Ethics

A Time for Ethical Self-Assessment

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:15:00 -0500

This may be the season of giving, but it sure feels like everybody is suddenly on the take.

Siemens, the German engineering giant, agreed this month to pay a record $1.6 billion to U.S. and European authorities to settle charges that it routinely used bribes and kickbacks to secure public works contracts across the globe. Prominent New York attorney Marc Dreier--called by one U.S. prosecutor a "Houdini of impersonation and false documents"--has been accused by the feds of defrauding hedge funds and other investors out of $380 million.

Let's Get Ethical

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:27:00 -0500

A few disclosures to the incoming Obama administration: As a 20-year-old, I received a ticket (fine greater than $50) for having jumped a subway turnstile in New York City. A few years later, I received another ticket (fine likewise greater than $50), this time for allowing my miniature dachshund to run off the leash in Riverside Park. I spent several years as a bass player in a rock band. And one of my earlier efforts in journalism, a poorly-received attempt at humour about some socialists who turned me into a Republican for an evening, led to a demonstration by the International Socialist Organisation outside the offices of my employer. I believe one of the chants was this: "TA Frank, he should go, kill and die for Texaco."

I recite this dull list of facts because each is an example of what I would need to reveal in order to be considered for a job in the Obama administration. And I imagine the above paragraph alone would be enough to bring the process to a premature halt. The New York Times says this year's questionnaire may be the "most extensive – some say invasive – application ever". And the increased levels of disclosure have been coupled with what Obama's transition guru John Podesta calls "the strictest ethics rules ever applied".

Sounds like fun. We're well on our way to the most boring group of applicants ever. (When even I look overly colourful, you know you're in a boring place.) On the one hand, I suppose this is all well and good, provided these boring people are good at their jobs and can save the nation from meltdown. That's high priority. But on the other, I hope Obama will pick a few eccentrics and rogues – not only because some jobs are best suited for eccentrics and rogues (Pat Moynihan was an entertaining UN ambassador), but also because scandal will befall someone in his administration anyway. It's unavoidable. Relentless disclosure of one's life has been standard in Washington since the end of Watergate and the passage of the Ethics in Government Act in 1978. With the exception of George Bush's White House, nearly every incoming administration has been described as having the most stringent vetting ever.

Disclosure of even minor traffic tickets – as well as the all-purpose request for information that "could be the possible source of embarrassment to you, or to the president" – has been standard for nearly 30 years now. Has it prevented scandals? Not at all. Even with copious vetting, every president from Carter though Bush has put forward some nominee who embarrassed him. In the case of Bush the Elder, one classic move was to make White House Counsel C Boyden Gray an ethics advisor, only to find that Gray had innumerable conflicts of interest himself.

In an ideal world, of course, the very act of disclosing all finances and potential conflicts of interest would go a long way towards satisfying the American people that their public servant in question was honourable. In the real world, however, it has wound up having the opposite effect. Disclosure just tends to feed more insistence on disclosure. That's because we tend to think the worst of our political opponents, so that the more we see the more suspicious we tend to get. This works the same way on both sides. I still find Dick Cheney's Halliburton connections to be rather malodorous, even though they've been disclosed. Republicans still find Democratic connections to Fannie Mae to be malodorous, even though they've been disclosed.

Certainly, some of the conflict of interest blowups we've seen over the years have been genuinely outrageous. More commonly, though, they've revolved around things like the peanut loan to Jimmy Carter. Do you happen to recall that in 1979 a special counsel was appointed to investigate the loans made to Jimmy Carter's peanut business by a bank once controlled by his friend Bert Lance, director of the office of management and budget? If you do, then you're probably Jimmy Carter or Bert Lance. But at the time, it seemed like a big deal for some long-forgotten reason. The trouble is that Washington DC is a small town, and conflicts of interest suffuse everything that happens there. No amount of disclosure is likely to change that.

Now look, I'm still a big believer in transparency and disclosure. I'd never suggest that the White House revert to backroom winks and handshakes when staffing up or that Congress ease up on its ethics rules. And Obama has done very well to vet his people fully rather than meet them once and look them up on Wikipedia. But let's not forget that the press is hungry for scandals no matter what, and if it can't get big stuff, it'll settle for small things. Embarrassment of some sort is inevitable, and Obama might as well make the best of it. So if a non-boring-but-checkered candidate comes across his desk – like, say, a Clinton – I hope Obama won't let the vetting break the deal if he really wants to hire the person in question. Like every president, he's screwed anyway, so he might as well enjoy the company he keeps.

Drowning in Lawyers

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:34:00 -0400

The US Senate judiciary committee has drawn a line in the water -- and is holding it. Before the committee's Democrats approve Michael Mukasey's nomination for attorney general, they want to know that he believes waterboarding is torture under United States law. Simulating drowning to get terrified detainees to speak, a favourite technique of the Khmer Rouge, strikes many as a paradigm of torture. If it isn't torture, what does the word mean?

This is about more than a terrible practice. It's about the integrity of the elite lawyers who assess the president's power -- who answer to the attorney general. We recently learned that at the end of 2005, while Congress was preparing to pass a ban on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners, those lawyers were crafting secret opinions holding that none of the CIA's interrogation techniques violated that standard. The memos remain secret -- itself a serious problem for the rule of law -- but they seem to have been classic legerdemain, playing with definitions to rob words of their meaning. Any first-year law student learns how to do this. At some point, she also learns that, although the trick is easy to do, personal and professional integrity make it inappropriate, especially for a government lawyer assigned to say what the law means. The political loyalty that the Bush administration demands evidently overrode that standard, just as it overrode the longstanding justice department practice of not firing federal prosecutors in the middle of their terms for showing insufficient partisan zeal. This administration sometimes seems to treat law the way a tax-dodging corporation does, as nothing but an obstacle to its goals.

Elite lawyers are not exactly poster-children for a human-rights campaign. This administration is often contemptuous of professionals, with their refined training and esoteric norms. That isn't a hard attitude to cop. Lots of Americans already believe the same, and many lawyers at least halfway believe it about themselves.

But really believing that would be poisonous. If there are to be meaningful limits on power, those who interpret and apply the law must treat it as a constraint that defines what they do, not just a cluster of impediments to their righteous goals. Otherwise, nearly anything is justifiable. To stay away from that grim result, advisers to power, and those who exercise it, need to honour limits. As the president said in his second inaugural address, self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self.

It's a safe bet that he didn't mean lawyers, particularly his lawyers. But his phrase is telling, coming from a president who counts personal virtue and unchecked executive power among his favourite things. It's an old conservative idea, most famously associated with Edmund Burke, that traditional virtue is the best form of prudence. You should be reluctant to discard a taboo because you never know what else might turn out to depend on it.

The Bush administration sometimes embraces this Burkean idea. The president ran in 2004 on his opposition to same-sex marriage, arguing that social stability and personal responsibility depended on "traditional" marriage. Back when he was obsessed with cloning and stem cells, Bush chose as bioethics czar Leon Kass, a medical doctor who believes biotechnology turns the life into a plaything of human desire, denying us the constraint and suffering that produce moral maturity. Without the old limits, this view goes, there is only the freedom to harm others and degrade ourselves.

Unlike some things Burke thought -- for instance, that invading and trying to govern a faraway country is often bad for occupier and occupied alike - this conservative idea is usually wrong. If the last few centuries prove anything, it is that humanity is flexible and resilient. Conservative preachers in the first decades of American independence argued that the country was on the verge of collapse from an excess of freedom, evidenced by public swearing, drinking and traveling on the Sabbath. A few decades later, southern traditionalists argued that slavery was the last thing standing between the United States and moral collapse. Then the threat was women's emancipation. And so forth. These days, the argument is hard to make with a straight face. There's plenty wrong with Britney Spears, but she doesn't portend the end of civilisation.

There is, however, one place where Burke's idea is an extremely good one, because there freedom depends on fixed limits. This is the use of political power against individuals. Ironically, that's where the administration has been most willing to discard old limits. There are many familiar examples: torture, defiance of federal criminal law (which barred warrantless domestic surveillance when the White House began its secret monitoring program), holding prisoners indefinitely without due process. But something subtler is being eroded in all these abuses: the professional integrity that undergirds the rule of law. Unlike more specific wrongs, this cannot be undone with the stroke of a pen. A classic Burkean wound to the body politic, it may take years of patient labor to restore, and past a point it might be irremediable. Asking judge Mukasey to draw a line is a way of asking a whole profession to do the right thing.

While free society doesn't depend on chastity, opposite-sex weddings or patient acceptance of genetic defects, it does require that those most intimately responsible for law take it seriously. Otherwise, where it counts most, there will only be power -- to harm others and degrade ourselves. An administration that thinks sex is morality but law is only power has got self-government ass-backwards.

Spin Means Always Having to Say You're Sorry

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 01 May 2007 16:49:00 -0400

Who’s sorry now? Lots of people these days are rushing to the cameras, claiming to be misunderstood -- but none of them seems truly regretful.

Saying that one is sorry, of course, is just the beginning. Those who are genuinely apologetic know that repentance is a stern taskmaster. According to Catholic doctrine, for example, "contrition" is "a sorrow of soul and a hatred of sin committed, with a firm purpose of not sinning in the future."

In other words, if you are contrite, you really have to mean it. So we can make short work, then, of Randall Tobias, who, until resigning suddenly Friday, was deputy secretary of State, overseeing, among other concerns, anti-AIDS abstinence programs. The married Tobias admitted to ABC News that he called an escort service "to have gals come over to the condo and give me a massage," but insisted that "no sex" was involved.

But, if the Bush administration believed Tobias’ story, why did he resign? And, if his bosses didn’t believe him, why should the rest of us?

Bottom line: Tobias is not contrite; he does not yet hate the sin he committed, even if his wife might find a way to keep him from committing it again.

Another miscreant who obviously isn’t sincerely sorry is Don Imus, the ex-shock jock. After a career of calling people names, he went over the line in slurring the female Rutgers basketballers. He issued a couple of grudgingly remorseful statements, then announced that he was done with the sorry routine: "I’m going to apologize but we gotta move on."

Unfortunately for Imus, the transgressor can only make his best case for forgiveness. It’s up to the world to decide whether to accept the apology. And, in Imus’ case, it was not accepted because few saw in him a firm purpose never to name-call again.

Next up in the "Sorry/Not Sorry" dock is former CIA Director George Tenet, who collected a $4-million book advance so that he could spin his role in the Iraq War -- specifically, that his now-notorious "slam dunk" phrase was taken out of context.

Well, Tenet said those war-justifying words in December 2002, and yet he just smiled as they were cited by President George W. Bush for the year-and-a-half that he clung to his perch. And Tenet held his tongue when awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2004.

Only now, after all these years of debacle, does he wish to undunk himself from Iraq, because, as he told 60 Minutes, he is now seen as an "idiot." So he’s out to fix that by spinning on TV.

Well, it’s one thing to make a mistake, even a big one. The question is: What does one do about it? If Tenet genuinely hated what he had done, he could give his medal back and donate his book millions to charity. Until that happens, he is just another Beltway operator who failed upward to riches.

Speaking of failing upward, now we come to Tenet’s ex-colleague in the Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz, who, more than anyone else, dreamed up the Iraq War from his Pentagon ivory tower. Having been kicked upstairs to the World Bank presidency, Wolfowitz now stands accused of finagling the intelligence once again over WMD -- Woman Much Desired.

Wolfowitz says his enemies are out to get him over what he did in Iraq, not over what he is currently doing at the World Bank. That’s for sure. And let that be a lesson to future armchair generals -- if the war you foment goes as badly as this one has, a lot of people will be upset.

So, once again, malefactors should be warned: The road to perdition is short, but the path back to forgiveness is long. And ineptly spinning the media only makes these attempted comebacks laughable, as well as futile.

Infamy is Another Way to Make a Mark in D.C.

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:25:00 -0400

Confession is good for the soul -- even here in Washington, D.C. How do I know? Because many here confess, albeit in the circuitous style of the Beltway.

We all know of cases in which the malefactor just blurts out his guilt years after the crime; that seems to be what’s happening, in stages, to O.J. Simpson. But Washingtonians, who excel in the sneaky arts of manipulation, confess in their own Machiavellian manner, with one eye on the camera and the other on the history books.

The very obviousness of such confessions, paper or electronic, forces one to conclude that there’s method in this self-incriminating madness. And what might that method be? Perhaps down deep in these politicos’ souls, a spark of conscience wants to burn away their sin in the white heat of public exposure. Or perhaps, as a more cynical interpretation, getting caught is a way of getting credit. Credit for being bad, to be sure, but credit nonetheless.

The most notorious example of such self-destroying -- and maybe credit-getting -- comes from Richard Nixon. In the Watergate tapes, the 37th president freely inculpated himself for all time. On June 23, 1972, less than a week after the Watergate break-in, Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, met to consider a course of action. Both men knew that their every word was being tape-recorded, and yet they co-conspired anyway.

Nixon told Haldeman to use the CIA to persuade the FBI to back away from the investigation: "They should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case." OK, that sounds like a plan for cover-upping the truth, not for getting it out.

But here’s the point: At some level in his mind, Nixon must have known he was destroying himself with those conversations. And yet he kept talking, and he even kept custody of the tapes, which he could have destroyed anytime before the revelation of their existence in July 1973. Which is to say Nixon safeguarded the incriminating "sword" of evidence that would be used against him in impeachment proceedings. In fact, just four days after this "smoking gun" conversation was disclosed, he was forced to resign the presidency.

Some say Nixon was brought down by criminal arrogance. And so he was. But, in addition, maybe he knew what he was doing, as he eyed the prize of historical notoriety -- and thus immortality. "The evil that men do lives after them," Shakespeare observed. "The good is oft interred with their bones." Well, Nixon lives.

And Nixon hasn’t been the only Washingtonian to immolate himself into immortality. In 1993, Vince Foster, deputy counsel to President Bill Clinton, unburdened his conscience in a note -- and then shot himself. Foster has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since.

So maybe we should keep these precedents of "Catch me if you can -- please!" in mind as we evaluate the uproar over the firings of the U.S. attorneys last year. It seems as if every original statement made by either the Justice Department or the White House has been contradicted -- not by reporters or even Democrats, but by the Bush administration’s own revealed e-mails. Smoking guns everywhere, leaving tell-tale trails.

Was there no politics in the firings, as the administration asserted? If not, then why did Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, take the trouble to spell out, in an e-mail dated Jan. 9, 2005 -- subject line: "Question from Karl Rove" -- that those who weren’t being fired were "loyal BUSHIES"?

Sampson is now the ex-chief of staff, of course. But at the same time, for one brief shining moment, he was a powerful man. And so if we spell his name right, for the historical record, Sampson, like so many wheeler-dealer Washingtonians before him, will have achieved something.

Beyond Bioethics

Communications — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 18:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
03/02/2007 - 11:45am

Beyond Bioethics, a new report by Dr. Francis Fukuyama and Dr. Franco Furger, provides the most comprehensive examination to date of legislative and/or regulatory answers to the challenges raised by human biotechnologies in the United States. The report's premise is that reaping the benefits of medical progress offered by biotechnology while preventing possible abuses requires that we create a new regulatory agency. Dr. Fukuyama and Dr. Furger discussed legislative developments at the national and international level and explore public attitudes… more

Chronicle of Higher Education Cites Education Policy Program

Communications — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 00:58:00 -0500

On the eve of the Congressional elections, a report has surfaced that reinforces the close ties between members of the student-loan industry and Republican leaders.

Now that polls show that Democrats have a good chance of gaining control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, many lenders fear they will pay for tying their fortunes so closely to the Republican Party.

According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, no company has donated more money this year to the National Republican Congressional Committee than the National Education Loan Network, a major for-profit student-loan provider based in Nebraska.

Officials with the company, known as Nelnet, have given, individually and through the company's political-action committee, $153,000 this year to the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is the fund-raising arm of Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives. The committee's Web site says it is dedicated to "increasing the 231-member Republican majority" in that chamber.

Nelnet's three top executives each gave the panel donations of $26,700, the most individuals are allowed under the law to contribute to a national party committee in a single calendar year...

News of the contributions, first reported on Friday by Higher Ed Watch, a more

Michael Dannenberg Discusses EduCap Junket in The New York Times

Communications — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 01:56:00 -0400

It turns out there probably will not be much talk about education on the Caribbean island of Nevis this February. The student loan company that invited university officials and their spouses to an expenses-paid education summit meeting there has canceled the event.

George Pappas, a senior vice president of the loan company, EduCap Inc., had said the purpose of the conference, which was to be held Feb. 2 to 5 at the Four Seasons Resort, was to discuss education, not loans.

But some financial aid administrators have said the conference was EduCap’s way of wooing university officials who could steer student borrowers their way, for example, by putting them on so-called preferred-lender lists... Michael Dannenberg, director of education policy at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington, called the cancellation “but a small victory for the integrity of financial aid,” saying, “larger conflicts of interest remain.”For the complete article, please visit The New York Times website.

Restoring Trust in Pharmaceutical Effectiveness Research

Communications — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 21:00:00 -0400

A New America Event
09/27/2006 - 9:00am

Conflicts of interest may be endemic to American medical research, but better policy could improve the chances that we draw the right conclusions about which drugs are best for which conditions and for whom. The New America Foundation invited Ross McKinney, M.D., Vice Dean of Research at Duke’s Medical School, and Jerry Hoffman, M.D., emergency department physician and professor of clinical epidemiology at UCLA, to join Schwartz Senior Fellow Shannon Brownlee to discuss the realities, incentives, and policy options before us. … more

The Best Minds Money Can Buy

adminn — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 19:09:00 -0400

Most of us place enormous faith in our universities. We trust that they are autonomous, independent institutions committed to education, scholarship, academic freedom and the production of knowledge free from the influence of special interest groups. Right?

Wrong. In the last 25 years, the United States has given birth to a market-model university, one where professors increasingly work "for hire." Just last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that a major academic study -- which found that antidepressants were safe and effective for pregnant women -- was tainted by undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Apparently, although the study itself was financed by the federal government, most of its 13 authors -- including many prominent academics -- also served as paid consultants to manufacturers of antidepressants. None of these financial ties were made public.

Reports like this have proliferated in the last decade. Today, it is common for professors to moonlight as consultants for drug firms. They receive generous stipends to join company advisory boards. For a nominal fee -- anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 -- some professors will even agree to be named as authors on journal articles ghostwritten by the drug industry and published without disclosure of company involvement.

Editors at top medical journals have warned that such commercialism threatens to undermine the integrity of academic science, but the blurring of academia and commerce continues.

It's not just medical professors who have such conflicts. The new commercialism also involves law and business professors and academics in many scientific disciplines. It even affects administrators, such as Chancellor Marye Anne Fox of UC San Diego, who is a director at three corporations (two medical firms and a chemical company). In the last year alone they paid her cash and stock worth at least $339,260, according to the San Diego Union Tribune.

And the universities themselves, eager to share in the profits from research being done on campus, are getting in on the act. In recent years, changes in federal patent law have allowed universities to behave more like commercial enterprises. They now run their own patent offices and venture capital funds and industrial parks, and sometimes have equity interests in the companies that do the research, causing new institutional conflicts of interest.

Industry money represents a small percentage of overall university research funding (the bulk of which comes from the federal government), but the number of professors who receive supplemental income from industry is continuing to grow. Last week, the San Jose Mercury News reported that more than a third of Stanford University's top administrators, department heads and other leaders have outside financial interests related to their research. These include stock options, royalties, consulting fees, etc.

Even more worrisome, seven of the 10 faculty members who sit on Stanford's conflict-of-interest committee -- charged with oversight -- have financial connections to medical companies.

The pharmaceutical industry has certainly made the deepest inroads into academia, but commercial conflicts are hardly confined to medicine.

Consider Exxon Mobil's unusual relationships with Stanford. In 2002, Stanford signed a 10-year, $225-million deal with Exxon and other energy companies to fund a Global Climate and Energy Project, or GCEP. At the time, Exxon Mobil was pushing the U.S. government to reject any mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases; it also continued to question whether human use of fossil fuels causes global warming, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary. Instead, it called for more research.

Shortly after the deal was signed, Exxon ran advertisements on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times celebrating its research alliance with the "best minds" at Stanford. One ad suggested that the scientific debate about global warming is ongoing: "Although climate has varied throughout Earth's history from natural causes, today there is a lively debate abou...the climate's response to the presence of more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

Remarkably, this ad was signed by Lynn Orr, the professor heading up GCEP, and it carried the official Stanford University seal. Many observers found the university's blatant endorsement of Exxon's PR campaign shameful.

Current academic conflict-of-interest policies are weak and vary enormously from one institution to the next. Each university is afraid to tighten its rules for fear that this might drive talented faculty (and industry dollars) to other schools with more lax policies. But until the top U.S. research universities collectively adopt one rigorous, uniform policy, their autonomy will continue to erode.