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Accountability folly ideological culture insider corruption media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Choice Corruption

What is corruption? said no jesting Pilate ever.

But please, stay for an answer.

A week ago, Jimmie Moore pleaded guilty to filing a false campaign finance report in order to conceal a $90,000 payment to drop out of a congressional race. Moore is a former Philadelphia judge (heavens). The nearly one-hundred-grand came from the incumbent he was challenging: Congressman Bob Brady (D-Pa.).

Moore, who implicated Rep. Brady in the scheme, now faces as many as five years in prison. Brady, for his part, has yet to be charged.

A pro-life politician’s 15-year tenure in Congress has ended. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) has resigned following revelations that he had urged the woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair to have an abortion. Additional bad behavior — “a culture of abuse and a culture of corruption” in his congressional office — was detailed in an in-depth Politico exposé.

But for the biggest scandal story, go Hollywood. Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has been ousted from The Weinstein Company upon allegations that he had committed criminal sexual assaults for decades. As a huge donor to the Democratic Party, questions abound. Which Democrats had knowledge of Weinstein’s behavior and yet remained silent?

That ‘look the other way’ rot has already spread to a media/entertainment institution: Saturday Night Live. Last Saturday night, observers were surprised that SNL did not feature even one joke at liberal Weinstein’s expense.

“It’s a New York thing,” quipped Producer Lorne Michaels when questioned about the omission.*

I’m not big on launching boycotts at every turn. But how could anyone who values evenhandedness turn on SNL next Saturday — or the following — as if nothing had happened?

Who needs these jesters covering for corruption?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

* Audience members at a rehearsal said there had been a Weinstein joke, which garnered a big laugh, but it was apparently pulled from the live broadcast.


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Accountability crime and punishment government transparency insider corruption local leaders moral hazard porkbarrel politics

Interfering With a Sweet Racket?

One way for governments and enterprises to save money is to contract out some or all of their services. Towns, cities, counties, states — even the federal government — engage in such practices all the time.

It is really just outsourcing, as business lingo dubs it.* But, like any system for shifting responsibility away from direct management, it can be corrupted.

As Seattle citizens now learn, courtesy of Seattle Times reporters Mike Carter and Steve Miletich.

It appears that Seattle City Light, the public utility providing electricity to the city, has been contracting exclusively with Seattle’s Finest Security & Traffic Control. For a half a decade. Despite there being direct competition from another firm.

The utility paid “more than $7.8 million over the past five years to provide off-duty police officers for traffic control or security work,” the Times tells us.

The whole story came to light (no pun intended) when a new outfit offering similar services, but based on “gig economy” principles, sought to enter the market. Seattle’s Finest challenged the firm’s licensing, and, allegedly, directed abuse at the firm’s chief executive officer.

A Seattle detective off-handedly described the dominance of Seattle’s Finest “in organized-crime terms — using the word ‘mafia’ — and said nobody would be allowed to interfere with it.”

The FBI has now been called in.

Usually, local government may seem rather humdrum. But a lot of money can go through powerful, privileged hands. Things can get exciting. Terms like “murky” and “intimidation” abound.

Is this a surprise?

Remember: power corrupts; local power corrupts locally.

Right there where we live.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* An economist, R. H. Coase, got a Nobel Prize in no small part for explaining why this sort of contract can work better than establishing a complete firm-employee wage system.


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Accountability local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies term limits

Renewed Interest in Self-Service

“Michigan’s strictest-in-the-nation term limits law will force nearly 70 percent of state senators out of office in 2019 and more than 20 percent of representatives,” reports the Detroit News, “a mass turnover that is fueling renewed interest in reform.”

What?!! Could term limitation laws actually make our poor underpaid and overworked politicians vacate their powerful perches . . . even when they don’t want to?

Heaven forbid!

Who could have foreseen this strange turn of events, whereby limits on the number of terms politicians can stay in office would mandate that politicians, having reached that limit, would be summarily cast out?*

Of course, that “renewed interest in reform” comes not from citizens, but politicians.

Oh, and powerful lobbyists and special interests.

The paper continues: “Term limits remain popular with the voting public, but critics say Michigan rules have thrust inexperienced legislators into complex policy issues they may be ill-equipped to address.”

Rich Studley, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce’s head-honcho, argues that “experience really matters.” His lobbying outfit, “an influential business group with significant financial resources,” is working to organize a ballot measure to weaken the limits it has long opposed.

“Any reform plan is unlikely to extend or repeal term limits,” explains the News, “but may instead allow legislators to serve longer in the House or Senate.”

Come again? If legislators could serve “longer” than currently allowed, that would clearly “extend” the limits.

I smell a scam swirling around Lansing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The “mass turnover” consists of 26 of 38 senators termed-out and 24 of 110 in the House. Yet, there were 25 senators and 34 representatives termed-out in 2010, and the state survived.


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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Not So Bad, Communism?

First the good news. The New York Times has repudiated Walter Duranty’s 1930s-era “journalism” for whitewashing — “underestimating” — the murderousness of Soviet Communism.

So that’s done, right?

Whatever its failings today, the paper will certainly no longer allow writers to use its august pages to discount blatant systematic evil.

Right?

But Helen Raleigh, a writer for The Federalist who is an immigrant from China, finds that the Times does indeed persist in glossing over the sins of Communism. In commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the paper is “once again proving itself Communism’s greatest apologist” through articles variously arguing that “women had better sex under socialism to now claiming China’s Communist revolution taught Chinese women to ‘dream big’…”

As if, suggests Raleigh, Duranty’s ghost were still calling the shots.

In rebuttal, she recounts what so many people suffered under Communism, as exemplified by the fate of her Aunt San.

At age 15, her aunt was forced by Mao’s government to leave the city and work in the countryside, separately from her siblings, who were forced to do the same but in different villages. Cutting family ties was important “so people could devote themselves 100 percent to the Communist Party’s causes.”

Primitive farming, mandatory singing of gruesomely cheerful revolutionary songs, food rations, malnutrition, ritual humiliation, derailed education, derailed or extinguished lives.

Just a few of the standard ingredients of the totalitarianism that, according to the Times of 2017, taught women to “dream big.”

Which should remind us: despite only a few countries’ close ties to the doctrine — Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea — Communism’s threat to world peace, prosperity, and freedom remains big.

The Times must change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Off the Field

At last Friday’s event to rally support* for Sen. Luther Strange, the Mitch McConnell-financed establishment candidate in today’s GOP runoff in Alabama, President Donald J. Trump veered — as he is wont to do — off topic: the NFL players refusing to stand for the national anthem.

Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners,” the commander-in-chief asked the crowd, “when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired!’?”

Trump’s trash-talking touched off bigger protests before Sunday’s games. Some argued the president was undermining freedom of expression. But, of course, the president was freely expressing himself.

And no doubt speaking for many others.

Polling conducted last year, after former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the pregame anthem — which started this trend — found a majority opposed to his actions.

“NFL ratings are down massively,” the President correctly remarked.

The National Football League’s television ratings dropped 8 percent last year, and so far 2017’s ratings are down an additional 15 percent. Moreover, in a massive JD Power survey, the protests during the anthem were the top reason given for not watching the NFL.

Of course, Kaepernick was making a political statement, not trying to maximize his dollar-value in the marketplace. The now mysteriously unemployed quarterback said a year ago, “If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right.”

Whether one agrees with Kaepernick or not, he is paying a steep price to make a point. Firing folks won’t silence the message.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

* The president oddly quipped of his Strange endorsement: “There is something called loyalty, and I might have made a mistake and I’ll be honest, I might have made a mistake.” Trump added that Strange and his GOP opponent, Judge Roy Moore, were “both good men” and he would campaign hard for either Republican.


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Common Sense folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Evil Capitalists Hook Brazil On Eating

Have you heard the latest?

More and more peoples around the world these days have the unfortunate misfortune of having adequate food — not merely vegetables either!! — thanks to the ruthlessly profit-seeking food producers and their unconscionable engagement in the division of labor, capital accumulation, and international trade.

It’s right there in The New York Times, which is, as you know, the paper of record.

“DealBook: How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food.”

Dastardly! Those Big American Businessmen must have kidnapped the Brazilians, strapped them into chairs, and pumped Doritos into those poor souls with a syringe. Heaven knows, the fecklessly irresponsible Brazilians can’t be held responsible for their own diets.

How bad is it?

This bad: “As growth slows in wealthy countries, Western food companies are aggressively expanding in developing nations, contributing to obesity and health problems.”

One expert quoted in the story (no hungry people consulted) says, “Part of the problem . . . is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food.”

Worse than Hurricane Irma!

Thanks to the Times’s aggressive investigative journalism, we know that these brazenly food-selling companies do not even nag their international customers to be careful about their diets. Ergo, it’s chips and other indiscriminately convenient snacks for everybody, no strings attached.

It’s become all too easy to be well-fed and overfed and mis-fed.

Thanks a lot, capitalism.

Oh for the good old hunting-and-gathering days when human beings spent much of their time starving, and the world had the human population of Binghamton. No problem with anyone gorging on Twinkies and Doritos back then. No problem of epidemics of corpulence.

We’ve lost that swell paradise . . . perhaps forever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Illustration based on original photo by David Goehring on Flickr.