America Is Becoming An Empire Of Fraud and Crony Grifting

Last year in Kentucky, a Republican state senator read a list to a school superintendent: hotel, hotel, ice cream, musical theater tickets, hotel again, first-class air travel, hotel, trip to Australia. Officials with school district credit cards racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in often-insane charges that had nothing to do with educating children. Apparently the Galt House is quite a draw for public officials who have access to other people’s money.

The hearing took place as Fayette County Public Schools warned that the district had run out of money and needed more revenue.

Responding to the list of his own credit card charges, the superintendent said that the Australia trip had been “for himself and some other staff to examine best practices throughout the world to help students in emotional crisis.” A lot of very useful staff training for local public agencies turns out to happen on other continents, because of the educational value of the Australian emotional perspective.

A year later, that legislative hearing still echoes in continuing litigation and investigations. A story published last week describes a very strange “7-Minute Walkthrough” in which the now-retired superintendent strolled around school district headquarters and slid threatening messages hinting at legal action under the doors of his internal critics.

We’ve arrived at the quite comfortable assumption that your government job is supposed to pay for your hotel bar tab and your tickets to see Wicked, and no one is so supposed to complain. Why are your critics being so mean about it?

As always, California leads the way into the moral abyss. Republicans matter very little in the state legislature, where Democrats have supermajorities in both houses. So it caused some surprise this year when the then-minority leader in the Assembly, Heath Flora, supported two Democrat tax measures that they could have passed without him. May 21 headline: “Republicans rise in support of sales tax increases in California.” (See also: “California GOP leaders questioned for oddly backing Dems’ green light of local sales tax hikes.”)

It turns out that Republican leaders in the California legislature are victims of their own inattention, because they’re more focused on other topics: “Ousted California GOP leader Heath Flora who backed Dem tax hikes allegedly funded second affair with campaign cash.” Flora is also accused of using $11,500 in campaign funds at a single East Sacramento dive bar.

California Democrats are, if anything, somewhat less shy about taking care of themselves. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, who had no background in insurance when he was elected to that role, has a taste for foreign travel that makes Fayette County school officials look like mere amateurs: “at least 32 trips to 23 countries and territories — spending over 163 days abroad on state time.” Emotionally wounded, Lara told the Los Angeles Times that an accusation of improper travel expenses “really diminishes me as an individual.”

The more common Sacramento story is about the deep intimacy between NGOs and government, which raises questions about the term “nongovernmental organization” when they all float on an ocean of government cash. In the current budget, Assemblyman Corey Jackson, an absolute moron with a “doctorate” in social work from an online program, voted this year on a budget that lavishly funds an Inland Empire nonprofit called the Center Against Racism and Trauma (CART).

CART does important policy work like holding Zoom calls to complain about racism.

The nonprofit was founded by an Inland Empire activist named Corey Jackson, if that name is familiar, shortly before he entered the legislature and began voting to lavishly fund the nonprofit he founded. You can read a long and detailed report on the relationship between Assemblyman Corey Jackson and the important nonprofit founder Corey Jackson here, from the California lawyer and journalist Laura Powell.

You look at the decline of American institutions, and the widespread spiral into debt and financial instability, and wonder how it’s all happening. The people who are causing all of that institutional decline don’t share your concern. They’re at the hotel bar, buying drinks with your money.

Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.