{"id":47376,"date":"2014-09-24T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2014-09-24T17:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=47376"},"modified":"2014-09-24T11:48:44","modified_gmt":"2014-09-24T16:48:44","slug":"minneapolis-real-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=47376","title":{"rendered":"Minneapolis’ Real Scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Outrage is brewing over the scandal involving “Community Action”, a Minneapolis “non-profit” whose director, Bill Davis, spent a boatload of taxpayer money on living the high life, according to an audit<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yep, DFL figures are\u00a0involved in the scandals up to their eyeballs<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[5th CD Representative and DFLer Keith] Ellison, [Senate Deputy Majority Leader Jeff] Hayden, [Minneapolis City Council president and DFLer Barbara] Johnson and City Council Member Robert Lilligren were on the board during the time covered by the audit. All have said they appointed alternates and did not regularly attend meetings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Passing the buck to your patsy.\u00a0 Not exactly a profile in courage…<\/p>\n

…or, I suspect, much of a defense.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The GOP has filed an ethics complaint against Hayden<\/a>, and Ellison’s GOP challenger Doug Daggett has got Ellison pretty well dialed in<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But here’s the real scandal;\u00a0 this is inevitable<\/em> in a one-party city like Minneapolis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maintaining one-party control in a place like Minneapolis (or Saint Paul, which has its own single-party patronage scandal <\/a>brewing) requires paying off a lot of stakeholders from the dominant political class – in both the Twin Cities’ cases, that’s the DFL.<\/p>\n

There are only so many patronage jobs available for the giving out in <\/em>city government.\u00a0 Likewise, the city school district can only absorb so many petty administrators and\u00a0pay for so many “consultants”.<\/p>\n

So the “non-profit sector”\u00a0serves as a patronage factory for\u00a0people in the dominant political class.\u00a0 While many non-profits exist to do good things, many others exist to channel money from the government run by the party in power to the people who help get and keep it elected.<\/p>\n

Picking examples of corruption in a one-party city like Minneapolis – like its intellectual kin in Detroit, Camden, New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington DC and so many more – is like playing whack-a-mole.\u00a0 Until the people of Minneapolis decide they need the accountability that a multi-party government can (with a little elbow grease) bring, not to mention an adversarial (as opposed to dutiful) media?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meet the new scandal, same as the old scandal.\u00a0 And the next scandal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Outrage is brewing over the scandal involving “Community Action”, a Minneapolis “non-profit” whose director, Bill Davis, spent a boatload of taxpayer money on living the high life, according to an audit.\u00a0 And yep, DFL figures are\u00a0involved in the scandals up to their eyeballs: [5th CD Representative and DFLer Keith] Ellison, [Senate Deputy Majority Leader Jeff] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308,17,255],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entitled-america","category-minneapolis","category-the-racket"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47376"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47382,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47376\/revisions\/47382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}