Ethics Newsline®

Yale University has begun creating metrics and gathering data to “make environmental decision-making more empirical and analytically rigorous.” This year’s analysis of the environmental practices of 146 nations was released in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. A snapshot of the standings follows:

Top Five:
Finland
Norway
Uruguay
Sweden
Iceland

Bottom Five:
North Korea
Iraq
Taiwan
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan

Source: Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy “2005 Environmental Sustainability Index.”

LONDON
In a scene from the new German film Downfall, an exhausted gaggle of Nazi soldiers and citizens picks its way through Berlin. It is April 1945. Hitler has just committed suicide in his bunker below the Reich Chancellery, and the Red Army is advancing thunderously into the city. Against the sky looms the half-shattered wall of a bombed-out building. The street is a rubble of bricks and corpses. After years of war, this is all that’s left of the once-beautiful city that was their home.

In the annals of war films, the potholed street and towering wall has become a stock scene. The scene in Downfall (Der Untergang, with English subtitles) is small and confined, in contrast to, say, the vast destruction of Warsaw portrayed recently in The Pianist. But that’s why it caught my attention.

Like many Americans visiting Europe in the last several years, I’ve been trying to comprehend the moral roots of the current sharp political differences between Europe and the United States. Seeing Downfall here the other night with British friends, it finally hit me that however close the cultures of England and the United States may be, I was seeing the film through different eyes. Despite the universally gripping portrayal by Swiss-born actor Bruno Ganz of Hitler’s last days of alternately raving and avuncular banality, I was seeing history through 3,000 miles of removal.

Not so for my friends. Here where we stood talking — after emerging onto Baker Street from the theater one flight below — Londoners too had endured the blitz, the rubble, the shards of buildings. They too had spent time in subterranean bunkers, waiting out German bombs and emerging to landscapes and lives forever changed. They too still have to come to grips with Hitler. Like the Germans, they’re trying to understand how an entire civilized nation, now their partner in a new Greater Europe, could have been mesmerized into so fatal a follower-ship. Downfall, by focusing on the coterie still loyal to Hitler during his last days, seeks to probe the Führer’s allure — a necessary task, I suspect, though the film has been criticized in Germany for showing the monster’s too-human side.

Americans, by contrast, can have a different take on history. Insulated by distance, we can settle for a caricature of Hitler as the epitome of evil with less pressure to account for his appeal. Distance insulates us in other ways, too. Not since the Civil War have armies inflicted massive damage on our cities, and then largely in the South. Even 9/11, awful though it was, affected only parts of two cities with effects that were intense but unrepeated: There was no 9/12 or 9/13. We’ve never endured the persistent, widespread, numbing destruction of our infrastructure by modern weapons. The U.S. experience, instead, has been to fight in European wars — proudly, fiercely, and with significant loss of life. But we’ve always been able to go home to someplace untouched. For those who came back, the redbuds still bloomed in Wichita and the delicatessens still served pastrami in Brooklyn.

What Americans came back to was different also in scale. Europe is compact. Great Britain, for instance, has a population density about ten times that of the United States — meaning that the space housing four Americans would have to house 40 Britons. In that context, cities play a different role. European life, culturally and socially, centers on cities in ways that Americans have never had to understand.

That urban focus is reflected in the deliberate claustrophobia of Downfall. The American World War II films that I grew up with tended to be large-scale affairs, with long-distance shots of destroyers at sea, planes in open skies, or tanks roaring across limitless French farmlands. But the camera in Downfall, when it’s not trapped in Hitler’s labyrinthine bunker, focuses on city streetscapes tightly backstopped by masonry, with hardly any greenery or sky until the symbolic final frames.

There’s a lesson here. War, for many Americans, is a wide-open, far-flung venture. Its heroism still reflects the individualistic myths of the gun-slinging Wild West — a place of huge vistas to which, when it’s over, you can return. And it essentially happens elsewhere. War, for many Europeans, takes place at or near home, within cities and among civilian populations to which, if they’re annihilated, you can’t ever go back. Say war to Americans, and we think “over there.” Say war to Europeans, and they think “maybe here.”

Today, however, say war and both sides think “Iraq.” Here in London, that war is causing distress for Prime Minister Tony Blair, who faces a May 5 election with polls showing a lack of trust in him for (among other things) following the Unites States into Iraq. In Washington, U.S. intelligence services are being hammered for the inaccurate reports on weapons of mass destruction that shaped President George W. Bush’s case for invading Iraq.

Yet if many Americans support the war in Iraq — or at least want to see it through to the end — that’s perhaps because for them war is still a distant, heroic event that comes to an end. If Europeans resist the war, it may be because war is more like the violent, cruel spectacle portrayed in Downfall — something close to home that changes life forever. Helping us recognize such differences is a fundamental purpose of good cinematic art — and may be a necessary first step in healing the European/U.S. divide.

©2005 Institute for Global Ethics

“A key lesson from the recent scandals is that the checks on the system simply have not worked. The honor code among CEOs didn’t work. Board oversight didn’t work. Self-regulation was a complete failure. But one thing has worked: law enforcement.”

– New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, championing the role of outside regulation in a Wall Street Journal column last week. (via “Spitzer Good for Business?” Reuters, Apr. 5)

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

MONTREAL
A former Quebec advertising company executive, Jean Brault, has testified that he gave kickbacks and other illicit payments to officials and associates of the governing federal Liberal Party and to both the provincial Quebec Liberals and separatist Parti Quebecois in hopes of securing generous advertising contracts worth millions of dollars.

Mr. Brault, the former head of Groupaction Marketing of Montreal, has severely undermined the standing of the federal Liberal Party in Quebec by revelations that he passed funds to the federal Liberal Party headed by former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, placed Liberal Party organizers on his payroll, paid fake invoices, and gave envelopes stuffed with cash to political operatives since 1993.

He has testified that he also gave smaller sums of money to the provincial parties in Quebec, in part to obtain advertising contracts from the Quebec government.

The testimony of Mr. Brault had been under a publication ban imposed by Mr. Justice John Gomery, the judge presiding over the inquiry, in the interests of a fair criminal fraud trial that Mr. Brault and other individuals involved in the growing scandal will be facing in the coming months.

After the contents of the testimony by Mr. Brault had been published on a conservative U.S. weblog and after Justice Gomery ruled that the testimony for the most part would not prejudice the impending criminal trial of Mr. Brault, the explosive testimony has become public.

The furious reaction of opposition parties in the Canadian Parliament has raised the possibility of a no-confidence vote in the minority Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin, possibly leading to an early election in Canada and also increasing the chance of another separatist resurgence in the province of Quebec.

NEW YORK
American International Group’s (AIG) troubles worsened last week following admissions that the global insurance giant engaged in wide-ranging subterfuge to conceal business transactions and fraud. Among the developments:

AIG last week admitted that it concealed complex business deals involving two offshore firms and a host of reinsurance investors — a scheme that helped the company pocket profits without paying costs, reported the New York Times.

The news comes one week after AIG admitted that bookkeeping “errors” could wipe out $1.7 billion — or 2 percent — of the firm’s net worth.

AIG also admitted last week that it had doctored paperwork involving an October 2000 transaction with Warren Buffet’s General Reinsurance firm.

AIG initially paid General Re $5 million for services on the deal, but later altered paperwork to make it look like General Re paid AIG $10 million instead.

Lawyers for General Re discovered the manipulation in January and notified federal investigators, who have subpoenaed AIG executives involved in the deal.

Warren Buffet will be asked to answer questions, but has not been implicated in any crime, according to the Times.

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Senate last week held a hearing on the estimated $300 billion in financial fraud and tax scams among the nation’s nonprofits, warning that scandals are taking a toll on both public trust and the U.S. tax base.

The hearing before the Senate Finance Committee was the latest in a series examining scandals and scams among U.S. nonprofits, charities, and their donors, reported the Washington Post.

The papers note that the nonprofit sector, long overshadowed by Big Business, now is finding itself in the spotlight for many of the same financial scams that have sent corporate firms spiraling into bankruptcy and shame.

Hundreds of charities are under investigation for tax scams and fraud aimed at luring big donors, while others face charges of — and convictions for — mismanagement and outright embezzlement, noted USA Today.

“Simply stated, there are increasing indications that the twin cancers of technical manipulation and outright abuse that we saw develop in the profit-making segments of the economy are now spreading to pockets of the nonprofit sector,” Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Mark Everson warned last week.

The Post reports that nonprofits were left mostly alone by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act corporate clean-up measure, which demands that nonprofits have policies to protect whistle-blowers and preserve documents.

While some states — California last year, New York possibly this year — are adopting measures requiring tougher scrutiny and improved transparency at nonprofits, the sector itself is trying to take a proactive role in improving its practices.

The trick, Independent Sector president Diana Aviv told the Post, is to find a balance between proper oversight and pricey over-regulation that would cost too much for many of the nation’s struggling charities.

“The big issue for a lot of us relates to cost,” Aviv said. “The balance is between the commitment to do the right thing and the resources it takes to do it.”

WINDSOR, Ontario
In a move that could have repercussions in the United States, the Canadian government last week inked a voluntary deal with the world’s largest automakers to sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions over the next five years.

The deal requires 19 of the world’s leading automakers to reduce emissions from Canadian vehicles by 5.3 million metric tons by 2010 — the equivalent of improving overall fuel efficiency by 25 percent.

Natural Resources Minister John Efford called the agreement — part of the country’s efforts to implement the Kyoto treaty — a “good deal for the economy, the environment, and consumers.”

Automakers also welcomed the deal since it foregoes the narrow focus of legislation — on fuel economy only, for example — for a more flexible approach that allows the industry to decide how to meet the goal.

Automakers will still be able to sell gas-guzzling SUVs as long as their emissions are offset by reduced emissions elsewhere — via improved mileage in smaller cars, alternative fuels, hybrid engines, and other technologies.

In a twist, the Canadian deal appears to have been modeled after California standards being fought by automakers, which contend that individual states cannot set standards higher than those required by the federal government, noted the San Francisco Chronicle.

California’s emissions rules — which also have been adopted by Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont — now effectively have become the standard in Canada.

“The automakers will find it financially impossible to make one clean set of cars for eight states and Canada and a dirty set for the rest,” Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s global warming program, told the Associated Press. “Eight plus one equals 50.”

HARTFORD, Connecticut
Connecticut last week announced that it will sue the U.S. government for allegedly under-funding the demands imposed by testing requirement in President Bush’s controversial No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law.

Connecticut’s move makes it the first state to sue over NCLB requirements, though scattered school districts have filed challenges and other states have been grumbling, reported the New York Times.

Most of the complaints charge the federal government with failing to fund NCLB’s mandates, as required by law, while others target the Department of Education for failing to allow the states wanted flexibility in meeting the law’s goals.

Connecticut last week said both elements were behind its lawsuit, noting that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has refused the state’s request to test students on a schedule the state says is already effective.

Spellings followed her January rejection of that request with a March 20 opinion piece in the Hartford Courant that struck many of the state’s residents and educators as condescending, noted the Times.

Last week, Connecticut fired back by suing Spellings’ agency and the U.S. government over NCLB’s high costs, which the state estimates will cost $41.6 million more than the government has provided.

“This law imposes an illegal, unconscionable, unfunded mandate,” Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal charged. “It fails the test of both statutory and constitutional standards, as well as fundamental fairness.”

A Department of Education spokeswoman dismissed the planned suit as based on “a flawed cost study … that creates inflated projections built upon questionable estimates and misallocation of costs.”

Blumenthal refused to blink last week, saying the state was announcing the planned suit in advance of filing in case other states cared to join the legal action, noted the Times.

“The federal government’s approach with this law is illegal and unconstitutional,” Blumenthal told the paper. “There is burgeoning unhappiness among both Republicans and Democrats. The dissatisfaction is felt across the country and is across the board, politically.”

LONDON
Contending that the death penalty is an unfair and anachronistic form of punishment, Amnesty International last week released a report charting a nevertheless near-record level of nearly 3,800 executions last year.

Last year’s total of at least 3,797 executions is the second highest recorded since the global human rights group began tracking the number 25 years ago. Only 1996 had more known executions — 4,272.

The group’s report attributed at least 3,400 of last year’s executions to China, 159 to Iran, 64 to Vietnam, and 59 to the United States.

In the report, Amnesty International noted growing opposition to the death penalty, with Bhutan, Greece, Samoa, Senegal, and Turkey abolishing it last year, and Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, South Korea, and Tajikistan imposing moratoriums.

Amnesty International says the death penalty is too often imposed after trials that are unfair or employ evidence that is flawed or unreliably extracted under torture, reported the Associated Press.

The report notes that the United States last year released the 115th death row prisoner convicted on evidence subsequently proved wrong by DNA testing.

Amnesty International also contended that China and Iran executed three people who were juveniles at the time of their conviction, violating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which both countries are signatories. Only Somalia and the United States have refused to ratify the convention, which bars the execution of juveniles.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the execution of people convicted as juveniles was unconstitutionally cruel, ending the practice within the United States.

TAMPA BAY, Florida
Tampa Bay Devil Rays center fielder Alex Sanchez last week became the first player in Major League Baseball (MLB) to be suspended for steroid use, though he denied knowingly using banned substances.

Sanchez tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during spring training in Florida, receiving his suspension on the day of his team’s opening game, reported the New York Times.

The 5-foot-10, 180-pound player who came to the United States after fleeing Cuba initially denied any cheating, saying the positive test result must have been caused by some other drug or food supplement.

“I take some kind of stuff I buy over the counter. Multivitamin, protein shakes, muscle relaxers, that kind of stuff,” he told MLB.com. “I’m going to fight my case, because I never do any steroids thing, nothing like that.”

Later in the week, Sanchez dropped his appeal, saying he had discovered that one of his supplements — now banned by a law that took effect in January — contained an off-limits compound.

“First and foremost, it must be made clear that I do not condone the use of steroids, and I want to take this opportunity to warn everyone, especially children, of their danger,” Sanchez said in a statement. “If I am guilty, I am guilty of not taking the initiative to learn more about the contents of what I was taking.”

One day after suspending Sanchez, MLB officials announced automatic suspensions for 38 minor leaguers who also tested positive for banned substances, according to the Times.

All were first-time violators except for David Castillo, a catcher with the Oakland Athletics organization, whose positive test was a third strike, resulting in a 60-game suspension.

In related news, an Associated Press-AOL poll last week found that two-thirds of the U.S. public believe baseball players who test positive for steroids should be barred from the sport’s Hall of Fame.

ST. LOUIS
It apparently does pay to be pretty, according to two recent studies that found slim and attractive people tend to earn more money, hold higher workplace rank, and get treated better in the marketplace.

The two studies — a controlled experiment in Houston and a meta-analysis of existing research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — both concluded that conventionally beautifully people fare better than their plain-looking and overweight counterparts.

In Houston, researcher Eden King tested how sales staff in more than 150 stores treated women who followed a script while dressing in both casual and professional clothes, and while sometimes wearing a prosthetic suit designed to make them look obese.

King concluded that when the women appeared obese, they were treated more rudely, received fewer smiles and less eye contact, and were abandoned by sales staff more readily than when they did not wear the prosthetic suit. The unkind treatment was often abandoned when the obese-appearing customers said they were trying to lose the weight by dieting, reported the Reuters news agency.

The meta-analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found similar hurdles for less-attractive people, concluding that plain-looking people often fare worse in the workplace then their more attractive counterparts.

The study found that less-attractive people earn 9 percent less than those with average looks, while the more attractive enjoy a “beauty premium” of 5 percent more than the average earner, according to the Associated Press.

Still, the report sounds a note of caution, saying the discrepancy in pay and opportunity may not be the product of outright bias alone, but rather a result of increased assertiveness and confidence among those deemed attractive — meaning that there may be some hurdles that antidiscrimination laws will never fix.

From the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy:

“Finland ranks first in the world in environmental sustainability out of 146 countries, according to the latest Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) produced by a team of environmental experts at Yale and Columbia Universities.

“The 2005 ESI … ranks Norway, Uruguay, Sweden, and Iceland two to five respectively. Their high ESI scores are attributed to substantial natural resource endowments, low population density, and successful management of environment and development issues.

“The ESI ranks countries on 21 elements of environmental sustainability covering natural resource endowments, past and present pollution levels, environmental management efforts, contributions to protection of the global commons, and a society’s capacity to improve its environmental performance over time.

“The United States places 45th in the rankings. This high-middle ranking, just behind Armenia (44) and ahead of the United Kingdom (46), reflects top-tier performance on issues such as water quality and environmental protection capacity. Bottom-rung results on other issues, such as waste generation and greenhouse gas emissions, bring down the overall U.S. standing.

“‘The ESI provides a valuable policy tool, allowing benchmarking of environmental performance country-by-country and issue-by-issue,’ said Daniel C. Esty, professor at Yale University and the creator of the ESI. ‘By highlighting the leaders and laggards, which governments are wary of doing, the ESI creates pressure for improved results.’

“The lowest ranked countries are North Korea, Iraq, Taiwan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Esty said these countries face many challenges, both natural and manmade, and have poorly managed their policy choices.

“The 2005 ESI generates a number of policy conclusions. Income emerges as a critical driver of environmental results. At every level of economic development, however, there are countries managing their environmental challenges well and others less so. For instance, Belgium is as wealthy as Sweden, but it lags badly with regard to pollution control and natural resource management. In this regard, the variables that gauge a country’s commitment to good governance — including robust political debate, a free press, lack of corruption, [and] rule of law are highly correlated with overall environmental success.

“The ESI demonstrates that environmental protection need not come at the cost of competitiveness. Finland is the equal of the United States in competitiveness but scores much higher on environmental sustainability and outperforms the U.S. across a spectrum of issues, from air pollution to contributions to global-scale environmental efforts….

“‘Fundamentally, we see the ESI helping to make environmental decision-making more empirical and analytically rigorous. Such a shift toward data-driven policy-making represents a potential revolution in the environmental realm,’ said Esty, who directs the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

“‘While the ESI makes comparative policy analysis possible, it is shocking how many critical environmental issues are still not measured in any usable way,’ noted Marc Levy, associate director of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network in the Earth Institute at Columbia University and one of the lead contributors to the ESI….”

“The war for freedom will never really be won because the price of freedom is constant vigilance over ourselves and over our government.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt (U.S. humanitarian, writer, and wife of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, 1884-1962)