Ethics Newsline®

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.)