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.
And yep, DFL figures are involved in the scandals up to their eyeballs:
[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.
Passing the buck to your patsy. Not exactly a profile in courage…
…or, I suspect, much of a defense.
The GOP has filed an ethics complaint against Hayden, and Ellison’s GOP challenger Doug Daggett has got Ellison pretty well dialed in.
But here’s the real scandal; this is inevitable in a one-party city like Minneapolis.
Maintaining one-party control in a place like Minneapolis (or Saint Paul, which has its own single-party patronage scandal brewing) requires paying off a lot of stakeholders from the dominant political class – in both the Twin Cities’ cases, that’s the DFL.
There are only so many patronage jobs available for the giving out in city government. Likewise, the city school district can only absorb so many petty administrators and pay for so many “consultants”.
So the “non-profit sector” serves as a patronage factory for people in the dominant political class. 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.
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. 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?
Meet the new scandal, same as the old scandal. And the next scandal.
About a year ago, there was an article in the St Paul PP about a DFL leader who died. The story said she was the one who gave the blessing to people who wanted to run for office in St Paul.
So a party activist got to pick which other party activists were able to run for office. No one else was allowed to. There are about 100 things wrong with that.
I know it gets old saying this, but the above story….change Ellison to Bachmann and liberal group to a conservative group….imagine who MSM would report this story differently.
OK, so Hakim X and a couple of others completely blow off their responsibilities as members of the board of directors, ignoring huge financial improprieties, and this excuses them exactly why?
Honestly, it’s like a child gets hurt, and the parents’ excuse is “well, I wasn’t taking care of them.” Well, obviously.
Gosh! Imagine what would happen if one of these greasy, one-party-town politicians were elected president!
Passing the buck to your patsy. Not exactly a profile in courage…
Didn’t the Demonrats get upset when Enron tried this and demand that the corporate veil be pierced and the board personally sued? Doesn’t Ellison often berate boards for not behaving in the community interest? His own standards don’t apply to Ellison, I guess.
On U&AE this week, they talked about this and ridiculed the response by their mouthpiece that said “they were disturbed by the allegations”, rightly pointing out that this meant they were really disturbed that their minion got caught.
Congressman-for-life (and future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court) Ellison thanks you for your concern. Now bugger off.
And the IRS was putting Tea Party groups through the wringer in order to get 501(c)(3) status. Lois Lerner should have been auditing this organization.
The most reverend Reginald Bacon would heartily approve of and support such an organization … for a small piece of the action of course …