Ethics Newsline®

LONDON
On Saturday night in London, I was driving to a dinner party with a number of intelligent but not necessarily government-connected Londoners. The conversation turned briefly to politics — and I must confess I pushed it there as I was on a fact-finding mission. Immediately the complaints flew fast and furious, all involving the word “spin.” The term enjoyed a very high profile during the brief conversation — which ended as quickly as it had begun with a sort of disgusted agreement to turn to happier subjects.

I was not surprised. From the leader of a center-left think tank to a peer sitting in the House of Lords, Londoners are indicting “spin” when complaining of the state of British civic engagement. It’s on everybody’s lips, perhaps nowhere more frequently than on those of political columnists observing the behavior of government.

Thankfully for the United Kingdom, much of what is wrong with the current practice of U.S. politics is not likely to lift up its head in London anytime soon. England has laws in place governing the content of political speech, does not have paid candidate advertisements on television, has strict spending limits, and has an Electoral Commission (newly created in 2000) that has far-reaching and very real enforcement powers. None of this is in place in the New World, where it is a constitutional right for candidates to lie, and where the Federal Election Commission has almost no teeth whatsoever.

And so one would suppose that democracy surely is alive and well in Great Britain. Well, perhaps not: In this country, which typically boasts an 80 percent electoral turnout, only 59 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the most recent election. There is a downward trend — both in numbers and in general sentiment — that has most who ponder the matter worried.

The latest cause for general disgust is the story of Jo Moore, who continues to haunt Transport Secretary Stephen Byers. Jo Moore was the politically-appointed communications adviser to Byers who issued the email on September 11, 2001, that indicated that it might be a good time to release anything that needed burying in the press. (See Related Newsline commentary, Oct. 22, 2001.) More recently, Ms. Moore apparently earned a rebuke from her civil-service boss, Martin Sixsmith, over the question of releasing bad news on the day of Princess Margaret’s funeral. Moore got the boot, and Sixsmith in turn appears to have been given the axe by Byers, himself concerned about losing his trusted political appointee. All of this may be inside baseball, but it illustrates the privileged (and critical) place that the spin machine plays in modern government. Moore, too, was sacked, but Byers, and his Blair government, cannot now avoid the constant complaint of “spin.”

But what is this thing, “spin?” It’s a word we use in the States, in a similar fashion and with a similar vituperation. It didn’t used to be such a bad thing, and in its benign form refers to the practice of putting things in the best possible light to the press and public. The local football team doesn’t win a game all season? “There’s nowhere for us to go but up,” spins the coach. Sorely needed construction at the airport causes delays and people miss flights? “Thank you for your patience while we improve the facilities to provide even better service,” spin the new traffic signs. This has always gone on and doesn’t seem likely to collapse the empire anytime soon.

However, the benign spin has metastasized to the point where, rather than a way of talking about problems, it has become the problem. Why? Because it’s a tool that works too well, has been overused, and in inappropriate places, especially those in government. Now, “spin” means to most people, “lies told by people in government.” And, sadly, it seems to be an American political export.

The issue here, really, is not “spin,” but rather what it is in service of — something more pernicious and less obvious (but no less recognized by the public and the media): the “permanent campaign.” If spin is the tactic exported from Washington, the permanent campaign is the strategy that drives it. Simply put, it is the practice of using the power of one’s elected office to ensure reelection. Like spin, the permanent campaign has a relatively benign and time-honored form. Incumbent members of Congress, for instance, send newsletters to their constituents at government expense touting their legislative accomplishments, publications that, while useful, are clearly aimed at eking out another term in office. But when spin and the permanent campaign collide — and run unchecked as they now do — the consequences for public trust in anything that is said by anyone in government are disastrous, and hard to reverse.

At the end of the day, the complaint about the Blair Government is that many believe the permanent campaign has run amok: There are too many politically appointed communications advisers, who have too much control over when and how information is dispensed for it to be any good for democracy. It is not clear, either, that this is a partisan issue. It certainly isn’t in the States, where the Ronald Reagan White House pioneered the modern use of the permanent campaign, and the Clinton White House honed it to a keen edge.

“Spin” is too effective in promoting the permanent campaign, and the permanent campaign is too effective at getting people elected. Our political “technologies” have outstripped our ethics. If that is so, the answer lies in strengthening the latter rather than dismantling the former. The very disapproval that is turning citizens off of democracy may in fact be the catalyst to improve official behavior — as well as the means of convincing citizens to uphold their own responsibility in a system of self-rule. Instead of turning away, citizens need to demand a higher standard from their governments. Today’s public outrage needs to be coupled with public action, else the permanent campaign (as its name sadly suggests) is here to stay.

(c)2002 by the Institute for Global Ethics

“It’s an issue that very rarely comes up. Really, you’re talking about the froth on the daydream.”

WASHINGTON
Losing the first of several suits filed against it, the U.S. Energy Department was ordered last week to hand over documents related to meetings held when formulating the nation’s energy policy, meetings which reportedly included several sessions with executives from Enron.

Critics have claimed that the meetings, which the Wall Street Journal reported included a one-on-one session between Vice President Dick Cheney and former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, were cozy affairs that produced policy favorable to the energy industry.

Last week’s ruling came in a suit filed by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which first asked for the information in April 2001 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The Energy Department refused, prompting the NRDC to file suit in December. Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler blasted the Energy Department for stonewalling.

“In addition to having no legal or practical justification for working at a glacial pace … the material which [the NRDC] seeks is of extraordinary public interest,” Kessler wrote in her ruling, ordering the Energy Department to start turning over documents by March 25.

“There can be little question that the Department of Energy has been woefully tardy,” Kessler wrote, noting that “after making a virtually meaningless release of some form letters back in May of 2001, the department has done little of substance.”

“What is even more distressing is that [the NRDC] was not the only requester seeking this information,” Kessler wrote. “At least 11 other similar FOIA requests have been filed … and it would appear that none of those other requests have been responded to.”

In a separate ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan also accused the government of engaging in a strategy of “stalling” designed to keep secret the names of companies and people who worked with Vice President Dick Cheney and his energy task force.

Sullivan harshly criticized the Bush administration, accusing it of keeping private information that should be made public, giving the government only seven more days before it must defend itself in a suit filed by Judicial Watch, reported the Associated Press.

Two weeks ago, Congress’s General Accounting Office also filed suit against the Bush administration, saying it was refusing to release information that the public has a right to see.

White House officials say the information is private and immune to FOIA requests and government oversight.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

TORONTO
The Globe & Mail is reporting that a recent poll conducted by GPC International has revealed that 76 percent of Canadians think that an Enron-type debacle is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to happen in Canada.

Twenty-six percent of those polled said that they are less likely to invest because of the possibility of an Enron-like collapse in Canada.

Those polled showed support for putting regulations in place to prevent an Enron-style collapse in Canada: Two-thirds would support regulations to prevent auditing companies from providing both auditing and consulting services to the same client, while over 50 percent would support government monitoring of the accounting profession.

Gordon Nixon, CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, the nation’s largest bank, is reported to have stated that business leaders must put greater emphasis on ensuring public confidence in the financial system to maintain a healthy investment climate.

LONDON
A growing number of activists are swapping street protests for Wall Street proxies, buying into companies with policies they oppose — hoping to effect change from within by voting as shareholders.

“We want people to become active investors,” Matt Phillips, a senior campaigner at U.K. environmental group Friends of the Earth, told the Reuters news agency. “Instead of saying disinvest, we’re saying change the company.”

Friends of the Earth, a longtime critic of many multinational U.K. firms, is paving the way for others interested in tackling perceived corporate wrongdoing from the inside.

Last fall, Friends of the Earth bought $43,000 in shares of U.K. construction firm Balfour Beatty, partner in the controversial Ilisu dam project in Turkey. The activist group parlayed its shares into shareholder pressure, joining with others to force Balfour to rethink its role in the dam project.

Last November, Balfour and an Italian firm both backed out of the Ilisu dam, which critics say would have flooded historic sites and displaced roughly 30,000 ethnic Kurds, reported the BBC.

Last week, Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, backed out for similar reasons, citing “unsatisfactory” progress in measures designed to “minimize the social and environmental impact of the project,” according to a company statement.

The success of shareholder activism coincides with the steady rise of the practice known as socially responsible investing, which has attracted $2.03 million in the United States alone — 10 percent of all funds being managed in the country, noted Reuters.

Modern activists with a social or environmental conscience come in many shapes, sizes, and suits, British activist Mark Thomas confided to the Reuters news agency.

“These investors aren’t the kind of people who are going to show up in Parliament Square on May Day,” observed Thomas. “But there are fund managers who think a very important part of a company’s worth is its ethical worth.”

CHICAGO
The debate over embryo screening kicked into high gear last week with the announcement that a 30-year-old woman with a genetic predisposition to early-onset Alzheimer’s gave birth to a girl whose DNA was screened to avoid passing on the disease.

Yury Verlinsky, director of the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago, oversaw the process, known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), in which viable eggs and embryos are examined for defects.

Verlinsky, who told the Associated Press that he would not perform the process to enable gender selection or “cosmetic” improvements, said this case was different because it focused on a debilitating, predictable disease.

“If a patient with full conscience fully understands the circumstances, then I would use it for any diagnosable disease,” Verlinsky told the AP. “Prevention is still the best way to do medicine.”

And for the handful of families in the world with early-onset Alzheimer’s, PGD is “the only relief” if they want to have biological children, he added. “It’s not our place to make a moral decision for them.”

Some bioethicists disagree, saying the woman’s decision to undergo embryo screening for a disease that comes later in life could lead to a slippery slope toward designer babies.

“Today it’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. Tomorrow it could easily be intelligence, or a good piano player, or many other things we might be able to identify the genetic factors for,” hypothesized Jeffrey Kahn, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics. “The question is, whether we ought to.”

WASHINGTON
A highly publicized report warning that 31 percent of U.S. teenagers are regular binge drinkers was disputed last week by the alcohol industry and the U.S. government, which said the study’s figures were distorted.

The report, “Teen Tipplers,” was released by Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), which based its figures on data from a 1998 government survey.

According to CASA’s analysis, nearly one-third of U.S. teens are binge drinkers — consuming five drinks in a row — and the gender gap has disappeared, with girls now drinking to the same degree as boys. The group also reported that teen drinkers are purchasing 25 percent of all alcohol sold in the United States.

That last statistic came under fire from the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, which called the group’s numbers “flat-out wrong,” reported the Associated Press.

After the U.S. government also challenged CASA’s figures, the group conceded that its analysis was flawed by its failure to re-weight the original 1998 data, which oversampled teenagers as a percentage of the overall U.S. population.

The government’s analysis charts teen binge drinking at 11.4 percent instead of the 31 percent asserted by CASA, but added that “regardless of any discrepancies … alcohol use before age 21 is unacceptable and against the law.”

Despite last week’s dispute over numbers, all groups agree that the problem of teen drinking needs to be addressed, noted the New York Times.

“Alcohol is far and away the top drug of abuse for American kids,” said Susan Foster, the Center’s vice president.

Joseph Califano, Center president and a former U.S. secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Jimmy Carter, added that “underage drinking has reached epidemic proportions in America … and parents are too often unwitting co-conspirators who tend to see drinking and occasional bingeing as a rite of passage.”

GADSDEN, Alabama
An Alabama jury last week found Monsanto Co. and two other firms liable for negligence after decades of polluting the rivers and lands of an Alabama town with possible carcinogens known as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

Residents and neighbors of Anniston, Alabama, accuse Monsanto of dumping tons of PCBs — toxic chemicals that may cause cancer — into their streams and landfills without telling the public, reported the Washington Post.

Residents only discovered the contamination in 1996.

According to the plaintiffs, Monsanto knew the secretly deposited chemicals, used in the manufacture of electrical equipment, were dangerous but hid the fact. Internal memos and evidence cite tests performed by Monsanto engineers, who found that fish dunked in a local creek died within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin. Other water sources tested at 7,500 times the legal PCB level, and some plaintiffs’ blood registered PCBs levels 27 times higher than the national norm.

Despite such evidence, Monsanto executives concluded “there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges,” reported the Post.

Monsanto, the sole U.S. manufacturer of PCBs, has denied any wrongdoing, pointing out that it quit making PCBs in 1971, six years before the chemicals were banned by the U.S. government.

“When Monsanto learned that PCBs could possibly be in the environment, it acted promptly and responsibly,” company lawyer Jere White insisted during the trial.

But last week the state court jury determined the company’s behavior was “beyond all possible bounds of decency … and utterly intolerable in civilized society.”

Damages in the case have yet to be decided, but observers say the total will probably reach into the millions. Monsanto and its former chemicals branch, Solutia, have already paid more than $80 million to settle related charges.

Suits by more than 15,000 other local residents are expected to follow.

SAN FRANCISCO
The United States and other Western nations are using poorer countries as dumping grounds for their tech waste, creating environmental and health hazards for which they refuse responsibility, a coalition of trade and human rights groups alleged last week.

In a scathing report entitled “Exporting Harm: The Techno-Trashing of Asia,” the groups document what they claim is the damage being done to the land and people in Third World and Asian nations by the West’s technological waste.

Whereas Western nations insist they are recycling their technology waste when shipping it overseas, the report says the process is more akin to dumping, chronicling the pile-up and contamination fueled by the export of hundred of thousands of consumer goods and computer components.

“I’ve seen a lot of dirty operations in Third World countries, but what was shocking was seeing all this post-consumer waste,” report co-author Jim Puckett of the Seattle-based Basel Action Network told the BBC.

Puckett and others visited disposal sites, including one in Guiyu, China, where women, men, and children crushed, melted, smelted, and smashed TV tubes, computer keyboards, and wiring in the hunt for metals and other resalable compounds.

The coalition claims that in the process, the people are exposed to lead, mercury, cadmium, and other toxins, which enter their bodies and the local environments, ruining their health, water supplies, and arable land, according to a report in the New York Times.

Before 2004, as many as 315 million computers will become obsolete due to changing technology, according to forecasts from the National Safety Council. While the potential for waste is undeniable, no one knows quite what to do with it, noted the Times.

“Everybody knows this is going on, but they are just embarrassed and don’t really know what to do about it,” Ted Smith, head of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which also helped prepare the report, told the BBC.

While the European Union is moving toward cradle-to-grave corporate responsibility for electronic recycling, the United States has balked, according to the Times report.

The United States is the only developed nation that has refused to sign the Basel Convention, a 1989 United Nations treaty calling on countries to sharply limit the export of hazardous waste.

WASHINGTON
The U.S. government last week shut down its controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) after being blasted for a plan to possibly spread misinformation via the foreign press.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced the dissolution of the OSI, saying the office had “been so damaged … that it could not function effectively.”

Rumsfeld and other officials insisted that the OSI’s intent — to counter lies told about the United States in foreign countries — was a legitimate expansion of government activities.

Lies and obfuscation have frequently been used to mislead enemy governments about U.S. military activities during wartime and confrontation. But the OSI’s possible use of similar misinformation fell foul, largely due to a leaked classified proposal to tell lies to the foreign press, reported the New York Times.

While that course of action had not yet been enacted, press reports revealing the OSI’s potential plan to distribute propaganda through unwitting foreign journalists sent the OSI into a tailspin last weekend.

“I can’t say anything more than that the biggest disinformation campaign was leveled at us,” said Lt. Col. Marty France, a spokesman for the now-defunct office. The OSI’s aim was not lies, but truth — “getting the facts out to foreign audiences that are prevented from receiving them,” France told the Los Angeles Times.

NEW YORK
The city of New York last week urged Internet auction giant eBay to remove from its site a number of items related to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, saying the items would “belittle the memory of those who died.”

Michael Cardozo, the New York City’s chief attorney, said the items — including a pair of dust-covered boots allegedly worn at Ground Zero, and 911 audio tapes of phone calls made on September 11 — are “morally repugnant,” according to a Reuters report.

“Many of these items represent outrageous attempts to profit from a recent act of mass murder,” Cardozo wrote in a letter to eBay. “But most importantly, it is completely offensive to the victims and the times in which we find ourselves.”

Cardozo asked eBay to voluntary pull items related to the attacks, and threatened to attempt legal action if the auction site refused, reported the Reuters news agency.

Although eBay barred such items from its site for three months following the attacks, the policy was dropped in January. Since then, a large number of attack-related items have been offered for sale.

eBay spokesman Henry Gomez says the company is working hard to make sure that sales of offensive items are blocked. “The city has got to work with us a little bit,” Gomez told Reuters. “We are basically supportive of the city’s point of view.”

UNITED NATIONS
Workers from more than 40 relief agencies were accused last week of sexually exploiting refugee children in three African nations, according to reports from a United Nations agency and a prominent charity.

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Save the Children U.K. did not identify the workers or their agencies by name because of pending investigations, but leveled sweeping charges of sexual abuse after hearing testimony from thousands of refugees stranded by war, civil unrest, and violence.

The reports claim that refugees, entrusted to the care of relief agencies, have found abuse instead of help, with children being forced into sex in exchange for food, supplies, and medicine, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Most of the abuse is committed by local staff of the agencies, according to the report.

While the vast majority of perpetrators are male staff forcing girls into sex, some female staff have also targeted refugee boys in camps in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, the report claims.

“Sexual violence and exploitation of children appears to be extensive … and involves actors at all levels — UN staff, security forces, staff of international and national NGOs, government officials, and community leaders,” the report states.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan pledged swift and punitive action against those found guilty of abusing refugees. The UN is also expected to send in more female staff to monitor conditions, and to provide refugees with a safe contact to whom they can complain.

From the Gallup News Service:

“Hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians have increased in recent days, following the deaths of six Israeli soldiers in a Palestinian ambush on Tuesday and seven Palestinians in an Israeli counterattack on Thursday. A recent Gallup poll underscores the importance that Americans place on the United States helping develop peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. At the same time, the poll shows that Americans continue to be heavily in favor of the Israelis in the conflict, and that Americans’ perceptions of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat are growing increasingly negative.

“The poll, conducted Feb. 4-6, before the most recent wave of violence, reveals that 54 percent of Americans think the development of a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be a very important U.S. foreign policy goal. This represents an increase of 11 percentage points compared to last year’s 43 percent….

“While many Americans consider peace in the Middle East to be an important policy goal, a similar number is skeptical that peace will ever come to the Israelis and Arabs there. Americans have become more pessimistic over the last two years about peace prospects in that region. The most recent poll shows that 59 percent of Americans say peace will not come to that region while just 37 percent say it will. This represents a shift from 1999-2000, when Americans were more divided in their assessment, and a plurality thought peace was possible.

“Currently, 55 percent of Americans say their sympathies in the Middle East conflict lie with the Israelis, while just 14 percent say theirs lie with the Palestinians. Thirty-one percent have no opinion either way. Since Gallup first asked this question in 1988, the results have consistently been one-sided in favor of the Israelis. The pro-Israeli sentiment is also reflected in Americans’ ratings of the two sides and their leaders….

“Generally, Republicans and conservatives have more positive opinions of Israel than do Democrats and liberals. For example, 68 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of conservatives say they have a favorable view of Israel, compared to 56 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of liberals. Sixty-seven percent of Republicans and 64 percent of conservatives say their sympathies lie with the Israelis in the conflict, while 50 percent of Democrats and just 37 percent of liberals agree….”

“Public sentiment is everything: With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”

– Abraham Lincoln (16th U.S. president, 1809-1865)