Gwinnett corruption; BSA problems; corporate welfare

In another AJC article, she said developers told her that bribery was the way business was done in Gwinnett.
To those who have long watched the close ties between Gwinnett’s public sphere and its developers, none of this is surprising. Gwinnett’s political leadership has long been in bed with its private development community. Bribery or not, the lines between public and private interest in Gwinnett have always been blurred.
That’s one reason so many citizens in Jackson County are suspicious about any relationship between public officials and developers. Nobody wants a Gwinnett-style government dominated by the development community — an oligarchy of the rich and connected.
A decade ago when Jackson County had a board of commissioners made up of developers and their minions, it was a disaster. Private interest and public duties were so intertwined that nobody cold untangle the decisions being made.
Hopefully, the FBI will continue looking into the Gwinnett’s perverse political-developer culture and bring down any illegal practices that have taken place. And Jackson County citizens need to stay alert to that kind of problem here in the future.

***

As one who has been involved in the Boy Scouts for many years, I was saddened, but not surprised, at the scale of problems found in the recently released “perversion files” from BSA. Child abusers and molesters often look for access to children and those who work with young people have to always be on alert for those kinds of people.
On a few occasions, we would have adults show up to work with our Scouts who didn’t have their own children involved and whose motive seemed suspect. We would tell those people we didn’t need any more leadership help and turn them away.
In recent years, BSA has made a big push in the area of “child safety,” requiring criminal background checks of potential leaders and a slew of training programs for parents, boys and leaders about the kinds of issues to be aware of. Hopefully, some of that will help prevent future problems.
But the real issue that becomes clear in these reports is that it was often local community volunteers, not BSA employees, who didn’t do the right thing when molestation was suspected or known. Rather than reporting these incidents to the police, local community leaders would often quietly ask the adult to resign as a scout leader. Some cases were prosecuted — Maysville had a case in the early 1990s. But many adults around the nation went unpunished because local officials were reluctant to call the police when abuse was suspected.
Perhaps that was sometimes done because there was no evidence. In other situations, families were perhaps reluctant to come forward with a criminal accusation.
But there were cases that should have been prosecuted, yet were swept away by local community leaders who didn’t want to embarrass anyone involved. Saving face became more important than seeking justice and preventing further abuse.

The background checks and BSA training that is now required will help change some of that, but even those things won’t be enough to stop those who are serial child predators. Everyone who works with young people should be a mandated reporter of any kind of suspected abuse. It’s not the job of a Scout leader, a church leader, a schoolteacher or any other person who works with youth to investigate these suspicions — but it is our duty to report what could be abuse and let the proper authorities do the investigating.
BSA is a good organization overall and although I’m now officially “retired” as a scoutmaster, I have a lot of respect for what the BSA program can mean in the life of a boy.
But the organization’s old culture of secrecy about suspected abuse was not a good thing either for the victims of that abuse, or for BSA itself. Creating the right institutional culture is important in any large organization. BSA failed, for too many years, to do that when it came to dealing with those leaders suspected of abusing young boys.

***

The Georgia Legislature, a conservative, Republican-dominated body, is apparently prepared to commit millions of dollars to help the Atlanta Falcons build a new stadium.
That is nothing more than corporate welfare at its worst. Falcons’ owner Authur Blank is one of the wealthiest men in the nation. Why should government help fund his private business venture?
Oh, yes, it’s about “jobs.” If you listen to proponents of these corporate welfare projects, every “investment” will create a zillion new jobs and bring in another zillion dollars in tourism.
To quote vice president Joe Biden, “malarkey.”
“Jobs” has become the new Republican mantra used as a cover for any use of public money for private companies. That was the excuse for the corporate welfare given to Caterpillar for its new plant in nearby Oconee County. It’s one of the world’s largest, wealthiest firms, yet it got millions in local and state tax dollars to help fund its new plant.
On the one hand, Republicans rail against President Obama’s bailout of GM and Chrysler; but Republicans themselves have no hesitation about giving away tax money to private firms when it suits them.
Anyone who works and pays taxes hates how welfare is being abused in the country by people who would rather live off the government than work. But we should also hate the abuse of corporate welfare that is being doled out by “conservative” legislators who hide behind the skirt of “jobs” while they pass money to favored corporations.

Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald and co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.