The power broker, the paper bag, the honest cabbie, and the Trumps — a true tale of corruption and ethics

Ethical Crook

Unethical Crook

Way back in 1957, a political boss named Carmine De Sapio made a grave mistake.

De Sapio was no run-of-the-mill power broker. As leader of a political machine called Tammany Hall, founded by the notorious “Boss Tweed” in the 19th Century, De Sapio controlled the Democratic Party when the Democratic Party controlled just about all the elected offices that mattered in New York State.

He had been credited, for example, with “handpicking” both the Governor of New York, a patrician heir to a railroad fortune named W. Averall Harriman, and the Mayor of New York, Robert Wagner  Jr., whose father before him had been a United States Senator.

Fear and toadyism in New York

“Time magazine put Mr. De Sapio on its cover as a national force to be feared and admired,” the New York Times recalled in his obituary. “And at fund-raising dinners, favor seekers would push past Governor Harriman and Mayor Wagner to shake hands with Mr. De Sapio, whom they viewed as the most powerful politician in the room.”

De Sapio came by his power as a would-be reformer. He took over Tammany Hall with promises to end its back room shady deals and its almost world-famous corruption. This “reform” was sometimes greeted with slightly more than a few degrees of skepticism. Tammany Hall was one hell of a huge ship to turn around. The very mention of its name conjured up visions of cigar-puffing men in smoky rooms, stuffing kicked-back cash into little tin boxes. 

It didn’t help his image that De Sapio, a sharp dresser if ever there was one, always wore a pair of dark sunglasses that somehow gave him a thuggish look. But this was not an affectation. It was an irony. De Sapio suffered from an eye condition that made him hyper-sensitive to light, even as he promised to shed light on political dealings.

A bagful of money

Now, on to that paper bag. One day in 1957, De Sapio seems to have absentmindedly left something in the back seat of the taxi that he was taking to the now-vanished Biltmore Hotel, where he had one of his several offices. 

That object was variously described  in the press as a paper bag and as an envelope. The taxi driver who discovered the object also discovered that it contained $11,200 in $100 bills. That’s quite a fat wad of cash to stuff into an envelope. So I’ll go with paper bag.

The cabbie who drove DeSapio was an honest working man. He not only turned over the paper bag to the police, complete with contents. He also identified the owner. He knew what De Sapio looked like from newspaper pictures, the driver said, and the man who left the bagful of bucks in the back seat was most certainly Carmine De Sapio. Not to mention that the alleged De Sapio got off in front of one of De Sapio’s offices.

Note well, please, that this was back in the day when men were men and a buck was still a buck. Run $11,200 through an online inflation calculator and you’ll discover that De Sapio’s 11.2 grand is more like $97,000 in 2017 money. So the dough was nothing to sneeze at, even for a guy who might have been handling buckets of it under the table. And do you know what De Sapio did?

The elegance of denial

De Sapio denied — yes, adamantly denied !— that the bagful of money was his, or that he had anything to do with it. He wouldn’t touch it, refused to take it, walked away from it, making his driver perhaps the luckiest cabbie in the history of New York. The driver was awarded the money. 

By now only God and the ghost of De Sapio know exactly how De Sapio ate the loss. Maybe it simply but tragically meant $12,500 less unreported income for him that year. Maybe the money was meant to pay off some political debt, and paying it back now had to involve finding political appointments and no-show jobs for an impressive number of creditors. Or maybe De Sapio had to hock his wife’s jewelry and empty out his bank account. 

We’ll never find out because, unlike the leaky Trump administration, De Sapio and the people around him could, when they wanted to, keep their lips zipped for eternity. (Sometimes he didn't want to. De Sapio evidently had a little side job informing for the FBI. But that's another story.)

I recall that De Sapio’s denial of the money in the taxi prompted  Murray Kempton, a columnist for the then-liberal New York Post, to comment with only a very vague soupçon of satire, that whatever else you might have thought of the Tammany leader, this incident demonstrated that “De Sapio is a real gentleman.”

And so De Sapio was. He may have been something of a crook and conniver, an extorter, and a judicial nomination peddler. But at least he was a crook with class. He would pay dearly to avoid so much as the appearance of impropriety. Hs bearing, his modesty, and his willingness to eschew greed, even when a big bagful of what was perhaps his own money was at stake, mark him with indelible stamp of noblesse oblige.

Class vs. no class

Now, compare De Sapio to Donald and the rest of the Trumps.

Do the Trumps owe you money on your investment for a project — say a gambling casino — that Donald Trump has incompetently blown? You can kiss your money goodbye. The Trump modus operandi is simply to declare bankruptcy and leave investors (or in one case, duped Trump “University” students) holding the bag — a completely empty bag whenever Trump is involved.

Foreign emoluments in violation of the Constitution of the United States? Every time a foreign diplomat stays at a Trump hotel, the Trumps pocket more bucks. He rents space out at a profit to the U.S. Government to contain the Secret Service agents who protect him. Even when he proposes a ban on visitors from Muslim countries, he exempts visitors from Muslim countries in which he owns hotels. Hey, that might be bad for his bottom line. And he has refused to divest himself of his holdings.

All other chief executives in recent history have sold their financial holdings and put their money in a blind trust. But Trump? 

He turns his holdings over to his sons, and promises not to peek. As if he didn’t know what and where the Trump properties are. As if he didn’t know that not putting the screws to a nation where he owns hotels might fatten his greasy bottom line. As if Trump’s new tax “reforms” and his mockery of a healthcare replacement program would not benefit the Trump family richly, while depriving the poor and working people in this nation of  doctors and drugs when they are sick.

It’s not just the corruption,

it’s also the unmitigated greed

The terrible truth is, Trump and his den of nepots and cronies and crazies are not merely corrupt thieves. They are hopelessly greedy thieves, unfettered by even a faint whiff of propriety. It seems that nothing keeps them from reaching with both arms deep into the thick barrel of corruption and moral sludge that is their playground, to scoop up and stuff into their bulging pockets more, and more, and still more wealth for themselves.

We have not seen the end of it, and will not see the end of it until either the Trump administration is voted out of Washington, or they bumble into a nuclear war that wipes all of us off the face of the earth.

Can you imagine someone  trying to hand Donald Trump a big bagful of money, and Trump denying that it was his?

We know we have arrived at a horrible place in history when we get nostalgic for the corruption of Tammany Hall.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

Next year, a White House turkey may pardon himself

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow Americans. In honor of today's holiday, the President of the United States traditionally 

Which twin is the turkey?

pardons two turkeys. 

Presumably, instead of getting their heads sliced off and their chest cavities crammed full of stale bread and spices, they’ll go back to a farm somewhere and gobble happily ever after. Or at least until a big, ominous trailer truck arrives to load up on raw material for the frozen dinner company down the road.

At any rate, the subject of pardons for turkeys got me wondering: Does Donald Trump have a plan to circumvent the law concerning foreign emoluments — not to mention potentially uncountable conflicts of interest — without cooking his own goose?

If Trump goes down the road it seems he wants to travel — keeping his businesses, cutting foreign business deals in the Oval Office, making sure foreign diplomats stay in his hotels, hiding misdeeds behind the privacy of his tax returns, hiring his kids, son-in-law, and maybe even his dog if he can buy one that won’t bite him — how will he get away with his outrageously corrupt behavior?  

And then it occurred to me exactly how he can do it.

It’s simple. The turkey in the Oval Office will simply pardon himself. 

Not to mention that there eventually might be pardons in the offing for all the other foul fowl and free-range birdbrains who suck up to this cluck.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

Bribery arrests? They’re only for the little people.

Public domain art from ClipArt ETC [etc.usf.edu]

Bits and pieces from a  Los Angeles Times story by David G. Savage. It concerns a former Republican (natch!) governor of Virginia, one Bob McDonnell:

McDonnell and his wife were deeply in debt. Jonnie Williams, a free-spending Virginia businessman, offered to improve their "financial situation" if they helped promote his tobacco-based dietary supplement. 

Over two years, he secretly gave the couple more than $175,000 in loans, vacations and gifts, including a New York shopping spree by McDonnell's wife and an engraved Rolex watch for the governor.

[SNIP]

Prosecutors showed evidence that within minutes of speaking to Williams about personal loans, the governor called or emailed aides and state health officials, asking them to come to the governor's mansion to hear more about the dietary supplement. McDonnell used the governor's mansion for a product launch for the new supplement. And he carried a bottle of pills in his pocket and suggested state employees might want to try them.

[SNIP]

McDonnell was charged with bribery and corruption, and a jury convicted him in 2014 on 11 counts. A U.S. appeals court upheld the convictions and said the governor had taken bribes in exchange for "using the power of his office to influence governmental decisions."

But now the good part — good, that is, if you’re either a government official on the take, or a rich individual who wants to buy the law for your own benefit.

McDonnell has appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. He may  lose in the tied-up court now that Justice Scalia is dead. I sincerely hope so. But the sheer gall of his appeal is vomit-worthy. 

Moreover, the very fact that the Roberts Court would entertain such an appeal is worthy of a counter-appeal to God: “Dear Lord, don’t stop at Scalia. Please take Justice Roberts as well.” 

As the LA Times tells it:

"The possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner influence over or access to elected officials" is not evidence of bribery or corruption, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said two years ago in striking down the limits on how much in total a single donor may give to a field of candidates. "Ingratiation and access... are not corruption," he said, quoting from the Citizens United opinion
McDonnell's attorneys have latched on to that legal rationale to argue that doing small favors for big donors is protected under the 1st Amendment .

"Paying for 'access' — the ability to get a call answered or a meeting scheduled — is constitutionally protected and an intrinsic part of our political system," they said in their appeal. "If Gov. McDonnell can be imprisoned for giving routine access to a gift-giver, an official could equally be imprisoned for agreeing to answer a donor's phone call about a policy issue.”

Alas, McDonnell has been sentenced to a piddling two years for what has grown into an effort to subvert not only a bribery law, but the very basis of Democracy, which is that  government is not just for those who can afford to buy it. 

If it were up to me, McDonnell would spend his two years in solitary. Either that, or in a maximum security prison with other major felons, which he is.

And Justices Roberts, Alito, and Thomas would be in cells further down the solitary cell block.

Special thanks to “Comrade Misfit” at the Earthbound Misfit blog for taking note of this issue, which is how it came to my own cranky notice.

United Airlines honchos bail out after corruption charges. What about charges of torturing passengers?

Will his golden parachute open? Stay tuned.

As I write this, the New York Times is reporting that United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek and two of his lieutenants are resigning because of a Federal corruption investigation.

All this evidently has to do with having “improperly sought to influence” officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. You know. The Port Authority. As in "Chris Christie" and the “George Washington Bridge Scandal.”

Just like Chris Christie, who has been known to bully the little people even if they have real grievances, I also believe in hitting a man when he’s down. At least I believe in hitting him if he's a bad man. But I’m not gonna bother with Chris’s corruption-connected political operation just now, because I’m more interested in United Airlines. Last time I flew them, out of Dayton, Ohio, in June 2014, it was a nightmare. I think about it often. And gnash my teeth.

Grounded below the "friendly" skies

Y’see, it rained that day.  Other airlines flying out of Dayton (none, alas, with available space to New York) seemed to have their acts together. Their planes were taking off. There were no lines at their ticket counters. 

But at United, and United alone, there was a line long enough to dance a conga from here to the moon. A single clerk was on duty to make new arrangements for all United’s passengers whose flights had been cancelled due to “weather.” The sun was shining brightly as we waited but hey, you know, weather. Somewhere.

What about calling in extra clerks to deal with the hapless passengers standing in line? The airline had a different idea. Go call 'em yourselves, you feckless passengers.

“You can do this on the phone by calling 1-800-UNITED-1” the clerk screamed at us. Fortunately, I stayed on line while I  tried to call.  I was put on hold, and forced to listen to repetitive blather, because my call was so very important to United. So important, in fact, that by the time I reached the clerk’s desk, perhaps an hour or more later, my ear was sore, my cell phone battery was dead, and a live person still hadn’t picked up the phone on the other end.

“I’d like you to change my ticket to the next available flight to New York,” I told the airport clerk. “My cancelled ticket is to LaGuardia but I’ll take any airport in the New York area. I’ll even go to Philadelphia.”

Flights for stranded passengers?
We don't got no stinking flights.

I can put you on a flight to New York at 5:10  p.m. tomorrow,” the clerk said, unsympathetically. “Everything’s booked until then.”

“That’s more than 24 hours from now!” I said.

“That’s what’s available,” said the clerk, in her best take-it-or-leave-it voice. 

“What am I supposed to do, sleep on the airport floor?” I asked her.

“You can go over to that desk,” (she pointed) “and find a local hotel.”

“Will United pay for it?” I asked.

“No.”

Screwing passengers is never
having to say you're sorry

So I spent the night at a nearby Clarion, paid for my bed, my meal, and my back-and-forth transportation between the airport and the hotel. The next day, when I got to the airport, nobody even said sorry. But they did charge me extra for my baggage.

I don’t have to tell you about in-flight sardine can conditions.

So when I hear that United’s top officers may be as corrupt as the rotting corpse of Boss Tweed, I am not moved to pity. Nor am I moved toward giving them the benefit of the doubt. 

You bastards are bailing out? My only hope is that your golden parachutes fail to open.

Taking hostages: ISIS, Kim Jong-un, Norman Seabrook and Viral Bad Behavior

Seabrook – you'd better
read about him below

Dear Leader Kim fattens while his people starve

Mr.Charm

Let’s start with the firm premise that I have no use for any of the entities mentioned in the headline or depicted above. Each, in his own way, represents something disgraceful about the human race. 

But what I’ve noticed lately is that vile behavior is spreading like a virus, thanks to guys like these.

I don’t need to explain much about ISIS, the organization whose trademark outrage, among its many outrages, is capturing innocent strangers and cutting off their heads.

Nor do I have to explain Kim Jong-un, the fat North Korean dictator in a land of starving people. He’s the one who just made a name for himself by bringing Sony to its knees for daring to make a film that satirized him. In the course of it he threatened the lives of any person who dares – dares! – to see the movie. He’s threatening violence in the style of 9-11. 

The silence from Congress is deafening. Our lawmakers seem terrified to so much as speak a word against him. He may be the most powerful influence on Congress since the NRA. Sometimes I wonder if he has bought as many legislators as the NRA.

But unless you live in New York – in fact,  even if you live in New York but don’t read the papers closely, Norman Seabrook’s name may leave you scratching your head. Norman who?

Seabrook is head of something called COBA, a renegade union called the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, and although his photograph makes him look affable enough, he is your worst nightmare. His sociopathic excuse for a labor union has demonstrated that he will shut down the city’s courts and criminal justice system if anyone dares challenge the brutality of the prison guards who form his union’s membership.

 They beat up teen-agers and allow or encourage others to do the same. They continence prison rape and sodomy and have been known to participate in it themselves. They smuggle contraband in to prisoners who pay off. They allow prisoners to bake to death. And then they lie, in incident after incident, to cover up the true facts.

And should anyone dare to bring individual officers up on charges, the union shuts down the courts by preventing the transport of prisoners from the Riker’s Island prison complex in the East River to any of the city’s courtrooms. The New York Times reports:

Last year, the same union effectively shut down the court system in the city for a day, an exercise in a different kind of power. Led by Norman Seabrook, the president of the union, correction officers claimed every single bus for transporting prisoners was unfit to drive or could not be moved. What were they up to? Well, the shutdown took place on the day a man being held at Rikers Island was supposed to be delivered to the Bronx courthouse to testify at the trial of two correction officers accused of assaulting him. The prisoner, and 750 other people due in courts throughout the city, were not able to go.

Each time brutal or justice-evading tactics are used – whether by ISIS, tinpot dictators, a corruption-tolerating union chief who is giving the many good unions a bad name, another stake is driven into the heart of civil society.

It’s all hostage-taking, whether you’re ISIS and you behead them, or you’re COBA and you take the entire criminal justice system hostage while you beat prisoners to death, some of them mere kids.

Hey, if they can get away with it, then why not me or my organization, too? And so brutal, thuggish, corrupt bad behavior grows viral.

Norman Seabrook is no better than Kim Jong-un, or the ISIS murderers. If he and his people get away with it, there will be another group perpetrating a new group of outrages, for sure.

A bill, egged on by Seabrook and Coba,  is coming before New York State Governor Cuomo. It will move the venue for cases brought against out-of-control brutal prison guards to Queens, from the historic and legal venue of The Bronx, where at least the distract attorney seems to have a spine. The question is, will Governor Cuomo also have spine – or at least spine enough to veto the bill? 

Or will he let the unions get away with it because they’re big campaign contributors – having “donated” $300,000 to state elected officials from both parties.

The New York Times reports:

The two prosecutors signed a letter stating their vigorous opposition to the bill’s purpose and language. 

“Remarkably, in one short sentence, this bill manages to be ambiguous as to its meaning, potentially unconstitutional and at odds with the surrounding provisions of Criminal Procedure Law,” they wrote. 

The state district attorneys association is opposed to it; the Legal Aid Society is opposed; Mayor Bill de Blasio is opposed; so is the New York Civil Liberties Union. 

“It’s rare that you’ll see those individuals and groups coming together on one side of an issue,” Mr. Brown said. 

Governor Cuomo’s office did not reply to a question about his intentions.

Eh, Governor Cuomo?

Is New Jersey’s Governor Christie a corrupt crook? A New York Times expose might lead you to think so.

The New York Times this morning reports an alarming story of systemic corruption in the Hunterdon County, New Jersey sheriff’s office, with a trail leading straight to the New Jersey Attorney General and other appointees of Governor Chris Christie.

I’m not going to recapitulate the whole tangled spider’s web of sleazy and corrupt interlocking acts by Christie appointees. Just go here and read the lengthy and very well-reported New York Times horror story by Michael Powell.

But I can’t resist a few highlights:

• A Hunterdon County Grand Jury indicts a  Christie-appointed sheriff on 43 counts of what comes down to downright abuse of power worthy of a police state. So what happens?

• The state takes over the county prosecutor’s office and fires three veteran prosecutors

• A deputy state attorney general walks into a state court and asks that the case be dismissed, insisting that the case was full of “legal and factual deficiencies,” but enumerating not one of them. Does the judge ask the deputy attorney general what the heck he's talking about, or for evidence of those "deficiencies?" Nah! The judge simply dismisses the case.

• When one of the dismissed prosecutors sues, “claiming that the attorney general killed the indictment to protect prominent supporters of the governor,” the records of the indictment get spirited away to the state capital, where the state has now has them hidden while it resists and appeals court orders to release them.

There’s more. Powell learned of so called “law enforcement” officials doing the backgrounds checks on…themselves! There were threats from law enforcement against someone whose website reported on the matter. Police IDs get issued to friendly campaign contributors. Explanations from the attorney general’s spokesman about what’s going on and why change with the wind.

I urge you to read this, and keep in mind that Governor Christie is a potential Republican candidate for president. Given his police state tactics in New Jersey, that’s not just worrisome. It’s terrifying.

Shoot the watchdog – and other political stuff that will either make your head explode or tickle your fancy

So you’ll noticed that I haven’t posted for about a week. Sorry. I open the newspaper, or turn on the TV news, and it’s the same-old same-old.

Until this morning that is. Suddenly I found a number of items ­­– well, three of them anyway – that may not merit a full post on this blog, but that are certainly worth calling to your attention.

Let’s start with shooting the watchdog

Suppose there’s a great government agency. Or suppose, if you don’t believe in such things as great government agencies, that there’s one highly exceptional government agency that miraculously is doing its job. And that job has been helping millions of Americans. How?

It has saved thousands of home buyers from predatory lenders. It has sued and won in a settlement $85 million from a credit card company that would rather fork over the $85 million than go to court over its discriminatory marketing and billing practices.

It has also launched an investigation into the way banks, in collusion with some colleges and universities, rip off college students and get vulnerable kids skewered on a financial hook for a lifetime, or at least a few decades, of unnecessary debt.

In other words, you’ve got a government watch dog that not only barks, but also bites the bad guys. What would you do with this dog?

Well, many of the political prostitutes who call themselves Republican senators and congressman are trying to shoot the dog, of course, before it ruins the political corruption business. Further details here.

To the left march! With laughter

Like most progressive bloggers, when I read the news for more than ten minutes at a time, my head starts to explode with rage. But every so often, a blogger comes along who can get you, well, to use the language of text-a-holics, ROTF!

Such a blogger is Tom Degan. I have no idea why I never came across him the blogosphere before. But I can tell you, I’ll be reading him from now on. And I've posted a link to  his hilarious rage on my own blog.

Just to give you a sample, here’s what Deegan says about himself in his biographical notes:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: TOM DEGAN is a traitor to this beautiful and bountiful nation of ours. Not only that, he is a disgrace to the flag that all real Americans honor and revere. It is a sad thing to realize that he walks among us, with the same rights granted to decent people everywhere. Here is how utterly contemptible he is - He wrote what you are now reading. He is trying to make you believe that it is being written by a third party. How cruel! He is just being a smug, elitist liberal! Tom Degan has no shame. I take back what I said. "Contemptible" is too kind a word for me - I MEAN "HIM". 

Run over here and read him.

“I don’t know much about science

but I know what I like”

Introducing the case of another ignorant school teacher, (by law that ought to be an oxymoron) this particular school teacher in Indiana, Her name is Diana Medley, and Ms. Medley wants to ban gay kids from the high school prom because she, er, doesn’t “agree” with homosexuality.”Agree?”

Reports the Crooks and Liars blog: 

"I don't believe they were born that way," she opined. "I think life circumstances made them choose that. I think God made everybody equal...  

Wait a second, lady. Just wait a second. This isn’t a matter of opinion. It doesn’t matter what you think, or what I think. This is a matter of science and the interplay between endocrinology and genetics. I know this is hard, lady, but let me simplify this for you. The latest science is that gay kids were wired that way by a combination of the hormones in their mothers’ wombs and genetics that they didn’t ask for. They were just handed the dang things and told by nature to go be gay and have a life. 

On the other hand, Ms. Midley, one might come to the conclusion that you were wired for airhead – unless, of course, you chose airhead.

Perfidy at Antioch: tales of university trustees and senior staff lying, double-dealing, and committing institutional sabotage continue emerging.

If you’ll forgive an old (but apt) cliché, studying the reasons why Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio has in effect ceased to exist is like peeling an onion.

Antioch, as you may recall from an earlier post here, is a 157 years old college controlled by a “university” of the same name – although the university facilities consist of a bunch of second rate college continuation and adult education schools, some offering a few graduate courses.

These satellite “colleges” have no tenured faculty, no residential campuses, and sometimes offer courses of quality one well might question. (See the item on the Seattle campus’ science lab, way down below.)

An ongoing horror story

Each time I receive an e-mail from enraged college alumni – about the university trustees’ rejection of an attempt to save the college by an alumni group called the Antioch College Continuation Corporation (ACCC) – I go digging a bit more. And each time, I find myself peeling off more layers from the onion. It’s an ongoing horror story and at the center of it, if anyone ever gets to the center, you may find a plot as tangled and crooked as the Watergate scandal.

Needed, an ambitious
Ohio attorney general

It’s the kind of case that an ambitious state attorney general – if Ohio has one ambitious enough – might fruitfully explore to see if members of the Trustees and the parent Antioch University chancellor’s staff have been up to shenanigans that might violate state laws involving charitable trusts.

At any rate, here are some shockers I’ve stumbled across this week:

From the Yellow Springs News, the local weekly that finally seems to have its dander up:

Had the negotiating team, led by Chancellor Toni Murdock, wanted an agreement with the ACCC, it would not have started out asking the outrageous price of $54 million for the college, then stalling almost a month before lowering that price while every passing day was critical to the college’s ability to stay open. Had the university negotiators wanted the college to live, they would not have included the demand that the college pay the university $22 million for the college’s own $22 million endowment.

What’s clear is that the university negotiators showed no interest in reaching an agreement that would benefit both the college and the university. Bottom line, they wanted cash. And now it’s reasonable to assume that should the college close, the university leaders will sell off its assets to the highest bidder.

Trustee asset raids worthy
of Wall Street barbarians

Turns out the University wanted to make a grab for assets created at and by the college. The $22 million endowment was only part of it. The University also demanded that it keep WYSO, the college radio station whose license could be sold for a small fortune, and Antioch Education Abroad, another potential money maker. Both WYSO and the education abroad program were begun before there ever was a university.

From Inside Higher Education:

And in an additional complication, university officials said over the weekend that if another buyer for the college emerged — willing to pay for the college with cash immediately and willing to let the university keep Antioch’s NPR stations — a sale was still possible. This prompted a mock ad on Craigslist that said: “Antioch College no longer holds any substantial meaning or value to its Board of Trustees, beyond what it can be sold for on the open market. Offers by alumni groups promising to operate the college in a continuous manner, beholden to its traditional values of openness and academic freedom are particularly loathsome. Real Estate developers with proven military-industrial success are preferred. Contact the Board of Trustees at their Corporate Headquarters in Yellow Springs for more info.”

Also from the same article:

A statement from the university said that negotiations fell apart because the alumni group, which offered to buy the college for $12.2 million, was able to provide only $6 million in cash immediately, and wanted to pay off the remaining sum over the next few years. The lack of security made the deal impossible for the board to accept because the university’s creditors wouldn’t have liked it, said the statement. (At least one trustee, however, reported that there was never a formal vote on the matter and that some trustees might well have accepted the condition.) The statement went on to pledge support for the revival of the college at some point in the future.

Leaders of the Antioch College Continuation Corporation disputed the board’s statement. Eric Bates, co-chair of the group, called the board’s statement “mostly incorrect” and said that he was “shocked” by it. Specifically, he said that his group had offered to use the physical campus of the college to back up its financial pledges, so that in fact the alumni had offered something of far more value than the funds it would have still owed the university.

Borgersen [One of the people trying to keep the college open] said [of the trustees] …“They are trying to build a University of Phoenix clone out of the ashes of Antioch College and we will not let that happen.

From another source comes the news that Tulisse (“Toni”) Murdoch, the Chancellor of Antioch University, received a campus-wide vote of no confidence from the college community last year.

The referendums stated Murdock has “violated long-standing Antioch College values, community standards, and the Civil Liberties Code.” This community-wide vote of no confidence in Chancellor Murdock unifies the two pre-existing votes of no confidence in the Chancellor by Antioch College faculty and union staff. The College’s advisory body to the President, Adcil, was concerned and frustrated with the lack of consultation leading to the departure of President Steve Lawry. The community also endorsed a second referendum that advocates independence from the Antioch University system, including a separate Board of Trustees. This referendum posits that Antioch College can maintain operations beyond the 2007-2008 academic year by attaining autonomy and with the support of the College Alumni Board

And if you think Tulisse Murdoch’s reign is better on other “University” campuses, find the full text of this post to an article about Antioch from an anonymous faculty wife on the University’s Seattle campus. (You'll have to scroll down once you reach the linked article to find it.)

The science laboratory on the Seattle campus is a 3’by 5’ former clothes closet. A shelf has been installed, upon this shelf sets two (2) very, very cheap (toy store) microscopes. Yes, folks that is a science lab in Antioch terms. Any curriculum to accompany this facility? What do you think?

And so I’m waiting, Mr. Ohio Attorney General. Please bring in your charitable trust experts, your forensic accountants, a couple of hard-nosed assistant DAs and lots and lots of subpoena forms. With any luck, we may see some trustees and university administrators performing a classic dance:

The Perp Walk.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush does a little business with a New York bank. Next thing you know, Florida taxpayers are holding the bag for billions.

Corruption, thy name is Bush! This story has the makings of another Carl Hiaasen novel. All it still needs is a sexy blonde and a fisherman who finds his bone-fishing grounds occupied by a politician fellating a banker.

Remarkably, it appeared here on Bloomberg.com.

The nub of it

Here are a few choice excerpts from the Bloomberg News story:

Jeb Bush, who incorporated Jeb Bush & Associates in February 2007, a month after completing his second term [as Governor], had been hired as a consultant to Lehman Brothers in June. Bush is the brother of President George W. Bush.

`Do Something Quickly'

In November, school districts and local agencies that kept their cash in the state pool rushed to withdraw $12 billion, or 46 percent, of the money in the fund. On Nov. 29, the state froze the fund to stop all withdrawals. ``If we don't do something quickly, we're not going to have an investment pool,'' [Carl] Stipanovich [executive director of the state board of administration] told the board that day.

Until November, the Florida pool was the largest public money market fund in the U.S. It held cash for about 1,000 school districts, towns and local agencies in Florida.

Stipanovich resigned on Dec. 4. He declined to comment.

And furthermore:

What Stipanovich, 58, hadn't told his boss, Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, was that Lehman Brothers was the same firm that had sold the state fund $842 million of mortgage- backed debt in July and August. Those securities defaulted within four months, and totaled more failing debt than any other bank sold the state, Florida records show. `

`At the time, I never knew it was Lehman Brothers that actually sold us these investments,'' Sink says.

Florida CFO Sink is riled up about more than Stipanovich. She says JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Lehman Brothers were offloading tainted debt on Florida and other states at a time when those assets were plummeting in value.

So now, if you’re still following all this:

Ex-governor Bush, the President's brother with deep political ties in Florida, sets up a consulting business. Lehman becomes his client. Next thing you know, the taxpayers are stuck with a bunch of nearly worthless paper from Lehman. The public is screwed.

You don’t suppose George Bush’s new U.S. Attorney General appointee, Michael Mukasey, will bring corruption charges, against Jeb, do you?

Nah, I don’t think so either.

New York Senator Charles Schumer (Democrat), who rammed Mukasey’s approval through the senate, please take note. After all, the AG is now your boy.