A couple of weeks ago, <a href="http://cityandstateny.com/articles/politics/new-york-state-articles/bar…; target="_blank">in
a <i>City and State</i> column</a>, 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
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.<br>
<br>
But what is a "macher"? It's a Yiddish term that, in the U.S., is
most frequently used with respect to people in the Jewish community
who always have their fingers in everything that's going on. They
According to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/nyregion/retired-new-york-officers-an…; target="”_blank”">an
article in the New York <i>Times</i> this week</a>, 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
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 of only 16,000 people
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 href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/books/review/subversives-by-seth-rose…; target="”_blank”">A
review in this weekend's New York <i>Times Book Review</i></a> got me
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 advice; in fact, she might not have had
access to professional ethics advice from anyone, or only from a
city attorney who was an important player from the other political
party. The official might not have been required to disclose her
<a href="http://www.nola.com/prisons/" target="”_blank”"><i>Louisiana Incarcerated</i> is an
investigative series</a> that ran recently in the New Orleans
<i>Times-Picayune</i>. 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.<br>
<br>
The series has introduced into popular culture the term "honey
I never know where I'm going to find something that inspires a
blog post on local government ethics. This time it was <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jan/31/can-italy-change/" target="”_blank”">an
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.<br>
<br>
I would like to share one of these provisions that is truly worth thinking about. It appears in the <a href="http://www.colocode.com/windsor/windsor_00b.pdf" target="”_blank”">Windsor, CO
<b>Seeking Order in Government</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>