Why corruption matters – 48 hills

Public corruption is making headlines across the country as New York City Mayor Eric Adams is now facing bribery charges, California Attorney General Rob Bonta faces questions about his ties to a biodiesel company run by a man accused of financial crimes, and the latest city hall report, the scandal is growing.

Adams currently maintains his innocence and says he will not resign. Bonta says everything was clear.

Breed, in an unusual statement, said during the last debate that the city employs 34,000 workers, “and sometimes we have problems with some of them.” (Those in prison who faced prison or were forced to resign were mainly high-level department heads who reported to her and who were her close friends.)

All this should outrage voters, although we do not yet know how the scandals at the City Hall will affect the mayor’s candidacy.

(This could greatly help Proposal C, Sup. Aaron Peskin’s solution calling on the inspector general to crack down on corruption.)

I feel sad too.

Sad because the Dreamkeeper Initiative was a good idea, a way (initially) to divert money from the police to organizations helping the black community. (Breed quickly withdrew from this position and now complains that higher-ups do not adequately fund the police.) The money, like the lot of money the city gives to nonprofits, has done a lot of good.

Sad, because it gives Mark Farrell and Daniel Lurie more grounds to attack San Francisco’s solid and valuable nonprofit infrastructure that supports a huge number of ground services for the city’s most vulnerable residents.

Sad because all of this undermines public faith in government – ​​and without public faith in government, we as a society cannot even begin to address the existential crises of climate change and economic inequality.

I know everyone has to do their part, but we won’t solve climate change taking shorter showers and buying electric cars. This requires massive concerted action – government action – to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at local, state, national and global scales.

Solving the economic inequality that is the root cause of the housing crisis, homelessness and the decimation of the middle class, as well as the political anger that has sparked terrifying right-wing populism, can only be solved by raising taxes on the very rich.

And if people think the government is corrupt, they won’t want tax increases (even though most of us will never pay higher taxes if we create a progressive system) and they won’t trust new regulations.

I had a really moving moment many years ago when Willie Brown was mayor of San Francisco and I was interviewing a fairly progressive assessor candidate who had some good ideas for bringing more money to the city.

But he told me he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it “because Willie Brown would just waste it on his cronies and corruption.”

This narrative is terrible considering everything progress cares about.

I know government will never be perfect. When I served on the board of trustees of my alma mater, Wesleyan University, I complained that tuition was rising due to administrative waste. The president told me, “There is no such thing as a $25 million university budget without waste. “And there is no such thing as a $25 million university budget that is missing things that should be in it.”

You can’t run a $14 billion city without waste, mismanagement and expenses that shouldn’t have happened.

But what can be prevented is the culture of systemic, low-level corruption that plagued this city under Brown, Gavin Newsom, Ed Lee and Breed, who encouraged or tolerated this kind of behavior, gave jobs to friends (and then failed to even hold them to reasonable standards), and opposed any serious omissions.

Brown famously never used emaill (“e” in email stands for proof”). Mayor Ed Lee has developed a broad record deletion policy. Breed is now deleting, perhaps illegally, text messages that could give the public insight into what he is doing behind the scenes. Her hand-picked city attorney, David Chiu, allows this to happen (a previous employee of that office, Dennis Herrera, made it clear to local officials that text messages from a personal phone used for public purposes are a public record).

Former Human Rights Commission director Sheryl Davis, who resigned, complained about red tape making it difficult for nonprofits to literally save lives. I see.

I also understand that all the mayoral candidates who want to eliminate housing and development regulations are now saying they want more regulations for nonprofits. It’s ironic: the current laws and rules exist for a reason, and one of the reasons is to avoid corruption. For-profit corporations regularly and intentionally cause more harm than governments and the nonprofit sector on their worst days.

But what matters is the narrative that has been created about the corruption of government and the nonprofit sector – and that will hurt us all deeply in this election and for the next few years.

That’s why corruption matters, and that’s why Breed has deeply damaged the city by allowing it to happen.