Ethics

Several key City Council members and the head of the mayor's ethics commission announced a compromise Wednesday on a sweeping package of ethics reforms that would restrict outside income for public officials and would establish publicly financed elections. The compromise was reached after weeks of rancorous public debate and private arm-twisting, and comes just days before the council's self-imposed deadline for passing ethics reforms.

A recent, and much-heralded, study on how to reduce the spread of HIV and AIDS appears to be raising more health- and ethics-related questions than the dramatic findings might first suggest.  First, the news : Giving antiretroviral drugs to HIV-positive people reduced the transmission of the virus to their partners by 96%. But the research doesn’t mean all HIV-positive people will be taking the cocktail of drugs used in the study....

Los Angeles provides work for plenty of television gag writers. Some, it would seem, can be found at City Hall, where the concern over ethics has evolved into a situation comedy. Council members once again are rewriting the ethics ordinance proposed last year by a citizens' commission appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley. The mayor, you may recall, set up the commission when he found himself in the middle of a conflict-of-interest scandal caused by his outside business activities.

Re "BP Hints Leak May Not Halt Oil Production," Aug. 9 How long does it take to figure out your pipes are corroding? Isn't routine maintenance and upkeep on the agenda? I am not a genius, but it seems to make sense to me that what would be required is a simple and routine examination to determine the problem and fix it. Why wait until you have to shut it down? Well, if you shut it down, you get paid for oil you did not deliver. This is another example of a corporation drawing the lifeblood from good working Americans and giving the proceeds to greedy, thankless, wealthy persons of questionable ethics.

When are we going to demand that government officials stop talking doublespeak to us? The latest verbal atrocity is Bush's ethics proposal to manipulate the law in order to protect the executive branch from being investigated independently. He is telling us that it is more ethical for the wrongdoers to be investigated by a friend than by a completely independent prosecutor. Please! What he is really saying, folks, is that there is something to hide and that he had better hurry up and get the cover-up machinery going.

Talk about locking the barn door after the horse is out. Can Josephson really be as surprised as all that? Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of history could have predicted the inevitable result to come from the brainwashing of two generations of spoiled children with relativistic ethics and the belief that their every subjective whim is divinely inspired. From the Republican Congress' override of President Truman's veto of the McCarran-Walter Act to the me-first greed of Reaganism is a logical progression in which it is John Kennedy's Pollyanna "Camelot" that is the aberration and not Richard Nixon's completely amoral "success-at-any- cost ethic."

Last week, as you may remember, we left the City Council deliberating on a city ethics law. The members had pretty much gutted the proposal and were ready to submit their effort to voters in June. City Atty. Jim Hahn's staff was preparing the final language, which would go before the council next month.