In The Land of the Mustangs

The three ambled slowly along the hard scrabble trail, rocky white clumps that crumble underfoot and disintegrate into grainy sand; a landscape peppered with knots of spiny sagebrush.  Looking at the trio you feel desolation; a desperate loneliness;drifting as if looking for something or someplace but you don’t know what or where.  They headed for the ridge that would soon swallow them up taking them to..

A family group of mustangs stops at a water hole

Money; The Root of Regulation

"Regulation is strangling businesses of all sizes in California, and we've got to streamline regulation so it's easy, not hard, to do business."
Meg Whitman 

"That role for government is breaking up the monopolies, insisting on public disclosure, insisting on public audits, insisting on restitution whenever someone has been cheated."
Dennis Kucinich

"Let me say that I don't like money.  I work and I earn it because it's fundamental to survival. I spend it on necessities and frivolities and I donate it (thought not as much as I should) to causes more worthy than those that get my money for the necessities and frivolities. Let me repeat; I don't like money. It is evil and it inspires the evil in people."
Paul Anderson (Me)

 

This all started with yogurt; Greek yogurt.  Greek yogurt and phony Greek yogurt to be precise.  Then it went to foreclosure and bank regulation and from there it went to a legislator ranting about laissez faire and now it’s grown into an argument about the morality of making money. 

Saints, Sinners and Codes of Silence

By now the world, or that small part of the world that follows American football, knows that the New Orleans Saints have been, for the past three years, taking part in some decidedly un-Saintly behavior.  No, this isn’t going to be a post about football per se but it is inspired by the events surrounding what is now known as “bounty-gate.” 

Football, a sport that thrives on violence, has been forced in the last few years to walk a shaky balance beam; one between the magnitude and types of collisions and hits that it can allow and the recent focus on the effects, both immediate and long term of those hits.  That focus has come from former players with debilitating injuries, from the medical community and also, as if they don’t have other things to worry about, from Congress; yeah that Congress the legendary house of grand-standers, losers, knaves and busybodies.  And so with all of this going on, members of the Saints’ coaching staff and defensive team decided it would be a fine time to offer bounties to players who could knock an opposing player out of a game.  It was a practice that violated an assortment of rules both written and moral and when Commissioner Roger Goodell got wind of it the Saints were told to knock it off; an edict which the team of course ignored.  The league office found out that the Saints from players on up must have thought that the commish was just kidding and continued with the bounties.  Well the Saints just found out that you do not fuck with Roger Goodell and you certainly don’t lie to him and make him and his most prized possession, the NFL, look like hypocritical chumps.  As a result, head coach Sean Payton was suspended for the year, former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams may have coached his last NFL game and various players are probably scanning the help wanted ads as they wait to see what happens when Goodell cracks the league whip on them. 

Well, someone must have told the league office of the goings on in Saintdom and here is where a moron named Warren Sapp comes in.  Warren Sapp is a former player and current idiot who now does football commentary on TV.  When Goodell fired off his lightning bolts Sapp tweeted that former Saint, Jeremy Shockey was the “snitch” in the vein that anyone who would reveal the bounty system could only be a sleazy, slimy, backstabbing dirt bag.  Here’s what you need to know about Warren Sapp; he’s a bug-eyed goon and longtime sufferer of diarrhea of the mouth with a Twitter name of QBKILLA.   In a similar tone, Mike Golic, one of ESPN’s Mike and Mike referred to the player’s traditional “code of silence” which apparently protects everything from players’ sexual escapades right up through bounties.

Codes of silence aren’t unique to football locker rooms.  They exist on the streets, in offices, in industry and in government.  A disgusting code of silence even existed in the Roman Catholic Church when priests who got their sick jollies out of telling their altar boys to bend over were shuttled from diocese to diocese and shielded by the hierarchy in order to protect the reputation of the church.  That worked out well for the church didn’t it?   Reporting illegal, immoral or otherwise harmful behavior to law enforcement, higher ups or, even worse, the media is frowned upon and can result in anything from being ostracized to be being demoted, to being harassed, to being fired, to ending up in a ditch sleeping the long sleep.  This is where a particularly repugnant T-Shirt comes in.  It bears the logo “Snitches End Up With Stitches.”

I used to work with a young man who would occasionally wear the Snitches in Stiches T-shirt and I found it offensive at the time (and still do). When Mike Golic discussed the “code of silence” he did so in reverential tones as if protecting questionable behavior is the moral thing to do.  Really?  Why is that?  Why is it honorable to keep silent about acts that are harmful or immoral or both?  Oh I know the answers.  You’ve got to have your friend’s back or you can’t do something to harm the brand of the organization.  Even if it means selling your own soul.   

I doubt that someone with Sapp’s malfunctioning moral compass would ever stop to think that whoever did blow the whistle on the Saints might have saved some player from having a knee blown out or worse.  To me it’s a pretty fair trade off if a rogue coach is forced to sit out a season to save a player from a potentially career ending injury.  Does a friend who commits crimes really deserve to be protected?  If that friend is robbing or injuring or even killing shouldn’t you first be turning that person in and then questioning your criteria for choosing friends? 

This, code of silence, “I’ve got your back,” mentality is entrenched in our society.  If you turn someone in you, YOU, Y-O-U are the bad person for “singing like a bird,” “ratting someone out,” or “dropping a dime.”  You are, in the language of my generation, a “stool pigeon” or a “rat fink.”  In an online dictionary I found a definition of rat as; “A despicable person, especially one who betrays or informs upon associates.”  Well what does that make the perpetrator?  What does it make the victim?  I know the answer to that question.  In the language of the day; “sucks for you.”  Even if you’re now broke, injured or dead. 

There is another term for “snitch” that shows up when it concerns reporting industrial or governmental shenanigans.  It’s called whistle blowing.  During my lifetime there have been a number of whistleblowers whose actions have exposed corruption, waste and illegal activities going on in places that we thought we could trust.

                In 1970, New York Police officer Frank Serpico exposed corruption within the department.  And you thought it was just a movie.

                In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers telling the American people that most of the justification for the Vietnam War was a charade; instead of seeking peace the U.S. Government was actually broadening the war and while we were supposedly promoting democracy in Vietnam we were taking part in corruption and the rigging of elections.

                Lois Jenson exposed rampant harassment of female workers in Minnesota’s Eveleth Mines leading to a class action lawsuit that forced the mining company to establish a sexual harassment policy.  It was the first ever sexual harassment lawsuit and it served notice to the business community that harassment is a real issue that is not to be taken lightly.

                And of course who could forget “Deep Throat”, the informant who fed reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein information that eventually led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, a sitting president who thought he was immune to the laws of the people he had been elected to serve.  At this time it’s appropriate to credit Nixon whose merry band of burglars got caught trying to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at a business complex in Washington D.C. called Watergate.  Watergate went on to become the general term to describe the chain of tawdry events leading to Nixon’s resignation.  Since then any scandal worth its salt is described with –gate tagged on to it; hence “bounty-gate.”

The people that I just described should all fall into the category of “rat fink, snitch;” shouldn’t they?  They ratted out their colleagues.  And when they and others like them did that they caused the improvement of society and in doing so they oftentimes were the victims of unrelenting retaliation.  Karen Silkwood, for instance, was in the process of exposing safety violations at the Kerr-McGee plutonium fuels production plant in Oklahoma when she died suddenly in a mysterious fatal one car crash. 

So lets put all of this in a nutshell. If you report an associate for purposely committing an immoral act that injures someone else, you are an asshole; even if the person who you are protecting is the original asshole. If on the other hand the selfsame associate becomes a victim of the immoral actions of another asshole who isn't an associate and you happened to see who the perpetrator was and turn him in then you are something altogether different.  You are now a champion of justice, a hero. Taking the twisting of morality further, consider that the moral bedrock of a code of silence is the protection of an immoral act. I have a new word for that; hypocrisy-gate.  

It Wasn't Their Money

     There was no Fourth of July parade in Hercules this year.  The annual Hercules fireworks display was dark.  A month ago the annual Hercules Multicultural Fair was canceled for the first time in what; twenty years?  The swim center has cut back on hours of operation.  I’m wondering if there will be annual haunted house and Christmas Tree lighting.  These are just the cuts to fun and games.

     There have been some much more serious cuts in our little community.  The number of police officers has been cut from 30 to 26.  The Chief of Police, Fred Deltorchio, a quality fellow who has done a marvelous job and who I’ve chatted with on bike rides and at the local gym has moved up his retirement date.  He’s fed up. Said Deltorchio about the current state of affairs, "I put together a really good team. They are a great group of professionals... who are in it to serve the city.  It's hard for me to go back and undo it."  In April, the city pink slipped 25 employees in what was described as the first round of layoffs that could involve as much as 40 percent of the city’s workforce.

     How did we get here? Sounds just like the typical symptoms of our recent/current global economic meltdown.  But it isn’t quite that way at all. No, this was the handy work of folks who were either knaves or bunglers or bungling knaves.  It’s the story of folks who milked the city coffers dry through a combination of bad planning, their own greed and the greed of others and a total disregard of their fiduciary responsibilities.

     Hercules started out as a company town for an explosives company and by the 1970s had evolved into a bedroom community.  When my family moved to Hercules in 1990 it was still that; a bedroom community with no real downtown, serviced by a couple of malls. The town has grown since we moved in, adding businesses, restaurants and a number of housing developments, some fairly tony. 

     But there had always been bigger plans; maybe plans that were bigger than we needed. The city council spent money wooing Wal-Mart and then when public opposition to the predatory giant was successful it spent more money making it go away.  There were plans for a transit center with a rail station, a ferry terminal and a transit village.  Construction began on a project called Sycamore North, a downtown that would house restaurants and retail.  At this writing, the project consists of unfinished buildings cloaked only in their bare wooden shells, a main street that goes through the project is closed, with traffic detouring through a residential area and the well that waters the whole thing has all but run dry.  It is possible that for the foreseeable future we will have a skeletal downtown.  Another project, a complex of six sports fields went too far beyond the mere contemplation phase.  For two years beginning in 2008 the city shelled out 30,000 dollars a month to a company called Big League Dreams for what was described as“project evaluation” and “conceptualization,” which sounds like a flowery way to say, consulting fees.  In 2010, the city scrapped the whole project. Big League Dreams has refused to refund a 450,000 dollar licensing fee and the city has sunk 2 million dollars into what turned out to be a big league hallucination.  And then there is Market Hall. Market Hall was built on the site of an abandoned Park and Ride on one of the area’s main streets.  It was conceived of as a temporary retail site before yet another project called New Town Center was to be built there; a "placeholder" as the developer called it.  From the start an amateur like me looked at it and said, “Huh?”  Market Hall housed a handful of uninspiring retail shops each about the size of my living room that included a plant store, a clothing outlet and a toy store which sold toys for plenty more than you would pay at the local Target.  There was a stage where local entertainers put on shows before audiences of phantoms, and a bocce ball court.  A bocce ball court?  That’s right, bocce. They might just as well have put in a polo field. Food was provided by food trucks most of which bailed out after a couple of months of desultory trade.  One truck which served Mexican food stuck it out to the bitter end albeit with a spotty schedule.  The only business that gutted out a regular schedule was the coffee house which served excellent coffee, superior to the swill dispensed by the nearby Starbucks and with much better, friendlier service.  From the start, Market Hall looked like a junky little trading post with no hall and very little market.  Now after being open for 11 months it is a closed and deserted, junky little trading post and all that’s missing are the tumbling tumbleweeds, the creaking signs and the jingling of a bridle swinging in the wind that characterize your typical ghost town.  The developer, Red Barn, billed the city for everything from property management at 30,000 dollars per month to trips to Vegas for corporate executives.  The Planning Commission consistently sounded alarms against less than promising projects like these but the klaxons went unheeded.  If projects were food the council's eyes were bigger than their stomachs and much, much bigger than the city's wallet. 

     Amidst all of the big plans for the future everything else seemed to be an unfinished symphony. We have poop bag dispensers along the recreation path that are now nothing more than modern art as the city has ceased to refill them.  A pleasant path through one of the new developments is bereft of poop bag dispensers.  But that doesn’t matter because there are no trash cans to throw the non-existent poop bags into.  The city put up it’s one and only dog park, an attractive yard that I took my dog to once and vowed never to go back to.  Why? Because it has no turf.  In the summer your dog comes home dusty and ready for a bath and after a winter rain the place is a muddy quagmire.  Locals go to the parks in neighboring Pinole.

     Who would do this?  There were the greedy and dishonest.  One of the chief gang members, a city manager named Nelson Oliva was the owner of a company doing a healthy business with the city. To avoid any apparent conflict of interest he “suspended” his activities with his company, NEO and put his then just out of her teens daughter in charge.  Her work experience prior to being a CEO was waiting tables at a local pub (talk about your skyrocketing career path).  This arrangement apparently made it alright for NEO to continue doing business with the city, even benefiting from no bid contracts.  In the meantime, Oliva, while still under contract with Hercules and in apparent violation of that contract, traveled to Lompoc to market a 350,000 dollar deal between NEO and that city.  This is just a taste of Oliva’s slippery dealings.  There was former mayor Ed Balico who’s own company profited from housing developments that the mayor pushed for and voted in favor of.

     There were the gullible like the city council members who approved no bid contracts and expensive projects with little or no discussion or public input. There were the enablers such as the city attorney who turned a blind eye to the entire nefarious goings on.  There were the ass coverers in the city council that gave a new city manager his walking papers ostensibly for insubordination but more likely because he had uncovered and was ready to make public the shady shenanigans of the past. There were those who fed themselves from the public trough like the property manager who allegedly helped himself to 73,000 dollars from a city trust fund but was circumspect enough not to drain it completely dry.  He did after all leave 39 cents.

     Where are the knaves and fools today?  Two council members were recalled in last June’s election.  Balico, with an impending recall petition dangling over his head resigned for “family reasons”.  Oliva no longer works for the city but collected a generous severance package.  The city attorney resigned as well and those remaining council members who never saw a project or met a consultant they didn’t like, failed in their reelection bids.  While there are rumblings of criminal and civil proceeding against these folks they will probably just live with their shame.  They probably shop in neighboring communities these days and no longer frequent the local watering holes.  Instead of a legacy of community service they are loathed by the citizens of that community.  I suppose the various consultants, attorneys, managers and other suits spent their recent Fourth of July weekend sipping umbrella drinks on a cruise ship or gambling in Vegas; all paid for by the generous citizens of Hercules.

     What does all of this have to do with anyone who doesn’t live in Hercules?  Nothing more than the story of Bell, California which was bilked on what can only be described as an artistic level by its “caretakers.”  These are object lessons to everyone whether they live in Bonanza Town, Colorado, population 14, or New York City.  There are people who go into politics for all of the right reasons, do their level best and even make mistakes but in the final analysis take their responsibilities seriously and care about the citizens that elected them.  And then there are those who go into public office with every intention of lining their own pockets or are completely clueless, with no idea of, or concern for, their fiduciary responsibilities.

     I know many people, too many, who characterize themselves as politically inactive; actually taking pride in their apathy.  They look down their noses at politics for its dirtiness and corruption, feeling that they are above it all, not deigning to soil themselves.  I know others who take part only to the point of going to the polls with as much knowledge of the candidates and issues as they have of, oh, astrophysics. In a free country that’s all fine and dandy but it does rather run counter to that whole silly notion of an enlightened electorate. 

     There are those who say, “Oh my vote doesn’t really count.”  To that argument I need only point to the failed reelection bids of incompetent Hercules council members and the subsequent recall of two other scoundrels.  In these elections the votes counted loudly and without those vociferous votes we might still be stuck with the crooked and the clueless.

     Every year I pay property taxes and about 1100 dollars of that goes to Hercules.  This doesn’t include any other fees and taxes that I pay throughout the year.  I’m giving a fair chunk of hard earned coin of the realm to a bunch of strangers and trusting that they are going to take good care of it.  Taxes and fees are something we are all compelled to pay.  It doesn’t have anything to do with parties or ideologies. If you gave 10 Benjamins to someone to spend on your behalf I’m pretty sure you would make certain it was spent with your best interests in mind or at the very least not spent on a cockeyed scheme that was approved with nothing more than a casual wave of the hand.  As my wife put it, “It wasn’t their money.” I understand that when it comes to national and state budgets it is difficult to figure out just what is going on in such a massive money pot. But at the local level with smaller budgets and more visible projects it is easier to spot the accounting sleight of hand.

     One of the casualties of our internet, gotta have the information now society, is journalism.  There is a dearth of true investigative journalism, the kind of work that exposed a sitting President, Richard Nixon, as a blackguard and common criminal.  Investigative journalism isn’t cost effective these days.  It takes time to follow the trails and develop the story, and newspapers with dwindling circulations and ad revenues find themselves with little patience for a long story to pan out.  And so with a fourth estate that has to compete with sensationalism, dumbing down, raging ideologies and stories that are hustled to the public because speed counts over vetting, who is left to protect our interests?  The answer is in your mirror.