Ethics Newsline®

Several years ago, my wife and I visited the former Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz at Oświęcim, Poland. We had come like so many visitors: against our will, in some way, yet impelled by history and conviction to visit this monument of inhumanity. We came to learn, to grieve, and to keep from forgetting. We left with a clearer sense of exactly what it was we needed to not forget.

That day, sobered and silent, we stood on the railway siding where prisoners disembarked from boxcars. Our guide led us along the camp’s grid work of roads to the sparse wooden buildings that housed the prisoners — Jews mostly, as well as Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays, political opponents of the Nazis, and Soviet prisoners of war. She showed us the tangled heaps of eyeglasses and the rafter-high piles of shoes taken from them before they were led away. She let us linger before the memorabilia on the walls — official papers and forms, personal letters and notes, and tattered, blurred black-and-white pictures — all testifying to the terrorizing interaction of captors and captives. Finally she brought us underground through the gas chambers and into the crematorium.

Mercifully, she then guided us back above ground to the perimeter track outside the fence, where she pointed through the tops of the surrounding trees to the gabled peak of a pleasant brick house a block away. That, she said, was where the Nazi commandant lived with his family. That was where, after work, he presumably retired to play with his children and his dog, talk with his wife about their plans, entertain colleagues for dinner, read and listen to music, and refresh himself for his daily job of killing.

Who was he? How could he do what he did? Why did a culture as refined, sophisticated, and thoughtful as Germany’s produce such individuals? What were his values?

In the years since that visit to Auschwitz, I’ve come to see that the answer to that last question doesn’t lie with the values themselves. Shocking though it sounds, that commandant probably held within himself the five common values of responsibility, compassion, respect, honesty, and fairness that the Institute finds humanity to be sharing worldwide. When he invited friends for dinner, he probably took on the responsibility to show up himself. He probably felt compassion for his children and respect for his wife. He no doubt strove to be honest in his dealings with his superiors and fair in managing his underlings.

What went so terribly wrong at Auschwitz, in other words, was not the values themselves. Nor was it, I suspect, the commandant’s definition of those terms. Asked for the meaning of, say, “honesty,” he probably would have defined it the way his victims would have. The issue, instead, was the perimeter within which his values operated.

Each of us, it seems, lives our ethical life within a moral boundary. Inside that perimeter we naturally put our values into action; beyond it, sadly, we tend not to. Feeling a moral obligation to those we see as insiders, we accord them the full dignity of respect, honesty, responsibility, fairness, and compassion. Those we define as outsiders we more readily dismiss. It’s not that we set out to treat them unethically. It’s simply that we don’t see them as worthy of our moral concern. Yet the moral exemplars we hold in highest regard — Jesus, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, to name but a few — are those for whom the boundary had all but vanished, so that every individual was worthy of the same moral obligation. By contrast, those who seem most vicious — Mafia families, international terrorists, inner-city drug pushers — have such a wizened sense of moral concern that it extends only to a few family members or close associates, beyond whom anyone is fair game.

That’s where I suspect we find the Nazi commandant. Whatever the processes within German culture that brought him to that place — political sloganeering, pseudoscience, cultural elitism, nationalistic fervor, or economic duress — the perimeter of his values had become so shrunken that it didn’t even extend a block away. He apparently couldn’t even conceive of Jews as worthy of moral concern.

The theme of last week’s tributes at Auschwitz was simple: Don’t ever forget. What is it, however, that we want to remember? Not simply that evil is possible, or that racial stereotypes can kill, or that a maniacal national leader can sometimes cow his more reasonable counterparts in other countries. We know all of this already. What we need to remember is that our protection against such things lies in our moral sense. Without it, each of us can be led, more easily than we imagine, to set whole categories of people beyond our moral perimeter.

Part of our task is to not forget the tragedy of the Jews who were walled in. But the other part is to not forget the moral anemia of those who walled them outside of their concern. The success of every culture is measured by the extent of its moral perimeter. Our task is to expand our boundaries until at every place, for all peoples, the values we already share so widely become readily, naturally, and broadly expressed. Our task is to be able to say, “There’s no one toward whom I feel morally neutral, nobody beyond the circle of my ethical obligation.” True, that’s a tall vision. But Auschwitz was such a calamity of moral shrinkage that nothing less than a wholesale commitment to moral expansion could do it the justice of rendering it unrepeatable.

©2005 Institute for Global Ethics

“It has not been lost on me that the most complaints I heard from our constituents when I arrived revolved around what are now (Fishbein’s office’s) functions. And since you have arrived, I have NOT heard a single complaint, and when I inquired about that, the answer has been the change brought about by you.”

– National Institutes of Health AIDS Division Director Dr. Edmund Tramont in a February 14, 2004, email praising Dr. Jonathan Fishbein for his performance on the job. Tramont had recommended Fishbein for a $2,500 award for first-year performance, the Associated Press reported last week.

* * *

“This is going to take some work…. [W]e must overwhelm with force.”

– Tramont in an email nine days later, outlining plans to fire Fishbein after he “raised allegations of interference with his safety work,” according to memos obtained by the AP. The agency now says he is being fired for poor performance. (“Whistleblower Had Been Promised Bonus,” AP, Jan. 26)

WASHINGTON
After a second commentator was outed last week for failing to disclose contracts with the federal government, President Bush said he would stop paying commentators to tout his administration’s programs and policies.

Maggie Gallagher, a syndicated conservative columnist who writes about marriage, revealed that she had been paid $21,500 to do work for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to promote marriage as a way of strengthening families.

In 2002, Gallagher helped ghostwrite an essay that appeared in a religious magazine under the byline of HHS official Wade Horn. Gallagher also helped with presentations and wrote brochures that went mostly unused, reported the Washington Post, which broke the story about the contract.

“Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?” Gallagher said to the Post. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

She later published an apology on her web site. “I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative,” she wrote. “I would have, if I had remembered it.”

Gallagher and the HHS’s Wade Horn both tried to distance her contract from the recent scandal involving $241,000 in taxpayer funds channeled to commentator Armstrong Williams by the Education Department to push Bush’s controversial No Child Left Behind program.

Gallagher said that she was given a contract due to her status as a “marriage expert,” and was hired to inform government research and publications, not tout Bush’s agenda in her columns.

Press reports noted that five months after winning her contract, Gallagher published a National Review Online editorial and wrote columns chastising critics and promoting Bush’s plan.

In the midst of last week’s dust-up, President Bush said his administration should no longer pay commentators to plug policies, saying there “needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press.”

“But all our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying, you know, commentators to advance our agenda, ” Bush said, reported the Reuters news agency. “Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.”

Shortly after Bush’s remarks, the administration acknowledged that a third commentator, syndicated conservative columnist Michael McManus, also had been paid to help the HHS with its marriage initiative. Neither McManus nor the HHS had disclosed the relationship previously.

Last week’s disclosures follow a series of controversies over the administration’s use of taxpayer funds to promote policies in materials condemned as “covert propaganda” by Congress’ nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, which will be investigating the payments to Armstrong Williams.

An analysis released last week by Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee reported that Bush’s spending on contracts with major PR firms nearly tripled since he came into office, reaching at least $88 million in 2004.

The total spent on such efforts during Bush’s first term was $250 million, nearly double the $128 million spent during President Clinton’s second term, reported USA Today.

WARSAW
A controversial Polish publisher was fined $6,500 last week for defaming Pope John Paul II in a scathing satire published in 2002, sparking concerns about freedom of the press in Poland.

Jerzy Urban, a government spokesman during the country’s Communist era and now a wealthy publisher, violated national taboos and an unusual law to criticize the Polish-born pope nearly three years ago.

In his satirical weekly magazine, Urban slammed the pope as “the Brezhnev of the Vatican” and an “impotent old man,” earning the ire of the public and government prosecutors who sought a 10-month suspended prison term, reported the CBC.

Last week’s fine came after Urban was convicted under a Polish law that bars insulting foreign heads of state, a status granted to the Vatican.

Urban said he pulled the stunt “not only to get media attention, but also to provoke protests. The point was to not allow the church and the pope to be free from criticism in Poland.”

Urban last week said he would appeal, but had little hope of success, citing the alleged “church-influenced intentions of our justice system,” reported the Associated Press.

A Polish Roman Catholic bishop told Poland’s PAP news agency that the verdict “should be a warning to those who would like to act in a similar fashion,” according to the AP.

After last week’s verdict, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and Reporters Without Borders both warned that Poland appears to be trailing its European counterparts in protecting press freedom, noted the Independent.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
A 78-year-old Ottawa-area man, Marcel Tremblay, committed suicide Friday after publicly announcing his plans in an act of protest against Canada’s prohibition against assisted suicide, which prevents those who are not able to take their own life to have the assistance of others.

According to Temblay’s lawyer, there is no law against suicide — only assisting in someone else’s death.

Tremblay, suffering from pulmonary fibrosis, a terminal disease that makes breathing difficult, gave his reason for suicide as the loss of quality of life due to the illness.

Hoping that his public suicide will move politicians to change the prohibition against assisted suicide, Tremblay invited the media to view his last meal, which was eaten in a restaurant with his family.

The case raised several ethical issues, including the role of the press in covering and publicizing a suicide.

Arthur Schafer, from the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, told the Canadian Press that while the issue deserved public debate, having the media become active participants in right-to-die cases is “culturally jarring” and should be cause for a “queasy feeling” among journalists.

NEW YORK
A coalition of some of the nation’s largest employers last week announced a plan to provide low-cost health insurance to 3 million eligible workers, saying that while not perfect, the move is a necessary first step.

Ford, General Electric, IBM, McDonald’s, and Sears are among the firms participating in the program, which is expected to be up and running by September.

Operating in all 50 states, the program will aim to help workers — part-time and temp workers, contractors, consultants, and early retirees — often excluded from the companies’ current healthcare plans.

While the current system of limiting coverage to full-time workers saves insurance fees up front, many firms say they are getting hit hard by premiums hiked to cover hospital costs for treating the uninsured, noted the Times.

The experimental program will offer six tiers of coverage with monthly fees ranging from $5 to more than $300 depending on deductible and coverage. Participating insurers include Cigna, Humana, and UnitedHealth Group.

Analysts say the pilot program, while not a cure for the current problem, is a necessary step toward fixing an employment system that relies heavily on workers who often cannot afford health care coverage of their own.

“It is extraordinarily important to address the issue of the uninsured for social, economic, and even moral reasons,” Tom Beauregard, a health strategy specialist at benefits consulting firm Hewitt Associates, told the New York Times.

According to current estimates, there are roughly 45 million uninsured U.S. citizens.

DETROIT
Following the resignation of four workers from a Michigan company that told employees to either quit smoking or quit their jobs, press reports last week profiled recent efforts by employers determined to stamp out cigarette use.

Insurance-claim processing firm Weyco Inc. of Okemos, Michigan, is among the firms taking the toughest line on smoking, requiring workers to take breath tests that check for off-duty smoking.

The company, which began offering free stop-smoking classes and financial incentives to kick cigarettes about two years ago, says its current clampdown stems from a desire to both help employees and save on health care costs.

Nearly 30 workers and their spouses quit smoking under Weyco’s incentives program, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“For every smoker who quits … there will be many people — family members, friends, coworkers — who are very thankful the person won’t be going to an early grave,” Weyco president Howard Weyers, a health enthusiast, wrote in a message on the company’s web site.

While Weyco cites employees’ health as a motivating factor — winning ire from some critics for “paternalistic” behavior — other employers say rising health care costs are forcing them to draw the line.

The Times notes that Nebraska-based Union Pacific Corp. and the sheriff’s department in Riverside County, California, are taking similar stances by refusing to hire smokers.

The U.S. government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the nation spends $75 billion annually on medical expenses attributed to smoking, according to the Times.

For employers, the statistics are similarly grim, with smokers costing firms a reported $82 billion annually in lost productivity and taking nearly seven more sick days a year than nonsmokers.

While few challenge the health risks posed by smoking, some say that businesses have no right to govern employees’ off-duty behavior.

“What you do in your own home after work or on the weekend is none of your bosses’ business,” National Workrights Institute president Lewis Maltby told the Times. “The last time I checked, tobacco is a legal product.”

“I understand drug testing, because drugs are illegal and can affect your work performance, but cigarettes?” hospital clerk Marijo Bedford told the Detroit News. “It’s not like I’m getting stoned off my cigarette. It doesn’t impair my ability to do my job. If cigarettes were illegal, I could understand.”

The issue “raises an interesting boundary issue — rising healthcare costs and society’s aversion to smoking versus privacy and freedom rights of an individual,” job placement specialist John Challenger said in an interview with the Reuters news agency.

While employers are barred by federal law from discriminating against workers on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and gender, only 29 states currently have laws insulating smokers from employment bias.

NEW YORK
A federal appeals court last week revived a lawsuit filed by two obese teenagers in New York who accused McDonald’s Corp. of falsely advertising the company’s fast food as part of a healthy diet.

The suit, which alleges that McDonald’s deceives consumers about the nutritional value of its products and makes accurate information difficult to find, was thrown out in 2003.

“If a person knows or should know that eating copious orders of super-sized McDonald’s products is unhealthy and may result in weight gain,” the judge ruled at the time, “it is not the place of the law to protect them from their own excesses.”

Last week, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s ruling, saying the case should proceed to the investigative stage, reported the Agence France-Presse.

The ruling should allow the two teens to seek documents on the company’s practices, noted Bloomberg.

The plaintiffs, who say McDonald’s advertising lured them into eating at the fast-food chain three to five times a week for 15 years, blame the chain for obesity, diabetes, coronary disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other ailments.

McDonald’s last week issued a statement saying the ruling “simply delays the inevitable conclusion that this case is without merit.”

“Common sense tells you this particular case makes no sense,” the company said.

Coinciding with last week’s reversal, McDonald’s announced that it was sending its mascot, Ronald McDonald, into elementary schools across the nation as an “ambassador for an active, balanced lifestyle.”

The announcement was made at a daylong workshop sponsored by the government’s Institute of Medicine, which is looking into any ties between fast food marketing and the spread of childhood obesity, reported the Washington Post.

“Ronald does not promote food, but fun and activity — the McDonald’s experience,” said company spokesman Walt Riker.

In other news, the film “Super Size Me,” which chronicles the health effects of eating high-calorie offerings in a McDonald’s-only diet over the span of 30 days, was nominated last week for an Academy Award for best documentary of the year.

WASHINGTON
Riggs Bank last week pleaded guilty to one felony count for failing to appropriately report hundreds of millions of dollars in funds held by the bank on behalf of brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and officials in Equatorial Guinea.

Riggs, which was ordered last May to pay $25 million in civil and criminal penalties, last week was ordered to pay a $16 million fine for failing to alert authorities to fund transfers and transactions that may have been money laundering.

Riggs is accused of helping Pinochet hide over $10 million in various accounts, deliberately concealing them from regulators by using code names, according to court documents cited by the Reuters news agency.

The bank, which also handled $700 million in accounts linked to senior government officials in Equatorial Guinea, failed to file required paperwork alerting regulators to large transactions as required by a 1970 law meant to crack down on money laundering.

While Riggs eventually did file the paperwork, it sometimes waited years to do so, reported the Washington Post.

“Riggs Bank was legally obligated to take steps to ensure that its services would not be used for illegal purposes,” U.S. Attorney Kenneth Wainstein said last week. “Despite numerous warnings from regulators, Riggs courted customers who were a high risk for money laundering and helped them shield their financial transactions from scrutiny.”

“This long-term and systemic misconduct was more than simply blind neglect; it was a criminal breach of the banking laws that protect our financial system from exploitation by terrorists, narcotics dealers, and other criminals,” Wainstein said.

Under terms of last week’s plea arrangement, Riggs also agreed to a five-year probation period, though that punishment would end if the bank is sold, according to the Agence France-Pressed.

Riggs in fact is scheduled to merge with PNC Financial Services Group in July, though press reports noted that the deal may be renegotiated in light of the latest fine.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina, who must approve last week’s guilty plea, last week questioned whether the $16 million fine was too light, noted the Post.

“What I’m trying to get a feel for is, how much is $16 million?” Urbina asked attorneys last week. “Is it just a business expense for the bank?”

According to the Post, lawyers for both sides say the size of the fine is far larger than the profits made by Riggs on the suspicious funds.

If approved, last week’s deal would conclude the bank’s liabilities, though individual officers still may face charges.

HOUSTON, Texas
ConocoPhillips, the nation’s largest refiner of petroleum products, last week agreed to pay nearly $530 million to settle federal charges of violating the Clean Air Act by releasing too much pollution.

The settlement calls for ConocoPhillips to pay civil fines of $4.5 million and spend more than $525 million to improve anti-pollution technology on nine refineries in seven states, reported the New York Times.

The deal is the largest of 13 such agreements between oil refineries and the U.S. government.

In all, more than half of the nation’s domestic refining capacity has been hit with penalties or settlements stemming from alleged Clean Air Act violations, noted the Associated Press.

While both industry and environmental groups welcomed last week’s deal, critics raised concern about follow-through, according to the Houston Chronicle.

A report last June from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) inspector general concluded that the agency frequently fails to make sure that companies comply with their deals to curb emissions and fix polluting plants.

“The announcement is good, but implementation is more important and there have been some problems,” agreed Environmental Integrity Project director Eric Schaeffer, a former EPA official who resigned in protest over the Bush administration’s handling of such cases.

NAIROBI
Despite government pledges to eradicate corruption, Kenyan businesses still face an environment rife with bribes, graft, and under-the-table payments, according to a new survey released last week.

The survey, conducted by the World Bank and the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis, found half of the country’s businesses saying they had been asked to pay a bribe within the past year, reported the BBC.

Bribe payments to members of Parliament, senior officials, and judges remain both routine and requisite to ensuring that legal rulings and government contracts result in desired outcomes, according to the survey.

Transparency International told the BBC that the poll results were disappointing, but not surprising, noting that the watchdog group’s surveys routinely rank Kenya as one of the world’s most corrupt countries.

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

“George W. Bush begins his second term with considerably less popular support than other recent incumbent presidents after their reelection. He also is proposing a second-term policy agenda that differs in several key respects from the public’s. Health care, aid for the poor, and the growing budget deficit are all increasingly important public priorities, while limiting lawsuit awards, making recent tax cuts permanent, and tax simplification rank near the bottom of the public’s agenda.

“Social Security, which the White House has targeted as a major issue, ranks near the top of the public’s policy agenda, with 70 percent identifying it as a top priority. But the public believes that the health care system currently is in greater need of repair than Social Security, the tax system, or the legal system - all of which are expected to be the subject of administration initiatives.

“Nearly half of Americans (47 percent) believe the Social Security system now works pretty well and needs only minor changes, with comparable percentages of Republicans and Democrats in agreement on that point. That compares with just 27 percent who believe that the health care system works fairly well and 36 percent who say the same about the education system.

“In principle, Americans are open to the idea of introducing private accounts into the Social Security system. But in practice, the public believes it is more important to retain a guaranteed monthly Social Security benefit than it is to let younger workers invest in private accounts whose value would rise or fall depending on how their investments perform….

“The latest survey … finds a yawning partisan gap in public policy priorities and in perceptions of President Bush. Overall, half of Americans approve of the president’s job performance while 43 percent disapprove. This is well below the approval ratings enjoyed by Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton as they began their second term….

“Looking ahead, the public believes that the military, business corporations, and conservative Christians will gain influence in Bush’s second term….

“In the wake of the contentious presidential campaign, the public expects an even greater level of partisanship in Washington in the year ahead. Roughly six-in-ten (59 percent) think Democrats and Republicans will oppose each other more than usual, while just 30 percent believe the two parties will work together….

“While the economy and terrorism lead the public’s policy agenda, a plurality of Americans (32 percent) volunteer the war in Iraq as the biggest problem facing the country. As Pew surveys found throughout the presidential campaign, Iraq has propelled foreign policy and defense issues past the economy among the public’s concerns….”

“Assertion is not argument; to contradict the statement of an opponent is not proof that you are correct.”

– Samuel Johnson (English lexicographer, critic, and poet, 1709-1784)

The other day a friend described a process for problem solving in the military: Officers and civilians gather around a seminar table, each with a computer keyboard, but nobody talks. Instead, they type out their ideas and responses and post them to a large screen that everyone can see. The participants don’t sign their names, so nobody knows whether a general or a private is writing. Result: All deference to rank and personality washes away, leaving ideas to rise or fall by merit alone. It’s a great way to level the conversational playing field.

But on one occasion, a South American general came to the table. He categorically refused to touch a keyboard. In his culture, that was a clerical task beneath his dignity. So, calling in a secretary, he dictated his responses. But when the discussion turned to matters requiring a security clearance, she had to exit — leaving him fuming and inarticulate.

Is this a tale of silly stubbornness? A reminder of the difficulties of modernization? Yes, but it’s more. I think it points to an ethical problem of fatal proportions.

Think about the FBI. The Bureau recently announced the failure of its effort to create a high-speed, modern information system — a priority suggestion in the report of the independent commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That system depended on building “virtual case files” (VCF) that could be accessed and updated rapidly by agents in and beyond the Bureau. The VCF software cost an estimated $170 million to produce. Now it may have to be entirely scrapped as unworkable.

Admittedly, it’s hard to figure out how to share often-secret information at high speed across different agencies, and hard to introduce new systems without closing down the entire Bureau during the changeover. But a deeper obstacle is identified by Coleen Rowley. She’s the FBI agent and Time magazine Woman of the Year who in 2003 went public with her accusations that the Bureau failed to investigate leads that might have thwarted the 9/11 attacks. Looking at the FBI’s computerization failures, she sees a shockingly simple reason that she calls “resistance to typing.”

In an email exchange with me, she attributes that resistance to “a carryover from male agents of the J. Edgar Hoover era considering [typing] to be women’s work and below their dignity.” At a VCF training program she attended last spring, she says she found that “the common agent complaint” was “reticence about becoming a mere ‘typist.’” While this reticence is not, she says, the “sole cause” for the FBI’s failure to modernize its computers prior to 9/11, she calls it “a big factor.”

Of course we can blame the old-guard agents — that’s easy. By the same token, we can celebrate progress: Young agents joining the Bureau today are generally happy to type. And for good reason: If a college student today tried to argue for the South American general’s position, he or she would be laughed out of the dorm — and left in the dust by friends who depend on keyboards for email and instant messaging.

But what about the inventors of the personal computer? We can’t blame them directly for the FBI’s problems. But shouldn’t they, like the developers of any new technology, have had some responsibility for trying to foresee the cultural, social, and ethical challenges always created by such sweeping technological change?

True, that change has happened faster than anyone foresaw. There’s hardly a senior manager alive today who grew up with a computer. But the resistance to such change was surely foreseeable. New technology has been disliked since the days of the Luddites. Armed with that piece of history, shouldn’t we have noticed hints of a passively aggressive digging in of heels around this question, at the FBI and elsewhere? Might we have looked over the horizon at the profound ethical consequences of that resistance — like the systemic problems addressed by Coleen Rowley’s famous letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller? Might we, in our imaginations, have spun out some scenarios to assess the impact of that resistance? Might one such scenario have included the death of, say, 3,000 people in a terrorist attack? As a result, might we have been fired up to correct this fatal flaw?

Perhaps this is mere 20/20 hindsight. But the point still stands: As we engage in fast-paced innovations — in everything from fuel cells and camera phones to genetic modification and global positioning — we have a responsibility to foresee their ethical consequences. We work hard to envision the upside benefits and potential markets for such innovations. Do we work hard enough to consider downside impacts and public resistance? If not, we leave ourselves open to situations in which terrorists may take up technologies faster than do bureaucracies. Bottom line? Innovation, lacking ethical foresight, can be fatal.

©2005 Institute for Global Ethics

“I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women. Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, and I do not believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science.”

– Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, apologizing last week after making controversial lunchtime remarks at a conference held by the National Bureau of Economics. Summers said his remarks, which dealt with the dearth of women in the math, science, and engineering fields, were intended to provoke discussion and research into the under-representation of women. (“Harvard President Apologizes Again for Remarks on Gender,” New York Times, Jan. 20)

NEW YORK
JPMorgan Chase & Co. last week apologized for the actions of two of its predecessor banks, which accepted 13,000 slaves as collateral between the 1830s and the Civil War.

The firm disclosed the link after an internal investigation required by the city of Chicago, which in 2003 ordered firms doing business with the city to probe their past dealings for any ties to slavery.

JPMorgan found that the two firms, Canal Bank and Citizens Bank, accepted roughly 13,000 slaves as collateral for loans and eventually took ownership of 1,250 of them when plantation owners defaulted, the company said in a press release.

Canal and Citizens, both based in Louisiana, failed during the Great Depression, when they were partly absorbed by a federally chartered bank. That bank eventually became Bank One Corp., which was bought last year by JPMorgan, reported the Associated Press.

“We all know slavery existed in our country, but it is quite different to see how our history and the institution of slavery were intertwined,” JPMorgan chief executive William Harrison and chief operating officer James Dimon wrote in a letter to staff. “Slavery was tragically ingrained in American society, but that is no excuse.”

The company said it will establish a $5 million scholarship program to pay tuition for African-Americans in Louisiana seeking in-state college education.

SAN FRANCISCO
Checking in on a growing bioethics debate, the Associated Press last week profiled Monsanto Co.’s efforts to fight seed piracy by filing lawsuits that seek fines and prison terms for farmers holding to age-old seed-saving traditions.

Monsanto is targeting farmers who use the company’s genetically engineered seeds, which carry with them not only protection against bugs and herbicides, but also a contract barring farmers from saving the seed for next season’s planting.

That stipulation is behind roughly 90 lawsuits filed in half of the nation’s 50 states, where Monsanto has tried to hit 147 farmers and 39 agricultural companies with penalties steep enough to deter others from following suit and saving seed from season to season.

Monsanto says it is simply defending its patents and protecting revenue vital to supporting the company’s $400-million-plus annual research and development outlay, reported the AP.

But farmers like Homan McFarling, a Mississippi soybean grower sued in 1999, say the rules buck decades of family tradition and are often a surprise to farmers who either failed to closely read their contract or never received the notice in the first place.

Monsanto’s patent-protected seeds now account for roughly 85 percent of the U.S. soybean crop, and for about 200 million acres of the world’s farm crops — a jump of 20 percent in one year, according to the AP.

Using a web of hotlines, private investigators, and stealth tactics, Monsanto says it goes after only the most egregious seed pirates, saying they should not be able to get a leg-up on contract-abiding farmers.

“We have to balance our obligations and our responsibilities to our customers, to our employees, and to our shareholders,” Scott Baucum, Monsanto’s chief intellectual property protector, told the AP.

While it tries to settle most cases, Monsanto says it has won each of the five cases that have gone to court. Last year, a Tennessee farmer was sentenced to eight months in prison and a fine of more than $1.7 million after hiding a truckload of cotton seed culled from patented plants.

PARKERSBURG, West Virginia
Federal regulators last week asked a scientific panel to weigh the possible health risks posed by a chemical in DuPont’s popular non-stick Teflon coating, accusing the company in a separate action of hiding studies into dangers for decades.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alleges that DuPont knew that perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the chemical compound responsible for hundreds of non-stick and non-stain products, posed serious health risks but kept quiet.

The allegations were made after DuPont was forced to release emails, memos, and other documents in the course of several court cases accusing the chemical giant of contaminating groundwater with PFOA.

Those documents revealed that DuPont scientists told company executives to avoid human contact with PFOA more than 40 years ago. Yet for nearly 20 years, the company did not disclose that its tests showed PFOA in the water supplies for thousands of people in West Virginia and Ohio, according to the Chicago Tribune.

DuPont insists that it disclosed all documents required by law, saying PFOA never has been legally classified as a toxic chemical that poses a “substantial risk.” The EPA appears to be countering that the chemical retained its less toxic rating because DuPont never disclosed the compound’s dangers as required by a 1976 law.

When two of five babies born to plant employees in 1981 had eye and face defects similar to those in newborn rats exposed to PFOA, DuPont did not notify the EPA. According to documents, DuPont lawyers urged the firm to settle lawsuits quickly and quietly to avoid publicity and class-action cases, reported the Tribune.

“DuPont remains confident that based on over 50 years of use and experience with PFOA there is no evidence to indicate that it harms human health or the environment,” company spokesman R. Clifton Webb said.

In October, the EPA disagreed, writing that “drinking water data in possession of DuPont ‘reasonably supports the conclusion’ that PFOA ‘presents a substantial risk of injury to health.’”

The EPA is seeking as much as $300 million in fines for DuPont’s decision to not report the possible dangers of PFOA. Next week, the company is expected to settle a class-action case over groundwater contamination in West Virginia and Ohio for as much as $343 million, according to the Washington Post.

EPA officials say it may take as long as a year before an independent panel concludes whether PFOA’s risk status should be upgraded, but says there is no need to avoid non-stick products.

While PFOA is getting most of the headlines, the Tribune report warned that there may be other threats as well. According to the story, the EPA “reported in 1998 that it had no toxicity data or ’safe level’ for 43 percent of the 2,800 chemicals produced in volumes of 1 million pounds a year or more.”