Not Making Their Parents Proud - Recent Antics Of The American Political Class

Seems like their has been a recent rush of bad behavior from three members of our political/government class, behavior that will definitely place at least one of our politicians in jail, may land another in jail, and has already led to the resignation of a high ranking member of the Obama administration. But before we get into the details of these three folks, let's do a quick review of other politicians that have been caught acting badly the past few years and whose antics have been given renewed press coverage lately, given the recent outbreak of bad politicians acting badly:

1. In 2004, Connecticut Governor, John C. Rowland resigned and served 10 months in prison for accepting gifts from state contractors and lying about it.
2. Also in 2004, married New Jersey Governor James MacGreevey resigned after confessing he had given a sensitive state government, homeland security-like post to his extramarital lover.
3. Ex-Illinois Governor George Ryan, was convicted in 2006 of steering state government contracts to friends and served prison time for his transgressions.
4. George Ryan is upholding a long criminal tradition in the state governor's office since four of the past nine Illinois governors have been sentenced to prison terms for criminal behavior.
5. Married New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned in 2008 after confessing to patronizing prostitutes and arranging for them to cross state lines, a criminal violation of the Mann Act.
6. In 2010, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford acknowledged an affair with a woman in Argentina, maintained through his misuse of state government money and resources.
7. Ex-Senator of North Carolina, John Edwards, will face trial in the near future for violating campaign financing laws when he allegedly used campaign funds from his Presidential campaign to support and cover up his extramarital affair, an affair that resulted in a child born out of wedlock, and an affair that was conducted while his wife battled terminal cancer.
8. Senator John Ensign of Nevada confessed to having an extramarital affair with the wife of one of his staff.
9. California  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced to admit to an adulterous affair and the father of a teenage child while in office.
10. President Clinton - too many bad behavior instances to review in this post.

Turns out all of these politicians were in one one form or another adulterers, liars, abusers of the power they controlled from their political office, or outright criminals. All of which could not have made their families (or their constituents) very proud.

They also did a horrible job of serving their constituents. If you are wasting time and energy maintaining an adulterous affair, maintaining a series of lies to cover up your bad behavior, abusing your power for your own enrichment, or conducting criminal activities, you cannot be focused on serving the Americans that placed their trust in you when they went to the voting booths.

To this ignoble hall of shame list of past politicians acting badly, three new members are have been recently inducted:

- Ex-Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in jail this past week for his antics while in office, including his desire to sell and profit by his responsibility to name the replacement for President Obama's vacant Illinois Senate seat. During Blagojevich's trials, we learned how he operated, shaking down businesses for campaign donations and other favors in return for favorable state legislative treatment, in addition to trying to auction the vacant Senate seat.

If you can find any positive attribute of Blagojevich's bad behavior, it occurred at his prison sentencing hearing where he at least stood up and took the blame and responsibility for his actions: "I caused it all. I'm not blaming anybody. I was the governor and I should have known better and I am just so incredibly sorry."

But taking responsibility for his criminal and disgraceful actions was not enough for the judge who accurately described the impact of his actions: "The abuse of the office of governor is more damaging than the abuse of any other office, except the President's. Whatever good things you did for people as governor, and you did some, I am more concerned with the occasions when you wanted to use your powers to do things that were only good for yourself"

Well said. Selfish, criminal behavior wiping out whatever good the Governor did elsewhere while serving. As discussed above, how much more good could have Blagojevich done for Illinois citizens if he was not so worried about his personal enrichment and had not spent so much time shaking down innocent Illinois citizens and businesses for campaign donations?

- Our second example does not include an elected official but a high ranking member of President Obama's administration. Top FAA administrator Randy Babbit resigned this week after being arrested for drunk driving when police pulled him over at night for allegedly drunkenly driving on the wrong side of the road in Fairfax City, Virginia. Within days of his arrest, Mr.Babbit had submitted his resignation.

What makes this case of bad behavior so bewildering is a number of conditions:

• Mr. Babbit's boss, Secretary of Transportation Ray Lahood has been very actively fighting the problem of drunk driving on our nation's roads. Thus, the drunk driving issue should not have been an unknown priority of Mr. Babbit's superior.
• According to recent news reports on this incident, Mr. Babbit has had a long career in government transportation efforts, dating back at least to the Clinton administration. The drunk driving issue, either directly or indirectly, was probably part of at least some of those transportation assignments.
• And finally, Mr. Babbit

Bewildering and certainly poor judgement, judgement that only fortunately killed what appears to have been a stellar government career before it killed an unsuspecting traveler. As a mature adult, a professional expert, one would have thought Mr. Babbitt would have used better judgement. But we probably thought the same of Spitzer, MacGreevey, Ryan, Blagojevich, Clinton, Sanford, Ensign, etc. and they all disappointed us also.

But to his credit, at least Mr. Babbit accepted responsibility for his actions when he nobly and promptly submitted his resignation: "I am unwilling to let anything cast a shadow on the outstanding work done 24 hours a day, seven days a week by my colleagues at the FAA. They run the finest and safest aviation system in the world and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to work alongside them."

- And our third candidate today for admission to the political class/government hall of shame, the ex-governor of my former home state of New Jersey, Jon Corzine. Mr. Corzine was chairman of Goldman Sachs before he was forced out of the company and served New Jersey as one of its two Senators in the U.S. Senate. He left the Senate to serve one lack luster term as governor of New Jersey. After his defeat running for a second term, he took over the investment firm of MF Global.

In the past month, MF Global collapsed into bankruptcy, mostly as a result of bad investments in European bonds. Now, companies collapse all the time and go out of business for making bad business decisions so a Wall Street type bankruptcy such as MF Global should come as no surprise.

However, it was how it went out of business that has aroused suspicions, questions, and is resulting in criminal investigations and Congressional hearings:

* Given that the Sarbanes -Oxley legislation, that arose after the Enron and Worldcom accounting/financial scandals from a decade or so ago, was supposed to make corporate accounting more stringent and less likely to lead to fraud, how did over a billion dollars worth of MF Global customer investment dollars "disappear?"

Was Corzine and MF Global illegally using their customers' funds not to invest for their customers' benefit but using those funds to cover the loss of MF Global's own investment wealth? As an ex-Senator who actually voted on the Sarbannes-Oxley legislation, he should have no excuse for not understanding the accounting reporting requirements under this law and allegedly stealing a billion dollars of customer funds.

* Given all of the hysterics and labor of passing the Dodd-Frank financial industry reform act, shouldn't Corzine have been aware, as an ex-Senator, that this legislation also probably prohibited a company from co-mingling its funds with the funds of its customers? Given how big MF Global is (it was the eighth largest firm to go belly up in the nation's history) and the political background of Mr. Corzine, ignorance is unlikely a valid excuse. An ex-politician acting badly is probably a better reason for this billion dollar scandal situation.

* Even with the above two pieces of legislation, which failed the industry and American investors again, this bad behavior of allegedly misinvesting over a billion dollars of someone else's money might also just be a basic criminal case of fraud by a high ranking ex-politician.

But the most annoying and despicable part of this sad situation was some of the comments made by Mr.Corzine when he testified this past week in front of Congressional committees investigating this potential fraud. He has invoked the so-called Obama defense, i.e. "it's not my fault." This defense has been used by the President innumerable times to blame the Bush administration, the tsunami in Japan, the Euro crisis, and myriad of other people and situations for the many failures of his administration.

Consider a few of Mr. Corzine's testimony statements as reported by the New York Times and The Associated Press:

• When asked what happened to the $1.2 billion of customer funds his company managed, he replied: "I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date." In other words, not my job.
• When asked how this misplacement of $1.2 billion could happen: “I did not, however, generally involve myself in the mechanics of the clearing and settlement of trades, or in the movement of cash and collateral. Nor was I an expert on the complicated rules and regulations governing the various different operating businesses that comprised MF Global. I had little expertise or experience in those operational aspects of the business.” In other words, not my fault, even though I ran the company and I used to run the one of the biggest financial firms (Goldman Sachs) of all times, others handled or mishandled the money, not me.
• When asked who was to blame for the collapse of the eighth largest firm in U.S. history, the Associated Press reported that "Corzine deflected blame for the company’s collapse. He argued that he inherited a firm already doomed by his predecessors’ bad financial decisions." In other words, those that came before me are to blame for what happened (e.g. Obama's constantly blaming of Bush for everything that went wrong during Obama's first three years).

Now, to be fair, Corzine did testify it was his responsibility for what happened to MF Global and the missing customer funds. But as we see from his actual testimony, he was all to anxious to blame others that worked for him or who came before him at MF Global.

So let's review: lying, adultery, felonious acts of crime, blaming others, drunk driving, extortion, misappropriation of customer and taxpayer funds, their parents should be so proud.

We must find a way to reform all of our political processes so that we no longer elect people who end up in the political class hall of shame. We need high integrity people that would actually make their parents proud, and in the process, make the American voter proud. Cleaning up these processes include many, if not all of the following steps that were laid out in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government:

• Reduce the volume and the impact of money from outside, special interest groups who bankroll our politicians. (Step 6)
• Remove politicians from their Congressional posts for non-performance (Sep 34).
• Require all sitting politicians to sign off on a shared  values/integrity pledge every year so they at least have a concept of what good behavior looks like. (Step 38)
• Institute term limits for politicians so that they have a limited time in office, hopefully limiting the time they have for bad behavior and extramarital affairs.(Step 39)

We need more action and less antics from those that sit in our political class.



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