Category: Ethics in Government

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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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Found a very interesting blog examining the issue of Dick Cheney having an ambulance always at the ready:

That the nation’s vice president and de-facto leader is so frail and so close to death’s door…should surely have been a major topic of conversation during the 2004 election.

But nobody mentioned it.

It’s also worth pointing out that this same administration that is spending what must be millions of dollars on a mobile cardiac unit to travel with the vice president is calling for cuts in Medicare and Medicaid that will force poor Americans and the elderly to make do with second-tier medications for such things as heart conditions.

This blog is not set up with blog software. At the moment this is the second post. Or search for
Ambulance Chasing and the Veep

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Now they’re reclassifying ancient once-classified documents, many of them with no secrecy value anymore and some of them widely published, The New York Times reports.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid [a researcher] found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Does this really need to be a secret? It’s been over 15 years since there even was an Iron Curtain!

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office.

Surely, there are more effective ways of deploying our anti-terrorism resources.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government

This article from Maclean’s covers many of the ethics issues involving business and China–not just the current controversy over Chinese censorship of the Internet (and the horrible fact that “Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist recently sentenced to 10 years in prison for divulging state secrets over the Net. Tao anonymously posted details of the government’s plans to limit coverage of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on a pro-democracy website, and Yahoo handed over his identity to Chinese authorities”)–but also looks at a wide range of issues involving western companies in China, from the making of clothing to the environmental and human rights nightmare of the Three Gorges Dam.

The article also compliments Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who “is sponsoring a draft bill that would require Web companies to establish a code of conduct for operating in repressive regimes, prohibiting them from facilitating unreasonable censorship or co-operating in the abuse of human rights.”

And the article has a very illuminating comparison of how the international business community helped force the end of apartheid in South Africa, and what is not being done in China–or, for that matter, in Sudan.

Go read it.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Even George Will thinks Bush has gone too far with his illegal spying.

If the Bush doctrine holds, he writes, future administrations won’t even bother consulting Congress even before going to war:

Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration’s stance…

And derides Bush for a double standard on new interpretations of the law.

Worth reading.

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

As a Massachusetts taxpayer, I resent this. The Boston Globe reports that several Boston-area hospitals have wildly overcharged the state on charges for caring for indigent patients.

Two among several examples cited:

[Cambridge Health Alliance] charged the pool $6,469 for 100 tablets of the anticholesterol drug Lipitor, for which it should have charged $224. In total, overcharges for Lipitor amounted to $1 million.

Boston Medical Center dramatically marked up charges for CT scans: $2,677 for a specific type of scan compared to $272 to $436 that Medicare or a private HMO would pay.

Hmph. It almost sounds like these folks borrowed some procurement “experts” from the Pentagon. You’d think the Mitt Romney administration, which ran on a campaign of fiscal responsibility, would pay more attention.

Now, keep in mind, these are only allegations–note the question mark in my headline. But they’re serious allegations, and I hope the Riley probe is thorough and fast.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

George C. Deutsch worked at NASA until yesterday. This was the guy who didn’t want to let reporters talk to NASA scientists who believe that there is in fact a climate change problem–or other science issues that did not follow the Bush administration line. He’s also the one who would not let the agency utter the phrase “Big Bang” without following it with “Theory.”

According to his resume, he graduated from Texas A&M University in 2003. According to the university, however, in a document released yesterday, he did no such thing. He attended, but never finished.

He’s only 24, but you’d think by now he’d have figured out a cardinal rule: never lie on your resume. Not only is it unethical, but it’s awfully easy to catch if anyone bothers to check.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

My congratulations to Noel L. Hillman, chief of the Department of Justice’s public integrity division, and until the other day, lead investigator in the Abramoff scandal. President Bush just named him to a judgeship.

Unfortunately, this rather too conveniently leaves this crucial probe, which has reached into many corners of the Washington bureaucracy, a rudderless ship.

Is this a coincidence? I rather doubt it. I am in no way impugning the integrity of Mr. Hillman, but I do wonder if he would have been promoted had he not been uncovering this nasty bit of business.

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