Ethics Newsline®

Now and then a new book comes along in which nearly every sentence deserves underlining. Such books are short, essential, and wise. Pursuing a single bright line of clear argument, they depend less on footnoted research than on the author’s credibility. They don’t come along often because they take a lifetime to write.

Profit with Honor is such a book. In it, Daniel Yankelovich brings decades of work — as one of the world’s most respected social science survey researchers and as a member of numerous corporate boards — to bear on the theme that long has consumed his attention: values and ethics. His book’s subtitle, The New Stage of Market Capitalism, explains accurately if drably what he’s after: how businesses can combine ethics and profit making. Had I been his editor, I’d have plumped for a more in-your-face subtitle — something like, Is Corporate Ethics an Oxymoron, and If Not, What the Heck Can We Do About It?

Even if you’re not in business, this question matters. It pulses through today’s scandal-soaked headlines. It underlies a Gallup Poll report from last month suggesting that a record four-fifths of Americans now agree that “the state of moral values” in the country is getting worse rather than better. And it leaves us, as Yankelovich argues, facing a “third wave of mistrust of business and other institutions” that, following two earlier waves around the time of the Great Depression and again in the late 1960s, began around 2002.

Yankelovich argues that the current mistrust, while fed by scandals at Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and elsewhere, springs from a convergence of three deeper trends:

• The “rage for deregulation” in the 1980s and 1990s that “transformed the gatekeepers — the accounting firms, the investment bankers, the business law firms, the regulatory agencies — into enablers.”
• The excesses of CEO pay, which tied it to “the vagaries of the stock market” and “sorely tempted” CEOs to “take questionable shortcuts, or even cheat.”
• The importing into business of bad cultural norms — those “unwritten rules that dictate what sorts of behavior are acceptable” — that include winning at all costs and gaming the system.

Trying to fight such trends with laws and compliance structures, he argues, isn’t enough. “If you want positive results,” he writes, “you need to give people a positive basis for trust and respect and an ethical vision to live by, not merely severe punishment for misdeeds.” Fair enough. But how? Unlike many laments about corporate malfeasance that are awash with diagnoses but scant on prescriptions, this book steers directly toward a concept that Yankelovich describes as “stewardship ethics.” He sees this concept as “a new stage of enlightened self-interest” that brings social norms together with business imperatives, focuses on community, leaves the corporation better off after a CEO leaves, and “emphasizes the conscious effort required to reconcile profitability with social good.”

Yankelovich locates his concept between two popular but (in his view) flawed theories about ethics in business. One is a laissez-faire approach. Generated largely by the business community itself, this theory promotes deregulation but inaccurately assumes that “all reasonably honest ways of making profit somehow serve the public good” and that no additional ethical imperatives are required. The other is a corporate social responsibility approach. Arising from the nonprofit sector, this theory tends to find profit making suspect and seeks to burden business with the correction of social ills unrelated to its core objectives.

Were he a typical academic, Yankelovich would at this point ground his concept of stewardship ethics in the writings of the great thinkers. To be sure, he mentions Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, and Adam Smith — but almost impatiently, as though wanting to keep you focused on the thread of his idea. Instead, he moves directly to the nut of his problem, which is that his theory may sound impractical. Will it matter? Will hard-driving executives buy into stewardship ethics? Here he draws two strong arguments from his own work over the years.

The first concerns executive pay. He divides compensation into two pieces: “the wealth needed to provide a CEO with financial security and a high-status lifestyle, and the wealth desired mainly for scorekeeping purposes (’my bonus is bigger than yours’).” His own research has convinced him that baby boomers — who make up the bulk of today’s CEOs — are interested in more than money. He finds them “hungry for recognition and for the conviction that they are leaving a valued legacy for the future.” If that hunger can replace the “scorekeeping” part of executive compensation — and Yankelovich thinks it can — then stewardship ethics may well be attractive to the CEO.

The second argument concerns our culture’s broad social norms. “The good news is that the larger culture is ready for less self-centered, more-communal-minded values,” he writes. “In fact, corporate America has lagged behind the nation’s broader culture, which is rapidly moving away from the crasser forms of self-seeking and is instead eager to see civil society norms grow stronger.”

Both arguments are complex. And each, in the hands of a less trusted author, would have required at least a chapter of charts, graphs, and quotations. Who but Dan Yankelovich, in fact, can talk so briefly about baby-boomer longings or civil-society norms and be so readily believed? If you hunger for detail, Profit with Honor may leave you unsatisfied. But if you suspect that what’s most needed, these days, is the gem of a powerful idea for regenerating corporate ethics, this book makes perfect sense.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics

“The message of this verdict is clear: in answering questions posed by Congress and by federal agencies, public officials have the same obligation as does the public for which they serve — to tell the truth.”

– U.S. assistant attorney general Alice Fisher, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, announcing last week’s conviction of former White House aide David Safavian. Safavian, who resigned last September, was found guilty of four counts of obstruction of justice and lying to federal investigators looking into his dealings with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

“Safavian is the fifth person to be found guilty in legal actions connected to Abramoff,” noted the New York Times. Safavian, former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, and embattled U.S. Rep. Robert Ney (R-Ohio) were among those who joined Abramoff on a 2002 golf junket to Scotland that has become one focus of continuing investigation.

Safavian’s lawyer said he will appeal last week’s conviction, which could carry penalties of up to 20 years in jail and $1 million in fines. Sentencing was set for October 12.

“Safavian was a little fish. I think this makes it easier for the prosecutors to ask permission at the Justice Department to go for the bigger fish,” a lawyer representing a former government official also entangled in the scandal told the Times.

WASHINGTON
Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration began secretly using a Belgium-based banking database to monitor financial transactions that may lead to terrorist activity, according to press reports last week.

While some drew an immediate comparison to the government’s controversial domestic eavesdropping program that was revealed six months ago, criticizing the monitoring as an invasion of privacy, the administration defended the financial surveillance as critical in the war against terror, insisting that the use of the data was ethical and focused, Forbes reported.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Treasury secretary John Snow said that the monitoring has been “a critically important tool. We’re not simply trolling for data. We’re not mining data. We are, rather, making precise inquiries.”

Monitoring of international bank transactions began in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when Treasury officials obtained access to a massive international financial database called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or “Swift.”

The Belgium-based Swift cooperative handles financial message traffic from almost 8,000 banks in more than 200 countries. Tapping into its records allows the U.S. government to track financial transactions worldwide without dealing with individual banks — or with the laws and privacy restrictions that govern them — noted the Los Angeles Times.

The program has been helpful mostly in tracking mid- to low-level terrorist and militant groups, not Al Qaeda, which “long ago began transferring money through other means, including the highly informal banking system common in Islamic countries,” according to the Times.

The existence of the program was first revealed in reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal last week.

Critics immediately denounced the banking surveillance as intrusive and unjustified. “Like the domestic surveillance program exposed last December, the Bush administration’s efforts to tap into the financial records of thousands of Americans appear to rely on justifications concocted without regard to current law,” Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), co-chairman of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, said Friday, according to the AP.

Vice President Cheney defended the program and crticized the media for exposing it, according to United Press International. He said it was “disturbing” that “some in the media take it upon themselves to disclose vital national security programs, thereby making it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people. I find that offensive.”

In a Sunday letter to readers, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller responded to Cheney’s criticisms, saying the paper had published the story only after “fully weighing the issues.”

“We weighed most heavily the Administration’s concern that describing this program would endanger it. The central argument we heard from officials at senior levels was that international bankers would stop cooperating, would resist, if this program saw the light of day. We don’t know what the banking consortium will do, but we found this argument puzzling. First, the bankers provide this information under the authority of a subpoena, which imposes a legal obligation. Second, if, as the Administration says, the program is legal, highly effective, and well protected against invasion of privacy, the bankers should have little trouble defending it.”

“Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress. Most Americans seem to support extraordinary measures in defense against this extraordinary threat, but some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government’s actions and over the adequacy of oversight. We believe The Times and others in the press have served the public interest by accurately reporting on these programs so that the public can have an informed view of them.”

WASHINGTON
In a precedent-setting case on workplace discrimination law, the U.S. Supreme Court last week effectively made it easier for workers to sue employers who retaliate after a discrimination claim is lodged.

The case under consideration, Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co. v. Whit, involved a female forklift operator who was reassigned after complaining that her immediate supervisors and coworkers had made inappropriate remarks. The woman was transferred to a common laborer’s job, which offered the same pay and benefits though the work was more arduous, CNN reported.

Later, she was suspended without pay for insubordination, although a company hearing reversed that decision and awarded her back pay. Her supervisor was investigated, suspended, and ordered to undergo sensitivity training.

The woman claimed she was the victim of illegal retaliation for filing her complaint. Her employer denied the charge, saying she simply had been reassigned, not demoted, noting that her pay and benefits remained the same.

Last week’s ruling clarifies what had been a muddy definition of the concept of retaliation, according to a report from the Christian Science Monitor. Previous federal court rulings on the anti-retaliation provision in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were all over the map — with some opinions holding that there must be monetary loss resulting from retaliation, while others said that any actions that would deter future complaints were grounds for a suit.

In last week’s case, the court held that the company’s actions, even though they did not involve monetary damage, were enough to deter a reasonable person from making a discrimination complaint in the first place, the Washington Post reported.

Writing for the court, Justice Stephen Breyer held that “interpreting the anti-retaliation provision to provide broad protection from retaliation helps assure the cooperation upon which accomplishment of the Act’s primary objective depends.”

Workplace-law experts say the broad standard will probably provoke many more relation complaints, according to the Scripps Howard News Service, which quoted New York employment lawyer Mimi Moore’s as saying that “employees will allege that borderline actions [such as] not being asked to lunch, not being given the best assignments, not being given the best schedule … are retaliatory.”

Justice Breyer’s ruling apparently anticipated such doomsday predictions, noting that an employer’s refusal to take an employee to lunch would usually be nothing more than a “petty slight,” noted the New York Times. “But to retaliate by excluding an employee from a weekly training lunch that contributes significantly to the employee’s professional advancement might well deter a reasonable employee from complaining about discrimination.”

Moore advised employers to comprehensively investigate claims of retaliation and to make their policies against retaliation clear, according to Scripps Howard.

WASHINGTON
Police union officials, outraged that a Georgia congresswoman who struck a Capitol Police officer was not indicted on assault charges by a grand jury, have demanded that the House ethics committee probe her conduct.

According to the Associated Press, Andrew Maybo, chairman of the U.S. Capitol Police Labor Committee, claimed the pass given to Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) sends the message that, “It’s OK to hit a police officer.”

“We hope that members of Congress will review her actions in light of their rules within their own ethics committee,” Maybo said. He claimed she violated House ethics rules that call for members to conduct themselves in a way that would reflect “creditably” on the house, the AP reported.

There was no immediate indication whether the House would consider the union’s request.

Maybo, along with local and national officials of the Fraternal Order of Police, a union representing almost half a million officers, also have called for the reassignment of the prosecutor who presented the case to the grand jury, according to television station WSB in Atlanta. They charge that U.S. Attorney Kenneth Wainstein gave McKinney preferential treatment and did not present the case aggressively to the grand jury.

McKinney has not denied striking the officer, who did not recognize her and tried to stop her at a Capitol entrance. She was not wearing a pin that identifies members of Congress, and scuffled with the officer when he stood in her way, according to the Hill, a newspaper covering Congress.

A Washington, D.C., grand jury decided on June 16 not to issue an indictment because it found the evidence presented did not support the indictment, and Wainstein subsequently announced he would not pursue the case further, the Washington Post reported.

LONDON
British doctors are expected to seek approval for a full face transplant from a London hospital’s ethics board this week, an action likely to prompt a vigorous debate over the scientific, psychological, and moral implications of the procedure.

The BBC reported that surgeons at the Royal Free Hospital are prepared to perform the operation but have not yet found a suitable patient.

While surgeons have performed partial face transplants in France and Germany, replacement of a full face has not yet been attempted and the complete range of implications remains unknown.

According to a report from the Reuters news agency, doctors and ethicists worry that while the operation would give severely disfigured patients a chance at a normal life, questions remain about the implications of living life with someone else’s face, as well as about the impact on the donor’s family.

According to reports from the Telegraph and the Independent, the surgical team is searching for candidates who fit a tightly drawn profile. The likely candidate would probably be an adult in his or her 30s with severe injuries to the entire face, a sound psychiatric history, and having experienced up to 70 surgeries already.

XINZHENG, China
In one of the more unusual education-ethics stories in recent memory, a Chinese college has been torn by riots after students learned that their diplomas would identify the fact that they graduated from a satellite school of a highly regarded national university, rather than listing only the national university.

According to a report from the New York Times, students at Shengda College paid one of China’s highest tuition rates because they believed that their diplomas would bear the name of Shengda’s parent, the prestigious Zhengzhou University, and make no mention of the little-known Shengda College.

But after they received diplomas that read, “Zhengzhou University Shengda Economic, Trade and Management College,” students began destroying campus property and fighting with police, according to the reports from the Hong Kong Standard and the U.K. Guardian.

United Press International reported that the college’s marketing campaign had promised that only the large university would be mentioned on the diploma, but a national law passed in 2003 requires that all affiliated institutions be identified on graduation documents.

The president of the small college admitted he had not been clear about the promised wording of the diplomas and resigned.

Small satellite colleges have mushroomed in recent years as China has struggled to provide seats for the growing number of students seeking a college education, leading to large “mother schools” spawning satellite campuses.

Graduates of less-prestigious schools often find it difficult to land a job, noted the Times.

OTTAWA
Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper last week offered a formal, unreserved apology for his country’s past treatment of immigrant Chinese and proposed a compensation package that includes millions of dollars for anti-racism education.

The Ottawa Citizen and the Can-West News Service reported that Harper, in an emotional speech before the House of Commons, admitted that the government acted “shamefully” by imposing what has become known as the Chinese Head Tax, a fee on immigration, and subsequently banning further immigration, effectively separating families for decades.

The head tax was in place from the late 1800s until the mid 1920s and was legally abolished shortly before World War II. About 29 people who paid the tax are still alive and could be identified, according to the Globe & Mail.

These survivors, along with roughly 250 widows, each will receive a token payment of about $20,000, according to a report from the Shanghai Daily, which noted that five frail survivors — the eldest aged 106 — were able to attend the ceremony.

Harper thanked Chinese-Canadians for their role in building the nation’s railways, noting that thousands of immigrants died during the construction of what he called Canada’s “iron backbone.”

The Canadian government had set aside about $25 million for redress to other cultural communities, including Ukrainians, who were imprisoned in Canada during World War I or required to register as enemy aliens. Late last week, a spokesperson for Canadian-Ukrainians said that Harper should offer the same sort of formal apology extended to the Chinese, according to a report from the CBC.

“Never formally in the House has a prime minister stood up and acknowledged this took place,” Paul Grod, national vice president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, told CBC News.

LONDON
British Airways, Europe’s third-largest airline, is under investigation by British and U.S. authorities over allegations the firm conspired to fix prices, according to press reports.

The Times of London reported last week that the probe relates to the fuel surcharge added to ticket prices for long-haul flights, a fee that can amount to about $130 on a round-trip ticket from New York to London.

Investigators will attempt to determine whether sections of the airline industry are colluding to inflate the charge.

The surcharges, which are supposed to defray the airlines’ costs related to the fluctuating price of petroleum, already have prompted several class-action suits as well as an investigation into alleged cartel activity by air cargo carriers, according to a report from MSNBC and the Financial Times.

British Airways (BA) said it was assisting Britain’s Office of Fair Trading and the U.S. Department of Justice, but provided no other details, the Washington Post reported. Virgin Atlantic, United Airlines, and American Airlines also said they were cooperating with the inquiry, though it was not known if they were targets of the probe. Only BA was specifically named by regulators.

The BBC reported that the investigation began after antitrust authorities were tipped off by an official from BA’s rival Virgin Atlantic.

The investigation may take several months, according to press reports.

WASHINGTON
The theft of laptop computers has become an increasingly common entry on the police blotter but is also a huge legal and ethical issue for corporations that lose private data.

As Washington Post reporter Petula Dvorak noted in the paper’s June 22 edition, “Week after week, Americans who conscientiously shred every piece of mail and all credit card receipts learn that their personal information was stored in the laptop of a low-level employee who casually took it out of the office and that it has ended up in the hands of some penny ante crook…. What is striking to many people is how widespread and haphazard the spread of personal information has become in companies and government.”

In recent weeks, the U.S. press has reported laptop losses compromising data from clients of travel companies, investment firms, banks, credit bureaus, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. According to the Post report, some of the thefts are being reported because of recently enacted state laws that require disclosure of lost data.

United Press International reported that a committee in the U.S. Congress last week advanced a measure that would compensate millions of veterans whose data was stolen in a recent laptop theft from the Maryland home of a Veterans Affairs employee. The final bill is expected to set up an office to help process claims of veterans who might become victims of identity theft.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says it still hopes to recover the stolen laptop before the information can fall into the hands of identity thieves, the Associated Press noted.

In a related story, search engine giant Google last week joined a group of technology firms demanding federal legislation to protect consumer privacy. The Agence France-Presse reported that the group, called the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum, includes tech heavyweights Microsoft, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard.

The group says comprehensive federal legislation is necessary because current privacy measures are a “patchwork quilt” of federal and state consumer protection laws, the AFP reported.

At least part of Google’s motivation was a recent court battle in which the federal government requested data on search requests by the firm’s users, AFP reported. While a federal judge dramatically pared down the scope of the government’s request, Google noted that there was no coherent body of law spelling out the government’s right to information or the firm’s obligation to provide it.

WASHINGTON
An emerging Internet technological and business framework that would vary the prices Internet service providers (ISPs) charge based on the type of communication being transacted is raising eyebrows among those who view the practice as unethical and a violation of privacy, according to press reports.

Globe & Mail reporter Jack Kapica notes that the technology, known as “bandwidth shaping,” would allow providers to sell priority access based on the particular user’s activity. Customers who use the Internet for phone calls, for example, could be charged a “quality of service” fee to ensure a good connection.

Kapica notes that a new technique called “deep packet inspection” allows ISPs to detect whether users are surfing recreationally or transferring large files.

Once traffic is categorized, paying customers can elect to be put on the fast lane.

The concept is at the core of an increasingly heated ethical debate, noted a report in the Ottawa Citizen. Some argue that bandwidth shaping is a necessity on an increasingly crowded Internet, but others contend that providing better service for customers with deep pockets will relegate startup firms to the Internet’s back roads, plagued by slow service and unreliable connections — a process that will eventually kill off innovation. They also contend that the content being transmitted on the Internet should not be subject to electronic inspection by the service provider.

The status quo — offering the same transmission speed to all comers — is increasingly referred to as “Net neutrality.”

Congress is exploring the Net neutrality issue, PBS reported, trying to decide whether to let ISPs offer tiers of service for premium fees or whether there should be an outright prohibition of the practice.

From Public Agenda:

“If an adult were forced to work in an environment where disrespect, bad language, fighting, drug and alcohol abuse and other bad behaviors are inflicted by a relative few, but tolerated or winked at by management, it might be considered a ‘hostile workplace,’ a report released today by the nonpartisan research organization Public Agenda points out.

“Yet, substantial numbers of the nation’s black and Hispanic students report conditions like these in their schools according to a Public Agenda national survey of parents, middle and high school students and teachers. Public Agenda also conducted a special survey of New England parents and students for the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. Asked to rate their schools on key academic and social dimensions — resources, promotion policies, dropout rates, truancy, fighting, drug and alcohol abuse and others — black and Hispanic students are more likely than their white counterparts to report ‘very serious’ problems in nearly every category, both in New England and across the nation.

“In ‘Reality Check 2006: How Black and Hispanic Families Rate Their Schools’ (the second report issued this year in the Reality Check 2006 series), Public Agenda found that American students have much in common regardless of racial or ethnic background. Majorities of all students back higher standards, say their teachers do a good job in most respects, and express some level of concern about lack of respect, profanity, and drugs and alcohol abuse in their schools. But for minority kids, academic problems like high dropout rates and kids getting passed through the system without learning, and social issues like profanity, disrespect for teachers and drug and alcohol abuse are far more prevalent and ’serious’ in their schools.

“Public Agenda’s research on New England schools finds that about 3 in 10 black youngsters attend schools with considerable turmoil:

• “32 percent of New EnglandÆs black students report that teachers spend more time trying to keep order than teaching
• “39 percent say their school has very serious problems with drug and alcohol abuse
• “43 percent report very serious problems with fighting and weapons
• “45 percent say their school has a very serious problem with kids cutting class
• “55 percent say their school has a very serious problem with kids who lack respect for teachers and use bad language

“…’Young people of color are among our fastest growing populations, yet, as these statistics make clear, many of them live and go to school in environments that are not conducive to learning,’ said Blenda J. Wilson, President and CEO of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation….

“Jean Johnson, Executive Director of Public AgendaÆs new initiative Education Insights and an author of the report said, ‘This is not grumbling from a group of easily-shocked adults who haven’t been inside a school in years and still haven’t come to grips with today’s teen fashions. These are the judgments of young people themselves who say problems like truancy and disrespect for teachers are very serous in their schools — not just ’somewhat serious,’ but ‘very serious.’ A lot of these kids are highly aware that their schools are not serving them well, and that has to be discouraging.’…”

“Colleges don’t teach economics properly. Unfortunately we learn little from the experience of the past. An economist must know, besides his subject, ethics, logic, philosophy, the humanities, and sociology, in fact everything that is part of how we live and react to one another.”

– Bernard Baruch (U.S. businessman and statesman, 1870-1965)

LINCOLNVILLE, Maine

Last Saturday morning, following a centuries-old New England tradition, the citizens of this rural community turned out for the annual town meeting. As usual, we raised sober concerns about spending hikes and tax increases, engaging in debates that added nearly an hour to an already long meeting. But despite the glorious June weather, no one complained. We settled the school budget, agreed which roads to close in winter, and debated the leasing of town land near the Sand/Salt Storage Building to the Lincolnville Mountain Goats Snowmobile Club. As we concluded, the moderator complimented the group for its polite and civil discussions.

It was an arresting compliment. A few days earlier in Washington, DC, I’d heard a talk by a longtime political commentator. He observed with sadness that beltway politics have become more rancorous and divisive than ever, with politeness absent and civility gone. That’s a refrain we’re increasingly hearing. From every corner, we’re told that national bipartisan comity — down to the level of cross-party congressional dinners and late-night senatorial card games — has evaporated. In place of deliberation is intransigence, with blame replacing goodwill at every turn.

Why should that be? Various villains come to mind. There’s the increased role of money in politics. There’s the new transparency that leaves scant space for private reconsideration of prior public positions. There’s the unwillingness of thoughtful people to run for office in what they see as a thoughtless system. There’s the long-prophesied end of a fabled age of innocence.

If that last point has merit, it’s not because the age of innocence — that illusory simple past, where life seemed easier and stakes lower — has given way to an age of experience. Instead, it seems to have given way to an age of adolescence. It may be that what we’re seeing in our national discourse is people playing at grown-up leadership who never quite grew up.

In one sense, that’s good. At their best, adolescents possess abundant energy, innate idealism, and a keen eye for hypocrisy. So, at their best, do politicians. But adolescents also can possess, more darkly, a sense of bravura and certitude that convinces them of their own invincibility. They can be subject to intense loyalties, deeply personal and at times almost irrational. They can see the world through black-and-white simplicities, riding roughshod over nuance in their urge to separate villains from heroes. So, at their worst, do politicians.

Given this volatile mix of attributes, it’s little wonder that cultures through the ages have created rites of passage whereby adolescents become adults. Central to such rites is some expression of courage, some capacity for recognizing danger and being willing to endure it. There’s a bear in the woods. Give the lad a spear and tell him to bring back the bear within three days. When he does, he’s no longer a boy but a man.

In centuries past, that was a useful test. Bears were evident, and spear handling was a practical art. In our century, bears are few. So the question is, How are we to move adolescents to adulthood absent the bears? How can we help them master real, external risks, letting them prove their courage and build their confidence?

The answer may lie in shifting our focus from physical to moral courage. That’s a more practical attribute in today’s world, where the most dangerous attacks come not from a glut of bears but from a dearth of principles. Teaching the young to stand up for principle is one of the most important things a culture can do. But how do we provide the young with experiences of moral courage if, as a culture, we’re busy protecting them from any semblance of risk and its consequences? Are we so intent on coddling the young toward adulthood that we never demand morally courageous acts of them? Are we refusing to let them grow up?

Suppose, unlike prior generations, we were committed to pampering our adolescents without daring to expose them to the slightest discomfort. Should we be surprised if they never express real courage? Should we imagine that a mere passage of years would turn them into adults? And should we expect from their leadership anything beyond the personality-driven, I’m-right-you’re-wrong, adolescent politics that we’re modeling for them today?

The lasting comity of Lincolnville suggests to me that it’s still possible to find citizens adult enough to admit mistakes, listen to alternatives, and hold their ground while remaining civil and gracious to their opponents. Needed now is a next generation of leaders with the moral courage to represent those qualities on the national and global stage.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics

“Many, but not all, on the other side of the aisle lack the will to win. The American people need to know precisely who they are. It is time to stand up and vote. Is it Al Qaeda, or is it America?”

– U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood, Republican of Georgia, taking part in last week’s highly rhetorical, heavily vitriolic congressional debate on the war in Iraq. As the midterm election season heats up, many Republicans are trying to frame Democrats as cowards, while many Democrats assail Republicans for being clueless on how to control the open-ended war. Lost amid the posturing, according to many press reports: any substantive discussion of a clear path forward.

WASHINGTON
In one of the more unusual scenarios involving ethics and government, the U.S. House of Representatives last week voted to take away a powerful committee seat from a representative under investigation for bribery — but not charged with any crime — and at the same time sent congressional lawyers to help him retrieve documents seized from his office.

Louisiana Democrat William Jefferson has not been charged with a crime and maintains his innocence, although the FBI claims to have videotaped evidence of Jefferson accepting bribes and says the agency confiscated $90,000 hidden in a freezer in his apartment, the Associated Press reported.

At about the same time as House Democrats voted for his ouster in a closed-door meeting, House attorneys were joining with Jefferson’s personal attorneys in a suit requesting the return of documents seized by the FBI in late May. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle expressed outrage at the search, which appears to be without precedent, because they claimed it violated the constitutional guarantee of separation of powers.

According to a report from ABC News, many House members continue to argue that the raid was an attempt by the executive branch of government to intimidate a member of the legislative branch, a breach of longstanding protections designed to shield lawmakers from executive branch harassment.

Jefferson’s attorney is arguing that the raid itself was improper because the FBI was not selective in the search. Lawyer Robert Trout claimed that agents were “pawing through every record in that office,” according to a report from the Washington Post. Trout said the FBI “took every single hard drive in the place.”

The case has assumed deeper ethical implications than might have been expected because the Democrats have been seeking to capitalize on GOP ethics scandals in a “culture and corruption” campaign designed to recapture control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shepherded the motion to remove Jefferson from the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which culminated in a 99-to-58 vote by Democrats, who opted to temporarily suspend Jefferson pending the conclusion of the probe. Jefferson will keep his House seat and his seniority.

Pelosi claimed that Democrats had to set the bar higher than Republicans when disciplining representatives suspected of impropriety.

But Pelosi drew flak from some who complained that she was acting without precedent, according to the Hill, a paper that covers Congress. Democratic party rules stipulate that only party leaders or ranking members of committees must step down during a probe, and then only when formally charged.

“There are a lot of Democrats who feel fairness is a higher standard than political expediency,” Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.), who sided with Jefferson, told the Hill. “We need to win the House back, but not at any cost.”

Jefferson’s removal also did not sit well with many in the 43-member Congressional Black Caucus, who say that Jefferson, who is black, is being singled out. Bloomberg quoted Caucus head Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat, as warning that if the only person removed from a committee in this manner is “a black member of Congress, our community will legitimately ask, ‘What in the world are you doing?’ “

Jefferson said his removal from the Ways and Means Committee, which has control over taxation bills and many other aspects of government funding, will hurt his ability to help his constituents recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Bloomberg reported.

BEIJING
A researcher for the New York Times was given a one-day trial last week on charges of divulging state secrets in what the Times says is part of a campaign by the Chinese government to rein in the foreign media.

No verdict was announced after the trial of Zhao Yan, who was arrested almost two years ago after the Times ran a story predicting high-level Chinese governmental changes. Chinese police arrested him and charged him with releasing classified information, although the Times and Zhao’s colleagues have denied that he was the source.

Zhao pleaded not guilty.

It was not immediately clear when and if the verdict would be announced, the Associated Press reported.

The Times of London reported that the Chinese government is attempting to make an example of Zhao in an effort to keep other Chinese from cooperating with foreign media on topics the government wants suppressed.

According to a report from the London-based Independent, China is thought to be the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with at least 42 reporters in prison on vague charges of violating state security.

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Supreme Court last week carved an exception into an ethical and legal principle that has been both praised as a guarantee of individual rights and criticized as a loophole for criminals: the “knock and announce” rule that requires police to announce their presence and wait for several seconds before entering a suspect’s residence.

The court ruled 5-to-4 that drug evidence seized in a raid on a private home in 1998 can be used against a suspect even though police admitted they did not knock on the door and waited only three to five seconds before entering, according to CNN.

Knock-and-announce search protections, part of English common law since the 1200s, were enacted into U.S. law nearly a century ago and given the status of constitutional protections by subsequent court decisions. While last week’s ruling does not invalidate the protections, it does put their permanence in question, according to press reports.

The court’s majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, maintained that knock-and-announce provisions were not meant to sanction “the shielding of evidence from the government’s eyes” and that the “increasing professionalism of police forces” and the threat of subsequent lawsuits will prevent police abuses.

The court also ruled that the evidence eventually would have been discovered even if police had knocked and waited the traditional 15 or 20 seconds, according to the Jurist, a weekly summary and analysis of legal news published by the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Last week’s decision is expected to have a major impact because it changes the traditional remedy for violating the knock-and-announce rule: suppressing the evidence seized during the improper search, prohibiting it from being used against the defendant at trial.

Marcia Coyle, Washington bureau chief for the National Law Journal, told PBS that the High Court’s decision essentially amounted to weighing two “right” outcomes. “Justice Scalia did two things,” Coyle said. “First, he weighed the cost and benefits to society of applying the exclusionary rule, which suppresses the evidence. The benefit is to deter future police misconduct…. He felt the benefit was far outweighed by the cost to society of suppressing the evidence.”

But dissenters argued that the decision swung the balance too far in favor of police. “The court destroys the strongest legal incentive to comply with the Constitution’s knock-and-announce requirement,” wrote Justice Stephen Breyer in a minority opinion, according to the International Herald Tribune. “Officers will always know … that they can ignore the knock-and-announce requirement without risking the suppression of evidence discovered after their unlawful entry.”