Matt Yglesias

Dirty Jersey

(adapted by right from cc photo by TheTruthAbout)

Illinois and Louisiana have been making most of the recent headlines, but New Jersey is renewing its claim to fame as a land of political corruption. Federal agents swept up “about 30 people including several mayors, in a federal investigation into alleged public corruption and a high-volume, international money-laundering conspiracy.” But there’s more!

The probe also involves the trafficking of body parts, according to a person familiar with the matter. One of the individuals who was arrested Thursday morning is an alleged organ dealer, this person said.

According to a statement released by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Newark, the arrests related to the public-corruption probe included Peter Cammarano III, the newly elected Democratic mayor of Hoboken; Dennis Elwell, mayor of Secaucus, also a Democrat; state Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt, a Republican; and Democrat Leona Beldini, the deputy mayor of Jersey City.

Mostly just funny.

Bush Joins the Ranks of the Unemployed

In 2007, George W. Bush spoke of a desire to “replenish the ol’ coffers” with post-presidential speaking engagements. Daniel Gross has an appealing theory indicating that this won’t work:

For many of President Bush’s critics, the fact that he is now seeking work in the worst job market in a generation is poetic justice. As Bush noted in his farewell press conference, he is too much of a Type A for “the big straw hat and Hawaiian shirt, sitting on some beach.” (He might want to reconsider: Thanks to the recession, tropical resorts are running great promotions.)

Given recent history, Bush probably expects to profit from ex-presidency. Bill Clinton reported income of more than $90 million from 2000-07. But Bush is very unlikely to earn Clintonian numbers. Ex-presidents peddle image, presence, and experience. In Bush’s case, each is tarnished. To aggravate matters, many of the industries in which ex-presidents make easy money are a) doing poorly, and b) based in the Washington-Boston corridor where Bush hostility runs deep.

I think this is probably wrong and at the end of the day Bush’s unpopularity will probably have only a mild negative impact on his future earnings. For one thing, itt’s a mistake to try to generalize about which industries are the ones “in which ex-presidents make easy money.” Bush’s actions in office should have earned him the undying loyalty of the core GOP business base in the oil, coal, pharmaceutical, defense contracting, and agribusiness industries. It’s true that given the recession these firms may not be able to be as generous as they would in other times. But by the same token, their continued profitability depends heavily on their ability to convince today’s politicians that loyal friends of industry will be taken care of. If Bush really wants money, the money will be found.

The Truth About Corruption

Lee Sigelman and John Sides team up to construct a graph plotting the “total number of public corruption convictions from 1997 to 2006 per 100,000 residents.”

As we can see here clearly, Illinois, though more corrupt than average, isn’t close to the top. Louisiana is a lot more corrupt than Mississippi which is a lot more corrupt than Kentucky which is substantially more corrupt than Alabama. After Alabama things get closer packed.

The Fitzgerald Factor

People talk about political corruption in Illinois as being unusually bad. And perhaps it is. But part of the story in Illinois has been that the local US Attorney is unusually good. And that itself was part of a weird confluence of circumstances. The tradition in the United States is to treat US Attorney jobs as a kind of patronage appointment. Basically, under a Republican administration states that have a Republican Senator have their US Attorneys picked by the local Senator or Senators. And under a Democratic administration it’s the Democratic Senators. In 2001, we had a Republican President and there was a Republican Senator from Illinois, Peter Fitzgerald. If Fitzgerald were doing his job in the usual way, he would have picked a lawyer who was somewhat respected and also tied into the local party machine. The kind of guy who wouldn’t launch a major corruption investigation of the incumbent Republican governor.

Instead, Fitzgerald insisted on appointing an out-of-state professional prosecutor from New York named Patrick Fitzgerald who had no ties to the GOP or Illinois or especially the Illinois GOP. Senator Fitzgerald was under no particular pressure to do this. In fact, he was under pressure from within his own party to do the reverse. But he went with the other Fitzgerald, and then he decided not to run for re-election and cited the lack of support from his own party as one of the reasons. That lack of support was especially bad for Senator Fitzgerald since on the issue he was a pretty hard-core conservative.

A ton of consequential things have sprung out from Fitzgerald’s decision to bring in Fitzgerald for basically quirky reasons. But it’s a reminder, I think, that the usual way of doing these appointments is pretty inadequate. Much better to look for serious professionals and see what kinds of corruption turn up elsewhere.

McCaffrey Background

It seems that Sharon Weinberger of Wired’s Danger Room reported on some of the information that forms part of the background of yesterday’s New York Times blockbuster on Barry McCaffrey. She was looking specifically at the case of a company called Defense Solutions here and here and here back in July.

Fun With Tax Giveaways

Amit Paley reports for The Washington Post on a staggering tale of an illegal windfall for banks inserted into the $700 billion rescue package by the Treasury Department. “Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no,” George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, told Paley. “They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks.”

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration’s request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.

But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.

The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Cell Tower

It’s still the case that my new house gets lousy AT&T service. I’d like to get a special tower set up only for my benefit. But I can’t get it. It seems, though, that John McCain can. Despite his campaign’s denials, and despite Verizon’s denials, it’s increasingly clear that Verizon did in fact try quite hard to install a permanent tower on the McCain ranch at the request of Cindy McCain. Meanwhile, McCain is the top Senator on the committee that regulates Verizon. It looks pretty corrupt to me.

UPDATE: A little vintage McCain:

“The appearance of it was wrong,” McCain said. “It’s a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

Of course these days McCain denies he did anything wrong related to the Keating 5.

Customer Service

The AT&T signal quality inside the Flophouse is deplorable and the situation at my new place is, if anything, even worse. Too bad I don’t chair the committee that regulates telecom firms, if I did I might be able to get them to install a special cell tower just for me.

Change I Can Believe IN

The McCain-Palin plan to get corruption out of the headlines: shut down the investigations.