One mother’s actions can have more impact than a thousand parents’ lectures. Here’s an example I heard recently that shook a town to its roots 25 years ago and made tsunami-like waves all over the state.

Our heroine — let’s call her Janice — lived in small town in a large, thinly populated middle-American state. She worked for the state social services department in addition to raising three bright, very active children. Her teenage daughter Betsy was a rising track star who expected to run in the state championship meet.

The track meet, occurring late in spring before the summer heat became insufferable, was the major event of the year for Janice’s town. The high school held numerous records and competed successfully against much larger, wealthier schools from the state capital. For years, the town’s population had gathered at the championship to cheer on its local participants. If you missed a meeting or a phone call in town, you could be assured of catching up with your contact at the track finals; almost everyone went.

Saturday night, the week before the championship, Betsy went out with friends — nothing unusual in that. But when she returned, Janice suspected that she and her friends had been drinking — a direct violation of the school rules and the track team’s training covenant. When Janice asked her, Betsy confessed. She even offered to tell her coach, despite knowing that regulations would require her name to be removed from the team roster, effectively barring her from participating in the state meet. Summing up their conversation, Janice said, “Tomorrow, first thing, you’ll report to your coach and tell him what happened.” Betsy nodded, wiping away a few remorseful tears as she gathered her resolve for confessing to the coach.

From time to time the next day, Janice looked up from her work, reminded that she was expecting a call from the school to confirm that Betsy would be disciplined. As the afternoon progressed into what would normally be Betsy’s after-school track practice, no call arrived. The shadows had lengthened into dinner time when Betsy finally came home.

“Did you tell the coach?” Janice asked.

“Of course, Mom!,” Betsy replied. “He said it was no big deal and we could talk about it later, after the state meet.”

Janice stared at her daughter, disbelieving. “Are you suspended from the team? Is he going to do anything about it at all? Are other kids involved?”

Betsy shook her head. “I think our conversation was the end of it. He seemed to have a lot on his mind. He didn’t ask any questions and hasn’t talked to anybody else as far as I know.”

Betsy watched her mother’s expression change slowly from blank surprise to jaw-grinding determination. “Oh, no, Mom, please don’t,” Betsy pleaded. “It’s over now.”

Years later, recalling the incident, Janice told me that “making up my mind to call the principal was the most difficult decision I ever made. Other people might have shrugged off the dilemma, but I knew what I had to do, and I knew that it would be painful, at least to me.”

No one, however, could have imagined how bad it would get. “I thought that Betsy and a couple of other kids might be suspended from the team and the championship,” Janice said. But the principal was aghast at the coach’s cavalier disregard for the rules, particularly when the school had worked so hard with the community throughout the year to enforce the tough new anti-drug and -drinking standards for teens, hoping to prevent car wrecks and arrests. He called the school board together and advised them to fire the coach, suspend the track team, and withdraw from that year’s championship. Extreme? Perhaps, but the principal wanted the punishment to underscore for the whole community — especially students, parents, and faculty — that the rules were an inviolable part of school life, not something to be pushed aside when there was a championship to win.

“You can imagine what happened,” Janice said. “My daughter wouldn’t look at me for weeks. Our neighbors avoided us. If I went into a room anywhere in town — the library, the market, the Post Office — conversation stopped. Some people stared. Others just looked away, embarrassed to be in the same room with me.”

Time passed. The wounds healed. Janice and her family moved out of state. Betsy grew up, graduated from college, began her career, married, and became a parent. She has begun to experience what it’s like to set an example for her children — how to help them sort out right from wrong, how to help them think hard about tough decisions, and finally, to act on principle, even in the face of disaster.

Recently she brought up the incident with her mother. “When it all happened. I was sure I could never forgive you for what you did to me and the track team. I thought it was a terrible decision!” Betsy told her. “My life has changed a lot since then, and now I understand why you did it.”

And because Betsy understands, and because she’s a role model for her own children, another generation will be able to carry on her family’s moral tradition.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics

“When I was informed by the archives that there were documents missing, I immediately returned everything I had except for a few documents that I apparently had accidentally discarded.”

– Former Clinton-administration national security advisor Sandy Berger, trying to quell a storm of speculation last week over his removal of several documents and personal notes from the National Archives. Berger said that in the course of reviewing thousands of pages of terrorism-related documents, he inadvertently mixed up some of the government’s classified papers with his own, illegally taking them home and later discarding a few of them. Berger, who resigned from his role as an unpaid foreign-policy advisor to John Kerry over the issue, is under criminal investigation and has been accused by some Republicans of trying to both conceal evidence for Clinton and provide secret information to Kerry. Experts say both allegations are unlikely since multiple copies of the missing Clinton-era documents remain and since Kerry probably had clearance to view any of the information himself. Some Democrats have questioned the timing of the news, suggesting that the Bush administration, which has known about the missing documents for months, tactically leaked the story to divert attention from the report of the 9/11 commission. The White House denied the charge. (“Clinton Adviser Probed about Removing Classified Terror Memos,” USA Today, July 19. “White House Knew of Inquiry on Aide; Kerry Camp Irked,” New York Times, July 21.)

WASHINGTON
Despite the official return of Iraq to local governance, the United States last week continued to feel the fallout for various practices and abuses stemming from the Iraqi war and occupation. Among last week’s developments:

• A new Army report released last week admits that flaws were present in the military’s Iraqi operations, but insists those missteps, which include poor training and outdated policies, were not to blame for prisoner abuse. Instead, the report claims the abuses were the result of rogue and “unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals.” The report says the mistreatment of prisoners was abetted by “a few leaders” who failed to adequately supervise their soldiers, but said all such abuses were “aberrations.” The report, presented at a hastily called Senate committee hearing, appears to conflict with the earlier Taguba report, Red Cross findings, and even some of the report’s own determinations that systemic problems were evident and largely to blame for the abuse, according to the Times.
• USA Today reported that U.S. authorities in Iraq allowed the use of dogs during prisoner interrogations months after the practice had been ordered discontinued at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The practice, reauthorized by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the U.S. commander in Iraq, indicates both official sanction of questionable tactics and inconsistent policy, the paper asserted. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman last week said that regardless of Sanchez’s memo, the practice was stopped by early October, when evidence of prisoner abuse began being documented. A spokesman for Sanchez declined comment, saying “soldiers are not allowed to make comments to the media” about abuse of prisoners.
• The body overseeing accounting for the new Iraqi administration harshly criticized both U.S. occupation authorities for lax and primitive accounting and the Pentagon for a persistent lack of cooperation. The agency, which says it has found no evidence of fraud, said the slack bookkeeping standards of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority have opened the door to corruption, reported the New York Times.
• In a scathing critique of U.S. intelligence, a bipartisan panel investigating the 9/11 attacks concluded, “Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.” The commission chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, suggested that Congress convene a special session to enact legislation to reform intelligence operations. After saying such actions would be put off until Congress returned from recess in the fall, House Speaker Dennis Hastert took extreme heat and hastily recanted. “The American people expect us to act,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said last week. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting for months.” House and Senate committees will now hold special sessions in August to determine next steps, reported the Associated Press.

BHOPAL, India
After years of dragging its feet, India’s government was ordered last week to end its legal wrangling and make immediate plans to disburse nearly $330 million to victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy.

The accidental release of toxic gas used to make pesticides at Union Carbide’s plant in 1984 killed nearly 4,000 people instantly. Over 20,000 others have died from related illnesses, and 120,000 remain chronically ill, reported the Reuters news agency.

Union Carbide, which was later bought by Dow Chemical Co., paid $470 million in compensation in 1989, though nearly 70 percent of the funds have been withheld by the government, which said it needed time to sort through legal claims filed by victims and their families.

India’s highest court last week said that plaintiffs had waited long enough — 20 years — and that the government had to take immediate action to try to ameliorate their hardship.

The court ordered the government to release the outstanding balance — roughly $325.5 million — under an expedited schedule, saying a report would be required within two to three months, according to the Agence France-Presse.

If anything good is to be found in the two-decade delay, it may be that the value of the withheld funds has risen considerably since 1989 due to currency fluctuations and interest, noted Reuters.

DUESSELDORF, Germany
Ending a criminal trial that had morphed into a forum on a country’s corporate ethics, a German judge last week acquitted six former Mannesman executives of breaching their duty to shareholders by approving high executive pay packages.

The trial centered on $71 million in bonuses given to Mannesman executives during a $189 billion takeover bid by Vodafone in 2000, reported Bloomberg.

Deutsche Bank head Joseph Ackermann, a former Mannesman board member who helped engineer the bonuses, was sued for violating shareholders’ trust by awarding payouts considered astronomical by German standards.

Ackerman and five others accused of approving or accepting the payments were allowed to leave the courthouse as free men last week, though the presiding judge said the case was cause for concern.

“Never in 25 years have I experienced such attempts to influence justice,” Judge Brigitte Koppenhofer declared in her closing statements, saying that coercive efforts had “ranged from telephone terror to open threats.”

Koppenhofer said she had no choice but to acquit the defendants of criminal breach of trust, noting that their payments were technically legal even if socially unacceptable, according to the Guardian.

“In this criminal process, it is not up to the court to make management decisions or moral or ethical judgments,” she said. “We are not judging German corporate culture, although the evidence we saw was puzzling at times.”

Many observers were watching the trial for a sign of how Germany is handling its shift from a consensus model of doing business to an Anglo-American model of rewarding performance, noted the Guardian.

Prosecutors last week said they would appeal the acquittals, reported the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON
Dozens of nations, Nobel Peace prize winners, legal and health organizations, religious groups, and former government officials last week urged the U.S. Supreme Court to ban the practice of executing teenage killers, calling the custom inhumane.

The international debate centers on a 17-year-old boy who viciously murdered a woman whose house he was robbing in 1993, allegedly telling his young accomplices that they would avoid serious punishment because of their ages, reported the Associated Press.

The man, Christopher Simmons, now 27 years old, was scheduled for execution until Missouri’s highest court banned the killing of juveniles as unconstitutional last year, prompting prosecutors to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

While the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that offenders 15 and younger could not be executed, it upheld capital punishment for 16- and 17-year-olds, noted the New York Times.

Last week, a prestigious and powerful group of disparate officials and organizations urged the court to ban the practice, saying it violates international human rights norms and puts the United States at odds with Western civilization.

Last week’s filing noted that only five nations have executed juveniles in the past four years: Congo, China, Iran, Pakistan, and the United States, according to the AP.

“In no other area of human rights does the United States consider these nations to be our equals,” one filing noted.

Signatories include Canada, Mexico, the 25-nation European Union, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and a host of other medical, legal, and religious groups.

“By continuing to execute child offenders in violation of international norms, the United States is not just leaving itself open to charges of hypocrisy, but is also endangering the rights of many around the world,” said the filing. “Countries whose human rights records are criticized by the United States have no incentive to improve their records when the United States fails to meet the most fundamental, baseline standards.”

Six of the 19 U.S. states that still executive young offenders say the practice should continue, insisting in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in one case that “a bright-line rule categorically exempting 16- and 17-year-olds from the death penalty — no matter how elaborate the plot, how sinister the killing, or how sophisticated the cover up — would be arbitrary at best and downright perverse at worst.”

NEW YORK
Eight states and New York City last week sued some of the nation’s largest power producers, saying the plants’ emissions are hastening global warming and threatening their citizens, economies, and environments.

The lawsuit, which does not seek monetary penalties, asks for a court order requiring the power producers to reduce their output of carbon dioxide, one of the gases responsible for global warming.

California, one of the suit’s plaintiffs, says it expects consequences of global warming to include the melting of the Sierra snowpack, a decrease in water for farmers and cities, more frequent wildfires, and increased smog, reported the Sacramento Bee. Other states cite a list of similar potential threats.

Defendants in the case — American Electric Power Co., Southern Co., Xcel Energy Inc., Cinergy Corp., and the federal government’s Tennessee Valley Authority — contend that the lawsuit is misguided.

“There is nothing one company, five companies, or one country can do to resolve global warming,” American Electric Power spokesman Pat Hemlepp told the Associated Press. “It will require a global commitment including developing nations.” Others say it will take federal action.

The states and environmental groups agree, but note that the Bush administration has backed away from exactly those kinds of steps: refusing to sign the Kyoto climate treaty, loosening “new source review” pollution restrictions, and abandoning campaign-2000 promises to restrict carbon dioxide emission for softer and unenforceable voluntary measures.

“We’re here because the federal government has abdicated its responsibility,” Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, one of the suit’s co-plaintiffs, charged to the New York Times.

Other plaintiffs include Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, and the city of New York.

WASHINGTON
The federal agency in charge of making sure gun dealers operate legally is way behind in its inspection process and lax in reporting even serious violations, according to a Justice Department audit released last week.

The report found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) inspected less than 5 percent of the nation’s 104,000 federally licensed gun dealers in 2002. Its stated goal is 33 percent.

At its current rate, it would take the ATF 22 years to check all licensed dealers for compliance with regulations requiring them to account for all processed firearms, including those sold in bulk, stolen, or gone missing.

With only 420 inspectors to cover the entire nation, the ATF is stretched thin, according to the Associated Press. However, even when the agency’s inspectors find serious violations, they sometimes fail to report them, the report claimed.

ATF director Carl Truscott characterized the audit’s findings as “constructive criticism,” insisting that his agency is committed to improvement and has adopted most of the audit’s recommendations, noted the AP.

The audit, which paints a bleak picture of federal firearms regulation, comes as the U.S. Congress prepares to drop a ban on the sale of most styles of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons.

The ban, enacted in 1994 and bitterly opposed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and congressional Republican leaders, will lapse in September without political intervention by President Bush.

While Bush, who is backed by the NRA, has said he would sign a renewed ban if such a measure made it to his desk, he has declined to push for its passage, reported the Reuters news agency.

LONDON
Saying decades of focusing on offenders’ rights had created a culture of leniency, British Prime Minister Tony Blair last week announced a five-year plan to combat crime and improve public civility.

The program is part of a continuing push by the U.K. government to bring respect back to the streets through a concentrated campaign of crime control aimed at stigmatizing antisocial behavior.

Blair last week blamed much current criminal behavior on the country’s four-decades push, begun in the 1960s, to protect the public from problematic police discrimination, profiling, and miscarriages of justice.

While those steps were commendable, “some took the freedom without the responsibility,” Blair said, reported the BBC.

Blair’s proposal aims to cut crime by 15 percent by 2008.

Strategies include quintupling the street presence of community support police offers to 25,000, reducing bureaucracy, creating courts that focus on antisocial behavior cases, stripping some adolescent criminals of their right to anonymity, and using satellites and electronic tags to track the most recidivistic criminals.

The civility push comes as crime rates in England and Wales continue to fall. Overall crime dropped by 5 percent in the past year, marking the longest sustained decrease since 1898, according to a government report covered by the Guardian.

LANSING, Michigan
In an apparent contest between political ideology and electoral pragmatism, U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader last week said he would accept Republican help to get on the November ballot in Michigan.

Nader, whose appearance on the Michigan ballot is uncertain due to conflicts within the Reform Party, needed 30,000 signatures to qualify independently for the ballot, reported the Associated Press.

Nader’s campaign had submitted only about 5,400 signatures before halting its effort about a month ago, leaving him far short of the required threshold.

Nader, who has harshly lambasted both the Democratic and Republican parties, last week said he would accept help from the Republicans — in the form of 43,000 signatures corralled on his behalf.

Michigan Republican executive director Greg McNeilly, who helped circulate petitions on Nader’s behalf, emailed Republicans saying their help was needed “to ensure that Michigan voters are not disenfranchised,” reported the New York Times.

Michigan Democrats criticized Nader’s unlikely alliance with the Republicans, saying the latter’s interest was not in empowering voters but in fracturing the non-Republican vote into pieces too small to defeat President Bush.

“We urge Nader to reject this Republican political trick and demonstrate that he is still a man with great integrity who honors his own beliefs,” Michigan Democratic executive chairman Mark Brewer told the Associated Press.

Nader campaign spokesman Kevin Zeese, who previously said the campaign would refuse the GOP signatures, last week changed course, saying the goal was to get on the ballot, regardless of whose help it took.

Democrats said they may challenge the legality of the Republicans’ helping hand, which may have violated federal election laws if more than $5,000 was spent rounding up signatures for Nader, noted the AP.

Last week’s fracas over ends, means, and political maneuvering come even as more than three months remain in the politically heated and fractious campaign season.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

TORONTO
The Globe & Mail is reporting that eight U.S. states and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec have established a preliminary agreement to prevent large-scale water exports from the Great Lakes.

The U.S. states that border the Great Lakes and the two Canadian provinces also have agreed to establish an oversight body that would regulate water export proposals.

The ethical dimension of denying access to increasingly scarce fresh-water resources in the U.S. South seemed not to be a major concern by the parties to the agreement and, according to experts, is a call for the arid parts of the U.S. South to look elsewhere to solve their increasingly critical water shortage problems.

According to the Globe & Mail report, any request to divert more than 3.8 million liters of water a day from the Great Lakes Basin, averaged over a 120-day period, would have to be approved unanimously by all eight U.S. states and reviewed by the two Canadian provinces.

This level of agreement would be very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. In addition, the agreement would require most of the water to be returned in a nonpolluted form. However, experts and politicians also have pointed out that the Great Lakes Basin, which has about 20 percent of the world’s fresh water, is a finite resource and that large-scale water diversion would cause water levels in the Great Lakes to drop precipitously.

The final version of the agreement is not expected to be in place until next spring and the U.S. Congress, the eight U.S. states, and the two Canadian provinces would have to approve the final agreement.

From the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press:

“The public broadly approves of the performance of the 9/11 commission in investigating the events that led to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By more than two-to-one (61 percent – 24 percent), Americans approve of the job being done by the commission, which is expected to release its final report later this week. Significantly, there is no partisan divide in this view – as many Republicans (62 percent) as Democrats (61 percent) approve of the commission’s performance to date.

“The partisan agreement over the commission’s investigation contrasts with the enduring political differences over the government’s efforts to reduce the terrorist threat. Seven-in-ten Americans (71 percent) say the government has done at least fairly well in reducing the terrorist threat, but just 18 percent believe it has done very well. These ratings have changed little over the past two years. Three times as many Republicans as Democrats and independents give the government top marks for reducing the threat of terrorism (35 percent very well vs. 12 percent and 11 percent, respectively).

“The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, conducted July 8-18 among 2,009 adults, shows that in spite of government warnings of a possible terrorist strike to undermine the election, public concern over terrorism has not increased recently. In fact, the percentage saying they are very worried over a new attack on the U.S. fell to 17 percent from 25 percent in June, and is on par with the level of concern expressed in multiple surveys conducted over the past year….”

“The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.”

– Socrates (Greek philosopher, 470? – 399 B.C.E.)

Aren’t there any good-news stories about corporate ethics?

I got thinking about that last week when, to escape a blistering late-afternoon thunderstorm, we tied up our boat at a marina on a nearby island. It was after-hours, and several of the staff were waiting out the downpour on the porch before heading home in their boats. So we joined them. From our vantage, we could see the clouds boiling overhead and the harbor slowly fading behind the rain. When the storm finally hit, we retreated inside — six adults, a boy, and two dogs — to watch through the windows.

I’ve had some fascinating conversations with strangers while waiting out storms, and this was no exception. Maybe it’s that a storm overwhelms our petty human wills, forcing us to reschedule the living date-book we call our lives. Maybe it’s that our collective vulnerability makes our commonalities seem more obvious, so that it’s harder not to need each other. And maybe it’s that what sustains the moment is conversation, as engaging and unpredictable — and yet as purposeful — as the storm howling outside.

I found myself standing by a window with a man who had spent his life as a homebuilder. With typical Yankee canniness, he found out soon enough what I did for a living. Perhaps because of our location — with the rain pelting the glass but making no inroads into the room — we found ourselves talking about the ethics of windows.

He’d been installing them, he told me, for decades. And he’d always gone back to the same company, Andersen Windows — not only because of the quality of the product and their twenty-year guarantee, but because of their commitment to keeping their word. Again and again, he said, that choice paid off.

He recalled building a house not long ago where, as they sat on sawhorses eating lunch one day, a large windowpane suddenly snapped from top to bottom in a lightning-shaped crack. Over the weekend, two more did the same thing. Turned out, he said, that the company had used a bad lot of glass. Andersen replaced every one of the windows, no questions asked.

He also told me about a house where over time the windows began taking on an odd tint. When the owner called to complain, he phoned the Andersen representative. All the company wanted to know was the measurement of every bad window. A couple of weeks later, he said, a truck rumbled into the driveway. Two men got out in suits and ties, pulled on their coveralls, unloaded their freight, and set about replacing every bad window. As they left, they handed the dumbfounded owner a packet of window-cleaning cloths, a gallon of cleaner, and a long-handled squeegee — just by way of thanks.

But his most recent experience was the most thought provoking. Back in 1983, he said, he built a summer cottage on an island for a “really nice guy” and his family, and they’d stayed in touch ever since. Last year, the windows began fogging up. My friend wasn’t able to get out to check them right away. Meanwhile, the owner got an estimate from another company, which grimly informed him that he’d have to rip out the old frames and redo the beautiful interior pine trim and the well-weathered outside shingles — all at considerable expense.

So this spring my friend went out to count and measure the windows. He also wrote down the number on every pane of glass. Each number included an “83″ — the year the house was built, and now one year beyond the 20-year warrantee.

“Are you sure that number was 83 and not 84?” asked the representative at the lumber yard when he called them in. “Sometimes the light is funny, and a four can look like a three. Why don’t you go look again?”

It was meant as a helpful suggestion. And it could have saved a bundle of money for the owner. But it wasn’t right, and the contractor knew it. “No,” he said, sighing as he told me, “it was 83.”

He didn’t hear anything for a while. Then the representative called back. He’d added up the purchases this contractor had made with Andersen over the years. It came to over a million dollars. The replacement windows for the owners’ cottage were on their way, free.

Lessons? There must be dozens, but I see four. First, when you let people know you’re interested in ethics, you hear great tales. Second, it takes integrity to stay with what’s right — especially when, through a tiny shift in your reporting, you think you could save thousands of dollars for a friend.

So why did the contractor hold his position and not lie about that number? That goes to the third lesson. It’s all about corporate America, which (as readers of Ethics Newsline know) has been taking a beating over integrity issues. This lesson suggests that when you build a company on quality, service, and ethics, you build loyalties that last far beyond the life of your product. There’s another company he could go to, my friend said, selling pretty good windows for less. But he’s not budging.

And that’s lesson four, which is that what goes around comes around. The company’s ethics brought out an ethical response — even in the face of great temptation. My friend didn’t try to put something over on the manufacturer. And in the end he didn’t have to. That’s a story worth getting rained out to hear.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics

“CLARIFICATION: It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.”

– The Herald-Leader of Lexington, Kentucky, in a self-published exposé earlier this month criticizing efforts by former management to deliberately downplay coverage of the civil rights movement. (“Front-Page News, Back-Page Coverage,” Herald-Leader, July 4)

NEW YORK
Shortly before last week’s landmark sex discrimination trial was scheduled to begin, Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $54 million to settle allegations that it denied equal pay and promotions to women.

The settlement, which allows Morgan Stanley to avoid the public airing of possibly embarrassing testimony, covers all women who worked at the company’s institutional-equities division since 1995, reported the Reuters news agency.

Nearly 350 of those women had filed claims accusing Morgan Stanley of gender bias, citing alleged instances of denied promotions and pay, men-only golf trips, and visits to strip clubs.

Morgan Stanley, which has denied wrongdoing, was not required to admit any fault.

Of the firm’s $54 million settlement, $40 million will be set aside for claimants and $2 million will go toward a new independently monitored diversity program, reported the New York Times.

The remaining $12 million will be paid to former Morgan Stanley bond trader Allison Schieffelin, whose 1998 complaint against the firm led to the federal charges filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) in 2001.

“With this settlement, Morgan Stanley has taken an important leadership step in adopting progressive programs to promote diversity that should serve as a model for the financial services industry,” EEOC chairwoman Cari Dominguez said last week.

“I expect that we will hear more from women on Wall Street and from racial minorities,” added EEOC lead trial lawyer Elizabeth Grossman, saying that Wall Street discrimination is still “very much a problem.”

WASHINGTON
The head of the U.S. Park Police, which protects the nation’s monuments and historic sites, was fired last week, seven months after angering her superiors by telling reporters that budget shortfalls were causing problems.

Teresa Chambers, the first person from outside the National Park Service to head the police, accused the Bush administration of punishing her for publicly acknowledging widely held budgetary and safety concerns.

Her firing came seven months after Chambers was suspended and slapped with a gag order after discussing her concerns in an interview with the Washington Post.

The Post’s piece examined concerns laid out in a November 28 memo from Chambers to the director of the National Park Service, which oversees the police.

“My professional judgment, based upon 27 years of police service, six years as chief of police, and countless interactions with police professionals across the country, is that we are at a staffing and resource crisis in the United States Park Police — a crisis that, if allowed to continue, will almost surely result in the loss of life or the destruction of one of our nation’s most valued symbols of freedom and democracy,” she wrote.

Three days after the Post piece was published, Chambers was suspended for improperly making public remarks about budget and security issues, reported the Post.

Last week, Chambers petitioned for reinstatement. Hours later, she was fired.

“There’s been a lot of talk from Chief Chambers about the Park Police budget. I’d like to report that the Park Police operating budget has increased by 39 percent since the Bush administration took office,” said Interior Department spokeswoman Tina Kreisher.

Critics say that increase still leaves the agency vastly underfunded, falling far short of the amount needed to meet expanded security duties demanded of the agency after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, according to the Post.

Chambers, who has appealed her firing, is supported by a raft of watchdog and employee groups who contend that the Interior Department is squelching transparency and public dialogue about public safety and the administration’s funding priorities.

This fight is “not about me,” Chambers told CNN last week, insisting that she is only a small “player” in the dispute.

“The American people should be afraid of this kind of silencing of professionals in any field,” she contended. “We should be very concerned as American citizens that people who are experts in their field either can’t speak up, or, as we’re seeing now in the parks service, won’t speak up.”

WASHINGTON
A U.S. Senate report released last week slammed the eminent Riggs Bank for a series of failures and violations allegedly undertaken to protect multimillion-dollar business deals with corrupt dictators.

Riggs, which paid a record $25 million fine in May to settle charges that it violated federal banking laws in its handling of accounts in Equatorial Guinea, is accused of hiding funds for deposed Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet and for current African officials.

Riggs’ Washington bank received suitcases stuffed with shrink-wrapped cash, set up offshore accounts hidden from regulators, and kept quiet about transactions that should have set off alarms, according to the report from the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations.

The firm’s alleged violations, which the report said began in the mid-1990s and included personal visits to Pinochet by Riggs’ former chief executive, continued after the dictator was arrested and his accounts frozen, reported the New York Times.

The Senate inquiry also criticizes Riggs for accepting between $400 million and $700 million in funds from the government of Equatorial Guinea, whose ruler is suspected of torture and human rights abuses.

Oil firms Exxon Mobil, Amerada Hess, and Marathon Oil have been implicated in the scandal, reported the Times.

Despite such misgivings and in defiance of stricter laws against money laundering in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the report says Riggs “turned a blind eye to evidence suggesting the bank was handling the proceeds of foreign corruption, and allowed numerous suspicious transactions to take place without notifying law enforcement.”

The report is a “sordid story about a bank with a distinguished name that was blatantly disregarding its anti-money-laundering obligations,” said subcommittee member Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

Both Riggs and the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which has been criticized for lazy oversight, said mistakes had been made and that reforms to prevent similar abuses were being undertaken.

“In general, we have acknowledged that the Riggs situation represents a failure of supervision. We were too slow to act, we gave the bank too many opportunities,” Comptroller spokesman Robert Garsson told the Los Angeles Times. “We were too willing to believe that the bank was sincere in its promises and effort to make changes.”