Earlier this year, veteran political writer Thomas Edsall reported an eyebrow-raising fact about Americans' views of government.
Polling by Gallup, he noted, found that the proportion of Americans who believed government corruption is "widespread" had risen from 59 percent in 2006 to 79 percent in 2013.
"In other words," Edsall wrote, "we were cynical already, but now we're in overdrive."
Given the blanket coverage devoted to public officials charged with selling their influence, this shouldn't be surprising. Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife were convicted last month of violating public corruption laws.
Former mayors Ray Nagin, of New Orleans, and KwameKilpatrick, of Detroit, were good for months of headlines.
So were Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, convicted last year on influence-peddling charges, and Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who pleaded guilty to charges of misusing campaign funds.
If you add state and local officials who cross the line, it might seem that we're awash in corruption. Yet as political scientist Larry Sabato told The New York Times, that's more perception than reality. "I've studied American political corruption throughout the 19th and 20th centuries," he said, "and, if anything, corruption was much more common in much of those centuries than today."
Nor have the numbers through the past couple of decades risen. In 1994, according to the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, 1,165 people were charged in public-corruption cases, of whom 969 were convicted. Last year, 1,134 were charged, of whom 1,037 were convicted.
Corruption is hardly a negligible issue. Americans rightly have very little tolerance for public officials on the take. Officials who violate the law in this regard should face criminal prosecution and incarceration.
Americans remain uncomfortable with "corruption" as our forebears viewed it. A hefty majority believe that government is run on behalf of a few big interests. And Congress, whose ethics committees have not been rigorous in looking for misconduct that brings discredit on their chambers, has contributed to that view.
I would hardly contend that all who seek to promote their private interests are corrupt. But I do think the Founders had a valuable insight when they saw that a focus on private concerns could lead to neglect of the common good.
I have the uneasy feeling that too many politicians are self-absorbed, failing to put the country first, and using their office to promote their private interests.
Our founders had very firm ideas about the importance to the nation of "virtue" in a public official — and they were thinking expansively about the basic standards of public accountability.
Maybe it's time we looked to them for guidance.
Maybe it's time not to think of corruption only in the narrow sense of violations of specific laws or precepts, but more broadly in terms of failing to pursue the common good.
Lee Hamilton directs the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Presidential candidates traded accusations over political corruption on Friday night in a last ditch attempt to sway undecided voters before Sunday's election runoff in Brazil's closest race in decades.
In the final television debate of a bitter campaign, leftist President Dilma Rousseff and pro-business opposition candidate Aecio Neves sparred over who was best suited to restore growth to a stagnant economy, fight inflation, bring down rents and deal with open sewers in Brazilian cities.
But it was a deepening bribery scandal at the country's largest enterprise, state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA (PETR4.SA), that brought the fiercest exchanges.
"There is one easy way to put an end to corruption: throw the Workers' Party out of office," Neves said in reply to a question from a voter on how to improve Brazil's lenient anti-corruption laws.
Polls show that the festering corruption scandal involving the ruling Workers' Party has not had a significant impact on the race in which Rousseff gained a clear lead this week.
In his last chance to win over voters, Neves came out swinging in the debate and asked Rousseff straight out whether she knew about a scam that allegedly received kickbacks from Petrobras contractors and funneled funds to Rousseff's party and its allies in Congress.
The allegations were made in plea bargain statements made by former Petrobras executive Paulo Roberto Costa and a black-market money dealer called Alberto Youssef who were arrested in March in a money laundering investigation.
The weekly magazine Veja reported on Friday that Youssef has told police and prosecutors that Rousseff and her predecessor, Workers' Party founder Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, knew about the corruption scheme. The jailed money dealer provided no evidence.
Rousseff dismissed the allegation as unfounded and called Veja magazine an opposition mouthpiece that had systematically antagonized her government and was trying to derail her re-election.
Neves, the market favorite who had stirred investor enthusiasm by promising business-friendly policies to pull Brazil out of recession, assailed Rousseff for poor management of Latin America's largest economy and losing control of inflation.
A mild economic rebound and a bruising campaign have boosted the incumbent's chances in recent weeks. Surveys of voters by Brazil's top polling firms published on Thursday showed Rousseff with a lead of 6 to 8 percentage points.
Rousseff has gained ground by reminding voters of the rising wages and expanding social programs many have enjoyed over the past 12 years of Workers' Party rule, benefits she said would be at risk because Neves would govern for the elite.
Neves insisted in Friday night's debate that he would preserve social programs that have lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty and reduced inequality.
Analysts say the corruption allegations have not swayed voters to turn against Rousseff because unemployment remains low despite the slowdown and many Brazilians enjoy access to consumer goods, education and housing they did not have before.
Rousseff blamed Neves' Brazilian Social Democracy Party for the crisis facing Brazil's largest city Sao Paulo, which is close to running out of water. She said water was the responsibility of the state government run by his party.
"Such a lack of planning in the richest state in the country is shameful," she said.
Chen is a 34-year-old computer wizard who runs a startup called Captricity in downtown Oakland and has the crazy notion that transparency can combat corruption, and maybe even save lives.
“We’re an idealistic bunch,” Chen said of himself and the 26 people who work at Captricity. “I would call us the opposite of Beltway bandits.”
Chen’s company is part of a group that won a one-year $270,000 contract with the Federal Election Commission. Its mission will be to drag the Senate, mewling and scratching, into the digital age, though not until next year, after the Nov. 4 election.
Forgive me my rant; I’ve written this before. But U.S. senators, in bipartisan form, insult voters by refusing to submit electronic versions of their reports disclosing donors who fund their campaigns.
Rather than submit their campaign finance reports online to the Federal Election Commission as House and presidential candidates do, senators, in their arrogance, mail their reports to the Senate Office of Public Records, an ironic name.
The tradition of opacity is especially galling this year, when the Senate could flip from Democratic to Republican control, though neither party can claim the high road on this issue. No matter which party is in control, senators try mightily to block the unwashed masses from seeing who pays their way to Washington.
Starting a week ago last Thursday, the Senate office began sending senators’ campaign finance reports to the Federal Election Commission. By last week, 180 reports comprising 114,619 pages had arrived. Senate Minority Leader McConnell, for example, filed an October report that runs 1,063 pages. His challenger’s report ran more than 10,000 pages.
The commission, which tries to post parts of the reports online, was so overwhelmed by the volume that it posted a notice on its website:
“Unusually large paper reports filed by U.S. Senate candidates in the third quarter of the current cycle have overwhelmed our processing capacity, slowing public disclosure of those reports.”
Even when the commission posts the reports, they are useless for any voter wondering about whether Senate candidates are taking money from, say, coal, oil, defense and tobacco companies, and/or from their hometown pastors or high school civics teachers. The reports cannot be downloaded into spreadsheets, searched or sorted.
To get the documents into a more useable form, the FEC delivers the paper to a firm in Virginia, ILM Corp. There, keypunchers type in names of donors, the amounts they give and a few other details. ILM has had the FEC contract since 1998, though its run is ending now that Chen’s company is getting the work.
ILM has a month to produce the third-quarter reports in a form that can be posted online. By then, voters will have decided whether Republicans or Democrats control the Senate. Oh, well.
“It is an unbelievably laborious process,” said Ann Ravel, the Federal Election Commission member who was chairwoman of California’s equivalent, the Fair Political Practices Commission.
Thirteen senators voluntarily file reports online, including Californians Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. But of the candidates running in the 10 most heavily contested Senate races this year, only one, Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska, takes that step. Pending legislation would force senators to file reports online. It’s for show. Senate leaders prefer it that way.
That’s where Kuang Chen comes in. Who better to take on the challenge of forcing senators into the light? He knows something of imperious officials: As a high school student in China, his father was dispatched to a rice farm during the Cultural Revolution. As soon as China opened up, the family emigrated to the United States.
Chen arrived at age 9 speaking no English. He spent his childhood in Manhattan, Kan., and other Midwestern cities, attended public schools, got an undergraduate degree at University of Washington and his doctorate in computer science at UC Berkeley.
His 2011 dissertation is titled “Data-driven Techniques for Improving Data Collection in Low-resource Environments.” That may not sound scintillating. But it’s dedicated to “children who are not counted” and focuses on how he used the programs he created to help people who work in clinics in Tanzania and Uganda digitize handwritten notes, the goal being to improve health care.
To old people, like me, he explains what he does like this: His programs provide “a magical service in the cloud that reads handwriting at 99 percent accuracy.” Even bad handwriting, he says.
To his professors, he explained the problem he sought to solve like this: “Unfortunately, the most under-developed communities are still beyond the reach of modern data infrastructure, constrained by limitations in physical and digital infrastructure, in capacity and retention of technical staff and in performance incentives. …
“Even basic vital statistics are still largely unavailable – for example, only 24 percent of children born in eastern and southern Africa are registered, rendering the remaining children invisible to decisions regarding resources and policy.”
He digitized handwritten notes, helping African health care workers track and research people in need, freeing them up to provide care. Through his startup, Chen helped the U.S. Food and Drug Administration digitize reports about the adverse impact of drugs.
Ravel became acquainted with Chen when the Fair Political Practices Commission hired Captricity to use its technology to post conflict-of-interest statements from all California state judges on the FPPC website.
This year, when ILM’s contract with the Federal Election Commission was expiring, a company using Chen and Captricity as its subcontractor submitted a bid, and won.
“It is a little unfair,” Chen said of his company’s advantage over ILM. “It is like a car vs. a horse and buggy. We’re not even on same field.”
Chen’s promise is to transform the documents into digital reports that can be sorted and searched within five days, or fewer.
It all will be fitting, assuming it works as Chen envisions. Washington’s pols will be taken down a notch by a California computer scientist who is here by way of China. Alas, it won’t happen in time for the 2014 election, but that’s because of senators who would prefer that we be kept in the dark.
Senator’s Thesis Turns Out to Be Remix of Others’ Works, Uncited
John Walsh Credit Matt Volz/Associated PressPhoto by: Matt Volz/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Democrats were thrilled when John Walsh of Montana was appointed to the United StatesSenate in February. A decorated veteran of the Iraq war and former adjutant general of his state’s National Guard, Mr. Walsh offered the Democratic Party something it frequently lacks: a seasoned military man.
On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Walsh, 53, has made his military service a main selling point. Still wearing his hair close-cropped, he notes he was targeted for killing by Iraqi militants and says his time in uniform informs his views on a range of issues.
But one of the highest-profile credentials of Mr. Walsh’s 33-year military career appears to have been improperly attained. An examination of the final paper required for Mr. Walsh’s master’s degree from the United States Army War College indicates the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors’ works, with no attribution.
Mr. Walsh completed the paper, what the War College calls a “strategy research project,” to earn his degree in 2007, when he was 46. The sources of the material he presents as his own include academic papers, policy journal essays and books that are almost all available online.
Most strikingly, the six recommendations Mr. Walsh laid out at the conclusion of his 14-page paper, titled “The Case for Democracy as a Long Term National Strategy,” are taken nearly word-for-word without attribution from a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace document on the same topic.
In his third recommendation, for example, Mr. Walsh writes: “Democracy promoters need to engage as much as possible in a dialogue with a wide cross section of influential elites: mainstream academics, journalists, moderate Islamists, and members of the professional associations who play a political role in some Arab countries, rather than only the narrow world of westernized democracy and human rights advocates.”
The same sentence appears on the sixth page of a 2002 Carnegie paper written by four scholars at the research institute. In all, Mr. Walsh’s recommendations section runs to more than 800 words, nearly all of it taken verbatim from the Carnegie paper, without any footnote to it.
In addition, significant portions of the language in Mr. Walsh’s paper can be found in a 1998 essay by a scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at Harvard.
For example, Mr. Walsh writes: “The United States will have an interest in promoting democracy because further democratization enhances the lives of citizens of other countries and contributes to a more peaceful international system. To the extent that Americans care about citizens of other countries and international peace, they will see benefits from the continued spread of democracy.”
The Harvard paper, written in 1998 by Sean M. Lynn-Jones, a scholar at the Belfer Center, includes the same two sentences.
Mr. Walsh does not footnote or cite Mr. Lynn-Jones’s essay anywhere in his paper.
John Walsh was appointed to the Senate after a 33-year military career. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressPhoto by: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Both the Carnegie and Harvard papers are easily accessible on the Internet.
In an interview outside his Capitol Hill office on Tuesday, after he was presented with multiple examples of identical passages from his paper and the Carnegie and Harvard essays, Mr. Walsh said he did not believe he had done anything wrong.
“I didn’t do anything intentional here,” he said, adding that he did not recall using the Carnegie and Harvard sources.
Asked directly if he had plagiarized, he responded: “I don’t believe I did, no.”
On Wednesday, a campaign aide for Mr. Walsh did not contest the apparent plagiarism but suggested that it be viewed in the context of the senator’s long career. She said Mr. Walsh had been going through a difficult period at the time he wrote the paper, noting that one of the members of his unit from Iraq had committed suicide in 2007, weeks before the assignment was due.
The aide said Mr. Walsh, who served in Iraq from November 2004 to November 2005, had “dealt with the experience of post-deployment,” but said he had not sought treatment.
Later, the senator, in an interview with The Associated Press, contradicted the aide, saying that he was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder when he used the authors’ work without credit, and that he would consider apologizing to the scholars for doing so. He said he was currently taking antidepressant medication.
Mr. Walsh in 2008, when he was adjutant general of the Montana National Guard. Credit Lisa Kunkel/Independent Record, via Associated PressPhoto by: Lisa Kunkel/Independent Record, via Associated Press
After The New York Times published the article about Mr. Walsh’s paper online on Wednesday, the War College’s provost, Lance Betros, a retired brigadier general, said in a telephone interview that the college would begin an investigation immediately.
Mr. Walsh’s paper will be run through an online plagiarism detection program, the provost said, and if there is evidence of a violation, the college will convene an academic review board to determine whether Mr. Walsh committed plagiarism and, if so, whether it was intentional.
The school’s commandant would ultimately determine any punishment.
“We’re not going to treat this any differently than with another student,” Dr. Betros said.
But Dr. Betros emphasized that the War College’s students were repeatedly reminded about the strict academic integrity policy. “We drill that in incessantly,” he said.
Located in Carlisle, Pa., the Army War College is a coveted career stop for ambitious officers, and its graduates since its 1901 founding include Dwight D. Eisenhower and Norman Schwarzkopf. Its current student handbook states that plagiarism will result in disenrollment and that discoveries of academic violations have led to degrees’ being rescinded and names’ being scraped off the bronze plaques honoring graduates on campus.
The master’s degree in strategic studies from the War College has benefited Mr. Walsh’s career: In a military evaluation the year after Mr. Walsh received it, his commander praised him for it, writing that he “leads his peers and sets example in maintaining continuous military education and training subjects pertinent to today’s leadership challenges.”
Mr. Walsh's career included time at the Army War College and as adjutant general of the Montana National Guard. Credit Mark Makela for The New York TimesPhoto by: Mark Makela for The New York Times
In September 2008, Mr. Walsh, a recipient of the Bronze Star, was appointed adjutant general of Montana’s National Guard by the governor. A subsequent military evaluation said his prospects for the post had been “bolstered” in part by his degree from the War College.
In 2012, Mr. Walsh stepped down as the head of the Guard after winning his first bid for elected office to become Montana’s lieutenant governor. From that position, he was appointed to the Senate this year by Gov. Steve Bullock.
The Senate vacancy arose after President Obama nominated Max Baucus, the veteran Democrat, to be ambassador to China. Democrats had hoped that installing Mr. Walsh in February would strengthen the party’s efforts to retain the seat.
Mr. Walsh’s military record and centrist politics were seen as assets in the independent-minded state, and, as an incumbent senator, he would be better positioned to raise money for this fall’s election. Still, Mr. Walsh is trailing Representative Steve Daines, his Republican opponent, strategists on both sides say.
Questions have previously been raised about Mr. Walsh’s résumé and conduct, though they were comparatively minor.
He was reprimanded in 2010 for using his role as adjutant general to urge other guardsmen to join a private advocacy group, the National Guard Association of the United States, in which he was seeking a leadership role.
As a result, he was denied a promotion from colonel to general, he acknowledged in January. In response to the matter, Mr. Walsh released about 400 pages of his military records, which contained effusive praise from his commanding officers.
Mr. Walsh's name on a plaque listing graduates of the war college. On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Walsh, 53, has made his military service, including his time in Iraq, a main selling point. Credit Mark Makela for The New York TimesPhoto by: Mark Makela for The New York Times
There has also been a discrepancy about where Mr. Walsh earned his undergraduate degree. He was listed in the biographical directory of Congress as having graduated in 1990 from the University at Albany, State University of New York, but actually earned his B.S. degree from what was then known as Regents College, an adult learning institute that issued degrees under the umbrella of the University of the State of New York.
Mr. Walsh changed the listing after the newspaper Roll Call ran an article about the matter, but he did not offer an explanation publicly.
The breadth of Mr. Walsh’s apparent plagiarism, however, is rivaled by few examples in recent political history. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, was found last year to have presented the work of others as his own in a newspaper opinion article, a book and speeches. And Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. dropped his 1988 presidential bid when it was revealed that in campaign speeches he had used language similar to that of the British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock without attribution.
Mr. Walsh appears to have gone considerably further.
About a third of his paper consists of material either identical to or extremely similar to passages in other sources, such as the Carnegie or Harvard papers, and is presented without attribution. Another third is attributed to sources through footnotes, but uses other authors’ exact — or almost exact — language without quotation marks.
The senator included 96 footnotes in his paper, but many of them only illustrate this troubling pattern. In repeated instances, Mr. Walsh uses the language of others with no quotation marks, but footnotes the source from which the material came. In other cases, the passages appear in his paper with a word or two changed, but are otherwise identical to the authors’ language.
For example, in the first paragraph of his paper, Mr. Walsh writes of George W. Bush: “During the 2000 presidential campaign Bush and his advisors made it clear that they favored great-power realism over idealistic notions such as nation building or democracy promotion.”
At the end of this sentence, which Mr. Walsh included without quotation marks, he footnoted a reference to a 2003 article in Foreign Affairs by Thomas Carothers, a prominent foreign policy expert. The only difference between Mr. Walsh’s paper and Mr. Carothers’ essay is that Mr. Walsh wrote “advisors” rather than “advisers” and did not use “had.” In other instances, Mr. Walsh swaps a synonym for a word in the original document.
He writes on his second page: “There are deep disagreements about the appropriate theoretical framework, about whether democracy is simply an institutional arrangement for choosing rulers or an end in itself, about how to measure and evaluate democracy, and about the importance of prerequisites for democracy.”
The footnote at the end of this sentence, presented without quotation marks in Mr. Walsh’s paper, is to a chapter by Robert L. Rothstein in a 1995 book of essays, “Democracy, War, and Peace in the Middle East.”
Mr. Rothstein’s sentence is slightly longer and uses “profound” rather than “deep,” but is otherwise identical.
Such copying of a footnoted source without quotation marks is prohibited in the War College’s handbook. “Copying a segment of another’s work word for word, then conveniently ‘forgetting’ to include quotation marks, but ‘remembering’ to cite the source,” is described as academic fraud in the handbook.
John Walsh Credit Matt Volz/Associated PressPhoto by: Matt Volz/Associated Press
John Walsh was appointed to the Senate after a 33-year military career. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressPhoto by: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Mr. Walsh in 2008, when he was adjutant general of the Montana National Guard. Credit Lisa Kunkel/Independent Record, via Associated PressPhoto by: Lisa Kunkel/Independent Record, via Associated Press
Mr. Walsh's career included time at the Army War College and as adjutant general of the Montana National Guard. Credit Mark Makela for The New York TimesPhoto by: Mark Makela for The New York Times
Mr. Walsh's name on a plaque listing graduates of the war college. On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Walsh, 53, has made his military service, including his time in Iraq, a main selling point. Credit Mark Makela for The New York TimesPhoto by: Mark Makela for The New York Times
