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 he and the office's executive director were found by the city's inspector general to have mishandled a 2008 sexual harassment complaint (e.g., they tried to find the accused another city job). The IG recommended that the mayor suspend the two men for thirty days without pay.

It's not an unfamiliar story. Council candidates promise ethics reform. They are elected, and actually fulfill their promises with a proposed ethics ordinance. But there's not really much to the proposed ethics ordinance, and there's no enforcement mechanism.

This is what is happening in Yorba Linda (pop. 71,000), just outside Anaheim. The proposed ethics ordinance has few provisions, most of them involving campaign finance and city contractors and developers.

DuPage County, IL, a county of nearly a million people just outside Chicago (its largest town is Naperville), is juggling two ethics ordinance revision processes, one for the county, the other for the county election commission. Both appear to have attracted some controversy.

I was in Chicago for the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws annual conference for a week, which is why I haven't been blogging lately. I was there when Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested, so the arrest and the tales of selling a Senate seat and blackmailing the Chicago Tribune are old news now. But there are a couple of interesting facts about the situation which have been largely ignored.

My state, Connecticut, has just added itself to the at least 14 states that provide for public official pension forfeiture. Like some of the other states, its new law covers municipal officials.

Pension forfeiture is the capital punishment of government ethics.  It makes legislators look like they care about ethics, and it makes people feel that justice has been done. And with all these "good" emotions sparking supportive editorials, few think about the arguments pro and con, or the alternatives, which include fines and restitution (some of which could be taken out of future pension payments). Pension forfeiture is more about retribution than it is about ethics, law enforcement, or accountability.

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.

Recently, Google has taken what appears to be a distinctly less transparent and open approach to their news distribution search engine. Matthew Lee maintains a small blog/website called http://www.innercitypress.com/ and has a reputation for hounding the UN - specifically the UNDP about what he considers corruption. Recently though, google announced a partnership with the UNDP and here is what happened next:

(it seems that) "... someone at the UNDP had pressured Google into "de-listing" him from Google News — essentially preventing Inner City Press from being classified on Google News as a legitimate news source and from having its stories pop up when someone conducts a Google News search."