Last year’s villains were derelict churchmen and bloated
businessmen. Politicians, by comparison, escaped the public lash.
It is too bad. Many of them deserved just as much scorn. Some pols
even managed to combine the vices of bad bishops with the vices of
bad businessmen.
Yet little happens to irresponsible politicians. Businessmen
bankrupt companies and go to jail. Pols bankrupt states and win
re-election. Cardinal Bernard Law rightly resigned in disgrace for
not protecting the flock against sex offenders. Pols release sex
offenders early and win awards from the ACLU.
In California, politicians could feast on the fallout of
corporate and church scandals even as they created similar scandals
of their own. California Governor Gray Davis would take breaks from
supping at the public trough to condemn “greedy” energy executives.
Never mind that his management of the state would make a cashiered
Enron executive proud. Had he not gone into politics, he surely
would have made an outstanding colleague of Ken Lay’s. Betraying
shareholders is no different from betraying taxpayers.
California’s shortfall on Davis’s watch has climbed to $35
billion. Could a corporate executive lose that much for
shareholders and still retain his job? Davis raided the state like
the corrupt CEOs raided their companies. They placed their interest
above the shareholder, Davis placed his interest above the
taxpayer. To pay off his many donors and energize his political
network, he hiked up spending by 36%. He gave fat salaries to state
employees whose unions gave money to him, state jobs and contracts
to his cronies, and all the while tried to keep the voting public
in the dark about the magnitude of the budgetary crisis. Some of
the corrupt CEOs at least made money for their companies. Davis
just took a surplus he didn’t create and squandered it on personal
whims.
During his re-election campaign, he played dumb about the
possibility of tax increases. But now that he is safely re-elected
he can ask Californians to pony up for his spending spree. His
proposed budget includes a sales tax increase, and other tax
increases are certain to follow. This is equivalent to corrupt CEOs
demanding that their wronged shareholders retire their companies’
debts.
But if Davis is no better than a corrupt CEO, he is also no
better than a wayward bishop. “33,000 Sex Offenders Elude
California,” reports the Associated Press this week. Though public
safety is a point of New Democrat pride with Davis, he’s shown
himself as feckless as a libertine American bishop in protecting
the populace. Crime has risen during his tenure.
Californians are justly mad at Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony
for playing musical chairs with molesters. But the state
government’s practice of returning molesters to the society of
children is also appalling.
How could the Davis administration lose track of 33,000 sex
offenders? Because after releasing them — outrageously in many
cases, given the 100% recidivism rate of certain sex crimes — the
state merely required that they report their addresses. Apparently
the state expects rapists and child molesters to send state
officials a post card from time to time.
The numbers, according to AP, are probably higher than 33,000.
AP only got that number after repeated requests to the state. The
state said that 76,350 sex offenders have registered at least once.
And they no longer know the whereabouts of 33,296 of them. But many
sex offenders probably never registered at all.
The punishment for failing to register is not severe and most
California police departments aren’t even enforcing the law. The
state’s attorney general blames the problem on the state’s lack of
funding for the oversight program. “Our system is inadequate,
woefully inadequate,” he said. “It can only be improved by putting
money into the local law enforcement agencies. It’s a matter of
resources.”
AP reports that the state of Washington isn’t as passive. It
doesn’t foolishly wait for criminals to report their addresses. It
sends out cops to confirm the whereabouts of sex offenders. In all
of Davis’s free spending over the last four years — he once gave a
wholly unnecessary software contract to one of his donors, Oracle
— he couldn’t finance a program like that one? Davis evidently had
more important matters on his mind than tracking sex offenders. He
had to figure out how to get Al Gore advisers Chris Lehane and Mark
Fabiani on the state payroll, and confer with his political adviser
Garry South (who, by the way, no longer works for Davis, having
moved on to beat “the bejesus out of George W. Bush,” he said to
the San Francisco Chronicle).
Had Davis not gone into politics or worked for Enron, he could
have scented out a career, like his old boss Jerry Brown did for a
time, with the Church. His level of indifference to sex offenders
might have translated into a promising ecclesiastical rise as an
auxiliary bishop under Cardinal Mahony. Unfortunately for
Californians, he chose a safer line of work, one which provides
more netting for falls than business or ecclesiastics — American
politics.
