PROFITING FROM PUBLIC SQUALOR
Sleeper, Jim
Virtually every column I've read on New York City's unfolding municipal corruption scandals seeks salvation in greater citizen vigilance and participation in public life. A prosecutor warns...
...But the campaign contributions often come wrapped in the subtle contempt of patrons far wealthier than the recipient...
...Copies of the report and memorandum can be obtained from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 806 Fifteenth St., N.W., Suite 940, Washington, D.C...
...is the inevitable, if muted, cry...
...So saying, they end their columns precisely where the discussion should begin...
...A public relations consultant wonders how we can inspire people "to care...
...Thus reinforced in his view that "everyone else" views his public service as a means to their own With more rancor and opposition than is usually the case in such situations—but, alas, not enough to sway the Senate majority—William H. Rehnquist was confirmed as Chief Justice of the U.S...
...Their report on Rehnquist's "Judicial Record" was accompanied by a devastating memorandum subtitled "A 35 Year History of Hostility to Victims of Discrimination and Unanswered Questions of Candor and Sense of Propriety...
...Where's my cut...
...A prosecutor warns that only an aroused electorate can wrest reform from foot-dragging politicians...
...For all his apparent power, then, a politician feels squeezed between two kinds of contempt...
...There is only one long-run solution to this general rout of civic virtue...
...In 80 of 83 cases in which the Supreme Court disagreed about the application or interpretation of a civil rights statute, Rehnquist voted against enforcing the law, or for the narrowest possible interpretation of the statute...
...stop feeding private affluence through public squalor...
...Why the apparent public apathy and resignation about the continuing disclosures...
...Corruption on the scale now emerging is the fruit of their—and our—unexamined view of the public sector as a stepchild and whipping boy of the larger private economy, a view that makes public malfeasance all but inevitable...
...The ultimate guarantor of good government, our governors are agreed, is the governed...
...Most of the pillaging is legal precisely because politicians craft the tax breaks and contracts that facilitate it...
...the wonder is that more of them don't...
...End the widespread perceplion that the commonweal is open to legal plunder by the highest bidder, and you begin to curb the resentments that rationalize corruption...
...In every race-discrimination case in which Rehnquist cast the deciding vote, he voted against the black complainant...
...a newly elected reform legislator quickly learns from his majority leader or county party leader that he'd better vote for some questionable bond issue or tax code provision if he expects to get anything else done...
...I believe this is the story of men like the late Queens Borough president and Democratic party boss Donald Manes, who committed suicide as the scandals broke, and Bronx Democratic boss Stanley Friedman, 9 who has been convicted of some offenses but did much of his "siphoning" within the letter of the law...
...The power to do that is politics' chief attraction to many of its ablest practitioners, like Manes and Friedman...
...Long before "sting" operations begin, we in effect "set up" politicians for corruption by asking them to govern in the twilight zone between what John Kenneth Galbraith calls the "private affluence and public squalor" of our civic life...
...10 private ends, the politician may wonder why he alone should remain virtuous...
...A senator insists that political party life must be made more rewarding, not less, if "serious people" are to give time to it...
...and the increasingly alienated citizenry turns to tax evasion, organized and unorganized crime, drugs, and wild cards like the candidates of Lyndon LaRouche...
...Supreme Court...
...Why don't "we" care...
...Justice Rehnquist is the only member of the Supreme Court who believes that: • it is legal to give tax exemptions to segregated private schools that practice racial discrimination • it is legal for an employer to fire a worker over age 40 because the worker has too much experience • the Occupational Safety and Health Act is unconstitutional...
...It begins so simply...
...True, in return for his "accommodations," a politician gets the contributions and patronage he needs to build machines that can isolate and put down any pillagers or grass-roots rebels who fail to court him...
...For the answer strikes at the heart of arrangements they've always accepted in pursuing their careers...
...A comprehensive analysis of the opinions and votes of Justice Rehnquist demonstrates that he is an extremist without parallel in American judicial history...
...20005...
...Given his appalling record this remains a matter of great concern...
...How much so was presented in extensive detail in a report prepared by Elaine R. Jones and Eric Schnapper of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights...
...In 120 of the 124 cases in which Rehnquist cast the deciding vote, Rehnquist voted not to enforce the Bill of Rights...
...We do not have the space to reprint either the report or the memorandum, but we present below a condensation, a bill of particulars that was with the report...
...So HE STEALS...
...One wonders whether the professionals really want to know...
...We expect them to remain pure while mediating the inherently exploitative relationships between, say, senior citizens waiting in the cold for buses that don't come, and wealthy schemers who not only don't pay their fair share of taxes for those buses, but also siphon off what tax base there is into the contracts, fees, and commissions that build luxury housing, grand prix race tracks, and other dubious "public" works...
...Justice Rehnquist is the only member of the Supreme Court who believes that it is constitutional for the government: • to aid organized religious organizations for the purpose of encouraging religion • to direct that certain people cannot get married without government approval of the wedding • to suppress speech by a corporation or organization because government officials disagree with their views • to sentence a man to death based on secret evidence...
...Without reform more systemic than anything the professionals have proposed, the wonder isn't that some public officials succumb to temptation, or leave public life, or crack under the pressure...
...Some of these deals do spur needed development, but often they merely drain the public sector of resources for the basic services without which no polity or economy can flourish for long...
...Tighter contract provisions and campaign finance reforms are important steps—and it is both telling and troubling that Governor Mario Cuomo and the Republican-controlled State Senate failed to push for them this past year...
...stop the legal siphoning of the tax base for private gain unconnected to essential public purposes...
...And there is the not so subtle contempt of ordinary citizens hard-pressed by the decay of public services upon which they have every right to depend...
...But it creates the climate within which outright corruption occurs, because at some level, I'm convinced, it demoralizes both politicians and the public, making them cynical, even bitter...
...Tainted thus from the outset by such legal accommodations to public squalor, the politician discerns no obvious moral or civic reason for turning down a few "extralegal" compensations for his tough life in the twilight zone...
...or he invents public lotteries to restore some of the lost service revenue by playing upon the escapist fantasies of the deprived...
...But by themselves they won't shield the body politic from the predatory relations in which politicians and cynical voters have been amply schooled...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
