Category: Ethics in Government

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Uncategorized

A group of US Military Academy alums formed a group called West Point Graduates Against The War.

These distinguished alums of West Point specifically cited the lessons they learned as students in the Academy and announced specifically that the new group’s purpose is (quoting form the press release)…

To convert the disgrace of governmental lies and evasions about the assault on Iraq into a force to redeem the honor of their country. At issue–which directly assaults the West Point honor code which forges the character of all graduates–are the falsehoods by administration officials, culminating in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, which catapulted the United States into a preventive war.

“This fraudulent war has done such enormous damage to the reputation and prestige of the United States and its military forces,” said co-founder James Ryan. “Unless remedied, this will prove catastrophic to our country’s interests over the longer term.”

“The West Point honor code, which mandates cadets will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do, defines honor and duty,” said Joseph Wojcik, co-founder of West Point Graduates Against the War. “And this provides us with a lifelong sense of duty, a shared responsibility for graduates to do the right thing, even if that means admonishing our country’s leadership.”

Can you believe this? West Point Graduates Against the War received a cease-and-desist letter directly from the Academy, demanding that they remove the term, “West Point”; the use of the terms…

“West Point”, “United States Military Academy”, “USMA”, and “U.S. Army” without the express permission of the Department of Army [sic] constitutes a violation of Title 17 of the United States Code…it is deeply important to protect the valuable trademarks that enhance the image and standing of the United States Military Academy in [sic] the national and world stage.”

The group, in its public response, points out that businesses such as West Point Pizza, West Point cleaners, and the West Point Motel all operate nearby. And that they, as legitimate grads of West Point, should have every right to use the name.

West Point is far more than some mere product or “valuable trademark” to us. What is deeply important to us is the “image and standing of the United States Military Academy.” This is precisely what we members of West Point Graduates Against The War are trying to uphold. Our organization’s opposition to the policies of the Bush administration promotes the very Constitutional First Amendment rights all military officers swear to protect and defend.

To these courageous veterans, I have only a one-word response: Bravo!

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

How much more evidence to we need? Every time I turn around, it seems there’s another revelation about lies told to the American public by this corrupt and incompetent administration. Now, the Washington Post reports that the government knew all along that those two trailers it found in Iraq, and used to belatedly justify the invasion, had nothing to do with biological weapons production.

If ever there was an argument to be made for a parliamentary style of government, where a crisis forces new elections, it would be this administration. With its lies, its finger pointing, its illegal and thuggish tactics (can you say “Valerie Plame”? It seems that GWB can and did when he gave the authorization to blow her cover, according to Scooter Libby), and its very scary politics, this administration has been an ethical and moral disgrace from the get-go.

What kind of scary politics?

  • Going to war without justification
  • Stonewalling the 9/11 Commission
  • Rushing through legislation, like the Patriot Act, that is a direct threat to freedom and democracy
  • Illegally spying on its own citizens, and then trying to make it legal after the fact when it got caught
  • Overturning so much of the progress made on environmental and social issues over the past fifty years
  • Oh, and let’s not forget the deliberate decisions to let New Orleaneans face their flooding city without meaningful assistance, and then to repeatedly deny that they had days of warning and chose to do nothing

    • And we won’t even discuss the whole passel of personal enrichment scandals that taint so many Bush allies

    Enough is enough, already. We don’t have a parliamentary democracy here–but we do have an impeachment process. It is time to impeach both GWB and Cheney.

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

    I do find it interesting that there’s so much attention to Bird Flu these days on the part of the government. Especially with all the news stories breaking out (82,600 of them) about Donald Rumsfeld’s extremely lucrative connection with the company that developed it. Rumsfeld has never impressed me as being particularly concerned about human life–certainly not in Iraq–or about doing the right thing (he seems remarkably unconcerned about the torture of prisoners that has occurred on his watch).

    But he took quite a bit of stock in Tamiflu developer Gilead Sciences when he left his position as Board Chairman to take his current job in the Bush cabinet. The stock had appreciated to $30 million worth, so he sold off some shares and took a $5 million capital gain.

    In this administration, one does have to ask if it’s a coincidence that this firm gets to develop the virus drug and sell it to the government.

    And I further submit that this gang of rich rogues is completely out of touch with the needs of working Americans who don’t have a few extra million around with which to wheel and deal.

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

    Why do these people think for a moment that they can pull this crap and not get caught? Once again, we see proof that unethical behavior not only gives you a guilty conscience, but when (not if) you get caught, it’ll blow up in your face. Even if it doesn’t seem to be working in the scandal-ridden US government at the moment, it will. Meanwhile, Japan’s opposition party has just shot itself in the foot, big time, by faking an e-mail alleging connection to a corporation under investigation.

    Party leader Seiji Maehara and his lieutenants stepped down after the party’s credibility was torpedoed by one of its own lawmakers, who used a fraudulent e-mail in an apparent attempt to discredit Koizumi’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

    The funny thing is I’m sure they could have found some real dirt–no need to make any up. then the scandal would have played their way.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government

    I’m not used to nodding yes when US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales speaks. But his remarks to a business group in Portland, Oregon definitely resonate:

    But our dream can also be tarnished and diminished by government and corporate scandal.

    I’ve told Department prosecutors to operate with one principle in mind: No one is above the law-not a city councilman, a CEO, or a Member of Congress.

    The role of the Department is not to discourage business risks that are rewarded or punished in the marketplace. Rather, we seek to prosecute those who engage in lawless practices. In this same spirit, we will protect intellectual property rights as well against domestic and international piracy.

    The protection of the civil rights of all Americans is an historic mission of the Department of Justice and an essential element of realizing the American Dream.

    We will continue to aggressively combat discrimination wherever it is found. For example, we recently announced Operation Home Sweet Home, an expansion of our Fair Housing Act testing program.

    This mission includes protecting the rights of those with disabilities and institutionalized persons. We’re also vigorously working to end the modern-day slavery of human trafficking.

    Let me reflect for a moment on one major right, the key political right, the right to vote. Three years ago, when I was White House Counsel to President Bush, my then 72-year-old mother visited Washington, DC and the Oval Office for the first time. My mom never voted until she was 50. She explained that it had become a different time for people of color in America.

    Laudable sentiments, all. I hope this means we can count on Mr. Gonzales to support and vigorously enforce laws that provide consequences for business ethics violations, as well as for HR 550 — The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and co-sponsored by a number of Representatives on both sides of the aisle.

    This would provide for voter-verifiable, auditable paper trails in conjunction with the electronic voting screens so common these days–and thus would prevent the scandalously unverifiable questionable results we’ve seen in the last few elections.

    The e-mail I received about it (from TrueMajority.org) notes,

    It already has the bipartisan support of 1/3 of the House of Representatives, and has been endorsed by VoteTrustUSA and VerifiedVoting.org as the “gold standard” in verifiability legislation. Not only would it mandate a voter verified paper record for every vote cast, it would also:

    (1) establish a mandatory uniform national standard that states that the voter verified paper ballot — the only record verified by the voter rather than the voting machine — is the vote of record in the case of any inconsistency with electronic records;

    (2) provide Federal funding to pay for implementation of voter verified paper balloting;

    (3) require a percentage of mandatory manual (by hand count) random audits of actual election results in every state, and in each county, for every Federal election;

    (4) prohibit the use at any time of undisclosed software, wireless communication devices, and Internet connections in voting machines;

    (5) require full implementation by 2006; and

    (6) protect the accessibility mandates of the Help America Vote Act.

    The language in this bill was carefully written with input from computer scientists, disabilities organizations, and election reform advocates. It should be passed as written and in time to protect the 2006 elections.

    There are many politically contentious election reform issues mentioned in the report but making sure that votes are counted accurately is not one of them. Elections are the foundation of a representative democracy, and representative democracy lives or dies based on the integrity of its elections. HR 550 will help restore voters’ confidence and ensure the accuracy and integrity of America’s elections.

    Attorney General Gonzales, I look forward to your public support o this important legislation.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

    Unbelievable! The goon squad is going after veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, one of the few people in the White House Press Corps who actually still remembers how to ask an intelligent question or engage in critical thought.

    Earth to Planet Bill O’Reilly: do you and your “colleagues” need a refresher course in the First Amendment?

    It goes like this:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

    You say we’re in Iraq to to fight for democracy–well, how about a little democracy at home?

    Thomas was absolutely in line to ask why GWB took us to war in Iraq. After all, nobody’s found any weapons of mass destruction, Al Queda had no significant presence there until after the US attacked (though it certainly has one now, thanks to the predictably myopic policies of the Bush administration), and the enemy that had attacked us was thousands of miles away in Afghanistan.

    Bush, who almost never calls on Thomas and rarely calls on other reporters he can expect to ask hard questions (such as NPR’s Don Gonyea), gave a rambling, unfocused, and materially incorrect answer, and then patted himself on the back for taking a question from Thomas. Did he get attacked for this shameful, embarrassing performance? No–the attacks were against Helen Thomas.

    O’Reilly:”I would have laid into that woman, and I don’t care how old she is,”
    Don Imus: “The old bag should shut up and get out. I’m sick of her.”
    Ticker Carlson: “Propagandist.”

    Hey, pundits–the reason we have a First Amendment is that our Founding Fathers recognized the importance of an open press wiling to examine critically the actions of those in power whether in government or in the private sector. Questioning a policy based on lies and foggy vision is a high act of patriotism, IMHO.

    Or perhaps the O’Reillys and Imuses of the world think that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were unpatriotic scum. King George would have agreed with them, but he had some reasons. the ability to criticize was written into the Constitution by these true American heroes over 200 years ago, and thank goodness for their foresight.

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

    We all thought this was going to change in the fall. That’s when a spate of stories hit the news about the no-bid contracts on Katrina reconstruction, mostly awarded to large enterprises with close ties to the Bush administration and the military establishment, such as Halliburton and Bechtel.

    Here, among many examples, is a Washington Post story from September 29, in which…

    The officials responsible for monitoring more than $60 billion in federal Hurricane Katrina spending promised yesterday to take a hard look at every no-bid contract awarded since the storm and to investigate the adequacy of contracts the government had in place before disaster struck.

    Yet, here we are, six months later. And the government has reneged. Today’s Associated Press wire story shows FEMA’s dismal failure to keep its word.

    And not only that, but the usual percentages set aside for small (as the government laughably defines them–far bigger than most of the businesses I deal with) and minority-owned businesses aren’t even close to being achieved.

    Whether it’s incompetence or malfeasance, it looks might funky from here.

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

    If you follow business scandals, as I do, you’ll notice that a good many of the largest take place outside the US. There are constant reports from Japan, China, Africa, and elsewhere. In Europe, Italy’s Parmalat scandal got a fair bit of attention, among others.

    So it was rather a shock to read this Newsweek article about the dramatic collapse of a large state-owned bank due to poorly chosen investments in real estate deals that went ahead without the usual scrutiny.

    What’s really disturbing is that people knew about this all the way back to 2000. German taxpayers are left holding the bag underneath the rubble of Bankgesellschaft Berlin (BGB). The first trials of the company’s executives began last month.

    Noting that the Enron debacle helped push through Sarbanes-Oxley and other reforms, Newsweek expresses its surprise that…

    In Germany the response has been almost the opposite—public indifference and an official response that, at best, has been tepid and, at worst, amounts to a deliberate effort to enshroud the case in “extreme secrecy,” according to corruption watchdog group Transparency International.

    We had our own bank scandal based on “handshake” approvals for real estate deals here in Western Massachusetts about 15 years ago, and it took down one of the largest regional banks. The beautiful Northampton main branch, once the corporate headquarters, still remains vacant after more than a decade. But there was no shortage of reporting about it, and I think that made the banking community stronger—because the community wanted to protect itself from such a thing happening again.

    The article goes on to criticize the secretive German business structure that makes it hard to investigate or reform. Something German citizens who care about these things may want to change.

    Interestingly enough, I haven’t had a single signer of the Business Ethics Pledge from Germany. Any Germans want to step up and be first?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

    The February 06 issue of Business Ethics Magazine’s online edition includes this shocking note: A business lobbying firm called the Free Enterprise Forum has joined with an unnamed Nevada accounting firm to attack the Public Accounting Oversight Board, a key provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform law of 2002.

    SarbOx is pretty mild stuff, compared to the laws I might have written. But corporations do find it burdensome, with all the reporting requirements, etc. Still, they’ve had four years to get used to it, and it’s pretty amazing to come across remarks like this, from FEF chair Mallory Factor:

    “It’s a bad law and we’ll get rid of it any way we can.”

    Oh, and guess who’s on their legal team: Ken “Monica Lewinsky” Starr, and one of GWB’s former U.S. assistant attorneys general for legal policy, Viet Dinh.

    Starr spent millions of our tax dollars chasing down Clinton’s apparent inability to keep his pants zipped (or to tell the truth about it)–and now he’s attacking the ethics watchdogs. Hmmm.

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