Yesterday, the September issue of Levick’s monthly e-newsletter, High Stakes, was published and I’d like to invite all the readers of Bulletproof to check it out. This month’s focus is on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the communications strategies that can diminish the impact of an investigation or keep an international company out of hot water all together. With the number of FCPA prosecutions carried out by the U.S. government doubling between 2006 and 2007 – ... Read More

This week, The New York Times editorial board called on Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) to give up a Committee Chairmanship, while allegations of unpaid taxes are investigated by the House ethics committee. Adding to the embarrassment, the panel Rangel oversees is the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the nation’s tax laws. Clearly, Rangel is now faced with some taxing problems. Initially, the Congressman’s response to the crisis was as unusual as it was brilliant. ... Read More

Yesterday, the Yale School of Medicine released a study that once again raises questions about the safety of a chemical commonly found in everyday plastics.   The potential dangers associated with Bisphenol A, or BPA, have long been the subject of debate among regulators, scientists, consumer groups, and the manufacturers that produce nearly 7 billion pounds of BPA each year. But with the revelation that exposure to EPA-accepted levels of the chemical has caused brain function and ... Read More

It’s a sad but true reality of the 21st Century that companies and governments must make cyber-crime part of their crisis communications plans. There has long been paranoia in the international business, information technology, and law enforcement communities surrounding hackers’ ability to invade private enterprise databases – and as such, best practices for communicating during such an event are proliferating every aspect of the global economy. But as a recent report from the British Government indicates, the ... Read More

Critics of the food industry, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest and The San Francisco Chronicle, are questioning the Food and Drug Administration’s recent decision to allow irradiation of lettuce and spinach following devastating outbreaks of food-borne illness connected with those raw foods. The naysayers are scoffing at the idea of using irradiation, saying that it’s a distraction from what they see as the real problem – a lack of adequate resources ... Read More

In an opinion piece published in yesterday’s Washington Post, environmental lawyer Dusty Horwitt proposed the idea of a “progressive” tax by which energy prices would be “kept at a consistently high level” in order to “make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread.” Why is an environmental lawyer making a tangential case for new energy taxes by targeting information technologies? Because, as Horwitt opines, an information overload created by blogs and other online ... Read More