At the Institutional Corruption Conference sponsored by Harvard's Safra Center last Saturday, Bruce Cain, a professor at UC Berkeley, pointed out that the permeable boundary between government and business (and, I would add, business law) brings into government many individuals who have a different concept of ethics. That is, in the business world, loyalty to one's supervisors (or clients) and to the company is the most important thing. In government, loyalty should be to the public. Of course, this is not loyalty as we know it, so loyalty should be suppressed as much as possible. But political appointees brought in from the outside are unlikely to put their loyalty aside, and those who hire them are unlikely to want this to happen.

On December 6, according to an article on the Chicago Talks website, Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel promised that he would make many ethics reforms to “change the culture” of corruption and cronyism at City Hall.

It's been a year since I last wrote about placement agents, so it's time for an update, based on an article put up yesterday on the Forbes Magazine site, designated for the May 23 issue.

Placement agents are intermediaries between pension boards and companies that invest pension boards' funds. They are paid by the investment companies to win pension boards over. They are especially useful to investment companies that are new, lack sales staff, or do not want to deal directly with pension boards due to disclosure and conflict rules.

In a letter to the editor in yesterday's New York Times, two lawyers who represent clients seeking to gut Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections public campaign financing program end by calling Arizona's program "a vision of unconstitutional dystopia, not free speech."

I administer the public campaign financing program in New Haven, CT. These programs are intended to prevent candidates from being seen to owe their election to special interests, including contractors and others doing business with government, as well as to prevent elected officials from actually feeling indebted to them. These goals are similar to the goals of government ethics laws. So let's try out what these gentlemen said by applying it to government ethics.

It is generally agreed that it is best to preserve an ethics commission's jurisdiction over officials and employees after they quit or leave office. There are two reasons for this. One, to prevent them from escaping enforcement by quitting or leaving office. This is especially important because it can take a long time for information to come out that an ethics violation might have occurred, and for an ethics proceeding to be completed. The second reason is to allow for post-employment restrictions. But many ethics codes ignore this best practice, and end an ethics commission's jurisdiction the moment an official leaves office.

This becomes especially problematic when the jurisdiction has strict confidentiality rules, as can be seen in the recent events in White Plains, NY.

Term limits, the recession, a new kind of governmental district, and a drive to save and manage local parks have all contributed to a fascinating ethics situation in Pierce County, Washington, home of Tacoma. Just last year I stayed in Pierce County and visited some of these parks, so this story is a little more concrete to me than most I write about.