Ethics Newsline®

Proclaiming that “the business of America is business,” U.S. president Calvin Coolidge famously defined one of the basic objectives of the dozen years of Republican governance that followed the end of World War I. Seventy years later, another Republican administration — an equally ardent exponent of pro-business tax, environmental, and social policies — champions a similar goal. Have we entered a new “Jazz Era,” with all of the opportunities — but also all of the risks — demonstrated by the history of the 1920s?

Now as then, Republicans have embarked on a potentially extended period of dominance, a derivative of President Bush’s decisive leadership in the aftermath of September 9/11 and the public’s confidence in Republicans as custodians of the nation’s security interests. Meanwhile, divided and leaderless, the party of James Cox, John Davis, and Al Smith — the three defeated Democratic candidates of the 1920s — struggles to make significant inroads into President Bush’s popularity.

Against this background, greed and irresponsibility of Biblical proportions have spilled over, 1920s-like, into a long string of high-profile corporate scandals. The collapse of Samuel Insull’s massive 1920s gas and electric empire is echoed in the tribulations of Enron, WorldCom, and a host of other companies afflicted by ethical lapses. In foreign policy, too, a taste for unilateralism — “isolationism” as it was earlier called — characterizes both periods.

And in another, more profound way, the current era has some of the ominous moral overtones of the 1920s. During the early twenty-first century, as during the 1920s, the nation appears unusually self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and heedless of the warning signs that point to long-term dangers.

On the surface, a stock market substantially above its post-9/11 lows provides a respite from worry. But below the surface, the combined effects of budget hikes and mounting deficits are shattering GOP economic orthodoxy. Only in part because of 9/11, federal spending — typically an anathema to conservatives — has risen by 20 percent since the start of the Bush administration. Meanwhile, government revenues have fallen 12 percent, the result of a sluggish economy but also of tax cuts of unprecedented magnitude. The result: an annual federal deficit that could exceed the half-trillion-dollar mark this year alone, washing away a budget surplus and an earlier bipartisan consensus that runaway deficits are bad for the United States.

If tax cuts fail to generate hoped-for revenues — an open question in the mind of most experts — Medicare and Social Security could be threatened with bankruptcy. Adding to the burden, a new, $40-billion-per-year prescription drug benefit has been added to Medicare that, whatever its merits, no one has any idea how to pay for. Meanwhile, the generally U.S.-friendly International Monetary Fund now warns that, by forcing up global interest rates and slowing global investment and economic growth, U.S. profligacy could threaten the financial stability of the entire global economy, with no small implications for the United States’ own economy.

All of which prompts sobering questions. Who is taking moral responsibility for the next generation? Is the U.S. public as reality-averse and inattentive to today’s warning signs as the isolationist generation of the Jazz Age was to the fragility of 1920s prosperity? Have the White House and GOP lawmakers, in an effort to lay the foundations for long-term Republican dominance, thrown fiscal caution to the winds? Would an absence of solvency undercut the social and public services — quality public education, veterans’ benefits, law enforcement, infrastructure improvements — upon which any party’s success depends? Would that loss have a dramatic bearing on future political loyalties, as happened in the early 1930s?

If leadership lies in providing strength and comfort to a nation under attack — as President Bush has so ably done — it also lies in discerning and acting on the nation’s fiduciary obligations, which Congress and the administration have dangerously ignored. However one feels about the merits of either party, one thing is certain: Nobody wants a repetition of the kind of economic crisis that brought the Jazz Era to its dramatic conclusion. Now as then, such a seismic event would decisively end Republican Party dominance — and perhaps usher in a new version of the Roosevelt revolution of 1932 and a replay of the Democratic “New Deal” — with whatever benefits and risks that may imply. Surely there are better ways for nations to change direction than by watching history repeat itself.

©2005 Institute for Global Ethics

– Waleed al-Tabtabae, head of the Kuwaiti Parliament’s human rights committee, explaining his opposition to a measure that would have allowed women to vote in city council elections for the first time. The measure was killed last week by conservative lawmakers, dealing another blow to political rights for Kuwait’s female population, reported the New York Times. (“Lawmakers Block Women From Voting in Kuwait,” New York Times, May 4)

WASHINGTON
The U.S. House of Representatives last week continued to hold hearings on whether drug maker Merck hid dangers when marketing its popular painkiller Vioxx, which was pulled from store shelves last year after being linked to an increased risk for heart attacks.

The House Government Reform Committee questioned the company’s aggressive pursuit of Vioxx sales despite internal concerns about the drug’s dangers.

Even after a Merck study found a fivefold increase in heart attacks and strokes for Vioxx patients compared to patients taking a competitor’s product, the company put a full-court press on physicians, instructing its sales force to use materials with less worrying figures and avoid discussions of the study, according to press reports.

More than 100 million Vioxx prescriptions pulled in $2 billion in annual sales, with the vast majority of prescriptions being written while Merck was downplaying safety concerns, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Last week, Dennis Erb, Merck’s vice president in charge of regulatory issues, defended the company’s tactics, saying its marketing materials complied with regulatory requirements.

“We believe Merck acted appropriately and responsibly to extensively study Vioxx after it was approved,” Erb told House committee members. “And we promptly disclosed the results of these studies to the FDA, physicians, the scientific community, and the media.”

Lawmakers said that while Merck indeed did disclose results to the FDA, it was less forthcoming with physicians pushed to prescribe the medicine — training sales reps to skirt discussions about Vioxx’s dangers, tucking away worrisome results in fine print, and aggregating study results to soften starker findings.

“The real question we want to know is, can we trust you?” said Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.), according to the New York Times.

“Merck’s sales representatives were trained to sell as if lives depended on it,” added Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). “Ultimately, their message may have cost lives.”

Merck, which voluntarily pulled Vioxx from the market last year, is considering returning the product to store shelves. Before it does so, it is trying to determine what label warnings will be required, noted the Times.

In other news, Merck chief executive Raymond Gilmartin last week stepped down ten months ahead of schedule. The company’s head of manufacturing, Richard Clark, will assume the reins following a six-month search that failed to find a better candidate from outside the company, noted the Times.

COLUMBUS, Ohio
Under pressure to fill military rolls, some recruiters for the U.S. Army are breaking rules, helping potential recruits cheat, and concealing applicants’ police and medical records, according to a report last week from the New York Times.

While the Army has increased signing bonuses and relaxed its age and education requirements for recruits, it is struggling still and failing in some quarters to meet its enlistment quotas. Faced with a shortfall, some recruiters are taking their efforts further.

The Times, which interviewed more than 24 recruiters in 10 states, says deception among recruiters is widely acknowledged among the ranks, with commanders often encouraging the fraud or turning a blind eye.

A recruiter in northern Ohio, who says his commanders know he has been hiding police records and medical histories that would disqualify potential recruits, told the Times that the top priority right now is producing enough recruits to meet the military’s goals.

“The saying here is, ‘Production is power,’” he told the Times. “Produce, and all is good.”

Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, the Army’s commander of recruiting, last week denied that the system is becoming corrupted, saying there is no significant increase in rates of cheating.

The Times reports that Army investigators last year substantiated 320 cases of recruitment improprieties, investigating 1,118 — nearly one in five — of its recruiters. Both figures are higher than in previous years.

Of those recruiters found guilty of gross negligence or deliberate improprieties, only three in 10 were relieved of duty last year — a decrease from 2002, when 5 of every 10 were punished.

Rochelle told the Times that he has decided that recruitment violations — from concocting bogus academic credentials to helping applicants beat a drug test — may no longer warrant automatic firing.

“My shift in thinking was that if an individual was accused of doctoring a high-school diploma, it was an open-and-shut case,” Rochelle said. “It may still be, but now I look at person’s value to the command first.”

Interviewed for a CBS report on recruiting violations in Colorado, Lt. Col. Michael Shepherd, U.S. Army Recruiting Command assistant chief of staff, said such violations are “totally unacceptable.”

“We just need to get back to the business of recruiting,” said Shepherd, admitting that times are tough for military recruiters. “These problems are just ones that we can’t stand (for).”

Despite sabotaging the system himself, the recruiter in northern Ohio said he too has concerns about enlisting unqualified applicants, noting that if they assume leadership roles someday, their capacity for making good decisions may be substandard.

“If they are in a leadership position and they’re sending 10 or 11 people all over the place because they can’t focus on the job at hand,” he told the Times, “we’re in trouble.”

WASHINGTON
Despite learning almost immediately that “friendly fire” killed a celebrated U.S. Army Ranger, the military withheld the facts from the man’s family for weeks, admitting that fellow soldiers killed him only when the news was likely to be made public by returning combatants, the Washington Post reported last week.

Pat Tillman, a professional football player who abandoned the NFL for the Army after the attacks of 9/11, was shot by his fellow soldiers during a confused firefight in Afghanistan at dusk on April 22, 2004.

Soldiers on the scene realized almost immediately that Tillman had been killed by U.S. forces — a determination corroborated by an initial investigation a few days later.

While top officials within U.S. Central Command were informed of the fratricide by April 29 — a week after Tillman’s death, and four days before his funeral was broadcast on national TV — they continued for at least another month to maintain publicly that Tillman was killed by enemy forces.

Only on May 29, 2004, when soldiers familiar with the true cause of Tillman’s death were scheduled to return to the States, did the military concede that Tillman “died as a probable result of friendly fire while his unit was engaged in combat with enemy forces.”

Tillman’s family and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) pressed for an investigation into the details surrounding Tillman’s killing, culminating in a 1,600-page report obtained last week by the Post.

In the report, Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones said he found that soldiers on the scene knew immediately that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire, but were told by military officers to not talk about the incident.

Despite the destruction of evidence including Tillman’s body armor and uniform, findings of “gross negligence” by soldiers involved in the incident, and the military’s decision to withhold its knowledge about Tillman’s death from his family, Jones’s report concluded that there was no evidence of official reluctance to tell the truth, noted the Associated Press.

“At the heart of every notification effort is a commitment to compassion and completeness in providing information as it is known to those who sustained the loss,” Army spokesman Paul Boyce said last week. “That is what happened in the case of Corporal Tillman, and that effort continues to this day.”

GAZA CITY
Promising to make good on his anticorruption promises, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas last week sent a bulldozer to crush the homes of three senior officers who seized their seaside house lots illegally.

The bulldozer demolished the officers’ nearly finished beachside houses without resistance, turning the two-story homes into symbolic piles of rubble 300 feet from the Mediterranean Sea.

The officers — a major, a lieutenant colonel, and a colonel — were building on public land that they had illegally appropriated, reported the Associated Press.

“The Palestinian Authority policy is clear: No one is above the law, and we will work until we put an end to the lawlessness,” pledged Tawfik Abu Khoussa, a spokesman for the Palestinian Interior minister.

Abbas, who came to power promising to rout corruption from the government, authorized the demolition of illegally built shops, cafes, and kiosks in January, and has forced the retirement of senior officials in recent weeks, according to the AP.

SACRAMENTO
Increasingly concerned about steroid use by students, California high schools soon will be required to implement new policies aimed at curbing the spread of the drugs under new rules approved last week.

The state’s high school governing body, the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), met last week and adopted a set of measures targeting the spread of steroids among the state’s young athletes.

The 129-member CIF unanimously approved measures that require coaches to take training in understanding steroids and muscle-building supplements; regulate which dietary supplements coaches can distribute to players; and require parents, players, and school officials to sign contracts banning steroids.

Similar efforts are being considered in Michigan, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Virginia, reported USA Today. In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson last month announced $330,000 in state funding for a random steroid testing program scheduled to begin in July 2006.

The new California measures will take effect this fall, though coaches will have until the end of 2008 to earn their certification, reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

The move follows the release of studies charting a steep increase in steroid use by high-schoolers, with usage rates doubling from 1991 to 2003, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While many coaches welcomed the new CIF measures as a worthy effort, others said the initiative was much ado about nothing, too much work for already-overburdened coaches, or a waste of time since it lacks teeth in the form of actual testing.

Still others said that while steroid use was worth targeting, other drug problems loomed larger. While more than 3 percent of 12th-graders admitted using steroids in a national 2004 survey, more than 76 percent said they had used alcohol, marijuana (45.7 percent), cocaine (8.1 percent), or ecstasy (7.5 percent), reported the Chronicle.

“A fair percentage of 11th-graders are binge drinking and then driving, getting into car accidents, and kids are getting killed,” Richard Simpson, assistant superintendent of the Conejo Valley school district in Ventura County, told USA Today. “It’s not that we don’t care about steroids. It’s just not problem No. 1.”

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
Bunny Svay, a Cambodian man residing in Ottawa, was astonished to learn that he will have to pay a huge hospital bill for his medical care after a fire destroyed his apartment, killing five members of his family.

The nearly $18,000 hospital bill will not be covered by Canada’s much vaunted universally accessible and free medical health system because Mr. Svay was not a Canadian citizen at the time of the fire and hospitalization.

Friends of Mr. Svay are contemplating calling on the Cambodian and Chinese communities in Ottawa to help with fundraising for the hospital bill.

The Ottawa Hospital that is demanding the payment has asked Mr. Svay to “explore options as to how to pay the bill.”

NORMAN, Oklahoma
The head baseball coach at the University of Oklahoma resigned last week after using a racial epithet, for which he apologized and was forgiven by the African-American player he had referenced.

Larry Cochell submitted his resignation after sports broadcaster ESPN disclosed that he had praised one of his African-American players for staying in school by saying in off-camera interviews, “There’s no n—– in him.”

ESPN said it felt compelled to report Cochell’s remarks to the university after two of its commentators compared notes and found he had repeated his statement, reported the Associated Press.

Cochell, the Sooners’ head baseball coach for 14 years, last week apologized for making the remark.

“I deeply regret that I carelessly used language that is clearly contrary to the basic values of our university,” Cochell said in a resignation letter released by the school. “Those words also created an impression contrary to my own personal values and my respect for all people.”

Joe Dunigan, Jr., the player Cochell had been praising in the ESPN interviews, told The Oklahoman that Cochell should be forgiven, according to USA Today.

“He has apologized,” Dunigan told the paper. “Those words are powerful and derisive. They were inappropriate and offensive to African Americans. But he is a man who has done so many good things in his life.”

University of Oklahoma president David Boren agreed, saying, “The word that was used has a long and painful history in our nation and deserves unqualified condemnation.”

“A good and caring man has made a terrible mistake for which he must assume responsibility,” he lamented in a statement.

BERLIN
The German Football Association (DFB) last week imposed a lifetime ban on 25-year-old referee Robert Hoyzer, who helped rig a series of matches influencing the outcome of the German Cup.

Hoyzer admitted taking $87,000 from a Croation gambling ring in exchange for fixing four matches, planning to fix three others, and trying to recruit others to join the conspiracy, reported the Reuters news agency.

Hoyzer’s actions during the first round of the German Cup cost Hamburg SV a chance to advance. The DFB awarded the team $2.6 million in compensation after the fraud was revealed.

The DFB last week banned all betting on games by players, coaches, officials and referees, and announced plans to set up its own betting operation for the sport’s 2006-2007 season, reported Reuters.

In addition to the lifetime ban, the DFB had planned to fine Hoyzer more than $64,000, but dropped that penalty in light of his cooperation with investigators. Hoyzer still could face civil charges of fraud, with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

Another referee, Torsten Koop, has been serving a three-month suspension for taking a month to tell the federation that Hoyzer had tried to recruit him in the conspiracy.

Berlin prosecutors are investigating 25 other people, including four referees, 14 players, and three Croatian brothers, in connection with the match fixing scandal — soccer’s biggest such scandal in 30 years, noted Reuters.

From Zogby International:

“Young Americans entering the workforce overwhelmingly value honesty and integrity, with 92 percent saying they believe that doing the right thing is more important than getting ahead in their careers — but there is also a strong undercurrent of competing values, placing loyalty to friends, love, and getting ahead personally above honesty in business dealings.

“The survey finds that, despite more than nine-in-ten (92 percent) of young adults who say they value doing the right thing more than getting ahead in their careers, and 96 percent saying honesty and trust are important in the workplace, when faced with a number of potential ethical dilemmas, a substantial number are more likely to value loyalty to friends (43 percent) or forbidden office romances (32 percent) — and as many as one-third (34 percent) say that the cost of doing the right thing is sometimes too high.

“‘Loyalty and honesty are two essential components of good character,’ (ethics specialist Jim) Lichtman says. ‘However, time and again, when these two values conflict, individuals tend to choose loyalty over honesty…. Individuals often see themselves being placed in situations that call for them to choose between loyalty to a co-worker or boss and honesty to a client or another….’

“In addition to the 34 percent who say that doing the right thing can be too costly, another three-in-ten (31 percent) say ethics are important as long as they do not compromise personal goals. And this attitude is in evidence on a number of questions dealing with situational ethics.

“When asked if, in a management role in a company, they would consider dating a subordinate employee against company policy, even if it could potentially cost both the respondent and the other individual his or her jobs, one-third (32 percent) say they would pursue the relationship, and hope they did not get caught….

“In a question dealing with performance-enhancing drugs, 15 percent of respondents would, if on the verge of a professional sports career and encouraged to do so by their coach, violate known policies and use such drugs if they believed there was a low likelihood of getting caught — though the overwhelming majority, 84 percent, said they would not use the drugs.

“Throughout the survey, some values trumped proper ethical conduct. Loyalty to friends was one area that produced the greatest difficulty for respondents. Given a dilemma involving a friend stealing intellectual property — music downloads — from a mutual employer, and managers asking the respondent to investigate, 45 percent of respondents say they would turn in their friend. But 43 percent would not do so, and hope that management did not discover the wrongdoing independently….

“Do ethics still matter? ‘Clearly most 18-24 year-olds believe they do,’ Lichtman says. ‘Yet, when good, ethical conduct conflicts with what they want, many show a readiness to compromise the honesty and integrity they believe is so important in their lives.’…”

“If we choose to be no more than clods of clay, then we shall be used as clods of clay for braver feet to tread on.”

– Marie Corelli (English novelist, 1855-1924)