As I’ve noted before, “South Florida is corrupt and weird.” And just how corrupt and how weird is it?
First, corruption: The New Times, Miami’s alternative weekly, has issued corrupt local politician trading cards, “commemorating those halcyon days when bankruptcy loomed, graft was common, and lawmen busted bad pols like fishermen nail snook in the Keys.” What I find odd is that, given the long litany of corrupt South Florida politicians, they only found room for seven cards.
Now, weirdness: For what may be the first time ever anywhere, this week in Miami a couple of dumb hoodlums tried to sell a stolen shark to a fish market. The shark was apparently alive as they dragged it through the streets — and even took it onto the Metromover, an elevated trolley that runs in a circuit around downtown Miami.
Rob Orta, an employee at Casablanca Fish Market, told television station WSVN that the men offered his business the shark.
“But we don’t buy sharks off the street,” Orta told the station.
Wildlife officials later determined the animal was a nurse shark. The case could result in misdemeanor charges of improper killing and disposal of an animal and selling a shark without a license.
One resident of the area where the shark was dumped said he didn’t know what was going on at first.
“It was a relief that it was a shark,” said Keith Smith. “When I first saw it, I thought it was a body because of all the shootings that have been going on.”
For more on Miami corruption and weirdness see here and here.
(Thanks to Margaret Griffis and Jen Mass for the tips.)
by Hans Bader on June 20, 2009 · 3 comments
in Economy, Employment, International, Labor, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade
Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is now being used to force states to adopt racial quotas in government contracts, even if their state constitution or civil-rights laws forbid such quotas. Slate’s Mickey Kaus reports that “CalTrans, the huge state agency that spends billions in federal highway construction funds, ‘sets a quota of having 6.75 percent of contracts go to women or members of a targeted group–African American, Asian-Pacific American, and Native American.’”
The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had actually fought against welfare reform as an Illinois legislator.
Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.
Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.
At least four states (California, Michigan, Nebraska, and Louisiana) have state constitutions that ban racial set asides, but most of those bans contain exceptions for racial set-asides that are requirements for receiving federal funds. No such exception exists to the California Equal Rights Amendment, which was construed in Connerly v. State Personnel Board (2001) to bar gender-based set-asides even when they are permitted under federal law.
Detroit can astound even the most seasoned political cynic, and now it’s done it again. As the Detroit Free Press reports, the trustees of the city’s two public employee pension funds have been enjoying perks that even some CEOs would envy, apparently on the pensioners’ dime.
The trustees who oversee Detroit’s two public pensions, their lawyers and staff spent $380,000 over the past year circling the globe to attend conferences — often traveling in packs, with virtually no limitation on where they went or how often they traveled.
Trustee Ronald Gracia spent the most time on the road — billing the General Retirement System for $105,000 in travel, including three trips to Singapore and $18,600 on travel to Hong Kong, according to records provided by the pension funds.
The two public pensions, with 21 trustees, have guarded their travel records from scrutiny. The Free Press sued to get the records — which are actually only summaries from the past year.
The funds have yet to turn over actual receipts that would show, for instance, where trustees and staffers stayed and how they spent some of the money. Other documents have been destroyed.
Such apparent graft by public officials is hardly new, but today it should ring alarm bells about defined benefit pension funds in general, and union pension funds specifically. Many union pension funds today are severely underfunded, so any workers who could be made to join such funds should be concerned.
The so-called Employee Free Choice Act’s binding arbitration provision would do just that, by enjoining a federally appointed arbitrator to impose a contract on a newly unionized company that could include a provision for workers to join the pension fund of the union that now represents them, and for the employer to pay into it. (Thanks to Marc Scribner for the Free Press link.)
For more on pension funds, see here, here, and here.
Obama is firing an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered wrongdoing by a prominent Obama supporter and opposed letting him off the hook.
Ironically, when Obama recently nominated a liberal judge to the Supreme Court, his Administration trumpeted Walpin’s support for her.
Walpin is the Inspector General for the Americorps program, which is riddled with waste, fraud, and ideological misuse of taxpayer funds. Walpin “has been doing a good job” and he has “identified millions of dollars in AmeriCorps funds that were wasted or misspent,” notes Senator Grassley.
But when Walpin recently exposed wrongdoing by a prominent Obama supporter, Kevin Johnson, Obama moved to fire Walpin. Walpin protested the Administration’s failure to hold Johnson, a liberal mayor, accountable for using taxpayer money to pay for “political activities” and pay volunteers to run “personal errands for” Johnson “and even wash his car.”
Obama staffers and supporters are now falsely claiming that Walpin, whom the Obama Administration recently quoted as an authority (given his stature as a highly-respected former federal prosecutor and big-name law firm partner with clients across the political spectrum), is a right-wing nut (a ridiculous claim).
Walpin notes that although he uncovered massive wrongdoing by Johnson, it has led only to a sham settlement: $350,000 that is supposed to be paid back to the taxpayers never will be, since the entity that Johnson used to receive taxpayer money and spend it on himself now “is insolvent,” and its “settlement agreement was carefully drafted so that no obligation is imposed on” Johnson for that money, only the defunct entity he controlled. That’s so even though it was Johnson who used Americorps money to pay volunteers to “wash his car” and run “personal errands” for him.
The $800 billion stimulus package signed by Obama not only will make the economy shrink over the long-run, it will pay $88.6 million for unnecessary new construction in the Milwaukee School District, whose enrollment is shrinking so fast that it already has 15 vacant schools. And it will funnel over $355 million into the corrupt, racist Detroit schools, no strings attached.
Detroit is the fastest-shrinking big city in America. It once had two million people, but it has lost so many people that now it has only 800,000 residents, even as population in its suburbs holds steady. Its city council is blatantly, unapologetically racist toward white and Asian residents, something Obama’s Justice Department ignores.
Stock markets, which earlier fell after the Administration’s $8 trillion in new deficit spending spooked investors, are rising today on speculation that costly mark-to-market accounting rules will be suspended. But the Treasury Department says that the rules, which have been described as some of the “most destructive policies of the Bush Administration,” will merely be tweaked. If such rules had been in effect in the 1980s, “every major commercial bank would have collapsed.”
The stock markets fell like a stone since the Obama Administration pushed through its bailout and stimulus packages. Investors were spooked, as Stanford University economist Michael Boskin noted in his Wall Street Journal column, “Obama’s Radicalism Is Killing the Dow.”
Your hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist welcome you back to another episode of LibertyWeek, wherein we start by highlighting CEI’s new Agenda for Congress. After all, they need adult supervision from somewhere, right? We then take on the new rules for bailout spending at Treasury, Gov. Blagojevich’s no-show status at his own impeachment trial, and an interview with Bureaucrash Crasher-in-Chief Pete Eyre. Finally, we round out the program with some appropriately strenuous Olympic News.
Listen here.
Miami has been named the fattest city in America by Men’s Fitness magazine, and its neighboring burg of Hialeah among the nation’s most boring by Forbes. Some double whammy. For my part, having grown up in the area, the dubious honor of these two that I find surprising is not the one the rest of the nation would think about.
Some might ask: “How about all those beaches; isn’t that enough motivation to stay in swimsuit shape?” Well, no, unless you live right next to the beach. Plenty of Miamians rarely go to the beach, much as people in other cities don’t partake in their town’s defining landmarks — as in the cliche of New Yorkers who have never been to the Statue of Liberty. A dietitian interviewed by USA Today blames Miami’s girth on (surprise!) bad diet and lack of exercise, which can occur anywhere, so why not Miami?
Hialeah, on the other hand, is not like other places. The second largest city in Dade County after Miami (a distinction akin to Buffalo being the second largest city in New York State), Hialeah is a place of concrete as far as the eye can see (many lawns are paved over), terrible drivers (even by Miami standards), and incredibly corrupt politics (even by South Florida standards).
Hialeah is home to Raul Martinez, the city’s former mayor, who once won reelection after being convicted of racketeering and extortion, and once wanted Hialeah to become its own county. Incredibly, the man still has a political career; in 2008 he was the Democratic nominee to challenge Republican Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart for his seat, but fell short.
And a town that could inspire this be described as boring?
In the words of one Hialeah resident: “This town could use a little boring.”
For more on Miami politics, see here. (Thanks to Claudia Barrett for the first Herald link and to Margaret Griffis for the USA Today and YouTube links.)
Welcome back to LibertyWeek, where your hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist bring you the best in news and views, always from the perspective of free markets and limited government. We start this week’s episode with praise for the new look and feel of OpenMarket.org: the blog you want to read. We then move on to the most delicious edition of Scandal Watch yet — the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on federal charges of “staggering” corruption. After that we look at the demise of Rep. William “Freezer Cash” Jefferson, the rise of Rep.-Elect Anh “Joseph” Cao (pictured, right), investigations into the mortgage mess, how taxpayers get trashed by recycling mandates and a debate over the ethics of scalping tickets in Olympic News.
# Special thanks to Josh Barro for the Tweet of the Week.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Change to Win (CtW) union coalition have each released statements denying involvement in the corruption scandal that led to the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich this morning.
However, it may be some time before more is known. SEIU, in its statement, says, “In keeping with the U.S. Attorney’s request, we are not sharing information with the media at this time.”
Meanwhile, the Politico‘s Ben Smith credits an unnamed “Democratic source” with confirming the identity of “SEIU official” mentioned in the case.
A Democratic source confirms that SEIU President Andy Stern is the “SEIU official” referred to in the federal complaint against Rod Blagojevich.
There’s no allegation that the SEIU official did anything wrong, and what appears to be a wiretap transcript has the official reacting non-commitally to Blagojevich’s offer of a quid pro quo. Another Democratic source tells me that Stern was been in Chicago November 3 meeting with Blagojevich, a discussion thought to have included talk about the Senate seat — though that meeting isn’t mentioned in the complaint.
An SEIU spokesman didn’t respond to a call or email seeking comment.
It’s too early to tell what, or where anything improper, took place. Still, the SEIU and CtW connections are worth watching as the case unfolds. (By the way, Change to Win and SEIU are inextricably tied. SEIU President Andy Stern created CtW when he led his union out of the AFL-CIO in 2005, and SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger is also CtW Chair.)
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern is not known for being shy about his ambitions. Since taking his union out of the AFL-CIO and forming the new Change to Win federation in 2005, he has sought to assert his union’s influence over private equity firms, centralize his authority within the union by forcing various locals to merge, and negotiate large deals with employers without member participation. Now, however, it is worth asking who is really in charge at SEIU.
Amidst all this power grabbing, things seem to have gone awry. The arrest this morning of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris, for allegedly seeking to essentially sell the appointment to the Senate seat about to be vacated by President-elect Barack Obama, involves a tangled web of conversations between Blagojevich and other politicians and SEIU officials. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that on November 7:
[I]in a three-way call with Harris and Advisor B, a consultant in Washington, Blagojevich and the others allegedly discussed the prospect of a three-way deal for the Senate appointment involving an organization called “Change to Win,” which is affiliated with various unions including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
While no one at SEIU has been charged, the union’s less-than-stellar record in handling corruption within its own ranks should be cause for concern.
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