Fishwrapper - A new, ethical state government? My ass.
Not when the new guv is already defending conflicts of interest
Sonny Perdue almost made it to swearing-in day before caving in on his holy vows to instill ethics into Georgia’s cesspool of state politics.
You might not have noticed.
Rather, in the local daily newspaper of declining circulation, there have been geysers of gush over how Georgia pols, led by Perdue, are finally coming to Jesus and getting righteous.
Perdue says his minions are going to be “above reproach,” and has appointed an “inspector general” to clean things up. Senators and representatives fall over themselves declaring ethics are really, really “necessary” and that Georgians really, really want state officials whose morals are just a tad purer than mafia loan sharks.
No one stopped to question the incredibly glaring fact that the very same people who are now hallelujah-born-again ethicists are the very rascals who for years have been selling their votes to lobbyists, hiring their kin for make-work state sinecures, setting up bogus companies to grab state contracts, voting for deals that enrich themselves and their cronies — etcetera and etcetera.
The public is angry and aroused, and rightfully so. After all, citizens’ pocketbooks are being looted to pay for corrupt government and state giveaways to political insiders. Politicians, with their unsurpassed survival instincts, must act like they’re going to do something — until the media again numbs the minds of citizens with intellectual Thorazine.
Thus, there will be a lot of window dressing and damn little substance.
Take, for example, the “inspector general.” James Sehorn is a retired Air Force general, a genuine patriot and a former prisoner of war. But as I said: window dressing. Sehorn has met an inspector general or two during his military career. He has never been one. He has never been an investigator. He is not a lawyer. He won’t have lawyers working for him. He doesn’t know squat about the labyrinthine workings of state government. He does not have subpoena power.
Sehorn will be a toothless tiger whose job will be to spotlight some minor inefficiencies and peccadilloes so that his boss can trumpet that he’s cleaning up the government. The good ol’ boys — with whom Perdue was long a fraternity brother — are slapping their knees and hootin’ in down-home jubilation at this one.
But Sehorn was just the warm-up act for the real smoke-and-mirrors show. The main event took the stage Jan. 6 when Perdue named retired banker James Lientz as Georgia’s “chief operating officer.”
Background: Perdue is in the bizarre position of being a Republican who was not supported by Big Bidness. Rather, in the brothel called Georgia politics, all of the corporate and lobbyist johns were lined up, cash in hand, in front of the door of the sure winner, Roy Barnes.
Then, The Big Oops happened.
Barnes came down with the political equivalent of a social disease (to push this metaphor, call it “flag clap”), and everyone ended up looking pretty stupid. Barnes, of course, was the sorriest looking of the lot. But Perdue found himself appearing very un-Bush-like without the usual GOP entourage of well-heeled executives, lobbyists and lawyers all helping him plot how to carve up the state for developers and the business elite. And that elite found itself without a governor it could call its very own (as in bought and paid for).
Enter Jim Lientz.
I hand it to Perdue for chutzpah. He named the ultra-pro-business/ultra-anti-little-people Lientz as “chief operating officer” and claimed, with a straight face, that this was a progressive move.
Reality: Lientz’s ascension is a signal to the corporate leeches that the state is again up for sale.
Predictably, the daily press gave Georgians only the official propaganda. Republican Party shill and sometimes columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Jim Wooten went so far as to construct an entire ode of praise Jan. 7 that differed only in teensy, inconsequential details from the official Perdue press release on the new COO. A companion news story showed a total lack of skepticism or inquisitiveness.
Lientz’s official resume is just absolutely stuffed with prestigious memberships and leadership roles. The Metro Atlanta Chamber, the Carter Center, Woodruff Arts Center. It’s his long tenure as one of the state’s most powerful bankers, however, that is key to the appointment. Lientz is uniquely qualified to officiate at the remarriage of government with Georgia’s corporate thugs and moneyed powerbrokers.
First, there is no reason for a COO in state government. That job is what voters elected Perdue to do. And there are just herds and herds of underlings and bureaucrats to do all the piddling stuff.
So, the reason for hiring a COO is some other need. A need “The Boys” don’t want you to know about.
Even Perdue’s flacks were a little perplexed at concealing exactly why their Boss of Bosses needed an unelected capo. His job, sayeth Perdue spokesbeings (including Wooten), is to create “a customer-friendly, people-oriented state government.” Give us a break, please, from the platitudes.
As we’ll see in a few paragraphs, customer friendly and people oriented are almost the 180-degree opposite of what Lientz has been doing all of his long banking career.
So that little bit of dissembling is merely the spin docs’ effort to cloak Lientz with a warm and fuzzy cover. His real role, concede the publicists, is “management [and] supervision of state departments, agencies and their respective boards and commissions.” Not much left for Perdue to do, and it sure sounds like Lientz is the power behind the throne. Think of George Bush and his neocon Svengali, Dick Cheney.
Here’s the logic. Perdue has reopened the brothel, and Lientz is the piano player. Lientz, you see, is vintage Georgia business. He rose up through the ranks of Citizens & Southern, which mutated into NCNB and then NationsBank, to become the state president of the mega-bank. Then he was warlord of regional operations as the institution morphed once again, this time into Bank of America.
The growth of the banking octopus, fueled by the corporate welfare called deregulation, should hardly give Georgians a good feeling about what’s to come. After all, the bottom line of deregulation is fewer banks. Banking customers now have scant choices and pay higher fees than if there was a vigorously competitive market. If customers don’t like it, about the only other option is another McBank.
Here’s a more specific reason for anxiety. Georgians won a real victory when Barnes and state Sen. Vincent Fort last year pushed through a law attacking predatory home lending. It’s probably the most progressive such law in the nation. Not surprisingly, Bank of America was very big in the predatory lending biz, happily screwing working folks out of their homes and savings. The bank exited the lucrative if gangrenous business just two years ago, and only after activists mounted an increasingly successful campaign to curb abuses.
How long do you think the state’s predatory lending law is going to last now that the retired fox is watching the henhouse?
Or, let’s take economic development as another example of Lientz’s style. NationsBank’s strategy was to purchase regional banks, making a few top dogs incredibly wealthy. Meanwhile, to pay for the merger and for “efficiency,” tens of thousands of employees were sacrificed. NationsBank’s strongman and Lientz’s mentor, Hugh McColl, perversely liked to make the gruesome announcements on Labor Day — his tribute to hard-working staffers was to fire them. When NationsBank did the Labor Day blitzkrieg on Missouri’s Boatmen’s Bancshares, hundreds of citizens of the Show Me State marched on the New York Stock Exchange in protest.
So, under Lientz, we can envision “economic development” that shifts massive state benefits to corporations, gives developers unfettered and taxpayer-subsidized license, and leaves the rest of us out in the cold.
Massive layoffs weren’t the worst of what Lientz and the other NationsBank sultans did to their communities. The bank has been the target of volley after volley of allegations claiming discrimination in lending or hiring. During the last decade, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a complaint accusing NationsBank of bias in dealing with 1,500 minority job applicants in the Charlotte area. Similar charges have been made against NationsBank’s Tennessee branch. The Florida NationsBank operation was also targeted for a probe of its employment practices, but the bank stalled the investigation by filing a lawsuit calling the investigation “unreasonable.”
With lending, NationsBank denied home loans to African-Americans at least three times as often it turned down white borrowers in Atlanta (repeat: Atlanta, as in right here, Lientz’s fief), Baltimore, Dallas and Washington, according to a 1994 study by Johns Hopkins University professor Patrick Bond. Throughout its network, NationsBank turned down 35 percent of African-American mortgage applicants, compared with 21.5 percent of white applicants.
Hey, Shirley Franklin, how do those numbers make you feel? You might want to consult the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Madam Mayor. It has accused NationsBank of “commercial redlining” — refusing loans in certain neighborhoods. Now one of those alleged redliners is running state government.
And it gets worse. NationsBank has settled lawsuits for defrauding well over 100,000 unsuspecting, mostly elderly customers. Basically the bank was accused of conning the customers to trade in their government-backed securities for junk bonds and other high-risk investments whose value evaporated while McColl, Lientz and their boardroom pals made bundles. Those scams cost many of your neighbors their retirement nest eggs. NationsBank has paid well over $60 million to settle the lawsuits.
That’s not dated news, by the way. NationsBank’s consumer fraud was investigated at length by the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida. Just last May, NationsBank/Bank of America paid $14.5 million to settle that little irritation. Without admitting wrongdoing, of course (wink, wink).
Remember, I’m not here to bury Bank of America, but to shed light on the praise bestowed on Lientz, who is now, in effect, running Georgia without having ever received a single vote from citizens or any scrutiny from the press.
Oh, about ethics — Perdue made it very clear at Lientz’s ordination Jan. 6 that all of the casting-out-sin talk was just so much hot air.
Lientz serves on several corporate boards, including banks, financial companies and, most noteworthy, Georgia Power Co., the voluminous polluter that is regulated by state government. (OK, OK, quit laughing. I know the “Public Service Commission” should be renamed the “Utilities Service Commission,” and that if there’s a 900-pound gorilla in Georgia that can make politicians cringe and cower, it’s Georgia Power.)
Lientz and Perdue were asked if the new COO was going to resign from the corporate boards, especially Georgia Power.
The answer: Lientz will resign. But here’s the kick in the ass. Perdue already had unleashed his lawyers to determine if Lientz could have stayed on the boards. The governor-elect huffed that, as Georgia’s COO, it wasn’t illegal for Lientz to engage in the wholesale conflicts of interest. In other words, the new guv was already plotting what he could get away with legally, and to hell with such concepts as “doing the right thing.”
The potential conflicts are so spectacularly obvious that even the dimmest journalists at the press conference looked a little stunned at Perdue’s bluster. (Sigh. The timid AJC would never be so rude as to report the exchange.)
Ethics, shmethics. Meet the new Georgia. Same as the old Georgia.
Senior Editor John Sugg — who in the finest traditions of Georgia says, “Hey, in exchange for a few state contracts, I could probably rewrite this column” — can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.
You might not have noticed.
Rather, in the local daily newspaper of declining circulation, there have been geysers of gush over how Georgia pols, led by Perdue, are finally coming to Jesus and getting righteous.
Perdue says his minions are going to be “above reproach,” and has appointed an “inspector general” to clean things up. Senators and representatives fall over themselves declaring ethics are really, really “necessary” and that Georgians really, really want state officials whose morals are just a tad purer than mafia loan sharks.
No one stopped to question the incredibly glaring fact that the very same people who are now hallelujah-born-again ethicists are the very rascals who for years have been selling their votes to lobbyists, hiring their kin for make-work state sinecures, setting up bogus companies to grab state contracts, voting for deals that enrich themselves and their cronies — etcetera and etcetera.
The public is angry and aroused, and rightfully so. After all, citizens’ pocketbooks are being looted to pay for corrupt government and state giveaways to political insiders. Politicians, with their unsurpassed survival instincts, must act like they’re going to do something — until the media again numbs the minds of citizens with intellectual Thorazine.
Thus, there will be a lot of window dressing and damn little substance.
Take, for example, the “inspector general.” James Sehorn is a retired Air Force general, a genuine patriot and a former prisoner of war. But as I said: window dressing. Sehorn has met an inspector general or two during his military career. He has never been one. He has never been an investigator. He is not a lawyer. He won’t have lawyers working for him. He doesn’t know squat about the labyrinthine workings of state government. He does not have subpoena power.
Sehorn will be a toothless tiger whose job will be to spotlight some minor inefficiencies and peccadilloes so that his boss can trumpet that he’s cleaning up the government. The good ol’ boys — with whom Perdue was long a fraternity brother — are slapping their knees and hootin’ in down-home jubilation at this one.
But Sehorn was just the warm-up act for the real smoke-and-mirrors show. The main event took the stage Jan. 6 when Perdue named retired banker James Lientz as Georgia’s “chief operating officer.”
Background: Perdue is in the bizarre position of being a Republican who was not supported by Big Bidness. Rather, in the brothel called Georgia politics, all of the corporate and lobbyist johns were lined up, cash in hand, in front of the door of the sure winner, Roy Barnes.
Then, The Big Oops happened.
Barnes came down with the political equivalent of a social disease (to push this metaphor, call it “flag clap”), and everyone ended up looking pretty stupid. Barnes, of course, was the sorriest looking of the lot. But Perdue found himself appearing very un-Bush-like without the usual GOP entourage of well-heeled executives, lobbyists and lawyers all helping him plot how to carve up the state for developers and the business elite. And that elite found itself without a governor it could call its very own (as in bought and paid for).
Enter Jim Lientz.
I hand it to Perdue for chutzpah. He named the ultra-pro-business/ultra-anti-little-people Lientz as “chief operating officer” and claimed, with a straight face, that this was a progressive move.
Reality: Lientz’s ascension is a signal to the corporate leeches that the state is again up for sale.
Predictably, the daily press gave Georgians only the official propaganda. Republican Party shill and sometimes columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Jim Wooten went so far as to construct an entire ode of praise Jan. 7 that differed only in teensy, inconsequential details from the official Perdue press release on the new COO. A companion news story showed a total lack of skepticism or inquisitiveness.
Lientz’s official resume is just absolutely stuffed with prestigious memberships and leadership roles. The Metro Atlanta Chamber, the Carter Center, Woodruff Arts Center. It’s his long tenure as one of the state’s most powerful bankers, however, that is key to the appointment. Lientz is uniquely qualified to officiate at the remarriage of government with Georgia’s corporate thugs and moneyed powerbrokers.
First, there is no reason for a COO in state government. That job is what voters elected Perdue to do. And there are just herds and herds of underlings and bureaucrats to do all the piddling stuff.
So, the reason for hiring a COO is some other need. A need “The Boys” don’t want you to know about.
Even Perdue’s flacks were a little perplexed at concealing exactly why their Boss of Bosses needed an unelected capo. His job, sayeth Perdue spokesbeings (including Wooten), is to create “a customer-friendly, people-oriented state government.” Give us a break, please, from the platitudes.
As we’ll see in a few paragraphs, customer friendly and people oriented are almost the 180-degree opposite of what Lientz has been doing all of his long banking career.
So that little bit of dissembling is merely the spin docs’ effort to cloak Lientz with a warm and fuzzy cover. His real role, concede the publicists, is “management [and] supervision of state departments, agencies and their respective boards and commissions.” Not much left for Perdue to do, and it sure sounds like Lientz is the power behind the throne. Think of George Bush and his neocon Svengali, Dick Cheney.
Here’s the logic. Perdue has reopened the brothel, and Lientz is the piano player. Lientz, you see, is vintage Georgia business. He rose up through the ranks of Citizens & Southern, which mutated into NCNB and then NationsBank, to become the state president of the mega-bank. Then he was warlord of regional operations as the institution morphed once again, this time into Bank of America.
The growth of the banking octopus, fueled by the corporate welfare called deregulation, should hardly give Georgians a good feeling about what’s to come. After all, the bottom line of deregulation is fewer banks. Banking customers now have scant choices and pay higher fees than if there was a vigorously competitive market. If customers don’t like it, about the only other option is another McBank.
Here’s a more specific reason for anxiety. Georgians won a real victory when Barnes and state Sen. Vincent Fort last year pushed through a law attacking predatory home lending. It’s probably the most progressive such law in the nation. Not surprisingly, Bank of America was very big in the predatory lending biz, happily screwing working folks out of their homes and savings. The bank exited the lucrative if gangrenous business just two years ago, and only after activists mounted an increasingly successful campaign to curb abuses.
How long do you think the state’s predatory lending law is going to last now that the retired fox is watching the henhouse?
Or, let’s take economic development as another example of Lientz’s style. NationsBank’s strategy was to purchase regional banks, making a few top dogs incredibly wealthy. Meanwhile, to pay for the merger and for “efficiency,” tens of thousands of employees were sacrificed. NationsBank’s strongman and Lientz’s mentor, Hugh McColl, perversely liked to make the gruesome announcements on Labor Day — his tribute to hard-working staffers was to fire them. When NationsBank did the Labor Day blitzkrieg on Missouri’s Boatmen’s Bancshares, hundreds of citizens of the Show Me State marched on the New York Stock Exchange in protest.
So, under Lientz, we can envision “economic development” that shifts massive state benefits to corporations, gives developers unfettered and taxpayer-subsidized license, and leaves the rest of us out in the cold.
Massive layoffs weren’t the worst of what Lientz and the other NationsBank sultans did to their communities. The bank has been the target of volley after volley of allegations claiming discrimination in lending or hiring. During the last decade, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a complaint accusing NationsBank of bias in dealing with 1,500 minority job applicants in the Charlotte area. Similar charges have been made against NationsBank’s Tennessee branch. The Florida NationsBank operation was also targeted for a probe of its employment practices, but the bank stalled the investigation by filing a lawsuit calling the investigation “unreasonable.”
With lending, NationsBank denied home loans to African-Americans at least three times as often it turned down white borrowers in Atlanta (repeat: Atlanta, as in right here, Lientz’s fief), Baltimore, Dallas and Washington, according to a 1994 study by Johns Hopkins University professor Patrick Bond. Throughout its network, NationsBank turned down 35 percent of African-American mortgage applicants, compared with 21.5 percent of white applicants.
Hey, Shirley Franklin, how do those numbers make you feel? You might want to consult the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Madam Mayor. It has accused NationsBank of “commercial redlining” — refusing loans in certain neighborhoods. Now one of those alleged redliners is running state government.
And it gets worse. NationsBank has settled lawsuits for defrauding well over 100,000 unsuspecting, mostly elderly customers. Basically the bank was accused of conning the customers to trade in their government-backed securities for junk bonds and other high-risk investments whose value evaporated while McColl, Lientz and their boardroom pals made bundles. Those scams cost many of your neighbors their retirement nest eggs. NationsBank has paid well over $60 million to settle the lawsuits.
That’s not dated news, by the way. NationsBank’s consumer fraud was investigated at length by the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida. Just last May, NationsBank/Bank of America paid $14.5 million to settle that little irritation. Without admitting wrongdoing, of course (wink, wink).
Remember, I’m not here to bury Bank of America, but to shed light on the praise bestowed on Lientz, who is now, in effect, running Georgia without having ever received a single vote from citizens or any scrutiny from the press.
Oh, about ethics — Perdue made it very clear at Lientz’s ordination Jan. 6 that all of the casting-out-sin talk was just so much hot air.
Lientz serves on several corporate boards, including banks, financial companies and, most noteworthy, Georgia Power Co., the voluminous polluter that is regulated by state government. (OK, OK, quit laughing. I know the “Public Service Commission” should be renamed the “Utilities Service Commission,” and that if there’s a 900-pound gorilla in Georgia that can make politicians cringe and cower, it’s Georgia Power.)
Lientz and Perdue were asked if the new COO was going to resign from the corporate boards, especially Georgia Power.
The answer: Lientz will resign. But here’s the kick in the ass. Perdue already had unleashed his lawyers to determine if Lientz could have stayed on the boards. The governor-elect huffed that, as Georgia’s COO, it wasn’t illegal for Lientz to engage in the wholesale conflicts of interest. In other words, the new guv was already plotting what he could get away with legally, and to hell with such concepts as “doing the right thing.”
The potential conflicts are so spectacularly obvious that even the dimmest journalists at the press conference looked a little stunned at Perdue’s bluster. (Sigh. The timid AJC would never be so rude as to report the exchange.)
Ethics, shmethics. Meet the new Georgia. Same as the old Georgia.
Senior Editor John Sugg — who in the finest traditions of Georgia says, “Hey, in exchange for a few state contracts, I could probably rewrite this column” — can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.