Ethics Newsline®

Dear Beth,

Well, you did it. You walked across that stage, got your diploma, swung your tassel to the left side of your mortarboard, and joined the newest cohort of alumni. Your commencement speaker, heavily invested in imperative verbs, lathered you with well-deserved adulation, intoned about a rapidly changing future, and exhorted you to a full life of noble service. It was all good stuff. You have every reason to be satisfied.

But will you be? You and I have never met, but I’ve been interested in your progress since you and the rest of the Class of 2007 graduated from high school in 2003. That spring, before you left for college, Americans were feeling pretty good. In March of 2003, 60 percent of them said they were “satisfied” with what the Gallup Poll called “the way things are going in the United States.” Those numbers dipped during your first fall on campus — although, amid the sleepless frenzy of your freshman year, I doubt you noticed. By the time you got back to campus after Christmas, the satisfaction numbers were up again, to 55 percent in January 2004.

Then things changed. In the years that followed, your fellow citizens would never again be as satisfied. Now, as you and the rest of the Class of 2007 head out to take your places in that broad public life, satisfaction levels stand at only 25 percent — one of the lowest percentages Gallup ever has recorded.

Why does this matter? Because, like three-quarters of Americans, you may find yourself feeling an indistinct edginess, an indefinable sense of unease. Reflecting on your college years, you may notice that such a feeling wasn’t there four years ago. So you may blame your education for hardening your guileless youth into a shell more cynical than you ever intended. Or you may blame yourself for feeling bluer, grimmer, and less upbeat than usual.

These may not be accurate explanations. But unless you’re alert to trends in thought around you — the shaping influence of a thought system that can creep almost unnoticed into your naturally buoyant optimism — you may fall victim to them. In fact, I doubt that either you or your education is to blame. Four years of maturity may have made you more aware of the complexities of life, but that doesn’t mean you’re any less capable of expressing joy and awe at life’s revelations. Your education also may have taught you a healthy skepticism of shallow answers for sobering challenges. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into an intellectual dissatisfaction with everything around you.

So where does the nation’s dissatisfaction come from? When Gallup asked about the “most important problem facing the country” last month, the top nominees were the situation in Iraq and the issue of immigration and illegal aliens. Also figuring into the mix were oil prices, healthcare, terrorism, poor leadership, and dishonesty and lack of integrity.

Those are important points. But three other trends are worth noting:

• The growing income disparity in our country and abroad, turning the rich into the super-rich at the expense of vast, unimproving majorities.
• The cult of celebrity, focusing adulation on those who do little if any noble service for the world and yet become very rich.
• The pervasiveness of the popular media, gravitating magnetically toward riches and celebrity and portraying them as though they were almost normal.

What’s that got to do with dissatisfaction? Simply this: If you and the Class of 2007 don’t find specific ways to build up your resistance to these three trends, they’ll engender a persistent, restless dissatisfaction. However well-off you become, you’ll want more. However well-known you are, you’ll envy those more celebrated. And however much you strive to keep yourself well-informed through the media, you’ll find your quest for understanding constantly invaded by vivid images of wealth and fame that lead you to say, “Hey, that’s who I should be!”

Don’t fall for all of that. The work you’ve done for your degree has given you terrific tools of analysis and intuition, but don’t assume it has inoculated you against dissatisfaction. You need to do that yourself, by recognizing that satisfaction is a moral quality. It’s built from respect for others, compassion for the world, and responsibility for your own contributions. It’s not about getting but about giving.

Then is it wrong to be dissatisfied? Not at all. There’s a lot about “the way things are going” that should make you dissatisfied. But learn to distinguish between the imposed dissatisfaction of a thought system and the internal longing for your own moral progress. Doing that, you’ll find yourself increasingly doing your own thinking rather than merely reflecting the mood around you. Compared to that, nothing is more satisfying.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“While our investigation has uncovered many dirty secrets of the college loan industry, the stock and money that Student Loan Xpress funneled to Charlow and Frishberg were among the most flagrant. At times, it seems that Charlow and Frishberg were working more for Student Loan Xpress than for their universities.”

– New York State attorney general Andrew Cuomo, speaking last week in a statement about David Charlow and Ellen Frishberg, the financial aid directors of Columbia and Johns Hopkins universities respectively, both of whom resigned last week. Their resignations come as Cuomo’s office investigates the $85-billion student loan industry and its cozy ties with colleges, reports the New York Times. A third financial aid director, Lawrence Burt of the University of Texas at Austin, was fired last week after also being implicated in Cuomo’s investigation.

WASHINGTON
Ethics issues were the focus of much of the reporting from Washington last week. Among the top stories:

• The U.S. House of Representatives voted to require lobbyists to report spending more often and fully disclose the amount of campaign donations they raise. Bloomberg reports that the new provisions specify that spending totals be filed four times a year — up from two times a year under current regulations — and puts restrictions on the practice known as bundling, in which lobbyists collect and turn over campaign contributions. But the measure dropped an earlier provision that would have doubled the waiting period between a lawmaker leaving office and becoming a lobbyist from two to four years. The measures now move to the Senate.
• A task force investigating ethics enforcement in the House last week recommended the creation of an independent commission that would filter ethics complaints but not have any enforcement power. Congressional Quarterly reports that the panel would consist of representatives from both parties and would rule on the merits of ethics complaints and decide whether to send them to the House ethics committee. The task force, appointed by Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi, had been handed a political hot potato because while her party took control of both houses of Congress on an ethics-reform platform and had complained about the ineffectiveness of internal ethics committee policing, lawmakers from both parties are wary of any external control.
• Testimony by a former Justice Department official about the firings of U.S. attorneys, allegedly for political rather than job-performance reasons, provided more fuel for the ethics inferno that has occupied Congress for several months, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Monica Goodling, who resigned her post as Justice Department liaison to the White House, told congressional investigators that she had been the target of an “uncomfortable” attempt by attorney general Alberto Gonzales to discuss the case even though they both anticipated testifying before Congress and knew that such pre-appearance collaboration would be improper. She also testified that another Justice official had “not been completely candid” when saying that the White House was not in any way involved in the firings. Monitor reporter Peter Grier writes that while no smoking guns were uncovered, Goodling’s appearance “emphasized the circular firing-squad aspect of the furor over the fired attorneys — with many of the major figures in the controversy blaming one another for any mistakes that may have occurred.” Goodling originally refused to testify, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, but gave way after receiving a promise of immunity.
• Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former aide to vice president Dick Cheney, has shown no remorse for his role in corrupting the legal system and should serve 30 to 36 months in prison for his conviction on charges of obstructing the investigation into the leak of the name of a CIA operative, according to court papers filed last week by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Libby’s attorneys, who have not yet filed sentencing pleas, are expected to ask for no jail time, reports USA Today.
• Immigration reform now being debated in Congress would do away with a provision of current law that is the subject of fierce debate over both moral and practical issues — the “EB-1″ preferred status category that allows “aliens of extraordinary abilities” to have first crack at green cards and eventual citizenship. The Washington Post reports that while some praise the measure as closing a loophole for the elite, others say that the proposed replacement method of determining eligibility — a complex formula including weight for English proficiency and education — also tips the scales in favor of the privileged. Still, critics claim that closing the fast track for VIPs would diminish the ranks of universities, symphonies, universities, and sports teams, and could hamper, as a hypothetical example, the immigration of a Nobel Prize winner with weak English skills, according to the Post.
• In a page-one story last Friday, the New York Times details the relationship between U.S. senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and a controversial benefactor, Vinod Gupta, head of InfoUSA, one of the nation’s largest information brokers. According to records obtained in a shareholder lawsuit, Gupta has paid Bill Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services and spent nearly $900,000 transporting both Clintons to various events. According to the Times, the expenses were cited by angry InfoUSA shareholders who argue that Gupta squandered company funds trying to “ingratiate” himself with the Clintons. Also at issue, according to the report, is the scope of Gupta’s business in general: The paper reports that Gupta’s company, which sells information about consumers to marketers, was the focus of a probe in which InfoUSA allegedly sold data to criminals who defrauded the elderly. Spokespersons for the Clintons would not detail their relationship with Gupta, but said that the travel complied with ethics rules. Gupta, in an interview with the Mumbai-based news service Rediff, denied any impropriety and said the Times article was an effort to embarrass the Clintons.

VARIOUS DATELINES
A new report from the corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) claims that judicial corruption is undermining the rule of law across the globe.

Judicial corruption is a particular problem in the former Soviet republics in eastern and central Europe, and throughout much of Asia and Africa, according to a summary of the report in the Jurist, a publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Compounding the problem, some of the former Soviet satellites, while pushing various corruption reform measures, have failed to eradicate legacies of corrupt practices left over from communism. According to the Budapest Business Journal, some eastern and central European governments are attempting to remedy one such legacy — the mishandling of court papers — by redesigning justice buildings so that employees are more visible to other workers and to the public.

India’s judiciary received a scolding in the TI report, notes the Times of India, because of an estimated $580 million in bribes flowing to lower-level judges each year.

Bribery of the judiciary was also cited as a serious problem throughout much of Africa, reports the East African Standard of Nairobi, Kenya, which quotes one analyst observing a notion he says is widespread in Kenya: “Why hire a lawyer when you can pay a judge?”

TI’s report says that citizens in many nations feel they must pay bribes in order to gain access to the justice system at any level, a problem particularly acute in Albania, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico, Moldavia, Morocco, Peru, Taiwan, and Venezuela, according to the Caracas daily paper El Universal.

In the survey of 62 countries, 17 percent of respondents said they had bribed police officers to get away with offenses.

BRUSSELS
The European Union is raising concerns that information about searches done on Google, records of which are retained by the company, could be compromising privacy and violating EU provisions.

According to a report from the London-based Financial Times, a group called the Article 29 Working Party, which is comprised of officials advising the EU on privacy policy, has asked Google to justify its policy of keeping search records for up to two years.

Privacy advocates worry that search information could be used to identify individuals and profile Web searchers according to their political opinion, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation, the Financial Times reports.

Adding to the concern is Google’s recent announcement that it plans to purchase the online advertising firm DoubleClick, which places ads based on data collected from surfers, according to an analysis from the International Herald Tribune.

ZDNet, a news service covering technology, reports that Google has until mid-June to respond to the European Union’s request.

In a related story, South Korean officials last week said they will introduce an Internet code of ethics to clamp down on the distribution of inappropriate material, including pornography, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. The measure, which will be sent to parliament later this year, would punish Web portal operators if they fail to filter out obscene or defamatory material.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Three of the world’s largest retail chains made ethics news last week. Among the stories:

• The Reuters news agency reports that a fired Wal-Mart executive is accusing the CEO of the store chain of violating company ethics policy by accepting discounts and gifts from vendors and others. Former marketing communications chief Julie Roehm has sued Wal-Mart for breach of contract and Wal-Mart, in turn, has sued her on charges of taking improper gifts and misusing company funds. In the latest court filing, Roehm accused Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott of receiving gifts and discounts from an executive who does business with the store chain, and said other executives have accepted gifts from vendors, according to Reuters. Wal-Mart denies the claims.
• Home Depot, whose former CEO often was cited as an example of executive compensation wildly out of sync with company performance, adopted a new look at its annual shareholders meeting last week, according to a report from the New York Times. In contrast to the last meeting chaired by Robert Nardelli, in which the now-deposed company head refused to answer questions about his salary — or any other shareholder questions, for that matter — the new CEO, Frank Blake, spent over an hour talking business and taking questions. Shareholders applauded Blake’s pay package, reports the Times, because it is tied to the company’s performance and his salary, while a hefty $8.9 million, is about a quarter of what Nardelli was taking.
• Coles Group, a giant retailer headquartered in Australia, has adopted an ethical sourcing code that it says will protect workers who supply the chain’s footwear and apparel. The Australian Age reports that Coles’ policy mainly focuses on China and spells out 92 different criteria, including workplace safety and living conditions of factory workers.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Drug prices, a recurrent theme in international news, surfaced in three major stories last week:

• In Canada, a prominent cancer specialist is calling for scrutiny of drug prices following news that a popular chemotherapy drug soon will be sold by only one company — at double its current $500-per-vial price. The Globe & Mail and the Halifax Chronicle-Herald report that changes to Canada’s intellectual property law will give the firm Sanofi-Aventis a monopoly on the drug oxaliplatin, and let it charge $1,000 for a 100-milligram vial, a price the company says was approved by the Canadian government and is not unreasonable.
• China last week said it will clamp down on “unjustified fluctuations” in drug prices, launching an investigation into the practices used to market over 1,500 drugs, according to a report from the official government newspaper People’s Daily. In the past, marketers had escaped price controls by simply changing the name of the same concoction, according to the report.
• India’s government, also under pressure to reduce drug prices, has lowered the permissible increase in the cost of a pharmaceutical from 20 percent per year to 10 percent, according to the Economic Times, the nation’s second-largest financial publication. As of late last week, the government had asked various companies to explain price increases on 52 drugs, threatening to cut prices arbitrarily if it is not satisfied with the reasons.

WASHINGTON
While animal rights groups are praising a decision by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to end government breeding of chimpanzees for research, some scientists say the move could hamper critical research.

The Reuters news agency and the Los Angeles Times report that while the agency cited financial reasons, the Humane Society of the United States, which opposes the use of chimpanzees as lab animals, maintains that ethics issues also were behind the decision.

Critics have protested that the long lifespan of a chimp — in some cases, 60 years — makes confinement to a laboratory particularly cruel. Critics also contend that research results from apes does not apply particularly well to humans, with modern research methods providing less cruel and more reliable avenues.

But John Vandeberg, director of a research institute that uses chimpanzees for experiments, told UPI that in the long run the move will set back research into several illnesses.

“I’m disappointed by this announcement and it’s disturbing to me,” Vandeberg said. “I think it will have a devastating impact on some types of biomedical research, most importantly on hepatitis C and hepatitis B, other diseases for which chimps are used today, and other diseases that may emerge in the future.”

Vandeberg told UPI that chimps are the only research animal that can be infected with hepatitis C.

COPENHAGEN
The winner of the 1996 Tour de France last week admitted that he used banned drugs, becoming the first champion of the event to confess to doping.

According to a report from the New York Times, Bjarne Riis said he used the blood-boosting drug EPO, steroids, and human growth hormone throughout the 1990s. It is unclear what prompted Riis, now the manager of a Danish cycling team, to make the confession.

The Chicago Tribune quotes Riis as saying, “The time has come to put the cards on the table…. I have done things I now regret and I wouldn’t do again. I have doped. I have taken EPO. For a while it was part of my life.”

While Riis told journalists that he did not deserve to keep his title and expected that it would be stripped from him, he added that he was “a rider at a time when those were the conditions,” meaning that use of performance-enhancing substances was widespread, reports the Agence France-Presse.

A report from the Associated Press notes that Riis’s confession comes at a time when 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis is desperately trying to keep his championship jersey as he awaits a ruling on his doping case. Landis tested positive for synthetic testosterone, but has maintained that he was the victim of a laboratory error.

LONDON
The popular British reality TV show “Big Brother” is facing accusations that it covered up incidents of racist bullying.

The program, which has many versions in nations across the globe, involves a group of people who live in a house under constant video surveillance and vote members of their group out of the living arrangement weekly. Recent allegations that racist bullying was ignored by the show’s producer, Channel 4, have resulted in several on-air apologies and calls for the resignation of the head of the channel, reports the Times of London.

A regulatory agency called Ofcom found that Channel 4 was in violation of the broadcasting code and in a report issued last week cited several instances in which it says Channel 4 did not handle properly the house’s volatile situations, according to a report from the ITV network.

An Australian version of the “Big Brother” program is also in the center of an ethics controversy because producers of the show decided not to tell one of the contestants locked in isolation that her father had died, the BBC reports.

The Brisbane Courier-Mail adds that the contestant, Emma Cornell, knew that her father’s death was imminent and that her father had not wanted her to be informed.

But many, including Australian politicians, are outraged by the incident and say it is an example of reality programming sinking to a new low.

In a related story, the host of a popular British reality program called “Ethical Man” is continuing to chronicle his observations, most recently on a BBC blog. Justin Rowlatt spent a year on-camera, attempting to live an eco-friendly life. Last week, he reported on a trip he took to India, attempting to gauge attitudes there toward “ethical living.”

Rowlatt writes that even though India is a major polluter, the official position of its government is that fighting global warming is not the responsibility of developing nations.

Rowlatt notes that on a per-capita basis, India’s production of pollutants is relatively small, summing up the dilemma: “That is why — after a week in India — I found it easy to understand the Indian Government’s position. It is also why I found it hard to begrudge Indians — in particular the two families we filmed with - some of the luxuries like cars and holidays abroad we in the West have been enjoying for years.”

“We are told the world needs to reduce carbon emissions worldwide if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming. If India is going to increase its emissions that means someone somewhere will need to make some carbon cuts. The question is who.”

From the Pew Research Center:

“The first-ever, nationwide, random sample survey of Muslim Americans finds them to be largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.

“The Pew Research Center conducted more than 55,000 interviews to obtain a national sample of 1,050 Muslims living in the United Statesà. The resulting study, which draws on Pew’s survey research among Muslims around the world, finds that Muslim Americans are a highly diverse population, one largely composed of immigrants. Nonetheless, they are decidedly American in their outlook, values and attitudes. This belief is reflected in Muslim American income and education levels, which generally mirror those of the public.

“Key findings include:

• “Overall, Muslim Americans have a generally positive view of the larger society. Most say their communities are excellent or good places to liveà.
• “The survey shows that although many Muslims are relative newcomers to the U.S., they are highly assimilated into American society. On balance, they believe that Muslims coming to the U.S. should try and adopt American customs, rather than trying to remain distinct from the larger society. And by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern societyà.
• “Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries. However, there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than othersà. In addition, younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified. Nonetheless, absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world.
• “A majority of Muslim Americans (53%) say it has become more difficult to be a Muslim in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Most also believe that the government ’singles out’ Muslims for increased surveillance and monitoring.
• “Relatively few Muslim Americans believe the U.S.-led war on terror is a sincere effort to reduce terrorism, and many doubt that Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Just 40% of Muslim Americans say groups of Arabs carried out those attacks.”

“And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

–James Madison (4th U.S. president, 1751-1836)

No one doubts that it takes real moral courage for leaders to hold firm under fire. Sometimes, however, it takes even greater courage to resign. Last Thursday both kinds of courage were in evidence. Here’s how the Washington Post for May 17 displayed the topic:

Lead story, page 1: U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales faces new revelations that as many as 26 of the nation’s 93 U.S. district attorneys were candidates for firings — not eight, as Mr. Gonzales had testified earlier. He clings to his post.

Second lead, page 1: World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz insists that he will not leave unless the bank’s board exonerates him of some of the ethics charges against him. He clings to his post.

Bottom right, page 1: The controversial head of the Smithsonian Business Ventures, Gary Beers, comes under strong fire amid investigations into his expenses, management, and relations with a female subordinate. He resigns.

Lead story, Business section: Micah Green, the co-chief executive of Wall Street’s largest trade association, the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association, was subject to an internal investigation that revealed significant management failures on his watch. Several months ago he resigned.

Score: Two staying, two leaving — though by day’s end Mr. Wolfowitz also had exited his post. And that was only one day in one newspaper. What do we learn from all of this?

It may sound odd to talk of moral courage in the face of deceptions, mismanagement, favoritism, and misappropriation of funds. But what if the charges are at worst trumped up, or at best overstated and miscast? When a leader stands firm in the face of unethical headwinds, we have no hesitation in applying the word moral to his or her fortitude.

The harder case is the obverse. Suppose the charges are accurate and the leader really is acting unethically. In that situation, some leaders stonewall to the bitter end, braving even impeachment rather than admitting their mistakes. Others bow out more quickly and gracefully. Of the two courses, which is more ethical? Surely the latter. It takes greater moral courage to admit mistakes and take the punishment than to cling to a lie out of vanity, self-deception, or the slender hope of getting off on a technicality. Sticking doggedly to deceit is stubbornness, not courage. Stepping aside, even when you’re in the wrong, shows a measure of selflessness. It suggests a willingness to put the good of the entire organization ahead of your own personal satisfaction. I’d call that a moral act any day, even when performed by an immoral actor.

But what happens when, as at the World Bank, the situation is murky? Was this really about the ethics of Mr. Wolfowitz’s promotion of Shaha Riza, the female World Bank executive who was his close companion? Or was it, as the after-the-fact reporting seems to indicate, a clashing of management styles so profound that he was unable to lead effectively? What if, as seems likely, the ethics charges were technically valid though not, in ordinary circumstances, terminable offenses? What if the real issue was a collapse of trust that rendered him ineffective and the institution leaderless?

When leaders go that far off course and lose that much trust, no amount of bluster, intimidation, or recrimination will swing the issue back to the moral side of the ledger. The leader who, fighting ever-mounting opposition from his or her constituents, bulls ahead without regard for the welfare of the organization may do far more long-term damage than the leader who is caring enough to put the organization first. At that point, the courageous leader steps aside — even though the legal or ethical case remains ambiguous.

And at that point, courageous boards may have to compromise in order to help the leader resign. That, too, may sound odd. When a board has been handed an investigative report clearly concluding that the leader acted unethically, as was the case at the World Bank, is compromise an act of courage? Or is it mere capitulation? In this case, the World Bank board accepted Mr. Wolfowitz’s contention that his mistakes were made in good faith, despite investigative findings to the contrary. On that grace note, he departed.

Cynics may sneer that the board’s action rose no higher than a Machiavellian ends-justifies-the-means philosophy. In fact, it may be that this board found a way to turn its dilemma into a trilemma — and had the wit to reach a compromise for the good of the whole organization. Boards, too, need to have the moral courage to surrender what they can’t always stubbornly demand.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“I have a sense that when we finish our investigation, we may have a conclusion of the tenure of the attorney general.”

– Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), predicting the resignation of U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales last week as investigations continue into his leadership of the Justice Department. Six Republicans and a host of Democrats have called on Gonzales to resign after four months of deepening scandal over his handling of the firings of U.S. attorneys.

Gonzales’s problems continued to grow last week with the testimony of former Justice Department deputy attorney general James Comey. Comey testified that in 2004, Gonzales, then serving as White House counsel, tried to pressure then-attorney general John Ashcroft, recovering at the time in intensive care after surgery, into reauthorizing a terrorism surveillance program determined to be illegal by the Justice Department.

Two senators have called for a no-confidence vote in Gonzales this week, notes the Washington Post.

NEW YORK
In a case that some critics argue goes to the heart of governance issues at the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz last week announced his resignation as president of the powerful international development institution, planning to step down in June in the aftermath of an ethics scandal.

The Financial Times reports that Wolfowitz’s departure became all but inevitable after an ad-hoc committee of bank directors issued a devastating report about his handling of a compensation package for Shaha Riza, a bank official under his supervision with whom he was romantically involved.

Wolfowitz argued that he had cleared his involvement in the compensation negotiations with the World Bank’s ethics committee and followed its sketchy advice.

Wolfowitz and many of his supporters claimed that the chorus for his resignation was part of an orchestrated plan of character assassination, reports the CBS News media analysis column “Public Eye.”

The ad-hoc investigative board admitted that the bank’s ethics review system “did not prove robust” and that many people contributed to the incident.

But as the Economist reports, in the end the directors of the World Bank concluded that Wolfowitz had fallen short of the ethical standards of his office.

Moreover, the scandal eclipsed all of the Bank’s other efforts and made it impossible for Wolfowitz to lead the institution, reports the Economist.

A report from the BBC notes that Wolfowitz, who came into his post with an anticorruption agenda, was unpopular from the start among many Europeans because of his background at the Pentagon, where he was an architect of U.S. Iraq War policy. In the aftermath of his planned departure, some Europeans may seek to alter the arrangement for handling leadership of the world’s leading development agencies: The World Bank president regularly has been appointed by the U.S. government, while Europeans traditionally nominate the head of the International Monetary Fund.

Several leaders in the international development community also have called for more transparency in World Bank governance, and are planning to use Wolfowitz’s departure as a springboard for that agenda, according to the BBC.

LONDON
After a debate about both tactical and ethical issues, military leaders in Britain last week decided that Prince Harry will not see duty in Iraq.

Britain’s Ministry of Defense originally had slated the 22-year-old to serve as a reconnaissance leader in Iraq, with 11 men under his command, but top brass reversed that decision, saying the prince would be a valuable target to insurgents, reports the Yorkshire Post.

In addition to “specific threats” to Prince Harry, who is third in line for the throne, military leaders were swayed by the ethical dilemma of placing his fellow troops in harm’s way because he would be such a compelling target, notes the Scotsman.

Prince Harry is reported to be disappointed by the decision but plans to continue his military career, at least for the time being.

Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, who initially said the prince would go to Iraq but then changed his mind, put part of the blame on the media. “It is a fact that this close scrutiny has exacerbated the situation and this is something that I wish to avoid in future,” he told the Times of London.

In a related story, Prince Harry has been advised not to join his men for visits to London nightclubs, reports UPI, which quotes a source as saying the prince has been told “the public would find it unacceptable to see pictures of him drunk outside nightclubs during the six months his men are away fighting.”

WASHINGTON
The busy intersection of technology and ethics was the venue for several collisions of values last week:

• At least 25 nations block websites for political or social reasons, according to a new report. A survey by a group called the OpenNet Initiative finds that levels of censorship are higher than expected and are a sign that the Internet has matured to the point that governments are taking serious notice, reports the Washington Post. China, Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Tunisia, and Vietnam had the most repressive political filtering, according to the Post report. Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen had the strictest filtering practices based on social and cultural taboos, blocking pornography, gambling, and gay and lesbian sites.
• Popular websites such as MySpace, MTV, and YouTube no longer are available on U.S. military computers after the Pentagon blocked access to the sites. While the Pentagon says the blockage is purely an attempt to save bandwidth, some observers say the action is partly an attempt to keep purposeful or inadvertent security breaches off the sites. Critics, such as Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, called on the military to reverse the decision, claiming that the sites were used by troops to communicate with family and friends and were essential for morale, reports the Reuters news agency.
• The social-networking website MySpace is caught up in a legal and ethical dispute over whether it should release to state authorities the names of registered sex offenders who have used the site. MySpace has shut down portions of the site operated by convicted sexual predators, but so far has refused to turn over names to state officials who asked for them, citing federal privacy law. Pennsylvania attorney general Tom Corbett, one of the leaders of the effort by several state law enforcement agencies to obtain the names, tells Pittsburgh news-radio station KDKA that while MySpace acted properly in taking down the sites, he is disturbed by the firm’s reluctance to turn over the names, saying the states are legally entitled to the information.

Editor’s note: On Monday, MySpace released a statement saying it would provide information on sex offenders to the states. The company said its previous opposition was due to its belief that under federal privacy law, it could not supply the information without specific warrants, reports the New York Times. “We wanted to make sure that each state got the information through a legal process that allowed them to use it to prosecute and lock up these sexual predators. The last thing we wanted was for one of these predators to get off on a technicality,” said Mike Angus, executive vice president and general counsel for Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of MySpace.

OTTAWA
A current officer and a former ethics adviser to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) say the elite force has a culture of covering up crooked behavior or corruption.

Canada’s National Post reports that staff sergeant Andre Girard told a panel investigating alleged RCMP pension irregularities that he personally had been the target of retribution within the force due to his official actions looking into the matter.

Girard said the force is rampant with “institutional protectionism, anything to protect the image of the organization, sometimes at all costs,” according to the Post.

At the same hearing, John Spice, a former ethics adviser, said he was told by a former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli that he was making too much noise about alleged mismanagement in the pension fund and should back off, CTV reports.

Spice, who retired as an assistant commissioner in charge of the force’s ethical matters, told the panel that the RCMP is riddled with abuse of power and harassment, with officers and employees terrified of retribution for reporting wrongdoing, according to a report from the CBC.

“We should have had zero tolerance for any sorts of unethical behavior and, quite frankly, as much as I would like to say that we tried, we failed miserably,” he said, according to the Toronto Star.

Spice recommended that lawmakers establish an independent ombudsman to assure that complaints can be heard.

The panel is probing allegations of misspending of millions of dollars from the RCMP pension fund, widespread nepotism among fund administrators, and a cover-up that included threats of retaliation against whistleblowers.