Arthur The encouragement of a lack of imagination and public sloth. Below is an article that relates to the establishment, now what about the handmaidens? Do they escape being Mackerals in the Moonlight or are they just creeps? Too personally compromised to imagine and too addicted to the security of numbers to act? Have you ever noticed how so many people complain about education then cut the teacher's salaries? What do you think? Are they telling the truth or are they just covering their asses as they eleminate anyone understanding how compromised they really are?
Ray Evans Harrell ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Arthur you said: Many economists have come up with ideas. You should realize that economists in government and business are the handmaidens of the establishment. Academics are more and more in the same situation (the world of the consultant!!) Every once in a while someone comes up with an idea, and to the extent that it threatens existing distributions of income and power it is either not listened to, taken seriously or denounced. Change will have to come from outside. Some sort of political change which enables the consideration of new ways of looking the economy. Economists will then rush forward to justify, with models and mathematics the new agenda. Sad to say and sorry to say this, but seems to be the case. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - September 30, 2002 The Paradox of Corrupt Yet Effective Leadership By ALAN EHRENHALT ASHINGTON Every so often in American politics, we come upon an ethical problem more delicate and more depressing than the existence of outright evil. It is the problem of mackerels in the moonlight. John Randolph, the eccentric Virginia aristocrat, invented this phrase in the 1820's and used it against at least two of his Congressional colleagues. Henry Clay, he complained, was so brilliant, so capable and yet so corrupt that, "like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight, he both shines and stinks." The phrase has lived on not only because of its cleverness, but because it defines a moral ambiguity most of us find very hard to understand. We look for heroes to represent us, although we rarely find them. We take a certain perverse pleasure in unmasking hypocrites and dispatching blowhards who fail to deliver on their promises. The leaders we have trouble dealing with are those of obvious talent and genuine achievement who turn out to have displayed appalling ethical insensitivity - or worse. The past few months, for some reason, have produced a bumper crop of mackerels. Perhaps the prize specimen is Vincent A. (Buddy) Cianci Jr., the mayor of Providence, R.I., who was convicted last summer of conspiring to solicit bribes for city contracts and was sentenced to five years and four months in prison. It wasn't the mayor's first humiliation in court: During a previous term, in 1984, Mr. Cianci was given a five-year suspended sentence for attacking his estranged wife's lover with a fireplace log. In between those two convictions, however, Mr. Cianci did something truly remarkable, something certain to outlast him. He transformed Providence from a grimy industrial backwater into the liveliest, most appealing city in New England, a center of art and music, restaurants and thriving neighborhoods, and a busy downtown with a seductive human-scale charm. The difficulty of coming to terms with such a mayor was evident in the strikingly ambiguous things constituents said in the days following Mr. Cianci's disgrace. One woman expressed it in a few words of elegant paradox: "I wish he'd get away with it." The same problem presented itself in a different way earlier this month in Kentucky, where Gov. Paul E. Patton stands accused of demanding state assistance for a nursing home operator who was his mistress, then having her investigated once the affair ended. After denying the relationship at first, Mr. Patton admitted he had lied. He did not admit misusing the powers of his office, but at least one other state official insisted he had. Paul Patton is no Buddy Cianci - he lacks the flamboyance - but he is like him in one way: He has been a genuine leader, arguably one of the most impressive American governors of recent times. Mr. Patton brought a traditionally sluggish state government into the 21st century in a whole host of fields - education, economic development, information technology - often without attracting or seeking much attention for it. What is one to think about a public servant of such quality who gets into this kind of trouble? As in Mr. Cianci's case, the vast majority of citizens in Kentucky are not saying he was framed or that he's getting what he deserves. They are saying something morally far more confusing, like the truck driver in the governor's home county who declared: "I trust him because I did not catch him in my house." But of all the moonlight mackerel cases of 2002, the most bizarre is that of George Ryan, the governor of Illinois, who is leaving office after one term, a pariah to most of the voters of his state and to the politicians of his own party, who buy television time just to denounce him as an unethical scoundrel. It is a bizarre case because Mr. Ryan has not only been a highly capable governor, but also a courageous one. Sickened by the inconsistencies he saw in his state's administration of the death penalty, he declared a moratorium on executions that generated a nationwide movement to re-examine the entire capital punishment issue. Convinced that politicians could re-examine United States policy toward Cuba without sacrificing their careers, he traveled to Havana in 1999 with $1 million worth of medical supplies, creating momentum that led to federal relaxation of trade restrictions a year later. Urged by his party to use up the state's late-1990's budget surplus by cutting taxes, he opted instead to spend the money on a statewide capital improvement program that was politically risky but decades overdue. But while all this was going on, voters were gradually learning the details of an appalling scandal. During Mr. Ryan's eight years as Illinois secretary of state, before his election as governor, employees in his agency routinely sold trucking licenses to unqualified applicants in exchange for bribes, then donated some of the money - at least $180,000 of it, prosecutors discovered - to Mr. Ryan's campaign fund. One driver who bought a fraudulent license for $800 ended up killing six children on a Wisconsin highway. Mr. Ryan says he never knew about the bribes and has not faced prosecution, but it hardly matters; whether complicit or ignorant, he was grossly derelict in his duties as a public servant. All of these facts have been public knowledge in Illinois for several years now, and they explain why Mr. Ryan will be going home in disgrace in January, perhaps the only governor in American history to find himself positioned halfway between a Nobel Peace Prize and federal indictment. What the facts do not fully explain is how something like this could happen - how a public official could be so honorable and so obtuse at the same time. No doubt part of the problem was political inertia. When Mr. Ryan became secretary of state, motor vehicle licensing in Illinois had been notorious for decades. Changing it would have required a huge investment of energy and political capital - more of an investment, for example, than changing policy toward Cuba. One can easily imagine an ambitious politician choosing to leave the slimy process just as it was, and focus on larger issues - with ultimately tragic results for the politician himself. At a deeper level, though, today's moonlight mackerels are political leaders who convince themselves they can compartmentalize their lives and careers, setting the embarrassing parts aside in private containers where they need not contaminate acts of genuine idealism and tangible achievement. This may have been possible once; it was, despite occasional insults, for Henry Clay, and it was still possible in the time of John F. Kennedy. But it is a dangerous trick to attempt in the 21st century. Eventually it will come out. Too many reporters, prosecutors and bureaucratic whistleblowers are working overtime to uncover it. There are very few airtight compartments left in American public life. This is a good thing in that it will discourage quite a few elected officials in the next generation from mischief they might otherwise have been tempted to risk. It is a bad thing in that it destroys or fatally weakens political leaders whose downfall ultimately benefits no one. Buddy Cianci, Paul Patton and George Ryan are among those leaders. Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, is author of ``The Lost City.''
