Chuckrolled



When the bartender brings the third round of tequila shots to the table and it's barely 6PM on a Tuesday, you know things are going to get a lot uglier. That's how I felt when the Feds arrested chrome-domed and Fu-Manchu'd Chuck Turner, city-councilor-for-life for Roxbury, agitator nonpareil, and darling of the Fabian set, for taking a $1000 bribe to grease a liquor license in the same sting that saw Diane Wilkerson stuffing money in her bra in the Fill-a-Buster diner next to the State House.

So when Chuck said "see you on the steps of City Hall at 2:30 today," I decided it might be a good day for a late lunch and walked over for some free theater. Would he name names? Confess and beg forgiveness? Resign and vow to clear his name?

Of course not.

Aside from the de rigeur "I am innocent of all the charges against me" statement, the whole 30 minutes was pure huffenpuff, Charles the Bald jousting valiantly with the many windmills lined up against him. And of course, Council President Maureen Feeney (his emphasis), who according to Chuck is the one who needs to explain herself. After all, all he's done is get caught on tape pocketing some cake, for which the presumption of innocence ought to apply. Well, she got Chuckrolled, at least for this round. Street power beats back-office power, at least in the beginning.

The crowd was really two crowds--one part his constituents, the people who have actually lived and made their home in his district lo these past decades, and the rest, which looked like the the crowd in the Beacon Hill Whole Foods on a Sunday afternoon, from the mohawked butch girls to the revolutionary in the nice North Face jacket and the older couple in tailored clothing who could afford to hang around City Hall Plaza at 3 in the afternoon.

I don't begrudge Chuck's people, who voted for him in precisely the same way that Southie voted for Jimmy Kelly and the North End voted for Sal LaMattina and every other tribe of this city voted for its own guy at one time or another. The point of electing one of your own isn't to eliminate corruption, it's to make sure you'll have someone to pay off when you need a liquor license. But the "progressives" are another thing entirely. When Turner said his only goal was "the liberation of my people," he wasn't talking about the Amex anarchists and faculty club jock-sniffers who drew in close for their thrilling whiff of radical chic.

For these folks, I can see only two rationalizations: either he is really innocent and being set up by his enemies, or what he's done is a misdemeanor committed by every other city councilor, and he is being singled out by his enemies. The first will suffice only until he is convicted, at which point the denial will have to be augmented. The second is hardly a defense of Turner. By all means, let's shake out every carpet in City Hall. As far as I am concerned, the only difference between a building filled with elected officials and a prison are the bars on the windows.

In any case, we are living in an age when the self-proclaimed defenders of the public trust have told us that the standard for conflict of interest extends to the mere "appearance of impropriety," let alone enough evidence for a US attorney to file an indictment for the act. Turner is right that is not enough to convict him in a court of law. It is however more than sufficient for administrative and nonjudicial disciplinary action.

Has Business Gotten Too Big?

According to the New York Times,

...Citigroup is widely viewed, both in Washington and on Wall Street, as too big to
be allowed to fail.

The past six months have brought to our doors a succession of private companies which, we have been told, are too important to be allowed to fail. Perhaps it is true of Citi as a practical matter, but it is deeply offensive to darn near every economic and political bone in my body.

As recently as ten years ago, a block of downtown Boston might contain six or more different banks. Then all at once it seemed like the arena now known as TD Banknorth Garden changed names every few weeks. Shawmut Bank, Fleet Bank, BayBank, the Bank of Boston, and US Trust all disappeared within what seemed like a few years. At least the Patriots still play at Gillette Stadium, at least until an Excel spreadsheet at P&G's headquarters in Cinncinnati says it should be renamed Febreze Field.

It is possible that what we have is the financial equivalent of a 1000-year storm, and if we had a few dozen medium-sized regional banks instead of a half-dozen megabanks, we'd simply have a lot more failing banks in need of help. But it's also possible that with a lot more banks, we'd have more diversification and variation in business practices. Of course, plenty would have made many of the same bad decisions, but none of them singly would present as "too big to fail."