I don’t know how many Girl Scout cookies I’ve purchased over the years, but I do know that not all the orders were placed with cute little girls.
Quite a number of orders were placed with mothers and grandmothers of Girl Scouts.
No problem. The money goes to a good cause, and the cookies aren’t bad.
But the parents and grandparents aren’t supposed to be the ones doing the selling.
In a statement to USA TODAY, the Girl Scout organization said “the program is designed to be led and conducted by girls and not led by adult troop leaders, volunteers or parents.” Parents or troop leaders may help out by escorting girls or helping them set up booths, but the actual sales are supposed to be done by the Scouts
The statement was included in an article by Tom Vanden Brook about a Pentagon inspector general’s report that disclosed, among other things, that an Air Force brigadier general was reprimanded — or in Pentagon language “received verbal counseling” — for “wrongfully” conducting fundraising activities in the workplace “by selling the brigadier general’s daughters’ Girl Scout cookies in the office” and encouraging “the Executive Officer, a subordinate, to perform activities other than those required in the performance of official duties.”
The USA TODAY article pointed out that the cookie caper was on the low end of the ethical lapses noted in the report. On the high end was a bribery scheme involving millions of dollars “34 indictments, 23 convictions and eight people, including a retired admiral, facing trial.”
There are so many reports of alleged ethic violations from the White House to the lower echelons of government these days that pressuring subordinates to buy and/or sell Girl Scout cookies can, indeed, fall into the category of a low-level violation which it did.
What is ethical or not can be in the eye of the beholder, as well as figuring out to whom an ethics law applies.
His opponents repeatedly reminded voters in the recent U.S. Senate race that Democrat Mike Espy was indicted (they didn’t point out he was acquitted) for ethics violations when he was U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. At the time it was noted in some reports that the charges against Espy, which included receiving gifts from lobbyists and corporations his agency was regulating, would not have been illegal had Espy been in his previous job as a U.S. congressman.
Back before Mississippi passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1972 and later established the Mississippi Ethics Commission in 1979, the late Oliver Emmerich, editor and publisher of the Enterprise-Journal, when editorializing for the passage of ethics regulations, often posed the question:
“When does a legal fee constitute a bribe?”
The inference, of course, was that there were a number of lawyers in the Legislature whose votes might be influenced by legal fees.
The same question, then and now, could be: “When does a campaign contribution become a bribe?”
Campaign finance laws in Mississippi have been upgraded as late as 2017 when Gov. Phil Bryant signed legislation that, among other reforms, tightened restrictions on personal use of campaign funds by office holders and candidates.
The law came after lengthy investigative reports by the Clarion-Ledger which disclosed that some public officials had used campaign contributions to finance “automobiles, apartments, clothes, children’s parties, groceries, taxes, car insurance, home improvements and trips to Alaska, California, Colorado and Florida, among other places.”
It is regrettable ethics laws and agencies to enforce them are necessary, but they obviously are. It would be nice if everyone just “did what was right,” but to think that is pollyannaish.
Government, including the military, keeps getting bigger and oversight of the conduct of those in charge is necessary, even when it comes to Girl Scout cookies.
