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Jewish World Review Jan. 4, 2011 / 28 Teves, 5771 For those in government there are few consequences for failure, or even for deliberate sabotage By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The blizzard which crippled New York City last week brought at least momentary humility to the billionaire mayor, who could use some.
"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg admitted on Wednesday that his administration's response to the blizzard that buried New York this week had been inadequate, and he pledged to hold himself and others accountable as the city continued to work its way to normalcy," the New York Times reported.
Among those he ought to hold accountable are city workers whose sluggish response caused massive inconvenience and economic loss, and may have been responsible for the death of a newborn infant.
"Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts," the New York Post reported Thursday.
A Brooklyn resident posted on You Tube a video of three garbage trucks equipped with snow plows parked outside a Dunkin Donuts. He claimed the workers were inside for at least five hours.
Perhaps for a moment Michael Bloomberg wished he'd spent less time hectoring New Yorkers about how much salt they put on their food and how much soda their children drink, and more time attending to his duties as mayor.
But I don't put much stock in his pledge "to hold himself and others accountable." For in government these days, nothing succeeds like failure.
That's because for those in government there are few consequences for failure, or even for deliberate sabotage.
The bursting of the housing bubble has devastated our economy. It was caused in part by lax monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, which fueled the bubble; in part by government policies which encouraged banks to make loans to people who couldn't pay them back; in part by crooks like Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Mortgage, who deliberately made bad loans because he knew he could sell them to "government sponsored entities" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and in part by greedy Wall Street bankers who repackaged the loans into risky financial instruments, then misled investors about the risk.
What happened was fraud. Those who committed it should be punished, though they haven't been. Angelo Mozilo is a free, rich man. The Wall Street firms at the heart of the crisis have been bailed out with billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
Now let us consider the Securities & Exchange Commission, whose job it is to detect and punish financial fraud. Obviously it didn't do so in the subprime mortgage crisis. But it is worse than that. A Ponzi scheme is the simplest form of financial fraud. But the SEC failed to detect the enormous Ponzi scheme Bernie Madoff was running, despite the fact that a whistleblower had come to the agency twice with detailed proof of how Mr. Madoff was bilking his investors.
You'd think a failure of this magnitude would cause heads to roll at the SEC, and trigger a serious examination of its procedures. But you'd be wrong. Thanks to President Barack Obama's financial "reform" bill, the SEC has been rewarded for its monumental incompetence with a bigger budget, and substantially increased powers.
In its brief history, the Transportation Security Administration has had no successes, and many failures. The shoe bomber and the underwear bomber were permitted to board aircraft. Tragedy was averted by vigilant passengers, not by the TSA. According to ABC News, in annual tests at some major airports, TSA fails to detect guns, knives and bomb parts nearly 70 percent of the time. Yet TSA's budget and its authority to harrass air travelers keeps growing.
Government grows despite repeated failures to serve the public well because government's purpose no longer is to serve the public. Government now serves primarily the interests of those who work for the government. The pay and benefits package for federal employees is now more than twice as much as the typical private sector worker receives. Many state and local governments are going broke not because they've spent too much money on us, but because they've spent too much on pensions for their employees.
President Obama reportedly is planning to permit workers in the Transportation Security Administration to unionize, which could make them as responsive to the public interest as New York City's sanitation workers have been.
The biggest lie in the English language today is: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
© 2009, Jack Kelly |
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