The ethics rules of the Minnesota State Senate limit conflicts of interest to instances where a bill would provide a financial benefit to a senator or his or her employer that is not shared by other similarly situated individuals or firms. This is a common standard.

If anyone questions the value of advice regarding municipal ethics issues, look at these statistics from the Atlanta Ethics Office.

66% of ethics complaints filed in 2007 alleged use of city property.
3% of the requests for advice in 2007 involved use of city property.

If only people would ask. At least, Atlanta has an Ethics Officer to ask.

Campaign finance is an area of municipal ethics that is often treated as a separate field entirely. But they’re closely related. Both involve the conflict between private and public interest, and especially gifts to elected officials. The principal difference is that campaign contributions are a perfectly legal way of giving to elected officials, which makes the problem a bit more complex.

<b>See 1/16/09 addendum at bottom</b>

The dream of every machine politician is to have his city controlled by those who work for him. Unfortunately, every city has citizens who don’t work for the city administration. Or so I thought until I learned about Vernon, California.

Vernon is “an exclusively industrial city,” which is a fancy term for one big conflict of interest.

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.

I just watched the film <a href="http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0057286/&quot; target="”_blank”"><i>Hands Over the City,</i></a> and I believe it should hop up to the top of City Ethics’ list of <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/Top10+Ethics+Films&quot; target="”">Top Ten Ethics Films</a>.

When we talk about gifts to politicians, we often talk about gifts of nominal value being okay. Buy a politician a coffee, what’s wrong with that?

But what happens when it’s the other way around? What if the politician buys a coffee for a citizen? One citizen, no problem. A few more at a fundraiser, that’s okay (and it's not buying votes, but rather buying more money). But what about thousands of citizens? When does something of nominal value become something with a corrupt intention?

Last year, soon after I contracted to act as Administrator to the New Haven Democracy Fund, a new public campaign financing program, the Executive Director of Connecticut Common Cause called me (I sat on the board of CT Common Cause). He said that he had been asked to write a report about the Fund for the national office. My response was that I had to write a report to the State Elections Enforcement Commission, so why should he bother to write another? My report could serve both needs. He wanted me to resign from the board, and I thought that was silly. There was no conflict.

Recently, Google has taken what appears to be a distinctly less transparent and open approach to their news distribution search engine. Matthew Lee maintains a small blog/website called <a href="http://www.innercitypress.com/">http://www.innercitypress.com/</a&gt; and has a reputation for hounding the UN - specifically the UNDP about what he considers corruption. Recently though, google announced a partnership with the UNDP and here is what happened next:

Congressmen and -women sometimes act as if they didn't know the first thing about government ethics. Even when their actions are more in the public eye than usual, many of them unnecessarily, and selfishly, do the wrong thing.