California Politicians Propose Law Hiding Corruption from the Public

California’s ‘train-to-nowhere’ program started with a $10 billion budget in 2009 which shot up to $135 billion with no end in sight. The Trump administration has tried to cut off billions in federal funds for the money pit on rails and there are signs that even state voters are growing sick of it.

But California Democrats had an answer.

Around the same time that the CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, was arrested on suspicion of domestic battery after an appearance with Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrating the progress of the ‘train-to-nowhere’, Democrats were moving forward a bill to ban the public from getting crucial information about the project whose budget is more than 5 times that of NASA.

The cost of returning to the moon is estimated at under $100 billion. California is spending more than that on a rail project that still hasn’t gotten anywhere and which no one is interested in.

California Democrat legislators had already become infamous for covering up their own corruption. The California legislatures claimed that disclosing how much they were spending on defending their members against investigations would “violate attorney client privilege”.

The California State Senate had refused to release records of federal law enforcement subpoenas and search warrants, claiming that “the public interest served by not making the record public clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of the record.”

The public interest in this case is that of members of the legislators being raided by the FBI.

The secrecy around the California Capitol Annex for legislators, where costs shot up from an estimated $543 million to around $1.2 billion, has become equally infamous. The project’s leaders found an innovative way to keep the public from learning about what was going wrong by forcing over 2,000 people, including senior government officials, to sign non-disclosure agreements. Who weren’t they allowed to disclose it to? The general public. Obviously.

Only in California would top legislators sign NDAs so the public won’t find out that they’re shipping granite to Italy at a cost of over $5 million to build a lavish palace for themselves.

Assemblywoman Blanca Pacheco claimed that, “while I believe transparency is critical to maintaining public trust and did not sign this agreement lightly, it was necessary in this instance to protect sensitive information related to the project’s security.” Like the security of the two million pounds of granite being shipped to Italy from California which Assemblywoman Lia Lopez actually claimed was done to reduce the “spending of taxpayer dollars.”

Using the same facade of legality to ban the public from learning about their abuses, California Democrats introduced California Bill 1608 under the innocuous title of ‘Office of the Inspector General, High-Speed Rail’ which bars disclosing details about investigations into the project.

Buried in te technical verbiage, the renewed office of the Inspector General for High Speed Rail would be exempted “from all contract requirements of the Public Contract Code that require oversight, review, or approval by the Department of General Services or any other state agency” for “a contract up to $1,000,000 in value.” The new office will be doing the one thing the train project already does all too well: spend insane amounts of money without any oversight.

When million dollar spending by an inspector general’s office is treated as chump change, that’s a symptom of how a $10 billion project somehow turned into a $135 billion project. But this is a bill that casually mentions “additional activities, not to cumulatively exceed five hundred million dollars ($500,000,000), that maximize the efficiency of delivering the project.”

The project has been underway for 17 years and was due in 2020. But surely dumping another $500 million into the hole on wheels will “maximize the efficiency of delivering the project.”

Why specifically $500 million? KCRA’s Ashley Zavala, one of the few indefatigable investigative reporters left in the local media, has suggested that the entire bill is meant to cover up a $537 million ‘change order’ to the contract as part of a settlement.

But who knows because the whole point of the exercise is hiding things from the public.

By the time you get to Sec. 10 (b), California Dems write in this truly extraordinary piece of legislative legerdemain ordering that “none of the following items or papers of which these items are a part shall be released to the public by the Inspector General or the employees of the Inspector General” which include “papers, correspondence, or memoranda pertaining to any audit or review”, internal staff discussions and “any record of an investigation conducted under this division” unless the Inspector General decides to issue an official report if he determines “it necessary to serve the interests of the state.” It’s an official bill banning disclosures of abuses in the single most wasteful and corrupt government project in California history.

The public gets no say in any of this. Instead, the whole thing is routed through a government official who gets to determine what if anything is released, and only if he “has substantiated a violation of laws, rules, or regulations, or mismanagement, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to the public health and safety.”

Notably, it needs to be a “gross abuse of funds”, not a plain old abuse of funds and a “substantial” danger to public health and safety, not just an ordinary sort of danger.

A $135 billion train, a $1.2 billion capitol annex and FBI raids all form part of the same picture.

“This is a good thing for the public,” Assemblywoman Lori Wilson insisted. “We want maximum transparency and maximum accountability for this project.”

And nothing says maximum transparency like a literal ban on government transparency.

What is ominous about this is that the new bill no longer even uses the ‘fig leaf’ terminology of the “public interest”, but instead substitutes a different term; “the interests of the state.”

The “interests of the state”, a phrase more commonly associated with Communist dictatorships, recurs throughout the bill, such as “the Inspector General determines it necessary to serve the interests of the state” or ” individuals attempting to harm the interests of the state”.

California’s ruling class is starting to admit, in legalese if not in its press releases, that the public interest and the interests of the state are not the same, and that the latter preempt the former.

The absurdity of claiming that hiding FBI investigations of their members of the cast of Italian bricks for their political palace is in the public interest was a bit much. Like hiding abuses in their $135 billion ‘train-to-nowhere’, that’s not in the public interest, but in the interests of the state.

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/5702796877948590970/comments/default