Hmmm…

“…some contractors who were awarded low-bid contracts ultimately billed the city far more than originally estimated, in most cases because of change orders approved by the […] City Council.”

“…services were paid for twice…”  Double billing approved.

“…most of the tens of millions set aside for the Great Park went to plans, designs, administrative costs and consultants.”

“…Some individuals who told auditors they witnessed or were subjected to political pressure declined to speak publicly with auditors.”

The preceding quotes come from a Los Angeles Times article posted on January 13, 2014, and headlined Audit of Great Park raises questions about project.

Readers familiar with Orange County, California, will recognize the Orange County Great Park site as the now-closed MCAS El Toro.  It is now in the city of Irvine, California.  The Park’s Board of Directors?  The Irvine City Council.

The Orange County Great Park project was approved by the voters.  What they were promised to cough up the money for the project and what they will get are dramatically different.

Washington State and Colorado have legalized and regulated the sale, possession, and use of marijuana.  Now they are finding that there’s a very serious problem:   Too much cash and nowhere to safely put it.

Because the federal government’s Controlled Substances Act still classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug, state-licensed marijuana businesses are being denied access to banking services such as checking and savings accounts.

Banks, including state-chartered ones, are very concerned that Treasury and DoJ may invoke various federal laws including the Bank Secrecy Act and charge the banks with money laundering and related financial crimes if they offer traditional business banking services to the marijuana merchants.

While states like Idaho may smugly snicker at the problem faced by their neighbors, we need to very seriously and soberly consider the issue created for us and them by the next door neighbors’ very high volume of relatively unsecured cash:  violent crime.

Bricks of twenty, fifty, and hundred dollar bills in the hands of newly-legal drug merchants, people who are fundamentally small businessmen, are attractive targets.

Maybe even more significant, if the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington begins to significantly affect the bottom line of the well-organized and very violent drug cartels known or believed to operate in the United States, the cartels may become inclined to use whatever means necessary to neutralize the competition.

Suddenly the banking issues in Colorado and Washington State become issues of concern for those states’ neighbors, certainly including us in Idaho.

Lawmakers like to pass laws so they can say they passed laws.  Laws don’t protect people if compliance is unfunded and unenforced.

This article headlined Why wasn’t there a plan? appeared in the January 11, 2014, issue of the Charleston  Gazette-Mail newspaper.  It reports that Freedom Industries, the company believed responsible for storing the toxic chemical leaked into the Elk River in West Virginia, had provided the state and county officials with the report required by the federal Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act.  That law required the state and county officials to prepare for potential accidents including accidental discharges.

It seems clear now that the state, the county, and the water provider had either ignored the information they were given by Freedom Industries or they failed to act as the law required.  Or both.  This from the Gazette-Mail’s article seems to sum it up:

Fred Millar, a longtime chemical industry watchdog in Washington, D.C., said the lack of better planning was an example of how the landmark emergency response law hasn’t been properly enforced around the country.

“Obviously, the whole idea of the chemical inventory reports is to properly inform local emergency officials about the sorts of materials they might have to deal with,” Millar said Friday. “It’s just head-in-the-sand to be ignoring this type of threat.”

Laws passed without enforcement provisions and appropriate funding are meaningless and deceive the public.  As the West Virginia incident shows, legislators who pass laws which deceive the public are as complicit for the outcomes as those state and local officials who were allowed to ignore those laws.

This ABC News article titled Christie Aide is Latest to Use Private Emails seems to reaffirm what those of us using Idaho’s Public Records Law have long known:  Public records laws are useless without compliance by public officials.   The same can be said of open meeting laws.  Officials wanting to avoid compliance with the intent of the laws can easily do so with little risk.

Passing both public records laws and open meeting laws allow legislators to puff themselves up and point with pride at their effort, but those same legislators render the laws impotent by failing to require and fund timely public enforcement and failing to provide meaningfully deterrent penalties.

As the ABC story revealed, a newspaper which had dutifully submitted a public records request for the damning Christie aide emails a month earlier had been told they didn’t exist.

US Representatives Darrell Issa and Jim Jordan are upset because Barbara Bosserman, an attorney in the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, may have been  been appointed to head up the investigation into the IRS’s alleged targeting of conservative groups in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.  As the letter reveals, Bosserman has contributed several thousand dollars to President Obama’s political campaigns and the Democratic National Committee.

One question may be, “Assuming Issa and Jordan are correct, has Bosserman possibly violated the Hatch Act by making the contributions identified in the letter?”

Probably not.  The Hatch Act prohibits specific political activities by certain government officials such as Bosserman,  but it also allows participation in other activities.  As long as the donations she made were lawful campaign donations and nothing more, they would not violate the Hatch Act.

When publicly elected or appointed government officials refuse to act according to law or they intentionally act outside the law, those same officials should hardly be surprised when the citizens who elected or appointed and trusted them choose to violate the law themselves to achieve desired and rightfully expected accountability.

On March 8, 1971, a group of citizens burglarized the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.  They stole documents which showed the FBI had been conducting illegal surveillances and offensive counterintelligence operations against US citizens opposing the Vietnam war.  Rightly or wrongly, the citizens felt “…compelled to do something as ordinary citizens because no one in Washington was holding Hoover accountable.”

Here in an AlterNet article one of the Media burglars, Bonnie Raines, outlines why she and the others took such an extreme action.  The article is entitled Democracy Needs Whistleblowers – That’s Why I Broke Into the FBI in 1971.  A more detailed account of the burglary is in Betty Medsger’s book just released yesterday and entitled The Burglary – The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.

According to Raines, only the Washington Post published the Media papers.  All the others chickened out until after the Post ran with it.  What would have happened if the Post had been similarly cowed by the fear of Hoover?  Is it fair to say that Congress would not have acted without the Post’s publishing admittedly stolen government documents?  When state and local governments refuse to rein in officially conducted illegal activity and hold offending officials accountable, should citizens engage in illegal actions the way the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI did in 1971?

The problem with putting people on pedestals is that eventually they fall off.

It is a very common and dangerous practice to pedestalize people based on their occupational choices.  We can think of nowhere that pedestalizing does more harm than in the law enforcement and fire services.  Presuming that somehow these sworn employees are more honorable, more honest, than those in other occupations can result in not only disappointment but also in willful ignorance or blatant denial of misconduct.  In the end, the misconduct retards rather than enhances the agencies’ competence.  Here are some examples:

80 From N.Y. Police and Fire Forces Are Charged in Social Security Fraud

L.A. County Sheriff Baca plans to retire, sources say

Investigation revisits Secret Service prostitution scandal

The Burglary – The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI

The Feds Let ‘Whitey’ Get Away with Murder

As long as the public is willing to continue to put people on pedestals based on their occupational choices, there will be those employees who abuse their lofty and nearly always very well-paying positions, rationalize their misconduct, and continue to disappoint the deniers.