Conflicts of Interest

We are told in school that one of the reasons the American Revolution happened is that colonists faced taxation without representation. This is just about as bad as it gets. But there is also such a thing as representation without taxation. How bad is that? What effect does it have on government an…

When I saw the headline from the Anchorage Daily News, "Palin Calls Blogger's Ethics Complaint Bogus," and saw that it had to do with clothing the governor wore, I thought I might write a piece about using ethics complaints for the purpose of political harassment. But when I read the article, I rea…

Ethics codes do not generally have rules about the involvement of spouses of government officials in citizen groups. But this can create serious appearance problems, as it has in St. Charles, Illinois, an hour west of Chicago, according to an article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune. The wife of a St…

Last October, I wrote a blog entry about why parties should fight elections, not referee them. An indictment this month in Kentucky emphasizes the need for the election process to be taken out of the hands of those contending for the results of that process. According to the indictment, the Clay Co…

The controversy surrounding the New York State pension fund returned to the front page of the New York Times today. The players are former state comptroller Alan Hevesi, his political adviser Hank Morris, and pension fund investment officer David Loglisci. The occasion is the indictment by the stat…

Update below (August 19, 2009) Here's a recipe for conflicts of interest. Create a new kind of county commission to hand out grant money. Require that commission members include representatives from public and private agencies that handle the very services the grants are intended for. Stir until fr…

The most complicating (sic) part of conflicts of interest is the being interested part. When one is interested in something, not necessarily in a financial way, it can be very hard to get the emotional distance necessary to analyze a conflict properly. In other words, it's hard for many people to a…

Rarely does an ethics commission get a clear chance to show it has no favoritism. The Nevada Commission on Ethics will soon get that chance. The Nevada senator who raised a legislative immunity defense last year against the commission was accused of a conflict of interest due to his position as pre…

An article deep in the first section of this Sunday's New York Times presents an interesting ethical dilemma. In New York State, it used to be common for state troopers and local police officers to negotiate, effectively plea bargain, at the courthouse with people they'd given tickets to. And then,…

Here’s a new, foolproof way for an elected official to make some money on the side: loan money to your campaign, charge it a lot of interest, and then pay the loan principal off slowly, over a number of years. According to an article in yesterday’s Bloomberg.com, this is what Rep. Grace Napolitano …