WASHINGTON REPORT: Corruption, Conscience and Government:
Sisyphus
WASHINGTON REPORT CORRUPTION, CONSCIENCE & GOVERNMENT Corruption in government has many faces. There have been the economic "spectaculars," Credit Mobilier and Teapot Dome, and the big-daddy of...
...Productivity may increase, but good conscience and self-responsibility shrink...
...Yet in her tone, as distinct from her words, she conveyed a desire to help in a political house-cleaning...
...Tawney writes in his book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, that the new religious creed "which transformed the acquisition of wealth from drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions...
...Puritanism and its twin, Calvinism, swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money and, thereby, nourished the capitalistic spirit that exists within each of us...
...and this place is so awful...
...Pervasive, debilitating, cumulative...
...The theoretical right of the public's right-to-know may (Continued on page 18) Sisyphus (cont'd) have been re-enforced, but the Tightness of publishing the afflicted woman's name is violated and the competing claim of a right-of-privacy shrunk thereby...
...Other times, financial remuneration is involved...
...One of the suicides was chief of the Bureau of Enforcement for the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB...
...An example is a recent decision of the Supreme Court that upheld a newspaper's right to print the name of a raped woman...
...Parenthetically, the Maryland situation reflects the equanimity with which the affluent view corruption...
...Learned readers of Commonweal are better able to describe the theoretical and doctrinal basis for this ad--vancing state-of-affairs than is contained in this column, but the flagrant, accumulating examples of this category of corruption compel comment, nevertheless...
...These episodes are just a few of the examples of actual law-breaking or warped judgments that litter the daily newspapers hereabouts...
...Men such as these are becoming the de facto Special Prosecutors of our time...
...Actually, the epitaph for federal regulatory agencies was written in the last century just after establishment of the first one, the Interstate Commerce Commission...
...In this way, these persons, with no excuse not to be responsible, permit their attitudes to be compartmentalized, cut like salami into slices that prevent-or don't permit -ethical judgments to be brought to bear on the overall...
...Yes, the court said, you editors have that right...
...How much would CBS have paid for the recollections of Pontius Pilate...
...A member of the Maryland State Legislature recently commented that the stench in the state capitol, Annapolis, was unavoidable but that she, herself, could really do nothing and that, besides, her request for state funds for a worthy school program would doubtlessly be turned aside if she raised a fuss and upset the Governor...
...The organization of government, for example, is so large that not only, as is commonly acknowledged, are the various agencies unable to carry out effectively their assigned programs-foreign economic assistance or food-stamps for the domestic needy, for example-but conscience, too, becomes a casualty...
...Incidentally, this story in this jaded town was reported not on page one, but on an inside page of the news section of the Washington Post...
...sisyphuslace is so awful...
...Men of good conscience in government increasingly find themselves isolated and overwhelmed and finally acquiesce or, in despair over surviving otherwise, participate in the pillaging or in the carrying-forward of a wrong-headed war...
...The same week brought another example of "checkbook" journalism...
...She sounded like the old woman in Shaw's "Man and Superman...
...The milk now curdles...
...Nor is what is "right" always re-enforced by the courts...
...There have been the economic "spectaculars," Credit Mobilier and Teapot Dome, and the big-daddy of them all, Watergate, a political one...
...Also nullified is the intuitionist theory of Rousseau and Locke that conscience is a power of discrimination acquired by experience...
...They comprise a situation in which numbers of public and private managers display a lack of self-guidance...
...These involve a mutuality of organized avarice and lusting for power on the part of men in high positions in both public and private office...
...Obedience to the organization, public or private, is defined as liberty...
...The offenses become sometimes simply entrenched patterns of favoritism on the part of organizational men or their deliberate non-compliance with congressional intent of a law...
...The architect's suicide is the most dramatic in a stream of malfeasances involving the Maryland government, certainly one of the most disreputable that any state's citizens are afflicted with...
...One sits down to each day's newspaper dreading but nevertheless expecting to read about new shadows cast across federal and state governments by their managers and their confederates in state-subsidized "private enterprise...
...Three centuries ago, the churches were deprived of the right to provide guidance to the economic machines...
...Legislators from well-to-do sections of the State have been conspicuously silent (unlike a few from blue-collar districts) because they fear to anger the Governor and upset their own legislative projects, albeit worthy ones...
...But these simply are akin to the janitor who is too busy mopping up to turn off the tap...
...Ethical choices within the world of work become eroded/irrelevant or the choice is left to some nameless superior within public and private organizations...
...With the rise of the Administrative State in modern times, however, there's come about a less dramatic type of corruption that corrodes perpetrators, the acquiescent and the institutions within which they work...
...The second suicide was that of a middle-aged architect who in early March shot himself fewer than two hours after he told a reporter for The (Baltimore) Sun about what he regarded as improprieties in awarding a lucrative Maryland state contract for construction of prefabricated classrooms...
...Corruptions accumulate...
...A society may be brought down by corruption as well as by violence...
...The Washington and Baltimore newspapers have reported other less dramatic examples of how individual conscience has been infected with indifferentism, even docility...
...CBS has agreed to pay approximately $25,000 to H. R. Haldeman, convicted in the Watergate trials, in order that he may share with us his experiences as a presidential assistant in the most corrupt of all presidential administrations...
...An Assistant Secretary of the Treasury made a ruling, according to The Sun, that is financially favorable to clients of a law firm he was formerly associated with...
...Their holdings are illegal, GAO informed the Congress...
...Accompanying the phenomenon Of the division of labor is a division of conscience...
...Anesthetized is individual conscience, defined by some as innate in the sense there exists a moral sense that compels men to act on values beyond their immediate gain...
...He left as last testament a 20- to 30-page letter relating to political campaign contributions made by domestic airline companies, which an FBI investigation suggests broke the law...
...More numerous are instances of isolated wrongdoing of public men for individual advancement or financial gain-award of a contract to a friend, not the low-bidder, or filing of a false income-tax return...
...Managers, who in other aspects of their lives would not kick the ailing family cat or hold back their kids' allowances or steal the daily newspaper from a neighbor's front-stoop, act in their world of work to sell their services and goods as dear as they can, not as is right...
...As for an organization's "conscience," that suffers from analgesia...
...Not all the Halde-mans and Erhlichmans are Republicans and/or work at the White House...
...For the United States, one is as possible as the other...
...The moral question of committing suicide aside, the CAB official chose to punish himself in retribution for the notorious clientism that infects federal regulatory agencies and the business firms they profess to regulate...
...The investigatory arm of the Congress-the General Accounting Office (GAO)-reported this month that 49 officials of the United States Geological Survey own stocks in companies holding mineral leases on federal lands supervised by their own agency...
...Attorney-General Olney, seeking to pacify a president of a railroad, wrote him that "the part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission but to utilize it...
...Whatever laxness was exercised by his bureau over airlines' political contributions came during the service of his predecessors...
...Two recent suicides illustrate the matter...
...But law-enforcement officials who read his testament said he apparently felt that the bureau he headed had not performed its function adequately...
...In an extremist political climate, the organizational men are the dutiful Eichmanns who shroud the most murderous of undertakings as routine administrative actions...
...The scrolls of federal prisons at Danbury and Allenwood bear their names...
...Occasionally, despairing men with proof of illicit goings-on will not subside-or pull the trigger-but will make an anonymous call to Sy Hersh of the New York Times or write an anonymous letter to Jack Anderson or hold a furtive meeting in a hash-house with Ralph Nader...
...Both men who killed themselves were victims in that shadowy relationship of greedy entrepreneurs, willing to subvert public agencies for private gain, and the public agencies themselves...
...The death of the architect recalls an observation of Max Weber made in another context...
...but I am so lonely...
...On occasions when the public clamor compels response, committees of inquiry are established and/or codes of ethics re-affirmed or established...
...The CAB official, investigators agree, was himself blameless...
...sisyphus...
...In someone else's words, the churches are authorized to provide help for the economically wounded, but not to direct the main legions...
...The exercise of juridically determined rights frequently violates the rightness of an action...
...Prodded, Governor Mandel reacted to the classroom-contract scandal by bypassing the Maryland Attorney-General's Office and establishing an investigatory commission whose members are to be appointed by him and his cronies in the legislature...
...I almost got the impression that he was apologizing because his shop hadn't done a better job," one official said...
...Nor do they today show signs of effectively wishing to provide such guidance...
Vol. 102 • March 1975 • No. 1
