Issues of Corporate Honesty, Fairness Dominate Month’s News in Ethics
Feb 25th, 2002 • Posted in: TrendlinesSpecial to Newsline from editor Carl Hausman
Recognizing that the United States’ financial markets are fueled by trust as much as by money, corporate regulators vowed, as detailed in Newsline this week, to crack down on dishonest executives. Current penalties, some regulators argue, are no deterrent to the fabulous wealth that can be generated by financial skullduggery, especially when insurance companies often foot the bill for fines, penalties, and settlements. As we also reported this week, some insurers are balking at paying the price of deception when they themselves claim they were lied to.
The latter story, of course, evolved from the continuing Enron debacle, which figured prominently in our reports throughout the month. February saw the Senate subpoena Enron’s tax records and President Bush call for a “single standard” in the administration of 401(k) plans, eliminating the preferential treatment that allowed executives of Enron to sell equities nested in their 401(k)s while rank-and-file employees were forced to hold the tanking stock. During February, we also reported on former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay’s subpoena to testify before a Senate subcommittee, a suit by the General Accounting Office for details of meetings between Enron and White House officials and the hero status afforded by some to the whistleblower who first warned that Enron was about to collapse in a blizzard of accounting scandals.
Health care issues continued to figure prominently in ethics news this month. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell made headlines with his endorsement of condom use for sexually active teens. Allegations that high-powered medical researchers are simply adding their bylines to “research” conducted for them by drug companies figured prominently in our February 18 issue. New proposed guidelines for stem-cell research were a major story on February 11, and the issue of February 4 carried two health-ethics items: a controversial federal provision to extend health-care coverage to fetuses, which critics contend is a backdoor step toward defining a fetus as a person; and a heart transplant, at taxpayers’ expense, to a convicted felon.
Four speech and press cases figured in the month’s news in ethics: a promise from the U.S. Defense Department that government propaganda would not involve lying to the public, an agreement to keep things clean in traditionally nasty Hungarian political campaigns, a suit over a so-called “censorship clause” prohibiting purchasers of certain software to criticize it in the press, and a controversy over a teacher’s complaint that students got off too lightly after allegedly plagiarizing a paper.
And sports provided many ethics-related reports this month. The Olympic judging controversies raised calls for reform (Feb. 18, Feb. 25), and Mike Tyson’s checkered past continued to raise the question of when an athlete’s personal morality should disqualify him from competing (Feb. 4, Feb. 25).
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