cronyism

Federal Pension Guarantor's Cozy Ties With Wall Street

OurFuture.org Staff — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:05:49 -0400

Quote of the Day: Alphonso Jackson edition

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:04:32 -0500

Film buffs like me can't think of the acronym that signifies the Department of Housing and Urban Development without flashing on the classic 1963 Paul Newman flick of the same name—Hud.

Don't miss it if you've never seen it. The plot is simple and stately, almost Biblical. Paul Newman's Hud is a charismatic wanderer who returns home to the ranch of his achingly decent, hard-working father (Melvyn Douglas) just as dad's precious heard of cattle—his pride, his passion, and his entire livelihood—has to be put down because it's infected with hoof and mouth disease. Newman, our prodigal son, simply ignores his dad's misery, getting what's his and moving on. "I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner," the charismatic son of a bitch says at one point, and you want to hurl a rotten egg at the screen.

HUD and Hud. For as long as Alphonso Jackson has been its cabinet secretary, the coincidence is not merely in the spelling. It's in the grifting.

We've written about Alphonso Jackson on this site before. After Hurricane Katrina, at a Texas small business forum he volunteered a story about denying a HUD contract after the company owner expressed doubts about President Bush. “Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president?” Jackson asked. “So they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? That's the way I believe." (Like I keep on saying, I never cherish conservatives more than when they're accidentally over-candid.)

Meanwhile, tax breaks meant to build housing for Katrina victims under the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005 ended up subsidizing developers in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—a city hundreds of miles inland—to build luxury condos next to to the University of Alabama’s football stadium. The condos featured granite countertops, king-size bathtubs, and legendary Crimson Tide coach Bear Bryant-styled wall art.

Now this, from Monday's Washington Post

Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson demanded that the Philadelphia Housing Authority transfer a $2 million public property to a developer at a substantial discount, then retaliated against the housing authority when it refused to do so, a recent court filing alleges.

The authority's director, Carl Greene, contends in a court affidavit that Jackson called Philadelphia's mayor in 2006 to demand the transfer to the developer, Kenny Gamble, a former soul-music songwriter who is a business friend of Jackson's. Jackson's aides followed up with "menacing" threats about the property and other housing programs in at least a dozen letters and phone calls over an 11-month period, Greene said in an interview.

Greene and his colleagues have alleged in the court filing that Philadelphia is now paying a severe price for disobeying a Bush Cabinet official. The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently vowed to strip the city's housing authority of its ability to spend some federal funds, a move that the authority said could raise rents for most of its 84,000 low-income tenants and force the layoffs of 250 people.

The housing authority responded by filing a civil suit in December against HUD and Jackson, in which Greene claimed that the actions by Jackson's department are "retaliatory" and that the Bush administration has exaggerated the troubles it cited as grounds for stripping the funds. Greene said the developer failed to deliver on contracts, leading the housing agency to conclude that the transfer would be improper.

We'll leave aside the abiding sin of doing wrong by the legendary songwriter who gave us the imperishables "Love Train" and "Me and Mrs. Jones." Let's focus on the horror of the cronyism—of a degree and kind that would have made the first Mayor Daley ashamed:

Jackson, a longtime friend of President Bush, is under investigation by HUD's inspector general and the Justice Department for other alleged acts of favoritism and interference. Jackson's office last week said in a written statement that he could not comment on Greene's allegations because they are a subject of litigation.

According to people familiar with the existing probes of Jackson, investigators are scrutinizing whether he interfered in the operations of housing authorities in New Orleans and the Virgin Islands by helping steer no-bid and inflated contracts to friends, and whether he lied when he told authorities he had not.

Investigators are also examining Jackson's alleged role in arranging a New Orleans Housing Authority contract for a contractor and occasional golfing buddy who allegedly did repairs and remodeling on the secretary's South Carolina vacation home, according to two sources familiar with the probe. Details of these probes were previously reported by the National Journal.

Clearly Alphonso Jackson should resign. He's more likely to be cited for a Presidential Medal of Freedom, W's reward for all his favorite screwups.

Like we say in our introductory materials for our Big Con project, "Cronyism is not merely incidental to conservative ideology, it’s instrumental to it." Elect another conservative administration, and don't be shocked if Alphonso Jackson isn't part of it still—if he hasn't decided the action's better on the other side of the fence, selling his access in the private sector.

"I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner." That's our Big Con quote of the day.

Ex-Officials Benefit From Corporate Cleanup

OurFuture.org Staff — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:45:36 -0500

In the Department of Justice, prosecutors are steering no-bid contracts worth millions to former government officials to monitor corporations accused of cheating investors and other schemes.

Pay-to-play Politics

Terrance Heath — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:36:11 -0500

Legislators who raise money rise to the top. Those who can't, fall farther and farther behind. Money is the yardstick for success in conservative government. Performance is irrelevant. Tom Delay’s notorious K Street Project was all about using government money to reward campaign contributors in a mutually rewarding quest for power—leaving the public behind.

Related Conservative Failures

Quagmire in Iraq

When Bush crony Joseph Albaugh left FEMA to start a consulting company to held businesses drum up opportunities in war-torn Iraq, part of what he was selling was his government experience—his intimate knowledge about where to place the right contributions to get what you want. read more »

Failing Hurricane Katrina Victims

HUD secretary Alphonso Jackson admitted that he hands out contracts based on their loyalty to President Bush. And one way, of course, to show your loyalty to a politician is to raise money for them. read more »

Rotting Regulatory Standards

When removing one tiny line in a massive federal statute can mean millions more profit for your company, is it any wonder business tries to buy access? read more »

More conservative failures

Disdain for Government > Pay-To-Play

What could better demonstrate conservative contempt for government than their literal attempt to institutionalize the power of a single political party? As Nick Confessore wrote in the Washington Monthly in 2003:

When presidents pick someone to fill a job in the government, it's typically a very public affair. The White House circulates press releases and background materials. Congress holds a hearing, where some members will pepper the nominee with questions and others will shower him or her with praise. If the person in question is controversial or up for an important position, they'll rate a profile or two in the papers. But there's one confirmation hearing you won't hear much about. It's convened every Tuesday morning by Rick Santorum, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, in the privacy of a Capitol Hill conference room, for a handpicked group of two dozen or so Republican lobbyists. Occasionally, one or two other senators or a representative from the White House will attend. Democrats are not invited, and neither is the press.

The chief purpose of these gatherings is to discuss jobs—specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices centered around Washington's K Street. This canyon of nondescript office buildings a few blocks north of the White House is to influence peddling what Wall Street is to finance. In the past, those people were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured K Street firms would have clout no matter which party was in power. But beginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street.

That's the world of pay-for-play politics that conservative control has ushered in—a political machine as notorious as anything Boss Tweed could have dreamed up in 19th- century New York. San Diego congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham literally drew up a "bribe menu" specifying the amount it would take to get him to put earmarks into bills. Cunningham ended up in jail. Other malefactors have simply lost their jobs. But pay-for-play politics won't be going away until conservatives give up their addiction to money and their contempt for government—and that's not going to happen any time soon.

Free Market Fundamentalism> Pay-To-Play

K Street Project

Incredible as it may seem, conservatives don't consider such corruption incidental to their governing project. They see it as crucial. With their contempt for the idea of a disinterested civil service, they look at corporate influence peddling as a normal part of the operations of the free market. There's even a highly developed sub-discipline of economics, called "public choice," which argues that civil servants, with their salary and their conscience and their bureaucracies as their only incentive to do a good job, can't possibly do a good job. Only someone with "skin in the game" is supposed to be motivated to work for the public—by working, of course, for their own self-interest. It's the only kind of interests conservatives can grasp.

Deliberately and with malice aforethought, conservatives have been dismantling the checks, balances and transparency that made our country great. From legal campaign contributions to illegal junkets, government now serves the wealthy few, not the American people as a whole.

How Conservatism Caused This Failure...

Disdain for Government

Why not condone buying your way into government when your official ideology is that you don't even respect government in the first place? read more »

Ends Justify the Means

Crazy as it seems, conservatives can justify pay-to-play politics for ideological reasons—because it helps discredit government, and that's the end they're after. read more »

Free Market Fundamentalism

Since conservatives miscast anything having to do with business as part of the free market, it's easy for them to excuse the actual harm to freedom brought by pay-to-play politics. read more »

Corporate Welfare

When government's for sale, what corporation wouldn't demand, from the politicians they've bought and paid for, special favors out of the public purse? read more »

Cronyism

In order to pay to play, the big boys have to let you step up to the window in the first place. It's not just money that buys access in conservative government, it's who you know. read more»

Deregulation

When removing one tiny line in a massive federal statute can mean millions more profit for your company, is it any wonder business tries to buy access? read more

Cronyism

Terrance Heath — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:15:01 -0500

The idea that government can and should be administered by a disinterested and expert corps of public-minded civil servants is foreign to conservatism. Conservatives don’t believe that such a person can exist because they can't imagine serving the public without a profit-motive.

Related Conservative Failures

Quagmire in Iraq

When you turn over warmaking capacity to private companies looking to make a profit, there’s no wonder why the war drags on and on and on? read more »

Corporate Wilding

When you turn over regulatory authority to former corporate lobbyists, is there any wonder why corporations get away with swindling their stockholders and the public? read more »

Failing Hurricane Katrina Victims

When you hand over reconstruction work to your political friends via no-bid contracts, is it any wonder the work is (or isn't) done without accountability? read more »

Abandoning Walter Reed Patients

When management of the crown jewel of America's military health care system is turned over to a for-profit outfit, is it any surprise they tried to get away with cutting corners? read more»

More conservative failures

Cronyism is not merely incidental to conservative ideology, it’s instrumental to it. The idea was introduced in 1966 when Ronald Reagan, as a candidate for California governor, proposed turning over the state’s public agencies to the management of businessmen, calling it the "Creative Society."

Disdain for Government > Cronyism

Disdain for government leads to placing unqualified buddies in positions of power. After all, if you don’t believe in government – but you have hundreds of well-paying government positions waiting to be filled – you might as well hire your friends.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency—and what federal agency is more crucial to the safety and well-being of vulnerable Americans?—was hailed across the government as a model federal agency in the 1990s under James Lee Witt. Then George W. Bush took over, and did the conservative thing—he hired Republican political operative Joseph Allbaugh to replace Witt. When Allbaugh decided to leave—he started a consulting company to help businesses profit from war-torn Iraq—his handpicked successor was an old friend with no significant disaster management experience. That was Michael Brown, whose previous job was overseeing the judging of horse shows. Over a thousand unnecessary Gulf Coast deaths resulted.

Then Congress passed a law that included a requirement that future FEMA heads have training and experience in disaster management. George Bush promptly released a signing statement stating his intention not to follow that provision of the law.

Sometimes the cronies aren't personal or political friends. They're industry shills. At the Consumer Product Safety Commission, President Bush attempted to install as chairman Michael Baroody, whose previous job was lobbying against consumer product safety laws for the National Association of Manufacturers. When that appointment fell through, the acting chairman, Nancy Nord, stayed on. And she's not much better—a former lobbyist for Kodak, she also directed the organization that represents the interests of corporate lawyers.

Thus, though it was shocking when Nord announced her opposition to pending legislation to strengthen the CPSC after wave after wave of lead-tainted toys was imported from China, it was not surprising.

Cronyism is not a bug in the program of conservative government, as the computer coders would say. It's a feature—a built-in, conscious part of the architecture. One of the most important planning documents that came out of the conservatives' eight years in the White House came from the Heritage Foundation. It argued that the first task of a new conservative president was to empty out the government of independent, disinterested experts, trained in their field—and replace them with tractable political appointees.

Free Market Fundamentalism > Cronyism

Free market fundamentalism leads cronies in government positions to award non-competitive contracts to former employers. Tax cuts for the wealthy and tax breaks for big business have ensured that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It's impossible to imagine a conservative ideology with the checks that keep cronyism and corruption out of government.

When conservatives talk about privatizing government functions, they're usually practicing a kind of Jedi mind trick. It sounds like they mean to turn over a function formerly performed by a monopoly to an open competition, and may the best corporation win. In reality, the franchise is often awarded via no bid contracts—that is to say, simply turned over to a political crony. Often, the privatization laws are written for the specific purpose of delivering lucrative deals to favored corporations. There's nothing free market about it at all—except in the rhetoric conservatives use to swindle to the public.

The most notorious offender, of course, is Halliburton, the industrial services company formerly headed by Vice President Richard Cheney. The giant firm received so many contracts in war-torn Iraq that it wasn't hard to suspect that part of the purpose of this war was to aggrandize the well-connected corporation. Maybe real free market competition would have worked. But that wasn't what we got. Instead, we got swindled. For instance, Halliburton forced truck drivers to drive empty rigs across war zones, because the company got paid for the number of trips made, whether they accomplished anything or not. The cost overruns and systematic overcharges were notorious—and the whistleblowers who pointed this out were harassed or fired.

Congress has legislation pending to extend protection to these brave, harried folks—but President Bush has promised to veto that bill.

Halliburton in Iraq is only the best known example. From HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson openly admitting that he rewards contracts to political loyalists, to a disastrous private prison system that gives stockholders a vested interest in exorbitant mandatory prison terms, the conservatives preach "free market" but practice the kind of cronyism that systematically erodes the public benefits of market competition.

Unite Around a Common Strategy

Alex Carter — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:32:50 -0500

We have to end the partisan politics around the war with al Qaeda. And we have to get serious about security at home. Let’s stop letting cronyism and corruption cripple this central task and invest the resources needed to secure our borders and our ports, to bolster our public health and first-responder capacities and to ensure that nuclear, chemical and other prime targets have adequate defense plans.

Let Iraqis Take Control

Eric Lotke — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:30:23 -0500

Our soldiers rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The administration’s lethal incompetence and cronyism undermined any hope of a quick transition, but four years later, we’ve finally helped organize two elections and a constitution. Now Iraqis need to take control of their own destiny. A majority of Iraqis want us to begin withdrawing troops as does their new prime minister. It is time for us to go.