Gifts and Corruption

Wanting to be in the spirit of season, at a2ethics.org we have been writing about gifts. More accurately, in our roles as ethics correspondents, barcode 2x and I have been obsessed with the ethics surrounding gifts. We have also talked about gifts with a group of local gift-giving experts from local nonprofits, including representatives of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation (one of whose donor-advised funds also funds a2ethics.org) and The Salvation Army in our most recent and final podcast in the ethics and nonprofit series: www.a2ethics.org/node/502.

While a2ethics.org has been wrapping ourselves in gifts of the sort where we ask the question, who and what should we give to and why are they worth giving to over others, the world has been having its own sort of gift-giving stories.

The biggest story is the one involving the gifts before the holidays to the nation's private sector investment and commercial banks and to A.I.G. the insurance giant to save the financial system from imminent collapse. The $700B bailout to the financial titans is not technically a gift. But in my mind, it is, because it qualifies quite nicely in the category of the Gift With Strings Attached.

In fact, if we think about it, political gifts are always Gifts With Strings Attached.

One example close to home: think about the amount of money spent by special interest groups in Michigan to elect our...no... not our representatives or senators, but our Supreme Court Justices. According to Michigan Campaign Finance Network, $21M was spent in the 2000 hotly contested election where 3 incumbent justices were up for re-election. (Check out this organization:www.mcfn.org.)

Such large contributions, even on behalf of nonpartisan candidates, are not made to ensure fair and impartial justice. No, they are gifts to get a gift back in the form of favorable decisions from the bench of the highest court in the state. And to me, they are a form of corruption with serious ethical consequences.

But this example seems long ago. Especially when we have two hot stories about gift giving and their potential for corruption. The first was the revelation a few weeks ago, that the governor of Illinois, who has the authority to appoint vacated federal official seats, was allegedly offering President-elect Obama's open senate seat to the highest bidder.

The second was the announcement soon thereafter that Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of former President John Kennedy and the niece of current senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy, was interested in taking the vacated seat of Hillary Clinton in New York.

On the face of it, the two seem very different. First, the presumed offer to sell a political appointment is not really a gift offer. It is a direct reciprocal transfer and so in this way, the gift aspect of the transaction is obscured. This is because many gifts are given without an expectation that the one who gets the gift will not give anything back.

Even so, the offer to sell a political appointment has some gift elements to it. It is the gift that keeps giving, so to speak. That is because the person who takes such a gift is forever having to be grateful. He or she is forever beholden to the giver. The gift hangs over the taker's head for the rest of his or her life, unless one or the other decides to tell about it.

In this way, it is also the gift that can never be returned. Once given, it puts in motion the need for a coverup. All manner of unethical activities then become accepted in order to keep the gift of the appointment secret from everyone except the giver and the taker.

This is not remotely close to the situation of Caroline Kennedy you say. Everything in her case seems to be transparent and in the open. There is no sale involved. And it is not really a gift. Yet, it too, has gift elements.

In the U.S. we regard family businesses and family professional legacies as generally beneficial, and even moral goods. Children are legacies at their parents' schools. They join the same religious institutions. They root for the same sport teams. They are successors in both businesses and in occupations. For example, in some Michigan families, the Fords are not the only family in the auto business. Grandparents have worked on the line before their grandchildren.

This all seems morally acceptable to us. For some, it even seems like the natural order.

When it is applied to politics in a representative democracy, we should find it out of order. Why?

Because politics is different than other businesses where nepotism may well be morally alright. Politics is a gift and patronage business to begin with. Its greatest potential for abuse occurs when politics as the family business can lead to a sense of entitlement. This counters the sense of equal opportunity that should be part of a democracy. It also creates the potential for a new aristocracy, based on lineage, in this case in public life and in politics. To me, political nepotism corrupts democratic ideals.

Further, political nepotism diminishes individual promise. Recently, I read New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers. The book offers insights on how it is that individuals become successful in the United States. Its greatest insight, however, was the pattern of advantage that each of the successful individuals he chose to highlight can rely on from the beginning of their lives. We often assume that most highly successful people are just gifted. But we know that they are also given many gifts that others in our country do not receive.

Gladwell's book is not about political nepotism. But it helped me understand how marveling at an athlete's giftedness or a musician's precocity at an early age, or a child who seems a natural at politics, is really based on the many connections he or she already has, among them family members who are in a position to distribute the gift of power.

That is why, at the end of the day, I would not favor the appointment of Caroline Kennedy to the New York Senate seat.

And why, I will be watching carefully in the next election to see whether yet another member of the Dingell family decides to run for a House of Representatives seat now in my district that has been held by a Dingell for three quarters of a century.