The Seas Befouled: Too Much Government, Too Many "Good" People Not Saying "No"

         In the early 1960s, the Tribunes of the People on Beacon Hill set up the so-called Massachusetts Crime Commission, a seven (7) - member board appointed by the Governor whose duties included investigating corruption in state government and preparing an annual report to the legislature.

         In one of those reports, the Commission declaimed as follows: “... this realistic acceptance by normally honest individuals of the pattern in which, it is said, business with the state has to be done, have been major contributions to corruption."

         The recent news cycle has provided two stunning examples of how the willingness of otherwise “normally honest people" to “go along to get along" facilitates the "Hi, How wah ya" climate of corruption in this Commonwealth. 

         The first example emerged from the trial and conviction of Former House Speaker Sal DiMasi when it was disclosed that the Massachusetts Department of Education (talk about too much government!) entered into not one but two contracts with an Ontario-based entity, Cognos Inc., to purchase $17.5M worth of "performance management software."

         The Cognos deal didn’t pass the smell test to the point where even liberal democrats complained. Both Governor Patrick and his then Secretary of Administration and Finance (now Harvard Dean) Leslie ("she can hold her head high") Kirwan initially "pushed back" and questioned the need for it at a time when taxpayers everywhere were struggling and when public sector budgets were (or should have been) shrinking. But at the end of the day (to quote the Great Phrasemaker, Charlie Baker), the banana-backboned Patrick and Kirwan both signed off on the Cognos deal when they decided that acquiescence to pressure from the Speaker's office was the price of improved relations with DiMasi. 

         We now know that Team Patrick's initial instincts were right: $13.5M of the Cognos contract was eventually rescinded, thus confirming that the deal was not at all critical or necessary for the education of "the children". 

         But the test of good government, like the test of statesmanship, is evaluation before the event.

         The score: Crooks 1; "Normally honest people”: 0

         The second example came in the recent disclosures by the Commonwealth's Inspector General that one John B. Barranco, a career education bureaucrat and "executive director" of something called the "Merrimack Education Center" (whatever that is), had for more than a decade fleeced something called the “Merrimack Special Education Collaborative” (whatever that is) out of approximately $10M. The "Education Center" had apparently routinely presented bills to the "Collaborative" (that the "Collaborative" had unquestioningly and routinely paid) for such items as lavish trips, parties, meals at expensive restaurants, overnights at pricey hotels, flowers, princely salaries for Barranco and his girlfriend (natch), partridges in pear trees, and just about every other hot and cold running perquisite known to man (and some women). The ten (10)-member Board of Directors of the "Collaborative" (each one an education bureaucrat) that should have been making the tackle on these expenditures, was instead a lusty beneficiary of the largesse (which might explain its willingness to OK the items), in yet another example of a Board being bought off with corporate gravy by the managers they are supposed to be overseeing.

         O Tempora! O Mores!

         Now it is easy to sit back and criticize the venalities of such as Sal DiMasi and John Barranco. But why didn’t the “normally honest people” who rubbed up against them put a stop to their activity when they had the chance?

         One answer: because of that solidly bourgeois compulsion to seek popularity and the esteem of others and, above all else, not to be seen as difficult, prickly, or disagreeable. 

          And this is not always a bad thing. Companionability, the desire to please, and good manners are, after all, the lubricants of polite society.

         But in these days especially the art of government and the common good is too serious a business to be left to the sweet and ineffectual ministrations of glad-handing "yes" men. The financial crisis that looms over this Commonwealth requires roto rooters and SOBs, men and women who are good butchers and who have the viscera to say “No”. In short, public servants rather than self servants, who, in the words of the former head of Balliol College, "never apologize, never explain, get it done, and let them (the special interests) howl."