1971. New York City Police Officer Frank Serpico was nearly killed when a dealer shot him in the face during an undercover drug bust at a Williamsburg apartment building.  His colleagues in blue left him for dead, as vengeance for trying to fight the corruption of other NYPD officers on the take that allowed many of New York’s most violent criminals–particularly the hardened drug lords and organized crime syndicates that wrought the destruction of tens of thousands of lives in New York City–to continue business as usual for too long.
Several months after recovering from his wounds, he testified before the famous Knapp Commission investigating police corruption.  ”The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which honest police officers can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers,” Serpico stated before the commission.  He was the first cop in the country to openly expose the widespread and systematic corruption in a police force as well as its detrimental consequences on the people whom the department served.  He left the job in 1972 shortly after his historical testimony.

1996.  Irish crime beat reporter Veronica Guerin had been exposing drug kingpins preying on Dubliners for a couple of years, often with violent reprisals from the would-be subjects of her articles.  She had gunshots fired into her living room.  She was shot in the leg after a struggle with a gunman who showed up to her front door.  One drug lord even threatened to rape her son and kill her if she wrote even a word about him.  Yet, after surviving all these attacks, one summer evening in June on a road outside of Dublin, two motorcycle assassins pumped 6 bullets into Guerin’s car, killing her.

There are infinite examples that I can use, but these two remarkable, irreplaceable individuals alone demonstrate what it means to have the call of duty and the common good that can be borne out of the hardship along the way.

With the voluntary end of Serpico’s career as a police officer, so came the involuntary end of the careers and freedom of many corrupt officers: “On the basis of the [Knapp] commission’s work, several dozen indictments were issued and there were some convictions, although not many, given the scope of the report. If some wrongdoers managed to evade punishment because of lack of evidence, they saw their careers compromised or downgraded because of the inquiry.” The prosecution of corrupt cops continued well into the next couple of decades, and a whole string of successful anti-corruption reforms were implemented as a result.

In the wake of the public outrage that followed the brutal death of Guerin, which Irish Prime Minister John Bruton called “an attack on democracy,” hundreds of arrest warrants were executed, and multiple major drug lords were charged, tried, convicted and imprisoned.  The Criminal Assets Bureau, designed to confiscate any money earned through illegal operations, was created in the wake of Guerin’s murder as a further tool in the fight against major drug operations.

But you have to wonder, did these courageous and honorable people really have to suffer as they did in order to pursue a common good that only stood to benefit all of the other decent, honest and hardworking people around them?  Maybe if others tried a little harder before them to do the same, the tragedy of their experiences would have been much less severe.  However, that question can never be answered with any certainty for them.

However, it is a question we can ask ourselves as we look forward in our lives, in our community, in our country, and in our world.

For that call of duty does not have to be reserved for the truly exceptional individuals who seem to walk out of sheer legend for the dangers and obstacles they faced to fight for what was right and proper.  Each and every one of us has that call of duty as free American citizens, and that same call of duty exists for human beings everywhere on this earth.

We as individuals in aggregate have remarkable control over the good and bad things that people do when we choose to act on it.  The problem is the limited number of instances in which most of us realize it, and the even fewer occasions when we do take the chance to act.

Brooklyn has been experiencing a high number of shootings lately, most famously in Brighton Beach over a week ago when a gangbanger decided to shoot off rounds towards a rival.  Instead of hitting the target, though, the shooter killed a 16-year-old bystander and wounded three other people.

Do you think it is possible that no one knew the shooter had a gun, almost certainly an illegal gun?  No one sold it or gave it to the shooter?  The shooter had only the best intentions of pure self-defense in case of emergency?  I think not.  Violent crime would drop dramatically in this city, especially in already vulnerable communities, if only those who knew exactly what is going on did the right thing.

Let’s take community and political activity.  Who hasn’t heard, said, thought or experienced that politics is too dirty for honest people?  After all, congressmen who are guilty of mere non-criminal sexual peccadilloes are forced out of office when the real, indicted criminal politicians–ones who almost certainly took bribes and fleeced the taxpayers–continue to serve in public office simply because they haven’t actually been convicted and imprisoned yet?

So now your question is what do you think I should do about it?  You’re thinking, “Is he asking me to go out there and rip an illegal gun out of some lowlife thug’s hand and perform a citizen’s arrest?”  ”Am I supposed to break into my Assemblyman’s house and plant a bug, listening intently for whispers of unethical conduct?”

Of course not.  But do you really think only the Frank Serpicos and Veronica Guerins of the world have the duty of doing that for you?  We’re Americans.  We pride ourselves on our rights, our freedoms and the pursuit of happiness custom made to order.  We don’t often pride ourselves, however, on the comparably few responsibilities that we owe this society in exchange.  Many others before us have fought and won the battles that render everything this beautiful country has to offer at our disposal.  All we have to do is keep it that way, making improvements along the way as needed.

But how do you imagine that will happen if as individuals we are too often squeamish for the unpleasant tasks that allow us to keep this gift our ancestors have given us?

If we shy away from politics because dirty people who might smear and attack us have monopolized it, how will it ever get cleaner?

If we stay quiet when we know a friend got himself a gun because he needs protection when he’s peddling destructive drugs to the weaker souls of our neighborhood, how will it ever get safer?

If we buy that dime bag of marijuana without thinking of how wide and deep the blood trail runs from, let’s say, Mexico to get it here, how can we ever expect others to give thought to the unintended consequences of their actions?  How can anything get better then?

OK, so you say even if we do something, nothing seems to change in any measurable way, so what’s the point in making my life harder if things will be better for me not to be involved, not to care?

That is exactly why so many people ignore the call of duty that each of us are presented with on a regular basis, whether you notice it or not.  If a problem doesn’t directly affect us, the natural human instinct is to avoid it like the plague, maybe even pretend to ignore its existence.   Yet, every unresolved problem, whether it’s crime, drug abuse, political corruption, or some other offense, eventually affects all of us.

So you didn’t intervene by calling the cops about that drug deal you just saw where one of them had a gun.  God forbid you got tagged as a rat, right? But maybe, five months later, that drug dealer gets into a fight on your block with a rival dealer, deciding to shoot off a few rounds to prove what a proud and tough young man he is.  Then it’s your sister who’s fatally shot under the armpit, by accident, of course, just like poor Tysha Jones.  What then?  Let’s say it was your friend who saw the deal, and he said nothing, but it was still your sister who was killed.  Wouldn’t you be insanely furious that your friend didn’t do anything?  Of course, it’s not your friend’s fault, really.  He couldn’t have foreseen that your little sister would have gotten hurt.  She was a good girl.  She didn’t get mixed up in that stuff.  But if only your friend said something, did something, maybe it would have all been very different.  Maybe if that shooting could have been prevented, maybe your neighbor wouldn’t have to fear allowing her son to play with the other kids on the street, radically altering his entire childhood as a result.  And so forth, and so on.

It’s a hypothetical, but it’s based on the reality of what has happened hundreds if not thousands of times in places like New York City over the years.  Someone always knows, yet they too often fail to act before tragedy strikes, and even if the tragedy doesn’t directly affect everyone, its consequences can change everything for everyone anywhere near it.

On another hypothetical, you are a young American.  You love your country, but you feel it can do better.  You and your friends want to do something about that.  You start to, but then the older group of establishment cronies look at you as a threat.  They’re so disturbed by your initiative that they try to mess with your job, smear your reputation, and do whatever else they can to persuade you to quit.  You then give up, deciding that the obstacles and the efficacy of your cause just don’t make sense.  Your friends see that and they too throw in the towel.  Yet, an even bigger threat appears on the horizon, and now everyone is looking at each other to see who will have the courage to take it on when lesser challenges inspired more than enough trepidation to quit.  Maybe this time, it really is too big for you or your friends to do anything about, and only if 10 years ago you hadn’t given up so early, so easily.  Maybe if you only thought a little longer term about it, everything would be different.

How much harder and more destructive might the battle for the right and proper thing be when more and more people leave the toughest tasks to the select few?  How much better would this world be at home and abroad if people thought carefully about the little things along the way that they could do to change the course of events, whether for just another individual or an entire nation?

So the point is this: when you’re presented with the call of duty, however little or huge, think carefully before choosing not to respond.  Next time you see something wrong, say something, even if it’s just a pothole on the street.  At the very least, it’ll save a neighbor from having to go to a mechanic this week.   Next time your friend asks you to lend a hand with a community or political effort to right some wrong, do a little something.  It doesn’t have to be anything crazy, but at least a little something.  Who knows? You might feel better about yourself for having done it, even if it cost you some time or money.  And in 20 years, you very well may have changed the world because of it.

Just like Frank Serpico.

Just like Veronica Guerin.

Just like those countless known and unknown heroes, seemingly of legend, who have come before them and who most certainly will follow.

The question is, will you be counted among them?

Don’t get me wrong, we would be better off if all of those ideals could, in fact, be achieved.   However, this perspective too often leaves us to make some serious mistakes, however well-intentioned, as members of a democratic republic since we overlook how direct self-interest plays a role in everything we do in a society, and how understanding this is the key to effective reform.

First, let me just explain why this perspective of “if only…” can lead us astray.  Usually the pursuit of increased participation or access, which we think is in our best interest overall as a democratic republic, predicates some level of government intervention, and that is, by all counts, a very sharp two-edged sword.  The Scandal of Reform by Francis Barry details how the mobilization of New York’s political reformers and progressives throughout the 19th and 20th centuries actually created a rather dysfunctional and, arguably, equally corruptible political system in the pursuit of resolving the previous system’s woes.   To summarize one of the major themes of the book, in an effort to clean up a mostly unregulated political and electoral system, reformers and progressives argued for government to assume oversight and regulatory authority over much of the political process to make the system fairer, cleaner, and more efficient.   That, unfortunately, didn’t happen quite as planned as they instead created government-sanctioned legitimacy for political bosses, gave them unfettered access to patronage, and created a system that is still quite stacked against the very independent and insurgent candidacies that the reformers aimed to help.

Therefore, using government to ensure greater participation or access may, if not evaluated carefully, result in creating another set of problems without really improving on the current ones, especially if it inadvertently doesn’t really change the balance of self-interests in the system.   For instance, let’s look at compulsory voting, like Australia has.  Theoretically, if everyone must vote, and someone receives a majority of votes, that person is objectively the most preferred candidate.  Then he or she will more likely serve in the majority’s best interests than if only a plurality elected him or her.   Firstly, that borders on a genetic fallacy for a host of reasons, but, more importantly, what if voters, who are disgusted by having to vote, choose to cast a blank ballot?  Or what if a voter votes almost at random simply because they don’t care who wins?  Let’s look at a few more questions about this “reform”:

• If a voter casts a donkey-vote or blank ballot (which can neither promote nor harm their interests since it takes no action), does that actually improve or harm the system by distorting the vote of genuinely interested voters?  Will it statistically make a difference?  Is the winning candidate any more likely in voters’ minds to be viewed more favorably as a result?  Will that person’s agenda deviate significantly from the agenda of a person who was elected outside of a compulsory system?
• After all, if uninformed people who wouldn’t vote on their own vote anyway because it is the law, could that result in a “false-positive” majority for a candidate whom genuinely interested voters did not prefer?
• Doesn’t it also reflect the notion that every citizen must be concerned with the operation of government, regardless of government’s proximity to their own needs or interests?  Is that a bad thing?
• Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, does it make a material difference in what actually happens once the election is over?  Are lobbyists, special interest groups, government bureaucrats, corruption, abuse, waste, and so forth any less influential in the policies of government against what is in the best interests of the people?

I’m asking a lot of hypothetical questions because it leads to my main point: self-interest is what drives participation in anything.  Politics and government is a special interest, and those who are deeply involved are members of a kind of special interest group, which most likely consists of other special interest groups.  Am I crazy about art history?  Nope.  Those who are have a genuine interest in the topic and have some reason for it.  Whatever the reason is, it is rational for them because it suits them.   It doesn’t have to make sense to you.  It just has to make sense to them.

Ultimately, the self-interest factor in what government is doing, can do and ought to do is what determines the level of participation of various groups of citizens.

Take for instance the great disparity in Republican and Democratic enrollment in New York City.  One might think that there is a great–almost universal–preference for Democratic Party policies compared to Republican.  If that’s how voters actually made their decisions, you would be correct.  But it’s not.  After all, how else could Republican candidates for Mayor of New York do so well? So here are some of the reasons that there are so many Democrats in New York City, in order of strong to weak self-interest (and probably correlates to frequency and intensity of political participation):

• My issues and needs align most strongly with Democrats than any other party.
• I can better advance my political goals/career or get special favors by being a part of the Democratic Party since there are mostly Democratic elected officials.
• Leaders in my union, college, church/synagogue/mosque, community-based organization or workplace encourage me to do so because only Democrats support the same things I care about, either policy-wise or financially.
• I desire to vote in local Democratic primaries, which often result in producing the general election victor by default, so I can have a greater say in the process, regardless of whether I support the party, its candidates or its principles in the general election.
• All my neighbors, friends or co-workers are Democrats, so I want to fit in.
• My teachers in high school or my parents told me to register Democrat and I never cared to give it a second thought.
• Oh, I must have registered to vote by accident when I got my driver’s license.

In case you can’t already tell, this list can apply to the gamut of reasons anyone registers or votes for any group of candidates or party.

So let’s look at a very simplistic view of what gets voters in each party excited.  Republicans and Democrats succeed in mobilizing voters when voters’ direct best self-interest is squarely in the hands of government.  Generally speaking, Democrats promise programs funded by tax dollars, sweet contracts for public employee unions, or benefits for certain groups of voters that only government can provide.  Republicans seem like the party of limited government, but generally Republicans’ most effective mobilization of voters in recent memory has been when the Republicans tied the moral and spiritual well-being of the country to social legislation.  Lowering taxes could not get as many Republicans elected as promises to end abortion, prevent gay marriage, and so forth–something only government could do.  While the Democrats largely mobilize voters with promises of government-supported benefits, among other things, that allegedly serve voters’ best interests, Republicans provided, among other things, allegedly government-sponsored moral cleanliness for society, which those socially conservative voters valued more as being in their best interest.

Remember, I said that what one deems in their self-interest doesn’t have to be sensible to you; it just has to make sense to them.  Most importantly in politics, if you inject fear, sadness, indignation or anger into the equation, you will do quite well by playing the self-interest card.

By this logic, the voters who are most involved in elections, politics or their communities are those that strongly believe they have something very close and important to them that they must protect through government or from government.  Those individuals who feel extremely strongly about lower taxes, a right to life, better wages for City union workers, or social programs for certain populations are more likely to vote and be involved than someone who might gripe only on occasion about this-or-that.  I don’t imagine it possible that any of these groups alone constitute the absolute majority of voters, but I would not be surprised if any one of those groups constitute the absolute majority of reliable voters who consistently vote all the time, especially in Presidential races down to dogcatcher.

With that, I give you the voting bloc.  Voting blocs (which might also be special interest groups, but not always) and the coalitions that campaigns and parties form with them are representations of why it is so hard to fix the system and yet are the most welcoming of change under the right circumstances.

For instance, if there is a shooting on your block, and that never happened before, you and your neighbors, even if you never spoke to each other before, might decide to do something like attend a precinct community council meeting, petition for more police funding from your elected officials, organize a neighborhood watch, have public safety cameras or better lighting installed, and so forth.  You have a need for a function that pretty much only government can fulfill and it is most proximate to your best self-interest than most, if not all, of your other self-interests (like watching Hulu all day and night).  Your block has just become a public safety-oriented voting bloc. You will want to know what your public officials are going to do to make your block safer, and you and your neighbors are more likely to vote now that the stances of candidates on this issue really affects you.

Conversely, a few blocks away from your block with the recent shooting, you are also the owner of a hookah bar who is looking to open up another place.  You know the City government is looking to ban hookah bars and might be on the cusp of passing such legislation.  You’ve never voted before, let’s say, simply because you never had a good enough reason to.  Now that your entrepreneurial freedom and livelihood are being targeted, you start letting your customers know that government wants to ban one of their favorite recreational and social establishments.  You start organizing other hookah bar owners to do the same, and maybe create a permanent organization to advocate or lobby for the continued non-regulation of hookah bar establishments.  You and your colleagues now not only certainly vote, but also donate money to candidates who aren’t going to regulate or destroy your business.  Hookah bar owners and customers have now become a voting bloc.

Now, your block consists of 1% of the voters of a district, and your fellow hookah bar owners and customers represent 5% of the same district.  When you go out to vote, you are going to support the candidates that are pro-public safety and anti-regulation on hookah bars.  Assuming you have prioritized your self-interests similarly with others in the same voting blocs as you, 6% of voters are probably casting their votes the same way as you.  Heck, you yourself might have encouraged them on how they should vote!   You and your fellow voters could decide an election simply because of these two preferences.  After all, in a local election, if everything else is pretty status quo, those 6% of voters might generate 40% of the votes cast.

Pursuing one’s best interest through government or protecting it from government are the best motivators for political action. Most of us would love taxes to be lower, but I know (a) everyone else has to pay them, so I don’t feel totally singled out and (b) it is not really hurting my other self-interests that I value more highly.   Since reform tends to be general self-interest-oriented, it is very hard to mobilize the general public and especially the non-interested voters to support something an absolute majority might agree with since the proximity of its benefits are too far removed from anything immediately affecting them.  Plus, other voting blocs and special interest groups might vehemently oppose reforms if those reforms could make efforts towards protecting their self-interests through government or from government more difficult or less predictable.

In a future post, I will offer some ideas as to how one can tie direct best self-interest with reform that consists of interaction with government and outside of government.

Woohoo!

The system that was in place worked as follows. Whichever Republican candidate won a majority of votes statewide was the only candidate entitled to send their delegates to the Republican National Convention.  Before that system, each Congressional district was able to vote for whichever candidate’s delegates they preferred and whichever delegates won in those Congressional districts went on to the convention.  Apparently, the NYGOP has returned back to this more democratic system, which is a big plus for the Republican grassroots in the state.

It is not clear, however, from the details of the post, what the system will look like now.  For instance, in 2000, delegates and alternate delegates had to petition their way onto the ballot on behalf of a Presidential campaign in order for that candidate to appear on the ballot.  In the winner-take-all system, any candidate meeting a certain set of criteria, such as eligibility for federal Presidential election matching funds, would automatically be placed on the ballot and each campaign could simply designate who their delegates would be for each Congressional district.  Since it was the candidate and not the delegates running in the primary, only the actual candidate’s names would appear on the ballot–not the delegate’s.

I’m sure the details will surface soon enough, but in the mean time, start figuring out who you want to be the Republican presidential nominee in ’12 since now what you think might actually matter for once to the NYGOP!

Corruption, surprisingly, is defined at least a thousand different ways (ok, I’m exaggerating a bit…but only a bit).  Basically, corruption can be simply put as the subjugation of public goods or privileges for private gain.  That covers breaches of the law and breaches of ethical or moral behavior, which might otherwise be perfectly legal.  Most importantly, it thrives on a systemic level as much as the individual level.

It’s been quite a journey in terms of my own understanding and beliefs about the nature of the disease or corruption and the remedies used to treat it. As a general rule of thumb, after taking a number of enlightening courses that have better informed me on a variety of approaches through which one can study corruption, I tend to look at the individual and his/her behavior in order to understand the root causes of systemic corruption.

I have always been particularly inspired by something Polybius, an ancient Greek historian, wrote.  Essentially, he said that the key to the success of the Roman Republic, in his mind, was a fear of the gods, if you will.  He gives an example between a Greek and a Roman delivering a sum of money on behalf of their people.  He demonstrates that the Greeks have a world-class bureaucracy designed to check and double-check someone every step of the way so that the total sum of money gets from Point A to Point B.  Yet, he laments that despite all this effort, the courier in fact still manages to lift some of the cash without a clue as to where it disappeared to along the way.  On the other hand, he points out how the Romans, supposedly filled with a sense of piety and fear of the wrath of the gods, had none of the checks and balances the Greeks did and yet their courier delivered the money exactly as instructed.

Even if, for the sake of discussion, you want to take religion out of it, the most important point that’s made in this brief discussion of Polybius’ thoughts is the significance of individual self-governance.  If an individual sees fit to take advantage of a public good, all that one has left in their arsenal to combat that tendency is disincentive.  All the precaution in the world will not prevent an unscrupulous person who is dedicated enough to get what they want, whether they are right or wrong.  Now multiply this effect over hundreds or thousands of people, and we see very quickly how systems can deteriorate from the inside out.

Of course, Polybius isn’t the only scholar of the state who remarked on how much better the world would be if people did a better job of doing the right and proper thing when entrusted with any kind of public goods or power.  Federalist #51 makes its famous argument on checks and balances with this fact of human nature in mind:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Auxiliary precautions besides ensuring the people are ultimately sovereign?  That’s what got my attention, too.  See, we think of corruption as some dirty politician or major corporate executive stealing from shareholders and taxpayers to enrich themselves and some of their buddies.  What we don’t give much thought about is what role John Q. Public plays in enabling that behavior in his daily life.  Someone has to bribe the politician.  Someone wants to make the system fairer for themselves–and only themselves.  Others who are subordinate to the bigger corrupt players also might stand to benefit, like getting a promoting for staying quiet, keeping their job for staying quiet, and so on.  Perhaps an aide or junior exec plays an integral role in the deal and therefore is directly benefitting from the arrangement as well.  Let’s not forget that people also tend to acclamate to a certain level of corrupt practices, so much so that they consider it normal and perpetuate the abuses.  In many countries, it’s perfectly normal to bribe a bureaucrat to get a permit or a license and most people don’t even bat an eye.  Because of this, the World Bank estimates that $1 trillion is lost to corruption every year around the globe.  Now imagine if the average citizen in those countries simply stopped paying up and just demanded the services they are entitled to without any further remuneration to the bureaucrat?   Imagine if the bureaucrat, who is also presumably a citizen of the same country, did not think he or she ought to be entitled to bribes in exchange for doing the public service for which they receive a salary?  What a different world it would be!  And yet, it is regrettably not practical to believe that such a perfect world could come to exist.

So, as far as I am concerned, corruption is a two-way street.  The public is just as responsible for enabling systemic corruption as much as a dirty politician at the top ranks of government.   Now, the real trick is figuring out how to balance out these factors into a comprehensive anti-corruption reform strategy.  That’s something I hope to explore with you.  As I acquire a better understanding of the topic myself, I want to share more with you on what corruption is, how it manifests itself, who are the players, and what checks-and-balances of self-interests and ambition affect those behaviors.  It is in the course of doing this that I hope to add some pragmatic, balanced strategies to the growing discourse in this field.

That is the primary reason for me endeavoring to keep a personal site up and running with as much content as possible.  I have some pretty diverse insights on a lot of topics, and a lot of personal academic work which might actually go further if I share it with you.  You’ll probably see some of it and say why I would think anyone cares about that! The answer is: it’s the Internet.  You don’t have to care for me to post it.  So there.  At least you’ll learn something anyway.

Oh, full disclosure: I’ll be allowing comments for now.  However, I reserve the right to delete anything that I don’t like.  It’s my site and I can moderate it if I want to.