One reason to talk about corruption a lot is that there is a lot of corruption to talk about.
The scheme was to get Kaiser Permanente to buy 20,000 copies of her children’s book, Healthy Holly, at a decidedly non-discounted price of $5 a pop, while the health provider was negotiating a contract with UMMS and while she was serving on the UMMS board deciding that contract.
It’s been several months since I’ve discussed Baltimore, Maryland, a hotbed of Big Government degeneracy. Now that former Mayor Catherine Pugh has been indicted — this Tuesday — on multiple federal charges, we should take a moment to appraise her own tricky larceny against the city’s taxpayers and the patients of University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS).
What a scam.
And not her only one. She leveraged this scam to fund her mayoral campaign, for example.
So, it is good that she is being prosecuted.
Odd, though, that it is the federal government doing the prosecuting. Baltimore is a corporate entity under the sovereignty of the State of Maryland, not the United States.
What have state and local investigators and prosecutors been doing?
While this might seem a picky point, the federalization of law and order is, as the college crowd says, ‘problematic.’ Tasking the Federal Government to the rescue is great, insofar as it actually rescues. Yet, it is also an unmistakable sign not only of the corruption of the criminal justice system, but also of a failure of representative democracy to hold government officials accountable in that state or locality.
This is certain: government, removed from citizens’ vigilance, almost necessarily breeds corruption … and not just in Baltimore.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
