Political Reform Ideas

Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, pledged to drain the swamp of dirty politics in Congress when she took office a few years ago.  She said that she wanted to preside over the most ethical Congress in history.

Since she took office, the Office of Congressional Ethics has been very serious about fulfilling her mission and  their responsibilities.

Public opinion polls have become so ingrained in American politics that we give little thought to whether such polls are actually beneficial to our democracy.  More compelling, we think, is the increasing willingness  of public opinion pollsters to use their technologies  to tell us about our collective attitudes on a wide range of ethical issues: from whether we "favor" stem cell research to our willingness to "agree"  with some forms of torture.

When Austin Tracy found out he owed back taxes to the IRS, he took a stand. He refused to pay, on the grounds that as a gay American, he has been denied his rights. Jeanine DeLay and Barton Bund discuss the ethical framework for activism. This political gesture has drawn sharp criticism, but Tracy makes a persuasive case. Join us for a fascinating hour-long interview with the young radical.

Children are going back to school this week. First week attendance could be spotty this year. A few kids are staying home because of their parents’ fears about going to school without being innoculated with the swine flu vaccine. According to the latest reports, a vaccine is not going to be ready until October. Others, however, spent the first day at home because of their parents’ fears the President’s pep talk to the nation’s students, delivered the day after Labor Day, will permanently infect them with ideas they believe are dangerous to their minds.

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.

Seeing pictures of former employees walking with their personal effects (and trade secrets for future use?) boxes out of the revolving doors of the offices of the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers a few weeks ago, I was somehow reminded of the common ethics tool used by employers and many other institutions, known variously as disappearing, gone, out the door, and in the ancient usage: banishment.

As the insolvency and frozen credit crisis has yet to unthaw, like many other Americans, I have been trying to understand it. And given my lack of understanding of economics, my metaphor to grasp its meaning has remained decidedly literary and simple-minded. As I recall, it was Ernest Hemingway's character, Mike, who went bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises. Someone asked Mike how he went bankrupt. He replied, "Gradually, and then suddenly."

I first heard about a project called the Copenhagen Consensus a few years ago. As I understood the idea, it was all about prioritizing the world's greatest social and economic challenges and then deciding which solutions were the most effective, based on proven "what works" practices and on the results of "the biggest bang for the buck" social and community studies and research.

Today, August 5th is primary election day. In Ann Arbor, that means voters will be deciding the probable winners for the mayoral race as well as for City Council. There has been a lot of talk over the past decade (at least) about how America has become a nation of like-minded enclaves and clone communiities, where people hold the same political views and come from the same socioeconomic class.

Originally submitted by: barcode 2x