Blogs

Almost three years ago, I wrote a blog post about the scandal that rocked my town, North Haven, CT. Since then, one of the two arrested department heads, the finance director, was given accelerated rehabilitation (lenient probation) because he turned state's evidence. The other department head, and his wife, who was his assistant, spent years delaying trial, and then also asked for accelerated rehabilitation. They had been charged with...

India and China have not only been the home of new varieties of entrepreneurialism. In these countries, creative individuals have also come up with novel approaches to dealing with local government corruption.

An expatriate Indian physics professor in the U.S. came up with the brilliant idea of a Zero-Rupee Note to hand out in situations where local officials expect or ask for bribes.

Cheryl Forchilli, chair of the Florida Commission on Ethics (which deals with local government ethics), wrote a must-read op-ed piece that appeared on the Florida Thinks blog yesterday.
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It is a truism of government ethics that a sense of entitlement is an important cause of unethical conduct. People who feel entitled to the power they wield feel they have the right to deviate from ethical norms in ways others do not (see my blog post on this topic). Now there is research that supports this view.

Never a dull moment in Chicago. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, a now-former alderman has pleaded guilty to bribery and tax fraud charges relating to $40,000 in work done on his home by a developer whose development he backed. This makes him the 29th Chicago alderman to be convicted over the last four decades (including his father, on a similar...

Update: February 19, 2010 (see below)

This blog post is about Chicago, and things are more complicated in Chicago than in other American municipalities. So please read slowly and carefully.

According to an article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, the first deputy in the mayor's Office of Compliance resigned a few weeks after...