That’s not what I’m saying.
I’m saying that in general politicians tend to be more corrupt at lower levels. And I’m observing that the highest level in a small town is comparable, in terms of influence, power, and money, to a much lower (and more corrupt) level in a big city.
See also: Jericho, Arkansas.
http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/4000804.html
They didn’t even have a police force until grants in the 1990’s. (What was that program called again?) Apparently, it’s a useless extortion racket. Sounds like they just don’t have the ability to fund a proper police force themselves but tried to keep it as a shakedown racket.
If the town manager is corrupt. It stays corrupt forever. No honest person can get a job or promotion when corruption exists.
The “Citizens Coalition For Open Government Through Video” CCFOGTV is videoing the forums. The corruption starts there.
I post on a number of forums. What I am reading is a lot of frustration because of the inability to change things. People wanting to kill lobbyists and their political friends along with Banksters. I understand where they are coming from.
The answer is Shoot Them with video. I have been doing this for years and they don’t like it a lot. I got banned from videoing open council meetings in the 2 local communities. I have been hounding political forums with video since I ran for election here. See “Yellowhead Speaks 1993” During that election run I noticed how corrupt the political forums were and it made me mad real mad.
My plan is to run in every election from now on. Not to get elected but to out the Chamber of Commerce and their corrupt election stealing ways. My back will be to the attendees as I attack the CofC.
Political forums are the breeding grounds of corrupt politicians… Go get 'em Citizens
(2-Min 3-Sec) political forum; I attack the politicos back in 1993
The Chamber of Commerce rigs election / plants questions. That’s why the Marijuana question never comes up. They would lose too many votes.
(2-Min 2-Sec) Civic forum the CofC posed 3 questions. Should the corporate vote be reinstated. 3 of our 4 elected councilors thought it should. This never made the local paper.
Our group the Citizens Coalition For Open Government Through Video had 165 questions we wanted the candidates to pull from a hat. That didn’t happen.
http://www.telusplanet.net/public/stonedan/QUESTIONS.TXT
(2-Min 39Sec) here the signal for the planted question is a tap tap. There should be jail time for election tampering…
http://www.osoyoostimes.com/news/2011/04/13/oliver-federal-candidates-forum-to-be-closed-to-public/#comments
Wow people not allowed at the meet the candidates forum in the last federal election.
(1-Min 22-Sec)
a councilor and family was threatened by the CofC for his standing up for the homeless. This friend confronted James Roszko the infamous cop killer and thief. While on his trapline. The CofC wanted the homeless shelter removed from town. When they realized that the whole town was behind the homeless they wanted their business names removed from the list of concerned businesses. A CofC member tried to control the meeting from the crowd. He had a bully covering his back.
Here in Canada there was a riot during the Hockey playoffs. Most of it was on video. This will never happen again. People know they can’t get away with crimes in public because there will be video.
CCFOGTV needs to be doing civic audits not Municipality hacks. They never find anything wrong. All 4 communities I know about are totally corrupt. No honest person can work or get promoted in those towns.
Hunt them down with video. It’s easy.
Doug Pederson AKA SpectateSwamp
I worked in local government for about a decade. Corruption in small towns is real, and can be overwhelming, and its widespread, not because of widespread evil, but because of the natural affinities of small town politics. If you own a lot of land or a business, you are a lot more likely to be affected by decisions made by the county commission or a city government. So naturally you pay attention to them and befriend them and help the ones you want to get elected, to get elected. It’s not being evil at that level, it’s just taking care of your interests.
But of course in the course of that city officials and business leaders and wealthy people often become friends. At some point the line between helping your buddy in his real estate business as a natural part of helping your city to grow and giving him a considerable unfair advantage over others who have not befriended you can get blurry. It can get very blurry indeed.
People are corrupt. Cities are the largest local governments, thus more corrupt. State and national governments are corrupt also, but it’s more difficult to manage corruption as the number of competing interests increase.
I didn’t notice this thread when it first came out (though we’ve have various threads touching on the issue). And it’s still an on-going concern, worthy of more discussion because ever more city governments are turning up corrupt, especially in L.A. County. In fact, just a couple weeks ago the L.A. Times had a Google video blog addressing this issue.
(…so please don’t bother with stupid zombie comments)
Spectateswamp, you’re talking about Canada, right? I’d say that if we really want to address the OP, we need to take into consider the certain historical circumstances. It’s too broad a stroke to try to consider “city politics” in general. However, in one of the threads mentioned above, we talked a little about the Gateway Cities of Los Angeles, which are RIFE with corruption (hence the call to have a Google Blog just to talk about them). I’d say at least 50% of these cities have had some kind of serious corruption issue in the last 25 years.
I mentioned some of my thoughts in this post in a thread about the city of Bell. To sum up, I think it has a lot to do with the economic contours of the U.S. after WWII, and how the smaller cities around large cities developed.
I think that this comes closer to the answer to the question, (as opposed to the rhetoric), of the OP.
When the players all hang out at the same restaurants, bars, clubs, and churches, they can establish friendly relationships that allow them to manage deals out of sight of public supervision and the interlocked business and political (and social) relationships that control the letting of contracts or the purchases of materiel, tend to allow people who gain power to control who has access to power, letting only their “friends” into the “club.”
The higher the level of organization, the less likely that one can control all the players and the more likely that a whistleblower or a reporter or a disaffected co-conspirator will expose the situation, often, (not always), leading to the dismantling of the corrupt structure.
In addition, at the local level, such corruption is perceived as simply “doing business,” and so many people accept it as the normal condition and make no effort to change it. (The “just doing business” theme guides a lot of these situations. The water department in a large city with which I have had experience has had its upper management hauled off to jail on more than one occasion, and their replacements continue the old practices, either because they were promoted from within the ranks, and have a vested interest in continuing the graft, or because when they were brought in from the outside, they were simply kept in the dark by all their workers who continued the graft out of sight of upper management.)
The most “corrupt” governments I have witnessed, (using the measure of mutual backscratching and the inability of the public to get changes made), have occurred in the small townships in which I lived and the villages located in those townships. It was pretty well known and accepted that if one did not “make friends” with the senior supervisor, (which probably did not involve offering cash bribes, but simply agreeing to support his agenda and not threatening any of his personally favored businesses with competition or reports of rules violations), one would never get the permits to construct a business or get any changes to local ordinances.
The “welfare” speculation of the OP, of course, was utter nonsense. The townships where I grew up were solid 1950s anti-Communist Republican and there was nothing resembling welfare that could be handed out by the township supervisors or village councils or mangers. (Michigan laws at the time did not even provide for anything resembling “welfare” at that level, so the governments had nothing to hand out–and very few poor voters to whom to hand it.) The corruption was all at the level of businesses and ordinances without any “welfare” aspect to them.
Also, “welfare” proper (that which is called “social welfare,” such as TANF, CalWORKS, SNAP, etc.) are federally funded programs, allotted to states, and administered by counties. The city government is about the only one that isn’t involved.
Corruption exists because people want it to exist.The fact is, city boards have great power, and with power comes corruption. Take zoning: a piece of property can have a value close to zero-however, if re-zoned, it can become extremely valuable. Hence the corruption of the zoning boards. The city that I live near (Boston) has been highly corrupt for centuries. The mayor of Boston (in the 1920’s-40’s was a man named James M. Curley-he was widely known to be corrupt, but he was voted in with huge majorities. The reason? He would do favors in return for bribes-and people liked that. The rumor was that he got 5% off every city contract. If you are an honest contractor, what do you do? If you don’t pay bribes yo get no business. Hence, the corruption flourishes.
My 2 cents (and probably worth only that)…
Whenever you have responsibility (or oversight, impact etc whatever you wish to call it) that outstrips compensation you will be flooded with corruption.
Yes, even well compensated people can have corruption but if take a generally good person, pay him shit, give him much responsibility dealing with large amounts of money he will become disillusioned and tempted. He will say to himself “I do much work here and I am only paid $xxx…I DESERVE more but I don’t get it and it is unfair. Since it is unfair anyway I might as well make the unfairness go in my way for a change”.
Also, if these people are paid little, it doesn’t take much to bribe him. If you make $35K and a company slips him $10000 to get a deal through that $10,000 isn’t even on the radar for the briber but is huge for the bribee…and mighty tempting when your kids need shoes.
So, as another poster noted, we have corruption because we as a society want it. When govt officials are paid poorly it can be assumed they will make it up in some other way.
Podunk County isn’t less corrupt. All politics is corrupt. With power comes corruption. It’s just how humans operate.
Sincerely,
Formerly Active Podunk County Politico