Category: Ethics in Government

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

As if the scandals involving conduct of the war and treatment of prisoners weren’t bad enough…now we find a U.S. Army Reserve officer who doesn’t just have his hand in the cookie jar…he’s sucking the contents out with a hose!

Both AP and UPI reported identical stories about Lt. Col. Bruce D. Hopfengardner and his extortion of “cash, cars, premium airline seats, jewelry, alcohol and even sexual favors” in order to throw massive contracts toward those bribing him.

He has pled guilty, as have the two men who wooed him with such “gifts” as “a white 2004 GMC Yukon Denali with a sandstone interior,” a Harley-Davidson, and a $5700 watch.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Uncategorized

Come on, people–what possible justification can there be for re-classifiying ancient records of how many and which kinds of nuclear weapons the US government deployed through 1971? The stuff was made public, widely reported in newspapers at the time, and is completely irrelevant to today’s security concerns.

And as a taxpayer, I can only hope this is a typo: The Department of Energy alone…

…has reported to Congress that 6,640 pages have been withdrawn from public access (at a cost of $3,313 per page)

The cost per page cited here is almost exactly half the number of pages, so I’m hoping someone garbled their statistics. Surely there are better uses for $21,998,320 than to obscure information from a public that already has access, but now has to work much harder; if you’ve never had the “pleasure” of scanning old newspapers on microfilm, I can tell you that the Web is a heck of a lot easier. These are the people that are supposed to be fiscally conservative? What can they be doing to run up three thousand dollars in expenses for every single page?

Is this just a case of Bush Administration paranoia, or is it still another instance of a more disturbing trend to take away the rights of Americans, pull down the curtain on any sort of openness in government, and make it ever-harder for journalists and researchers to do their work?

Unfortunately, I suspect the latter.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Uncategorized

They still don’t get it! No matter how many times the courts and Congress tell them that torture is not OK, the Bush “do-it-my-way” Executive branch continues to duck, to twist, and to cause shame for thinking Americans.

The latest, as reported in the Washington Post, is a scheme to retroactively immunize CIA and other government torturers by making their crimes no longer crimes.

Disgusting!

Meanwhile the Bushies yap about how taking away the “right” to spy on American citizens will mess up their war on terror, which they’ve messed up quite well enough without outside help. Fortunately, yet another judge disagreed with them.

Sooner or later, it will have to dawn on these people that they are, in fact, bound by the laws they are charged with upholding. Meanwhile, there’s always the voting booth–IF we can be assured that those who count the ballots aren’t trying to throw the election again.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

The most famous Native American musician of my generation and a bit older is Buffy Sainte-Marie, singer and songwriter who was never afraid to be political. She had numerous songs about peace and about Indian rights. In the early 80s, I actually got to interview her at some length for a long profile that was published in a computer magazine (the focus of the story was the many unique ways she used her Macintosh.)

Now an article posted on the Indian Country website alleges that she was the target of a campaign of deliberate suppression by the US government. That in fact, there was a widespread campaign to suppress political rock music during the years of Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s presidency–and this campaign went so far as to at least consider assassination attempts.

Sainte-Marie says she was blacklisted and, along with other American Indians in the Red Power movements, was put out of business in the 1970s.

”I found out 10 years later, in the 1980s, that [President] Lyndon Johnson had been writing letters on White House stationary praising radio stations for suppressing my music,” Sainte-Marie said in a 1999 interview with Indian Country Today at Dine’ College…

In the United States, her records were disappearing. Thousands of people at concerts wanted records. Although the distributor said the records had been shipped, no one seemed to know where they were. One thing was for sure: They were not on record store shelves.

”I was put out of business in the United States.”

Sainte-Marie is someone who I don’t believe would make this accusation unless she truly believed it–she has always struck me as a person of great integrity. But she’s got her dates wrong. “Universal Soldier” was first recorded in 1964; Johnson, known as a strong-arm kind of a guy from his days as a leader in the Senate, was President from 1964 to 1969–a time when protest music and counterculture music filled the airwaves. While it wouldn’t be entirely out of character for him, this kind of action seems a bit of a stretch. Richard Nixon (of whom these accusations could more easily be believed) was president from 1969-74.

The Indian Country article focuses on a court suit by one Charles August Schlund III, who

…stated he is a covert operative and supports Sainte-Marie’s assertions that the United States took action to suppress rock music because of its role in rallying opposition to the Vietnam War.

However, Schlund has not established credibility in my mind, and comes across in this article as pretty flaky. He sees a vast conspiracy to replace rock with the (often politically conservative) country music genre, orchestrated by the Rockefellers in order to control the natural resources of Vietnam.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Events, General Commentary, Uncategorized

For several years, I’ve wondered about the failure to scramble fighter planes on 9/11 to intercept the hijacked jets. I’ve ready all the conspiracy theories, and agree that the series of coincidences is not plausible, and probably not random. However, now that the transcripts of NORAD’s Northeast control center (NEADS) have been released, it seems very clear to me that whatever conspiracies might have been in play, NORAD’s controllers weren’t a part of it.

Michael Bronner, writing in Vanity Fair, uses the actual transcripts of NORAD/NEADS control room operations on that fateful day, with his explanation and commentary. Bronner, an associate producer on the movie United 93, has the background to interpret what the cryptic military language actually means–and most of his commentary is simply explaining what we hear (yes, you can actually listen to several brief clips).

The article is long, and includes large sections of actual transcripts. I recommend printing it out and reading carefully (and listening to some of the clips).

What I come away with…

  • NORAD did absolutely the best job they could, given the lateness and dearth of information that should have been pouring into them from the first moment it was known that one plane had been hijacked
  • The government was completely unprepared for the possibility that planes would be hijacked by trained pilots who would know to turn off the transponder beacons that establish aircraft location for air traffic controllers
  • They only had four fighter jets to scramble, and they did scramble them, as well as call in additional resources so that by day’s end, 300 jets were patrolling American cities–but because of the late notice and the equipment’s failure to track planes with transponders disabled, they couldn’t intercept–and misinformation such as the belief that American flight 11 was still airborne and headed for Washington (not to mention that there were reports of over a dozen possible hijackings) didn’t help
  • There may have been a cover-up in NORAD’s testimony to the 9/11 Commission–but the incorrect testimony just as easily could have been faulty memory or misunderstanding rather than malice
  • Any order to shoot down civilian aircraft could only come from the President–and as we all know, GWB was reading children’s stories in Florida at the time
  • Dick Cheney lied about agonizing over the decision whether to shoot down Flight 93, which crashed in the Pennsylvania farm field within seconds of his first being notified that it was off course

    • What this article establishes in my mind is that NORAD’s people behaved phenomenally well under conditions more stressful than any in history–but they had antiquated and inadequate equipment, antiquated and inadequate and in some cases completely false information, and no chance to preemptively block the hijackers from reaching their targets.

    I commend their courage, and I thank Vanity Fair for running the article. Now…was there a conspiracy involving other aspects of 9/11?

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

    Remember the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from high school physics? It’s the idea that the act of observing something can alter the organisms or events being observed.

    A fascinating article by Thomas Kostigen on Dow Jones MarketWatch looks at how media coverage changes the behavior of governments and corporations, specifically dealing with ethical concerns. The article cites the work of Luigi Zingales, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business–who found that businesses will often improve their behavior when the media spotlight shines on them.

    As an example, when the media jumped on the excessive-compensation reportage regarding the salary of former New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso, he lost his job.

    However, government is a different matter, at least these days. Kostigan sees the media, in its coverage of both corporate and government issues, as irresponsibly unwilling to go deep, late in its reportage, and too eager to sail in the perceived political wind:

    Too often the media plays patsy and is meek in the face of challenge, as was the case with the reporting on the events leading up to the war in Iraq. Or it trails intrepid government inquisitors such as Elliott Spitzer. Or it gets the story wrong — weapons of mass destruction, President Bush’s National Guard record. Or lies about it — Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley

    On the business front, the media lagged inquiry on just about every corporate scandal in recent memory; its business is to break news, not merely report it.

    As someone who writes regularly about ethics and media, I have to agree with him, at least as far as the mainstream press goes. Most important stories these days are broken by the underground press, or by people like Greg Palast who is an American working for British journalism companies that are less afraid to go after the truth.

    I’m still hoping that the Business Ethics Pledge will help change that unwillingness to question. Questioning–questioning everything, and digging deeper–is what journalism should be about.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Uncategorized

    Here in Massachusetts, the failure of the massive road project in central Boston known as the Big Dig has been front-page news for about a week. A recently-married motorist was killed when a tunnel ceiling collapsed on her car; her husband managed to crawl out a window and escape.

    To his credit, Republican Governor Mitt Romney cut short an out-of-town trip, stepped in, assumed (long-overdue) control over the project, and began immediate inspections–inspections that revealed thousands of glaring safety errors in many parts of the project.

    Throughout its decades-long construction, the Big Dig has been plagued by cost overruns, corruption, allegations that inferior materials were used, and other problems. And almost as soon as the tunnels under Boston Harbor were opened (not that long ago), they began to leak. We already knew it was a boondoggle. Now it seems that both the design and engineering were deeply flawed and the largest/most expensive single road project in US history has been a failure.

    One has to question whether proper government oversight, complete with thorough inspections at every step of the way, would have shown the shoddy materials and flawed engineering without someone having to die.

    Meanwhile, here’s another example that corruption has human costs.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

    Want to learn about corruption and influence-peddling on the House Appropriations Committee–one of the very most powerful committees on the whole of Capitol Hill?

    David Sirota has quite a bit to say on the subject, in a wide-ranging article covering everything from Jack Abramoff to Mad Cow Disease. Highly recommended.

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

    You may also like this site: https://www.consortiumnews.com/: Easily scannable word and natinal headlines and articles from a progressive-politics viewpoint.

    h, and if you’re not familiar with Democracy Now, this hard-hitting and highly ethical one-hour news program airs five days a week and has broken story after story. The show has an excellent website, too.

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