Ethics Environments

Update (9/30/09)
I tend to focus a lot on weaknesses of ethics codes, but sometimes ethics codes go too far. One reason for this is that they are usually responses to scandals that are criminal in nature, that is, scandals that do not involve conflicts of interest. Another reason is that most people don't understand that ethics codes are really conflict of interest codes, not codes that deal with all of an official's behavior. It's appropriate to have aspirational provisions that...

A three-year FBI investigation of Cuyahoga County (which includes Cleveland) appears to have begun with a sting operation involving building inspectors, where an undercover agent offered bribes, and they were accepted, according to an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer...

There is a bright side to the British Parliament expenses scandal. For one thing, many M.P.'s had the fortitude to walk right by that enormous parliamentary trough and eat at home instead.

Second, Parliament showed the world how a failure to do the right thing and do it transparently — seek larger incomes — and instead to take public money clandestinely and then, when news started leaking out, to deny and obfuscate, can completely undermine trust in a public institution.

Here's a short opinion piece by Walter Dellinger, head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Pres. Clinton. It's part of a series of such pieces that will appear in tomorrow's Washington Post. The opinions concern what Pres. Obama should be looking for in his first Supreme Court nominee. After Dellinger's opinion piece, I tie his ideas into...

Two days ago, I wrote about a Chicago Heights (IL) situation where two council members who work under a third council member were in a position to vote for their boss to be the city's mayor. A suit brought by a group of local ministers to prevent this from happening was dismissed, according to an article in...

Booms and busts are common not only in a financial system. They are also common in government ethics.

Booms are when things are good, when local politicians seem worthy of our trust. Busts are when we find out that things aren't what they seemed. In other words, when there's a scandal.