The current economic crisis provides an important opportunity for government ethics professionals. It takes our eyes out of the trees -- individual government officials' conflicts of interest -- and lets us see the forest.

Here's an excerpt from Senior Fellow Benjamin Barber's Huffington Post blog entry today (Barber is author of the classic book Strong Democracy):

Today's big story comes to us from Cook County, Illinois, and although it's about whether a government lawyer has a conflict of interest, the matter falls into the area of government ethics in which Chicago and Cook County have led the way for decades: patronage.

According to a lawsuit filed yesterday in Alaska by five Republican lawmakers to halt an investigation into Gov. Palin's dismissal of the state's public safety commissioner, elected politicians cannot investigate the actions of other elected politicians if they have a political bias, such as giving a campaign contribution to their party's presidential candidate.

Is it a conflict of interest for local government officials to give themselves perks such as luxury boxes at sports stadiums, where they can not only entertain dignitaries in their government roles, which few would contest, but also their friends and contributors in their roles as person or candidate?

When U.S. presidents, or even mayors, are brought down by ethics violations, it takes some pretty hefty skullduggery and covering up to do it. But according to a Christian Science Monitor article this week, with the great title "As a TV chef, Thai P.M. cooked his own goose," Thailand's Constitutional Court ordered the prime minister to quit because he moonlighted as a television chef, with all the covering up coming in the form of sauces.

It's great to read newspaper commentary that shows an understanding of how an unethical organization acts, in this case, the effects of its employment of denial. Scott Lewis, voiceofsandiego.org's Executive Editor and political commentator, did this in a column this week.