Gifts

<br><b>"At the end of the day, anybody could fall into a trap like I
did."</b><br>

According to an article in the November 29 issue of <i>The
Economist,</i> when China banned gifts to government officials,
sales of the principal producer of baijiu, a sort of Chinese vodka,
fell 78% in just a year.<br>
<br>
The only sales that would likely go down if gifts were banned across
the board in the United States would be restaurant and golf club
sales. That is because petty bribery is less a problem here than the
ongoing reciprocal relationships between lobbyists and the

Former lobbyist, now jailbird, Kevin A. Ring shared some valuable
words of wisdom in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-virginia-ethics-advice-from-…; target="”_blank”">an
op-ed piece in the Washington <i>Post</i> this week</a>.<br>
<br>
He says that the gift limit should be zero, because any other limit

Five years ago, I wrote <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/569&quot; target="”_blank”">a blog post about gifts
and reciprocity</a>, based on a classic anthropological work, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Imagination-Erotic-Life-Property/dp/03947151…; target="”_blank”">Lewis

I want to revisit a situation I mentioned a few days ago in <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/how-not-accomplish-ethics-reform&quot; target="”_blank”">a
post about ethics reform</a>. Common Cause Rhode Island was
recommending a reform to deal with the situation where gifts are
made to officials by an organization that is not an "interested
party" (and therefore not subject to the gift ban) because it does

An excellent <a>article on the front page of last Sunday's New York <i>Times</i></a> looks at a <a href="www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-09-13/pdf/2011-23311.pdf&quot; target="”_blank”">proposal by the federal Office of Governmental Ethics</a> (OGE) to limit
two exceptions to the prohibition on accepting gifts from
lobbyists:  the "widely-attended gathering" (WAG) exception and

India and China have not only been the home of new varieties of
entrepreneurialism. In these countries, creative individuals have also come up with
novel approaches to dealing with local government corruption.<br>
<br>
An expatriate Indian physics professor in the U.S. came up with the
brilliant idea of a Zero-Rupee Note to hand out in situations where
local officials expect or ask for bribes.<br>
<br>