convince you that the time is long past to put impeachment back on the table?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Peace and War, Politics

    Facing a tough race for his own seat in Congress, Dennis Kucinich is ending his presidential campaign.

    This is very unfortunate. I heard Kucinich speak during the 2004 campaign, happily voted for him in the primary, and was appalled to see the way mainstream media refused to acknowledge his candidacy.

    In fact, Kucinich and the similarly ignored Ron Paul are the only ones to raise any truly visionary ideas in this campaign (unless you count Huckabee’s idea to rewrite the Constitution as a Christian fundamentalist document–ugh!). Kucinich’s platform included single-payer health care, a dramatic shift toward renewable energy, and many other things we progressives have advocated for years–and which the mainstream media cloaks in invisibility, so candidates with something fresh to bring to the table get no coverage, and people have to hear about them through their own personal networks and brave media outlets like Democracy Now.

    I question the ethics of a media empire that decides which candidates we should listen to, sanitizes those remaining, and ducks out on intelligent coverage of real issues. The whole system is deeply broken.

    To me, Kucinich was the first person since George McGovern and Shirley Chisolm that I could vote for with a smile and a light heart, as someone who actually represents my views, and I wasn’t old enough to vote for McGovern.

    He and Ron Paul have been the only ones willing to speak truth to power. Gravel has good politics but he’s been reaaaaly quiet!

    The country is poorer for him being forced out.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

    Seems to be a day for absurdist stories. First the FBI phone tapping gets shut off for nonpayment, and now this: some print journalists in Colorado want to keep “political activists posing as journalists” out of the legislature. and they’ve actually gotten a really dumb policy enacted.

    Translation, as I see it: keep the bloggers and other riff-raff in the indy media out. Just as Kucinich and Paul were kept out of the New Hampshire debates, becuse neither of them follow the party line.

    Let’s hope this gets reversed quickly, before it makes a lot of people look stupid.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

    Big Brother is Big Broke? One more bit of incompetence from the bizarre GWB administration:

    The FBI lost a whole bunch of its wiretaps for failing to pay its enormous phone bill, USA Today reports.

    Of course, since a lot of government wiretaps didn’t bother with such niceties as FISA warrants, this might turn out to be a good thing.

    But don’t you feel so much safer?

    Needless to say, some bloggers have been having some fun with this:

    Fast Silicon:

    Because incidents like this make it all too clear that “Big Brother” rides the short bus and frequently forgets to take his meds.

    This same blogger referred to the FBI being “outed as morons.”

    Then there’s this delicious satirical piece by James Dickerman on Huffington Post:

    When the ACLU complained initially to the phone companies, talking about some constitutional hooey, the phone companies said that they were just trying to do their patriotic duty to help the FBI find terrorists between phone conversations about The Office. It made a lot of sense. Now though, the ACLU is saying, “Hey hey, phone companies. If you’re really so patriotic, why are you shutting down the wiretaps?” It’s a ridiculous idea that completely contradicts what the phone company is up to. Can’t the ACLU see that if the phone company had to shut down the wiretaps in order to protect our way of life?

    If you want more, here’s the whole Google listing for fbi phone bill.

    Oh, and wait till you see the FBI’s official excuse–one of the best examples of how not to write a press release I’ve ever seen:

    The FBI is confident that the Department of Justice effort to create a Unified Financial Management System for all DOJ agencies will greatly strengthen oversight and controls over financial programs, including confidential case funds and the related costs associated with telecommunications services. While there is widespread agreement that the current financial management system, first introduced in the 1980’s, is inadequate, the FBI will not tolerate financial mismanagement, or worse, and is addressing the issues identified in the audit. Every effort is being made to either implement the recommendations or otherwise put in place corrective actions to ensure appropriate oversight.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Politics

    While others are shocked, investigate reporter Greg Palast is not surprised that Jon Mendelsohn, chief fundraiser for Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, is involved with a big scandal.

    Nine years ago, Palast secretly recorded Mendelsohn–thinking he was taling to a lobbyist from Enron–bragging that he could get to anyone in British government is the price was right, even Gordon Brown (at that time in charge of the British treasury).

    His question is not how a supposedly ethical party man was able to channel “£630,000 ($1.2 million) in dodgy, possibly illegal, campaign contributions to Labour”–but why Brown, who couldn’t have been uninformed about Mendelsohn’s shady history, brought him on board in the first place.

    An interesting question, indeed!

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

    Ken MacArthur reports that he was offered a Congressional Medal of Honor in a robot-telemarketing call by the office of Congressman Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma.

    He was quite rightly sickened by the for-a-fee pitch, as the Congressional Medal of Honor is supposed to be “the highest award for valor in action against an enemy force which can be bestowed upon an individual serving in the Armed Services of the United States. Generally presented to its recipient by the President of the United States of America in the name of Congress.”

    Hmmm–didn’t Jesus himself throw the moneychangers out of the temple? Wasn’t the Protestant Reformation launched by people who were sick and tired of the Vatican selling indulgences that hadn’t been earned? And didn’t a certain President Clinton get in trouble for selling access to the White House and the Lincoln Bedroom? Have we learned nothing? Are we so wwilling to cheapen the name of the veterans who earned this powerful accolade?

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