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crime and punishment insider corruption

Good Golly, Healthy Holly

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.


Baltimore, mayor, corruption,

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Categories
insider corruption term limits

House-​Cleaning & Law-Following

Larry Hogan, Maryland’s popular Republican governor, has vowed to “clean house” in the wake of the scandals rocking the “private” non-​profit University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS), set up by the State of Maryland. 

It isn’t just former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh, who resigned from the UMMS board after it was disclosed the board had purchased $500,000 worth of her self-​published children’s book, “Healthy Holly.” Yep, it’s always for the children. (Pugh also resigned as mayor after the FBI raided her home and office.)

In fact, nine of the 23 UMMS board members had money-​making contracts with the system they “manage.” Not to mention that a recent Post exposé detailed how former state legislator and long-​time board member, Francis Kelly, whose legislation established the system, had multi-​million-​dollar insurance contracts with UMMS.

Yet, as The Washington Post reports, “state law long has called for housecleaning … specifying that board members can’t serve more than two consecutive five-​year terms.”

Gov. Hogan and his predecessors — both Republican and Democrat — simply ignored the law, reappointing board members beyond the limits.

“If members were allowed to essentially stay on the board in perpetuity,” former state senator, now U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D‑Md.) argued, “it’s a direct threat to the independence and accountability of the board.” 

Abandoning term limits, State Senator Jill Carter (D‑Baltimore City) told the Post, was “part of the problem,” resulting in self-dealing.

Hmmm, think they’ll ever apply this knowledge to establishing term limits on their own powerful legislative bodies?

So much corruption, too few limits. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Catherine Pugh, corruption, Baltimore,

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