However, we ought to recognise his genius. This 79-year-old understood very early that there’s a new world order in which westerners don’t matter much.
.. Each western bidding country, I now realise, imagined that Fifa thought much like the country itself did. The English and American bidders, instinctive capitalists, thought they could win because they had big soccer markets. The Spanish-Portuguese bidding team probably thought they could win because they had friends inside Fifa. Australia hired lobbyists with other friends inside Fifa. The Dutch and Belgians believed in their green and compact bid. They even cycled into Zurich to present it.
.. Given waning western power, asks Pielke, “how do you effect global change? It turns out it’s really difficult. If we can’t reform Fifa, my goodness, how can we deal with nuclear proliferation or carbon emissions or trade?”
Many on Wall Street Say It Remains Untamed
In the study, to be released Tuesday, about a third of the people who said they made more than $500,000 annually contend that they “have witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.”
Just as bad: “Nearly one in five respondents feel financial service professionals must sometimes engage in unethical or illegal activity to be successful in the current financial environment.”
.. Its results appear even more noteworthy today for the sheer number of individuals who continue to say the ethics of the industry remain unchanged since the crisis (a third said that, by the way).
.. Nearly one-third of those asked “believe compensation structures or bonus plans in place at their company could incentivize employees to compromise ethics or violate the law.”
.. On virtually every question, those in Britain seem to indicate that ethics problems could be even more widespread there. “Respondents from the U.K. are either more willing to commit a crime they could get away with — or are more frank about it,” the report’s authors write.
.. Many of those asked said they worried “their employer would likely retaliate if they reported wrongdoing in the workplace.”
And quite a few said that they had signed, or been asked to sign, a confidentiality agreement that would prohibit them from reporting illegal or unethical behavior to the authorities.
.. Better commenters than I will tell you that corporations feel no shame
Did Laurence Tribe Sell Out?
“The role of advocate calls for constructing persuasive arguments that will generate favorable outcomes for clients. This is very different from the function [academics] perform as scholars.” In this manner, working for a client, over the long term, can prove corrupting, not just because of the money but because of natural human loyalty.
.. It may come as a surprise for those who regard Tribe as a progressive hero to learn that he also began to devote much of his time and effort to working for large corporate clients. In particular, Tribe developed a lucrative practice often premised on invoking his clients’ constitutional rights as “corporate persons” to try and avoid federal and state regulations.
.. In that sense, the current condemnation of Tribe can be seen as part of a larger progressive backlash against the use of the Bill of Rights to serve corporate interests.
.. When I asked Tribe whether he thought that his practice might have deviated too far toward the service of private interests, he responded, “My litigation practice over the past three decades includes only cases in which I thought I was advancing an important public interest through my advocacy.” Tribe, in other words, isn’t saying that his work is justified just because legal scholars should be given some latitude for paid work. He’s arguing, instead, that his work is part of his academic mission.
.. But for work to be considered in the public interest, it ought to be, at least in part, on behalf of clients who are in some way underrepresented, or present views that would not be heard. This is true of some of Tribe’s work; but in much of it he is empowering the powerful.
Daddy Issues: Corruption in New York and Shanghai
But, in paging through the complaint, one is struck, most of all, by the audacity of Adam’s alleged efforts to capitalize on his family name. In December, 2011, Adam “sought and obtained from his father’s Senate Office records of top donors” so that he could “attempt to sell products to these donors.”
.. New York, Illinois, Louisiana, and Kentucky have claims to the title of “most corrupt state,” depending on how you measure them. On a per-capita basis, Louisiana is the champ, but recently New York has surged: three of the past four Senate leaders have been indicted, a governor was forced to resign for hiring prostitutes, and the comptroller was found to be taking kickbacks. Skelos is the twenty-third New York State lawmaker to be indicted or charged with a crime since 2010.
.. The awkward fact is that cases of “princeling” corruption in the Communist Party, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party have more in common with each other than any of them would care to admit.
.. certain Wall Street banks are in a dispute with the U.S. government over its effort to use foreign-bribery laws to punish them for giving jobs to the princeling relatives of Chinese officials and state-owned company managers, in the hope of getting deals. (J.P. had to close down a program called “sons and daughters.”) Certain banks, according to theWall Street Journal, object to the investigation not because they deny such things happen but because they believe it is “threatening to criminalize standard business practices in some countries.”