Complicity and Knowledge

Ethics Codes & Reform December 18, 2015

Broad Responsibility for Ethical Misconduct

A couple of weeks ago, in a City and State column, veteran NYC reporter Wayne Barrett hit the nail on the head regarding the responsibility for failures to deal responsibly with conflicts of interest, specifically with respect to the conviction of former state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, a Dem…

Conflicts of Interest April 24, 2014

What to Do About "Machers"

Earlier this month, a bill came before the Israeli legislature, the Knesset, called the Machers Bill. Its goal is to expand the Knesset's lobbying law to the executive branch as well as to municipalities, something that is rare in American states. But what is a "macher"? It's a Yiddish term that, i…

Conflicts of Interest January 11, 2014

Police Officers' Failure to Report Criminal Activity for Their Own Personal Interest

According to an article in the New York Times this week, dozens of New York City, as well as Nassau and Suffolk County, police officers were arrested for grand larceny relating to a scheme to fraudulently get disability pensions through Social Security. It is somewhat like the Long Island Railroad …

Transparency & Disclosure November 16, 2012

How and Why to Bring Budget Transparency to a City Near You

It's a nice coincidence that, just when I was preparing to write a blog post about a trendy thing in the corporate world called "open-book management," the former comptroller of Dixon, IL, Rita Crundwell, pleaded guilty to a federal fraud charge that she siphoned more than $53 million from the town…

Conflicts of Interest October 6, 2012

Fire, Smoke, and Snowballs

It's valuable to put government ethics in the larger context of the use of public office for private purposes that does not involve a financial benefit for anyone. In other words, much of politics is personal. A review in this weekend's New York Times Book Review got me thinking about this. The boo…

Conflicts of Interest September 28, 2012

Questioning the Assumption of An Official's Sole Responsibility for Ethics Violations

It is assumed in government ethics enforcement that an official who mishandles a conflict situation is solely responsible for her misconduct. This assumption is rarely questioned. The official might have received no training, or poor training. The official might not have been encouraged to seek adv…

May 27, 2012

Treating Inmates as Commodities in Louisiana Is a Local Government Ethics Problem

Louisiana Incarcerated is an investigative series that ran recently in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. It is a story rooted in an extremely poor ethics environment that, despite vaunted ethics reforms (that many, including me, have criticized), does not seem to have changed. The series has introduc…

Ethics Codes & Reform March 1, 2012

Two Aspects of a Poor Ethics Environment

I never know where I'm going to find something that inspires a blog post on local government ethics. This time it was an essay by Tim Parks in the March 8 issue of the New York Review of Books, as well as on the NYRBlog. The essay is about Italy, and the possibility for change in its government, ec…

Conflicts of Interest January 18, 2012

The Ethics of Vote Trading

As I near the end of writing my local government ethics book, I am going over local government ethics codes looking for unusual, but valuable provisions to include in a special section that follows my discussion of the run-of-the-mill provisions. I would like to share one of these provisions that i…

Ethics Codes & Reform March 20, 2011

Nonviolence and Government Ethics VII – Seeking Order

Seeking Order in Government All government officials seek order, not just in the sense of law and order, but also in the sense of having everyone know their roles, their authority, and their relationships to other individuals and agencies. Nonviolent actors seek order in societies where some kinds …

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