This week, a citizen in the village of Niles, IL (pop. 30,000) made a proposal for applicant disclosure, something every ethics program should have, but most do not. According to an article in yesterday's Niles Herald-Spectator, the proposal "would ask if the applicant’s officers, directors or partners are related by blood or marriage or reside in the same residence as any Niles elected official, appointed official [or] village employee. It would also require the applicant to disclose information regarding political contributions to any such elected official, appointed official or Niles employee" over the past five years.

ProPublica ran an excellent article yesterday by Kim Barker and Al Shaw about campaign, PAC, and Super PAC coordination and self-dealing, primarily at the presidential level. What is so special about the article is that it follows the money to where it is being spent. The authors found that many PAC and Super PAC vendors are the same vendors, or different vendors owned by the same people, as the presidential campaigns'. In other words, presidential consultants are also PAC consultants or vendors.

This is also a problem at the local level, especially with local public financing programs, where coordination with PACs is less of an issue (the money is spent on other campaigns). What is prohibited is the taking of funds from PACs. What happens instead is that PACs sometimes pay a candidate's consultants and other vendors, including landlords and utilities when they share an office.

But that's only one of the ways local candidates use vendors to get around prohibitions and limitations.

Here's the situation. There is a state ethics program that applies to local governments, and an ethics issue relating to a local law arises. There is no local ethics commission to enforce the local law, so what happens?

This is the situation in Cincinnati. The issue involves a charter provision that prohibits city funds from being disbursed for the purpose of a political campaign. This is usually an ethics matter (misuse of city property), but since there is no ethics commission in Cincinnati, three things happened when a council member put references on her website to her campaign (thereby making use of the city's broadband service), according to an article on Friday in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

A good followup to my last blog post, on Lawrence Lessig's book, is what Jack Abramoff said on 60 Minutes this Sunday, pushing his new book Capitol Punishment.

America's most infamous lobbyist went almost overboard condemning both himself and the system by which lobbyists get what they want out of Congress. He said that he would make job offers to congressional aides, and once he did so, "We owned them. Every request we make, they're going to do it." Former Rep. Bob Ney's chief of staff said on the show that he had a "corrupt relationship" with Abramoff, who offered him a job at a hockey game. Ney, who also did time (the only member related to this scandal to do so) said that he and Abramoff were "involved in a culture of corruption together."

Lawrence Lessig's excellent new book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (Twelve, Oct. 5, 2011) is about Congress and mostly about campaign finance, but it is also an important look at institutional corruption that has some valuable things to say that are relevant to local government ethics.

Lessig, who is director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University, came to government ethics in an interesting fashion. As a law professor specializing in copyright law, he sought to make out-of-print but copyrighted books available to the public. But his efforts, as reasonable, as clearly in the public interest, and as consistent with the Constitution (which actually mentions copyright) as can be, went nowhere. Instead, copyrights were extended more and more.

Institutional Corruption
Lessig came to realize that what caused these extensions, institutional corruption, is "the gateway problem: until we solve it, we won't solve any number of other critical problems." True reform, in any area, is impossible as long as the current institutional situation remains. Therefore, he switched his focus from copyright to government ethics, with an emphasis on campaign finance.

Once again, an elected official in the national eye took an opportunity to teach the public about government ethics and used it solely to distort government ethics and defend himself.

The official is Texas Governor Rick Perry who, according to an article in yesterday's New York Daily News, was accused of having taken money from the pharmaceutical company Merck and then made an executive order requiring all junior high girls in the state to take a Merck HPV vaccine.