I was thinking, while I drove to work this morning,
about starting a "special-interest group" on ethics. As if
to settle my internal debate, the radio announced that
Scientific Games Inc., recently named the supplier of tickets
to the California State Lottery, had started building a factory
in Gilroy months before the initiative passed. To those of you
still unfamiliar with the issue, SGI (a division of Bally) wrote
the initiative (i.e., their lawyer drafted a "model" which was
adopted by the "citizens group" which actually sponsored the
proposition), and contributed heavily to the campaign. There
was a time limit in the initiative which could only have been
met by contracting with SGI, but Gov. Dukmejian ignored it and
took a bit of heat for that, although the lottery directors of
most of the existing lotteries said publicly that it was an
unreasonably tight schedule. Anyway, the limit wasn't needed to
secure the contract for SGI.

	Now, the question for debate is:
    Given that SGI did all this legally, filing the proper
    funding disclosures etc., was their action ethical. More
    broadly: Is a company ETHICALLY bound to respect more
    than the letter of campaign funding laws when pushing
    legislation which would be directly beneficial to it.

	I would like to hear from any of you who are interested
in such questions (perhaps not including this particular one).
I will create a distribution list so we can carry on with a
"forum" without clogging "JUNK".

	Side note to industry watchers- The "factory in Gilroy"
sounds like Bally found a use for the old Sente factory, no?

			Mike