If you wonder how important ethics is to the public, here’s a simple measurement tool. Search for the word “ethics” in your newspaper and see how many articles you can read before you have to start paying to see older stories.

By that test, this past week has been a zinger, driven largely by ethics scandals erupting in Congress:

• The House ethics committee agreed to investigate Ohio Republican Bob Ney and Louisiana Democrat William Jefferson. Mr. Ney, it appears, may have been entangled in the tentacles of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has admitted he sought to bribe members of Congress. Mr. Jefferson is under a cloud after a Kentucky business executive pleaded guilty to trying to corrupt him.
• The ethics committee also noted that it had planned to investigate Texas Republican Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, but backed off when Mr. DeLay announced his retirement from Congress. It will, however, investigate whether other members of Congress were corrupted by the defense contractors who bribed former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a California Republican now serving an eight-year sentence.
• Meanwhile, a Senate panel announced that it is examining the role of former senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey in the United Nations Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. The investigation follows allegations that while in the Senate he tried to steer Iraqi contracts to a political supporter who heavily funded his campaign.

This flurry of activity, which follows a disappointing effort to bring an ethics reform bill to the House, caps more than a year of paralysis in the ethics committee that seemed incapable of acting even as some of its members were sinking deeper into ethical mire.

Given that background, the results of a Gallup poll released last week aren’t surprising. When asked whether they thought “most members of Congress” are corrupt or not, 47 percent thought they are. That number is virtually identical to the number who disagreed — but it’s up from 38 percent only four months ago.

When nearly half the public thinks that even the most representative part of its government is corrupt, that’s cause for alarm. Sadly, there’s a broader context for this story. The most recent Global Corruption Barometer from Transparency International (TI) — based on a 2005 public opinion survey by Gallup International of some 55,000 people in 69 countries — rank-orders a list of institutions perceived to be corrupt. While various sectors are seen in many countries to be corrupt — most notably the police, the judiciary, the business community, and the tax authorities — the report notes that around the world, political parties were “perceived as far and away the most corrupt institutions in society.” Second on the list: legislatures and parliaments.

The United States is no exception: Here, too, political parties topped TI’s list, while “legislatures” tied for second with “legal system/judiciary” and the media. The numbers aren’t as bad as in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe, but they are significantly behind Western European averages. The point: Americans distrust their legislatures more deeply than do the voters in most wealthy nations.

But how do they feel about their own representatives? Very warmly. In the latest Gallup poll, when asked whether “your member of Congress” is corrupt, two-thirds said “no” (italics mine).

On its face, of course, that’s an absurd situation. Either each of us is being deceived by our elected officials — whom everyone except us perceives to be corrupt — or we wildly overestimate corruption in politicians we know less well. That puts us in a tough spot, forced to choose between being ignorant dupes or deep-dyed cynics.

I suspect, however, that there’s a third and more realistic explanation: It may simply be that we’re growing increasingly suspicious of the political climate, while retaining some faith in political individuals. When we vote for individual candidates, we try to get a reading on their character. We try not to vote for people with visible integrity gaps. But Congress as a whole is different. What worries us, perhaps, is that there’s a culture of corruption so strong that it trumps whatever individual ethical standards our politicians may arrive with. We worry that such a culture — larger than any individual moral compass, and larger than the sum of all currently serving members — can cause good people to go rancid.

If that’s so, reform won’t happen at the ballot box. If the culture itself is degraded, simply changing the names on the office doors won’t help. What’s needed will be a systemic change of the entire climate within which Congress does business. But here Americans are most skeptical. Gallup’s data suggests that voters doubt Congress can repair itself. Worse, they don’t think corruption is a very important issue. Or they didn’t, at least, at the end of April.

Based on last week’s events, they may think again. Given the enormity of events facing the nation today, I suspect most voters know that a Congress driven largely by bribery would be disastrous. Cultures are hard things to change. But if this is how people feel about Congress, this may be the week to start trying.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics

“We really had a situation where the firm was not accepting responsibility, was not making any substantial changes to the firm itself. We really were in a situation where we had no choice but to indict.”

– Debra Wong Yang, federal U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, talking about last week’s indictment of the nation’s most prominent class-action securities law firm, Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman. Milberg Weiss and two of its leading partners face a 20-count indictment by a federal grand jury accusing the firm of “making more than $11 million in secret payments to three individuals who served as plaintiffs in more than 150 lawsuits,” reported the New York Times. The indictment could destroy the firm and send the partners to prison. Milberg Weiss has denied wrongdoing. (“U.S. Indictment for Big Law Firm in Class Actions,” New York Times, May 19)

HOUSTON
The fraud and conspiracy case of former Enron top executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling went to the jury last week, capping a grueling trial that has consumed 16 weeks and featured a parade of 56 witnesses before a federal court in Houston.

In closing arguments, defense lawyers maintained that the meltdown of the firm was a result of a crisis of confidence, with bad press and panicky stockholders sinking the company’s finances, according to an analysis from PBS. The defense repeatedly claimed that bankruptcy is not a crime and that the government is attempting to criminalize normal business practices.

Prosecutors closed by reciting a list of actions they say cumulatively proves the guilt of Lay and Skilling, including side deals that violated company policy and Lay’s quiet sales of company stock while he was promoting the fiscal health of the company and leading people to believe that he actually was buying more stock.

Jurors deliberated on Wednesday and Thursday, agreeing in advance that they would take Fridays off. They made no requests of the judge for clarification of any point of law or a review of evidence, the Reuters news agency reported.

But there was no long weekend for Ken Lay as he immediately began his second trial on charges that he lied to banks about how he would use borrowed money. The International Herald Tribune reported that Lay is accused of using the money to invest in stocks on margin after signing documents saying he would not do so, violating federal banking law.

According to the Houston Chronicle, Lay’s attorneys have hinted that an automatic signature machine could have been used to forge his name on bank loan documents.

Lay’s bank-fraud trial will be conducted without a jury. The Chronicle reported that Lay apparently opted for a trial before a judge because of the complexity and technicality of the charges.

ROCHESTER, N.Y.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week said that Bausch & Lomb, the manufacturer of a contact lens solution that has been linked to a series of potentially blinding eye infections, did not promptly notify federal regulators of about 35 cases in Singapore, according to press reports.

The New York-based firm, which initially had won praise for its quick and candid handling of the crisis, is now under scrutiny by critics who question whether the company reacted quickly enough to the first signs of trouble, according to the New York Times.

Among the criticisms are claims that a doctor in Singapore, not Bausch & Lomb, was the first to report the infections to the federal government. Also Bausch & Lomb had taken the product — ReNu with MoistureLoc — off retail shelves in Hong Kong and Singapore in February but did not disclose that fact in the United States, the Associated Press reported.

The product was manufactured until April and subsequently pulled from all markets in May, according to the AP.

Bausch & Lomb disputed the media reports, telling the Rochester Business Journal that “the firm discussed initial case reports with the FDA’s Office of Compliance in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health within days of receiving a report in February of an unusual spike of fusarium keratitis cases among contact lens wearers in Singapore.”

The company also maintained that the very first cases were unrelated to the eye infection eventually linked to ReNu with MoistureLoc.

The FDA claimed that the firm had not filed a specific type of notification, called a Medical Device Report, within the required 30-day period. Bausch & Lomb said that it did file the report — on April 7 — after notifying the FDA through other channels and receiving guidance on federal preferences for the “content and form” of the report, according to the Rochester Business Journal.

The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported that Bausch & Lomb, which employs about 1,500 people in the Rochester area, could face initial losses of between $50 million and $70 million after buying back ReNu with MoistureLoc from retailers, about $100 million in anticipated sales of the product, and additional marketing costs related to a campaign to regain consumer confidence for other brands.

LONDON
A Nigerian woman who fell ill on a visit to Britain — and was given a lower priority on the National Health Service’s heart-transplant list because she was forced to overstay her visa — died last week.

Ese Elizabeth Alabi, 29, was a victim of laws designed to prevent “health tourism,” her lawyer claimed, according to the BBC.

“Health tourism” is a slang term for the practice of visiting other countries that provide better and cheaper health care.

The Cambridge Evening News reported that Alabi was admitted to a Cambridgeshire hospital in March, but doctors ruled that she was not a priority patient when it came to light that her visa had expired.

She took her case to Britain’s High Court where her lawyers argued that she was victimized by an unfair National Health Service (NHS) policy that keeps non-EU nationals off “urgent” lists for transplants, according to the London-based Telegraph.

The case immediately became the centerpiece of an ethical controversy around the effort to conserve scarce health service resources by restricting access by illegal immigrants.

In an unusually strident page-one story, the Independent, headquartered in London, reported “Ms. Alabi’s case offers a graphic illustration of the other side of Britain’s immigration debate, fuelled this week by the Home Office’s admission that it has no idea of the number of illegal immigrants in the country. The Government’s new rules, brought in last year in an effort to quell fears of foreigners coming to Britain to take advantage of the NHS, meant that Ese was effectively denied any chance to live.”

MONTREAL
Charles Guité, a former Canadian government bureaucrat on trial for fraud in what has been dubbed the nation’s Sponsorship Scandals, approved bogus contracts for work that was never performed, according to a series of witnesses who testified against him last week.

One witness, Francois Desjardins, a former ad-agency employee, told the court he didn’t do any work on the sponsorship project despite being told to bill 313 hours at $50 an hour, according to a report from the CanWest News Service.

Other former employees of Groupaction Marketing, the ad agency hired by the Canadian government, testified that they too did not do any work on the campaign, despite being told to fill out timesheets, the Globe & Mail reported.

Jean Lambert, a former vice president of Groupaction, also claimed that the “tentacles” of the fraud extended through many levels of the government with the office of former prime minister Jean Chrétien “at the center,” according to the Toronto Star.

Guité is acting as his own attorney because he claims that he has been bankrupted by prior legal fees related to the Sponsorship cases.

The former president of Groupaction, Jean Brault, was sentenced in early May to 30 months in prison for stealing more than a million dollars in the scandals, which evolved from an advertising campaign designed to promote the image of Quebec. The campaign ended amid allegations that the Liberal party funneled business to political cronies and that the government was billed for work that was never performed.

Those charges became the focus of televised hearings and a probe by a government commission.

Brault received an unexpectedly harsh sentence after the judge determined that Brault’s actions as a whistle-blower did not counterbalance his “total abdication of ethical principles and morality” when he stole government money.

In April, another ad executive, Paul Coffin, was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.

LONDON
Reports that phone companies provided records to the National Security Agency (NSA) assumed a new ethical dimension last week, with BellSouth denying those claims and demanding that USA Today retract its report that the Atlanta-based firm turned over domestic call information.

MSNBC and the Financial Times reported that BellSouth issued a statement insisting that USA Today “retract the false and unsubstantiated statements that they have made regarding BellSouth.”

USA Today reported in a page-one May 10 article that BellSouth had a contract with the U.S. spy agency to turn over records that were used to analyze calling patterns in hopes of detecting terrorists.

The paper said it stands by its story, according to the Reuters news agency.

Verizon also has denied that it turned over records to the NSA, but AT&T has refused to comment directly on the report, Reuters reported.

The Bush administration and the NSA will not confirm or deny the allegations.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit asking that AT&T be prevented from sharing phone records with the NSA moved forward last week, but a federal judge ruled that internal company documents will remain secret for now. The Chicago Tribune reported that the suit was filed earlier this year by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and relies heavily on documents provided by a former AT&T technician.

AT&T claims the documents contain proprietary business secrets, and the government argues that making them public will reveal sensitive security information, reported InformationWeek.

WASHINGTON
President Bush last week urged the Senate to act by the end of the month to pass legislation that will address border security and what has become an increasingly hot-button ethical issue — allowing illegal immigrants to apply for legal status or eventual citizenship.

But critics, including some prominent conservatives, say they object to allowing those who entered the country illegally to have a crack at citizenship, according to the New York Times.

Several Republicans interviewed by the Times said they regard Bush’s plan as an “amnesty” that would reward lawbreakers, even if they agreed to pay fines and meet other requirements.

“Whether they say it is amnesty or not, it is amnesty when somebody here illegally gets a path to citizenship without going back to their home country,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican.

Bloomberg reported that Bush responded to those sentiments in his weekly radio address on Saturday, saying, “I believe America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time,” Bush said. “We must enforce our laws while honoring our proud immigrant heritage.”

Bush’s view of a path to legal status faces tough opposition by many members of the House, according to Reuters. The House passed a much tougher immigration bill that effectively would make illegal aliens felons.

The House and Senate versions of immigration reform bills eventually must be reconciled by a conference committee.

In a related story, the Southern Poverty Law Center claimed that tension over illegal immigration is contributing to a spike in hate crimes, according to a report from USA Today. The center, a nonprofit group that tracks racist and other extremist groups, said there has been a 33-percent increase in what it characterized as anti-immigrant hate groups, claiming that the debate over Hispanic immigration is the most important factor in the increase and has provided “resonance” for the issue.

NORWALK, Conn.
Bad behavior behind the wheel — ranging from offensive to fatal — is becoming the norm rather than the exception, according to a recent survey.

An auto club called AutoVantage last week released a study claiming that nearly all drivers admitted to talking on a cell phone while driving, and more than half admitted they sometimes drive too fast.

The survey also ranked 20 metropolitan areas in terms of best-to-worst road manners. Miami topped the ‘road rage” survey, with 63 percent of drivers saying they witness, on a daily basis, behavior such as speeding, tailgating, cutting into traffic, and stealing parking spaces, according to Miami television station WPLG.

Rounding out the top five cities with the rudest drivers were Phoenix, New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. The best-mannered were in Minneapolis, Nashville, St. Louis, Seattle, and Atlanta, the cable news system New York One reported, noting that there appears to be a link between motorist behavior and length of commuting time.

Safety officials pointed out that bad behavior behind the wheel goes beyond a social annoyance into the realm of a safety and ethics issue.

“Human behavior is so involved with crashes at all levels,” Elly Martin, a spokeswoman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, told the Associated Press.

BEIJING
Research fraud is rampant in China and is endangering that nation’s position in international industry and scholarship, according to a report last week from the Christian Science Monitor.

Reporter Robert Marquard noted that the issue was brought to the forefront after the recent revelation that the so-called Chinese Chip, a centerpiece of research and development that was supposed to symbolize a national drive to create a homegrown super microchip, was not an original design but a product obtained by a foreign firm.

Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, last week acknowledged that the Chinese Chip was a fraud and said the scientist who orchestrated the deception, Chen Jin, was dismissed from his academic post.

In the aftermath, “other fraud cases are coming to light that reveal a deeply ingrained habit of plagiarism, falsification, and corruption — widely recognized, but not widely policed or punished in Chinese universities,” Marquand wrote. “It also arrives in the midst of growing concerns about the nature and character of native firms, of exports, and of the contributions to technology and scholarship by China around the world,” he added.

In reaction to the chip fraud, a group of 120 Chinese scholars living in the United States wrote an open letter to Chinese officials, claiming that research standards have dropped so low that the nation’s reputation is endangered, the Monitor reported.

The paper also reported that a recent study found that 60 percent of Ph.D. candidates admitted that they had resorted to plagiarism or bribery to complete their studies.

SHANGHAI
Censors in China want cuts in the new film “Mission: Impossible III” before it can be viewed on the mainland because it shows scenes of dilapidated housing in Shanghai and implies that the police force there is inept, according to press reports.

Major portions of the film were shot in China, but state-run newspapers have criticized the film because it contains images that “tarnish the image of Shanghai,” according to reports from the South China Morning Post and the People’s Daily Online.

Among those images are shots of shots of people hanging laundry outside the windows of ramshackle homes and scenes featuring the elderly, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency.

Times of London China correspondent Jane Macartney noted that the film might have been blackballed because “it suggests that Shanghai police may not be the world’s finest thief-catchers.” The police department there reportedly had expressed outrage that the film gave the impression that so many crimes could be committed in Shanghai without the police noticing.

NEW YORK
Spyware and spam — two of the most hated banes of Internet usage — both figured in ethics-related headlines last week.

An annual survey called Web@Work found that the number of companies reporting spyware infestations jumped by almost 50 percent last year, with about 92 percent of firms saying they have found some sort of spyware on their computers, according to the New York Times.

While “spyware” is a broad term covering a variety of intrusive software ranging from commonplace cookies to sinister programs that completely seize control of computers, the biggest current worries are new infestations by “keyloggers,” a particularly dangerous type of spyware that records keystrokes and can steal passwords and other information, according to the Times.

Also last week, spammers won a round against an Internet-security firm called Blue Security, which had mounted an attack against spam — only to throw in the towel after the villains smothered the company in an avalanche of revenge-motivated spam, according to BusinessWeek and the Associated Press.

Blue Security had adopted a controversial strategy of fighting spam with spam, bombarding spammers with requests from clients that they be taken off mailing lists — half a million of them emailed at once, the Washington Post reported.

The strategy worked — for a while. But a Russia-based spammer hijacked tens of thousands of computers and flooded the Blue Security website with so much traffic that customers couldn’t access it, according to the Post. The spammer also threatened to infect Blue Security’s clients with viruses.

CNET reported that Blue Security ran up the white flag because it said it didn’t want to endanger other businesses.

From Harris Interactive®:

“A recent Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive Personal Finance Poll reveals that while relatively few U.S. adults say they have fallen victim to identity theft, substantial numbers have taken specific steps to help prevent it from happening to them. Three in five (60 percent) adults who have had their identity stolen lost money as a result, and while a majority recovered their losses within three months (57 percent), one in five (21 percent) say they have not yet been able to recover their loss….

“Sixteen percent of adults say they have had their credit or debit card used by someone they donÆt know without their permission. Smaller numbers say their identity was used to open a phone, utility or other type of account (3 percent), their personal information was used for non-financial fraud (2 percent), a mortgage or line of credit they didnÆt authorize was opened in their name (1 percent) or their identity was stolen and used in some other way (6 percent).

“In an effort to help prevent identity theft, about seven in 10 adults say they watch for suspicious activity on their accounts (73 percent), shred mail that contains their account numbers (72 percent), and/or limit access to their Social Security number (69 percent) to prevent identity theft…. Some demographic differences exist:

• “Those with a college degree or higher are more likely than those with a high school education or less to watch for suspicious activity on their accounts (84 percent vs. 66 percent), limit access to their Social Security number (74 percent vs. 66 percent), and check their credit reports (54 percent vs. 31 percent).
• “Those with annual household incomes of $75K or more are more likely than those with household incomes of less than $35K to check their credit reports (53 percent vs. 34 percent).
• “Those ages 18 to 34 are less likely than their older counterparts to watch for suspicious activity (63 percent vs. 81 percent of 45- to 54-year-olds), shred mail that has their account numbers (62 percent vs. 78 percent of those aged 55 and over), and limit access to their Social Security number (60 percent vs. 74 percent of 35- to 44-year-olds and those aged 55 and over).

“…Banks have been most successful in gaining public trust, as 80 percent of adults say they trust banks a fair amount or a great deal to prevent others from accessing their sensitive personal information or account number. At least half of adults say they trust credit card (64 percent), insurance companies (62 percent), and brokers a fair amount or a great deal to protect their personal information. Retailers, however, have some work to do as about half (52 percent) say they trust retailers very little or not at all to protect their personal information.”

“There is one common safeguard in the nature of prudent men, which is a good security for all, but especially for democracies against despots. What do I mean? Mistrust. Keep this, hold to this; preserve this only, and you can never be injured.”

– Demosthenes (Athenian orator and statesman, 385? – 322 BC)