These People Run The State
Fred Grimm of the Miami Herald has a column that highlights the basic problem with Florida’s legislature: Ethics stops at Legislature door
The Florida Legislature hasn’t been so enthused about ethical niceties. Until now.
Senate Bill 1180 would finally get tough on “soliciting, or demanding money, gifts, or donations.” The bill mandates honest disclosure of personal finances.
SB 1180 provides much of what political reformers have sought . Except the strictures don’t apply to politicians. Just roadside beggars.
Our ethically challenged legislature has fashioned a code of ethics for panhandlers.
The leadership of the legislature spends the other ten months of the fighting court cases over their financial dealings, but they want the homeless to have more moral fiber than they do. If you doubt that, read the high points of the antics of one of the leading lights of the legislature in Fred’s column.
5 comments
I would have thought this sort of issue was settled when a Florida court affirmed the right of Fox News to broadcast lies. Or does the First Amendment only apply to corporations now? Maybe the panhandlers need to incorporate… if they’re required to be registered, they’re halfway there anyway, yes?
If they incorporate not only would they not be challenged, but they wouldn’t be required to pay taxes. It’s the only way to go.
Hey, if you’re a CEO you can steal billions from the government and use the money to run for governor, so it makes sense to incorporate.
“Moral fiber…” all of us need more of that in our diets, and your state government is going to make sure we get it… unless we are large corporations.
IIRC, there was once an occasion on which a lobbyist literally passed out checks to lawmakers on the floors of the chambers in the Texas Capitol. It’s good to see other state legislatures learning how it’s done… %-p
Heh! Yeah, Steve, we had one of those on the floor of the Louisiana legislature too. Caused a few eye-rolls and the passage of an ethics rule saying that the checks had to be passed out *outside* the chamber, but of course no real change in the self-serving corruption of Louisiana’s legislative bodies…
Occasionally, though — *VERY* occasionally — someone manages to break through the apathy and make it clear. I once worked for a man who’d done that. A major corporation came in and bribed the Legislature to legislate their software for every public school in the state, putting him out of business. He wasn’t the type to take that kind of thing lying down, so he put on a major offensive, he was in the offices of every newspaper in the state raising stink, he was on every news show, he was in the halls of the legislature wearing his gold Rolex and hand-tailored suit while his Cadillac limo idled outside button-holing legislators and telling them gleefully what dirty laundry of theirs he was going to air *next* if they didn’t promptly repeal that law… I have no idea how he dug up so much dirt on these people, but apparently it was enough, because legislators started scurrying for cover like cockroaches and promptly passed a new law explicitly prohibiting the state board of education from requiring that schools purchase *any* specific software package as long as it met the requirements for transmitting school date to the state (and thus implicitly repealing the old law). Which then presented the problem that the state was going to release said requirements about 3 months before the start of the school year, not enough time to meet the requirements. Which is why he hired me, I specialize in doing the impossible in short amounts of time :twisted:.
BTW, don’t think that because he did what it took to operate in a corrupt state, that he *enjoyed* participating in the corruption. He was constantly railing about how to get into any school district in the state, he had to grease palms. It upset him greatly that this is what it takes to operate in Louisiana (and Texas, and Mississippi, and Florida….). Luckily some of the school districts were cheap. Like in one school district, he *only* had to provide a couple of free computers to relatives of school board members and provide free Internet connection to the homes of another couple of school board members…. siiiiiiiigh! And you wonder why education’s so f*cked up in the South?!
– Badtux the Sulfur-smellin’ Penguin
At the same time Florida was imposing draconian testing on public schools, JEB was enabling charter for-profit schools to spring up everywhere with absolutely no oversight of any kind. All that did was generate a lot of fraud investigations for local prosecutors when the charter schools got carried away or went bankrupt.
A local charter school for “at risk youth” got busted initially for violations of child labor laws, which led to the embezzlement indictments.
One of Florida’s new Congresscritters may lose his seat and end up in state prison over some of his financial dealings that don’t appear on any disclosure forms. Of course, if he comes clean and clears it up, he goes to Federal prison for tax evasion. This is what “family values” means, for a given definition of “family”.