Resources & Learning

For a year and a half, in her Law of the Land blog, Patricia Salkin has been writing about local government ethics issues in land use cases. And since December 2008, she has been writing occasional local government ethics posts for the International Municipal Lawyers Association Local Government Bl…

Another cause for my last blog entry, on the three lies of government ethics, is that I had just finished F. G. Bailey's book The Prevalence of Deceit (Cornell, 1991). The book is about the close connection between deceit and power. Bailey pictures politics as a contest for power that employs rheto…

What could provide a better education for local government ethics practitioners than reading through a greatly expanded 261-page list of all the cases the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board has decided or settled from 1992 through last week? The ethics provisions may not be the same as every…

When Mayor John Peyton decided to hire Carla Miller as Jacksonville’s Ethics Officer in 2007, the city was in crisis. A grand jury was investigating violations of state open-meeting laws by nearly every member of the former City Council. The FBI had begun sniffing around JaxPort, probing dubious co…

Ethics training is a problem at the local level. It's expensive, and there aren't many experienced local government ethics trainers around. Online ethics training has recently become the answer, but even this is difficult to get people to do. As I wrote a couple of years ago in a blog entry and a c…

It is useful to establish some working definitions for the key words that we need to be using in addressing ethical issues. Here are some workable definitions for these terms: TRUST Is a relationship of reliance. A trusted party seeks to fulfill policies, ethical codes, law and their previous promi…

A year and a half ago, I started a series of blog entries on logical fallacies and their use in municipal politics. Logical fallacies are pseudo-arguments that consciously or unconsciously attempt to falsely persuade or manipulate people. They treat people as means rather than as ends, manipulating…

It took a long time for Egil "Bud" Krogh to write his book on Watergate, but it finally came out a few months ago. Krogh is not one of the better known Watergaters, partly because he pleaded guilty to his crimes. But as the head of the Plumbers, in charge of investigating leaks to the press, he ove…

Adolf Eichmann is the iconic extreme of the government bureaucrat. Not that any of us will hopefully ever be given orders like the ones he was given, but his simply following orders makes anyone question his or her own simply following orders. There’s a lot more about government ethics that can be …

I just watched the film Hands Over the City, and I believe it should hop up to the top of City Ethics’ list of Top Ten Ethics Films. Hands Over the City is a dramatic film that is about municipal government ethics, and nothing else. A film whose central fact is a glaring conflict of interest. Click…