Ethics Reform

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 of disorder are taken for granted, for example, in dictatorships that have usurped authority and destroyed relationships.

In this sense, government ethics seeks...

In his book The Search for a Nonviolent Future, Michael N. Nagler talks about two models for looking at violence that are also relevant to government ethics, the medical model and the educational model.

The Medical Model
The first is the medical model, which sees violence as disease, and peace as health...

Update: March 19, 2011 (see below)

Last December I wrote a long blog post about the pay-to-play culture of Prince George's County, Maryland. The new county executive and the county's state representatives appear to have been working hard to make changes to end this pay-to-play culture, although you wouldn't know it from...

My last blog post raised an interesting question. When an annual financial disclosure form (or, in some jurisdictions a special declaration of gifts received) requires the disclosure of all gifts from restricted sources, what are the expectations of an official who pays rent to a restricted source...

Update: August 26, 2011 (see below)

At the same time there is talk of local government ethics reform in New York State, the new attorney general has his own plan for local government oversight. But it is all criminal in nature.

His idea is to place public integrity officers in all thirteen attorney general offices in the state, starting with Rochester. The new attorney general's predecessor, now...

On January 28, the New York State Bar Association issued a report on government ethics reform in New York State, which includes a section on local government ethics reform. The report points out the many inadequacies of...