We can talk all we want about conflicts of interest problems in municipal government, but it really comes down to what Tom Brokaw, the former NBC anchor, said in his Skidmore College commencement address:

You've been told during your high school years and your college years that you are now about to enter the real world, and you've been wondering what it's like. Let me tell you that the real world is not college. The real world is not high school. The real world, it

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I've been on a sort of work-leave the last two weeks. My town, North Haven, Connecticut (pop. 24,000), has been a mess for a long time, but few people have cared enough to pay attention, and those who criticize the administration are personally attacked and delegitimized. It was my town's mess, and my inability to do anything locally, that led me to do work for Common Cause Connecticut, and then devote myself full-time to municipal ethics by coming to work for City Ethics.

Sadly, it...

This article is sourced from: http://www.laethics1.com/Package/ReformPackage.asp

A growing, statewide coalition of organizations has contributed to the development of this initiative and is supporting the following reform package in the 2007 session of the Legislature:

From: Ghana News Online

Professor Henrietta Mensah-Bonsu of the University of Ghana says corruption can only be eliminated if people face up to it and strip it of "the dignity conferred on it with fond names" for the society to see it for what it is.

She expressed regret that people approve of petty official corruption and have even coined fond names for such acts.

Prof. Mensah-Bonsu was...

Memphis has been the scene of some serious corruption in the last few years. And for years before that, as well, although they say that in the old days the corruption was institutionalized, so that there were rules about how you could and could not take advantage of your office.

In round numbers, in the last six years, 66 officials, employees, and contractors have been found guilty of various sorts of government-related crimes. In a city of only 650,000 people, that puts Memphis in...

Many areas of ethics have little overlap with municipal ethics. But one rather specialized area that I came across has some interesting applications: the ethics of casting love spells.

According to an article in about.com, 'the standard position among Pagans is that you should never do spells to make a particular person love you.' With municipal politicians, this should apply also to spells to make everyone love you...