Right To Work Law In New Hampshire

Aren't the Republicans masters of phrasing?  The "estate tax" becomes the "death tax" and an effort to destroy unions becomes "the Right To Work."  I mean, isn't everyone for the right to work?

Who is against telling a man or woman they have a right to work?


But, of course, what the law before the legislature in Concord, New Hampshire aims to do is to destroy unions, because, well, Republicans are the owner class, the bosses, and they hate unions.


The problem for Democrats is they have not been able to come up with a reasonable sounding answer to the anti union argument, which has been framed not as an anti union argument but an argument for freedom, for personal freedom to choose not to join a union.

If I am a man who wants to work in a super market but I grew up being repulsed by Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters' Union or if I currently hate the police union because they protect murderous, racist cops, why should I be forced to pay union dues?


All I want to do is to go to work and draw my pay. I don't want to join a movement. What's wrong with that?


The answer, of course, is you do not live your life in splendid isolation. You cannot ignore others around you. You are part of groups whether you want to be or not.

If the government fights a war, that requires a group effort. You can get drafted.
If you want to go to public school or send your kids to school, you have to be vaccinated against measles, because, much as you might want to just be left alone, you carry viruses which can threaten the health of those around you.


You benefit from the union contract, even if you do not join the union, because the union has done a lot of work negotiating with the owners to get the best wage and the best health insurance package, and since the union has done all this labor for you, you should not get a free ride. If you decide to undercut the union, to work for a lower wage, you have not taken that action in isolation, you have affected the market value of that job.


The bosses would be very quick to come down on any competitor to their product who undercuts their price--just look at all the hew and cry over China "dumping" steel in the U.S.--but when you undercut the wage package, well then you are a hero as far as the bosses and their Republican tools in the legislature are concerned.


But I never asked the union to do anything for me. How do you know I couldn't have negotiated with the boss for a better wage than what the union got?


The bosses, of course, would love you to think that. In fact, I worked for a corporation which in its employment contract forbid me to discuss my salary or benefits with any other worker. That was a firing offence. Why? Because the bosses knew they could keep wages down if they could prevent one worker from finding out another worker, doing the same job, was getting paid more.

There are some businesses which simply cannot run without human beings doing labor--everything from hospitals, to bus companies to super markets. True, technology is replacing workers in many businesses, but as long as the business needs human beings to do business and to make a profit, the workers are part of the cost of doing business and the owners and stock holders live in opposition to those workers every day, to the extent the wages paid are part of the overhead which gets subtracted from income to yield net profit.


But back to the "Right to Work" laws, which say the union can exist but it cannot ask workers who do not join the union to pay for the work of negotiations which those workers never asked the union to do for them.  Doesn't that sound fair?


The argument is, well, before you arrived, we had a union which got agreement for a pay scale, open to all, and every year since you've been here, you've benefited from that pay scale. You may not have asked for us to do the work, but you've benefited, so you have to pay your fair share.

You never asked the government to build the road you use to get to work, but you use that road and it needs upkeep, so you have to pay the tolls, the gasoline taxes used to support maintenance of that road. You can say, "Well, but I never asked for you to build that road," but as long as you benefit from it's presence, you pay.


You can say, well, that's different, because I can choose to use that road or not, but I can't choose to pay or not to pay those union fees.  But, actually, if you choose to work for a business which is kept going by the labor of its employees, you have chosen to benefit from the efforts of the union, which keeps the business going by insuring a reliable work force.


What you are really arguing in refusing to pay your dues is you want to live off the grid, you want to be unconnected to others while still benefiting from the work others do.  Some would say you want your cake and to eat it too.


All the benefits without any of the costs.

In fact, you learned to read and write at public schools and you paid property taxes for that. That made you more valuable to the business which employed you. You showered and used your home toilet before getting to work, more infrastructure you paid for. But when you got to work, suddenly you claim to be unconnected to the other workers keeping that business going. You are the lone cowboy, riding the range, the independent, self reliant man who needs nobody else in the world.


In the practical world, of course, if you allow some workers to opt out of paying union dues, then, especially when things get tight, more and more workers may opt out of paying dues and eventually the union collapses for lack of funds.


And when you get to work, you function in splendid isolation, with no desire to bond with your coworkers.


Congratulations: You need nobody in this life. You are strong enough to stand alone. Gary Cooper in "High Noon."

The Republicans want to frame this as an argument for personal freedom for that lone cowboy, that self reliant man who doesn't need the help of his co workers to fend for himself. Guy probably carries a gun, too, cause he don't need no police to protect him.  Truth is, that cowboy needs other people or he wouldn't be working for a pay check.

But if you want that job, where others work to support you, you have to pay.
You want to open your own business, work without others supporting you. Go right ahead. You want a pay check which has been enriched by the work of others, pay your damn dues.

Mutual Meddling: US and Russia, Nothing New

History is one long argument. Having little formal training in it, the best I can do to understand the past is to read and watch TV.  In that, I suppose I'm not much different from  my fellow citizens in those Blue Wall states.

1870 cartoon in New York Daily Graphic 

Lately I've been reading "Reilly: Ace of Spies" by Robin Bruce Lockhart and the more widely marketed, but far less compelling book on Reilly by Andrew Cook. 
And I've been watching "The Americans" on Amazon, and David Lean's version of "Dr. Zhivago," (a film made by a Brit, starring an Egyptian in the title role and an American actor as the chief villain.)

Sidney Reilly the real article 

From all of these sources the underlying concept I've formed is America (and Britain and France and most certainly Germany) have been reaching into Russia and trying to manipulate Russia for at least 150 years. We've had our hands up Russia's skirt so often, it is small wonder the Motherland is quick to slap us, and to want to return the favor.

TV version of Reilly

As early as 1870, at least some in America recognized Russia as a colossus we would have to deal with on a global scale. Britain orchestrated Russia's defeat and the loss of its Navy in the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century and its agents (including Reilly) tried to overthrow Lenin when Russia pulled out of World War One. 

Brits tried to remove this guy

The first World War was a revelation for many in Russia, as the true meaning of the word "decadence" surfaced in the terrible suffering of the many owing to the indifference of the rich few.  

As Lockhart observed, Russia's "gallant but inadequately equipped army was being mauled by the Germans while in the cities and towns the people starved in the bread queues. In Petrograd, the aristocracy and rich bourgeoisie continued to live an orgiastic existence in which champagne, caviar and bedding their coachmen's daughters and their neighbours' wives were the main ingredients. The Russian nobility was an intellectual superfluity lost in artificial life, in sensual pleasure and in unbroken egoism. They had reduced love for women to a kind of voracious gourmandise."

If the Russians did try to "influence" our 2016 election, one has to say, "So, what else is new? We've done the same and worse many times over to Russia."

And the fact is, Democrats have tried to blame their losses on the Koch brothers, and now the Russians, when, in fact, the truth lies closer to home. As the Koch brothers have noted, if money and the TV ads it can buy were sufficient to win an election, they would have been more successful in electing their candidates to office.  In fact, Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump five to one in most states she lost and and nine to one in some. The money, the Citizens United case, none of it made a difference. 













If the Russians somehow managed to actually hack the voting tallies, actually managed to turn a Clinton electoral victory into a computer hacked defeat, well, then we'd have a case of Russia succeeding in doing something the Americans have apparently never succeeded in doing, but which the British most certainly tried, i.e. actually placing in power their man as opposed to the man the local population voted for.

Like the best spy stories, the truth will never to known about the particulars. But the truth about the greater story is obvious:  The United States tries to control Russia and the Russians would like to do the same to us.

Maybe this image isn't photo-shopped 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had mostly forgotten about the Russians. They were mostly a bogey man I didn't really believe in growing up during the cold war, but then they faded and were replaced by the undeniably vicious and rabid Islamic fundamentalists. 

Enough Endless War

The new problem for me is our own FBI.  Looks like we've got the Republican FBI and the Democratic CIA/NSA.  We used to laugh at the Russians and the Germans who had politicized their national police, and saw the various organizations fight among themselves.

Now look at us.

Donald The Joffrey: Let Your Eyes Feast on the Truth

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what are these two pictures worth?

"How godlike, how immortal is he?...But the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself that is which determines or rather indicates, his fate."
--Henry David Thoreau

Of course, Mr. Thoreau never knew Mr. Trump.

Trump Hisownself 

The Arithmetic of Deceit: The Perversion of the Republic (Gerrymander)

When people say Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million, it leaves me unimpressed. That number does not speak to the underlying psychology of voting in this country, and the implication of the statement is that a majority of voters in this country wanted Hillary Clinton to be President, not Donald Trump.
That number cannot tell you what was or is in the minds of the American population or even the American electorate (which are two different things.)

As anyone knows who lives in Maryland or Massachusetts knows, if you are a Democrat,  you don't need to go vote for your state to go the way you want it to--so you may go to work or go bowling instead of waiting in line at the polls.  Same is true for Mississippi and Idaho, on the Republic side. It is entirely possible, if the voters knew the election would be determined by the popular vote, millions more in the South and Mountain states would have voted for Mr. Trump.

We, by now, all realize we do not have a democracy but a republic. A democracy is ruled by a majority of the people; a republic is ruled by the representatives of the people, very different. Our hallowed founding fathers hedged their bets, not trusting the mostly uneducated rabble which constituted the population of America in the 18th century, before public education and mass communications. 

So we have the electoral college.  
We also have a largely unexamined concept that a country is not simply the people living within the geographic borders of our nation, but it is, somehow, the actual geographic territory, the mountains and farmlands and lakes and rivers which should have a say in how our nation is governed.  
So we have people living in Wyoming and Montana and the Dakotas complaining bitterly about the people in Washington, D.C. trying to take away their "country" from them. In fact, those people have somewhere between three and six times the voting power of the Black man living in Philadelphia, or certainly the Black man living in Washington, D.C.

a safe Republican district in Texas 

The fact is there is something which has taken away our country from the majority of its citizens for at least a century,and that is the perverse practice of drawing Congressional districts to take power and representation away from the majority of people living in a state: Gerrymandering.

One could ask why we have states represented in Congress at all, why we couldn't simply create a grid for the nation and elect people from that, or why we need to spread out the representatives by geographical territories at all. Historically, the interests of the industrial the  Northern states, of New England, were at odds with the agricultural South.  New England shoe factory owners and workers might have wanted tariffs ,where South plantation cotton owners wanted no tariffs because they sold their cotton to England and Europe and they wanted no part of a trade war. 

But now, the country is more integrated commercially and financially and these state borders we live with now may be anachronisms.

Doing away with states, or re drawing their boundaries will likely never happen, but it is remotely possible, however unlikely, we might do away with the bizarre boundaries which define Congressional districts which are designed to deny representation to the majority of people living in a state.

To mention just one of fifty possible examples, Pennsylvania:  Pennsylvania has 18 seats in Congress, 18 votes of which Republicans claimed 13.  In 2012 it took roughly, only 180,000 votes to send a Republican to Congress n Pennsylvania,  where it took 270,000 to elect a Democrat. (Wyoming sent it's Republican Congresswoman to Washington with only 166,000 votes.) Put another way, Republicans voting for a Republican put him in his seat with an 87% success rate and Democrats voted for a winner only 49% percent of the time, despite the fact about 51% of the votes were for Democrats and 49% were Republicans.

If these numbers make your head spin, think of it this way. If you took all the Democratic towns from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and drew a line around them and connected them into one Congressional district then the 51% of the vote would send only 1 Democrat to Congress and the Republicans would sent 17. 


The fact is, it doesn't have to be this way. If Congressmen ran for the House the way Senators run for the U.S. Senate, i.e., "at large" then the Pennsylvania delegation would have 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans, rather than 5 Democrats and 13 Republicans.


Of course, we still have to ask ourselves about the U.S. Senate whose members are elected at large. But then you get back to the idea that the Senators from Wyoming, Idaho and Montana all get two votes even though they represent fewer Americans than live in Washington, D.C., whose voters get no U.S.Senators at all.

Reaping the benefits of a perverted system

If Congress actually reflected the will, the philosophy, the needs and the opinions of the people, it would not much matter whether Donald Trump won.  In fact, the past 8 years of paralysis, during which a popular President was stymied by a Republican House and Senate, would have never happened.

Think of what that would have meant in just one area: Health care. The votes for a "public option" or "Medicare for all who want it," would have been there. Instead, all the Democrats could get through was an organism (Obamacare) so wounded and tied in knots by Republican opposition it had to sink beneath the waves, bleeding and dying before it was barely born; then the Republicans had the chutzpah to shout: "There we told you it would never work!"

And don't even get me started on the Supreme Court, which next to the House, is the most reactionary, Right Wing Tea Party, originalist bastion in government.

Wealth follows power

When Benjamin Franklin was asked by that lady outside the hall in Philadephia, "What sort of government have you got us?" Franklin famously replied, "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."

We have our answer now. 

Of Experts and IQ

Reading Andrew Hacker's books about the follies of American educational theory and practice reminded me of an episode at one the annual Endocrine Society meetings some years ago.

The annual Endocrine Society meeting brings together four thousand endocrinologists from all over the world and it's where you have a chance to ask the "experts," the authors of the articles you've read in the "New England Journal of Medicine" or the "Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism" all those questions you've been storing up all year.

Every week I see newly pregnant women in my practice who have just learned they are hypothyroid, and these women have gone on line and read their babies will suffer a big hit to their IQ scores unless the mothers are treated yesterday. They arrive at my office, understandably, in a panic. Their incubating babies have been deprived of thyroid hormone from week 8 to 12 of their gestation and now they will never be smart enough to get into Harvard.

The source of this bad news about baby's IQ was a study done in Milan, Italy some years ago where mothers with low blood levels of thyroid hormone were divided into two groups, and one was treated with thyroid hormone to bring their levels to normal and the other was not.  The babies were tested at three years of age and those whose mothers were not treated with supplemental thyroid hormone scored three to four  IQ points lower than those whose mother got the extra thyroid hormone.

We discussed this study in our weekly endocrine conference and I was alone in voicing substantial doubts about the study, but, of course, like my colleagues, I figured, what the hell? Why not treat women with thyroid hormone?  The only real question was how often they needed their blood tests monitored and what to tell them about the harm done before they were treated.
Many of these women had experienced some delay before they were tested or treated and some were ready to sue their obstetricians for the blow dealt to their babies's brains and academic futures.

This simply made no sense to me for a variety of reasons:
1.  The developing fetal brain, it is well known, does not need thyroid hormone at various stages in development, which is the reason you can check babies at birth for the babies' blood level of thyroid hormone and you have a several weeks to treat them with thyroid hormone. This is the reason every American baby gets tested at birth for hypothyroidism (a test called TSH) and public health nurses track down those who are low and treat them. Since this practice was instituted the incidence of cretinism (the mental retardation caused by infantile hypothyroidism) in the United States has fallen to nearly zero, being seen only in babies born in places where mothers deliver off the grid. 
2. It's been long taught that thyroid hormone does not cross the placental barrier from mother to child, so why would treating the mother help?  Since this study, people have been back pedaling on this teaching and it has made me wonder how we knew this "fact" in the first place, and I have not yet discovered the answer. Another "truth" that "experts" taught, which may not be true.
3. The kids' IQ's were tested at age three. How do you test a 3 year old for IQ? And if you could reliably test for something called intelligence, at age three, what would you find at age 18 in these same kids?  This was the question I asked the panel at the meeting. I pointed out the neurosurgeons have been telling us for decades about how plastic the brains of kids are compared to adults, which permits all sorts of brain surgery, from which kids seem to recover and become perfectly functional. So why should we believe these kids whose mother did not get thyroid would not, at age 17,  get into Harvard because thyroid hormone therapy was delayed a few weeks when they were in utero?

4. During the discussion at the Society meeting someone mentioned that women in Italy do not get tested for thyroid until the 2nd trimester, sometime around week 14-16, so even the treated group got treated a lot later in pregnancy than American women, who are typically tested around week 8.  The organs are all "formed" by week 12, but this is one of those things which make you think that there might be more to an organ than its structure as seen by an ultrasound--there might be more going on in a brain or a liver in terms of "formation" and maturation. Lungs, of course, have long been known to look like lungs far before they can function outside the womb as lungs. 

The members of the panel on stage started squirming. One or two suppressed smiles, others could not, but some were clearly angry. No clear answer was forthcoming other than the usual, "We need more studies."

In the hallway, afterward a woman who introduced herself as a professor of pediatrics caught my arm and informed me that actually three year olds can be test for IQ and these IQ tests are very "durable" and predictive of adult IQ's, and a 3 to 4 point difference is "very significant."

I thanked her for her input and told her I did not believe a word she said. 

I'm a long way from being a pediatrician, but I've had two kids and I had the opportunity of observing them daily and closely and watching my wife, a nurse, put each one through their little Piaget tests at every age and I can tell you, I had no clue whether these kids would be academically talented, intelligent enough to tie their own shoes or even find their way from their rooms to the kitchen.  

For the longest time, our dog seemed several steps ahead of our kids. (He was a very bright dog, admittedly.)

an early fondness for blades

And one of these kids, was charming but I would not have bet on his getting out of middle school on time.  Doing his math homework with him, helping him write his essays, I thought, well, maybe he can work with his hands when he grows up, but he may not want to go to college.

Of course, I missed a few key clues about him. For one thing, when he was in 6th grade, he wrote an "epic" poem, based on a mix of fantasy books he loved, and the "Iliad" and his teacher put it in the literary magazine.  For another, while he seemed incapable of staying in his chair for more than thirty seconds, when he got home from wrestling team practice, beaten to a pulp and exhausted, he would read a 1,500 page fantasy novel with two dozen plot lines and as many characters and he would not budge until he finished. 

I was right about one thing: He did wind up making his living with his hands, as a surgeon. 

Working with his hands

His middle school teachers, his counselors, all the experts told us not to expect much from him, and looked at us as typical pushy parents who wanted their kid to go to Harvard when he really belonged in the construction trades.

His patients are human, but he makes an exception for gorillas

Expert opinion, right there. 

Anger: Andrew Hacker Illuminates

Sitting with the head of the board of trustees of the Sidwell Friends School, decades ago, I listened as the parent of one of the students, opined about what makes a school truly elite. "The worst thing Boston Latin ever did was to abandon the requirement that every student master calculus. The place was never the same." This parent was a well known lawyer in Washington, D.C.

Andrew Hacker

Speaking with a Dean at Vanderbilt University about my son, who was struggling to get past calculus as a freshman, I mentioned the last time I ever used calculus, which was required in my day to get into medical school, was on the final exam. "Oh," the Dean said, "But math is the language of science. You need calculus."  I asked him what his academic training was. He had a PhD in Anthropology. (That particular student managed to squeak by calculus and got into Columbia P&S, a pretty elite medical school, and he went on to be a vascular surgeon without ever mastering polynomials or any math higher than arithmetic and the few bits of algebra which allow you to calculate doses of drugs per/ml, something the calculators and computers now do for you.)

Listening to an electrician's apprentice in Haverhill,  I learned he had worked with his electrician sponsor for six years but could not get licensed in the state of Massachusetts because he could not pass the math portions of the electricians' licensing exam.
"What sort of math do you need to know to be an electrician?" I asked him.
"Damned if I know," he said. "Whatever it is, I don't know it."
"But," I asked. "When you are doing your work every day, do you use math?
"Nothing like what's on the exam."

Andrew Hacker

There are many malign sources of injustice in life. 
Looking at depictions of the 20th century, where injustices occurred in Army life where privates slept in the mud and officers slept indoors, and there were nasty injustices where Nazis seized property and sent Jews off to concentration camps, where Sophie had to make her choice.

One gets a sense of big, horrible injustice versus smaller, but still important injustices, like who gets to travel the road toward greater financial security and a more comfortable place in the higher strata of society.

Howard Zinn wrote of injustice in the South as it occurred in a society in which White males kept Negroes from voting, from getting good jobs, from getting a good education. Those were very serious injustices.

Howard Zinn

And he wrote about the bosses, people like Carnegie and Mellon hiring thugs to break the heads of union leaders trying to organize labor. Those were nasty, brutal forms of injustice.

But an injustice doesn't have to be racist or thuggish to be serious or to engender anger and hatred.  It can simply be mindless, institutional and narrow minded self interest thwarting rewards to deserving people.

Re reading Andrew Hacker's "The Math Myth" brought to mind all sorts of institutionalized injustices I experienced wending my way through school, going higher and higher, from college to medical school,  and being lucky enough to dodge and elude the math Mandarins. 

Some of the arguments for the Common Core, for advanced algebra for calculus derive from a commendable desire for rigor.  Learning and academic advancement should not be pleasant, enjoyable or fulfilling, the argument goes. You should have to take some courses which prove how much you want it. How much discomfort and drudgery you are willing to suffer.

Rule Makers

I've certainly seen the problems generated when people who are not inclined to dedicate themselves get into jobs which at least once upon a time required a certain amount of self denial and sacrifice, like being a doctor in a hospital, or in an emergency room.  
Watching young doctors walk away from a patient in crisis because their shifts are done, seeing doctors who do not bother to pick up the phone to call another doctor to explain why a patient is being sent for a referral, who really have no inclination to sacrifice anything for a patient's welfare--all this brings home how important the right "character" is for certain jobs. The trouble is, there is no assurance the student who will sacrifice to get his own glittering prize will then be likely to sacrifice his own comfort for a patient or a client.

I once admitted a patient whose blood smear in my office looked like acute myelocytic leukemia and I told  the patient to meet me at the hospital. I phoned the hematology oncology fellow who would have to do the bone marrow and I expected the fellow would, as was customary.  People who are told they might have leukemia are thrust into a special circle of Hell, awaiting the most dreaded news, and the waiting is in some ways as bad as what follows.
 But the fellow did not see the patient. He went to lunch, did some other chores and went home early to have dinner with his wife and he still hadn't got by to see the patient by dinner the next night and I was apoplectic and when I finally tracked him down, I let that  fellow know just how deplorable I thought he was. 
He reacted with indignation that I would get angry. Anger was unacceptable.  The fellow had done well in calculus and got good grades at an elite medical school who was I to judge him when so many had certified him as top drawer?
I thought I had better reason to judge him  a pretty miserable excuse for a doctor, despite his talent for solving polynomial equations.

All this bubbled up as I read Andrew Hacker outlining how we have fallen so far in America with respect to our idea of meritocracy, how thoroughly perverted we've allowed our system of awarding glittering prizes to become.

He tells the story of Jeb Bush visiting a high school in Florida where a girl student asked him if he knew the angles in a  3/4/5 triangle .  Bush had no idea.

"Then you could not graduate from my high school," the student said.

In fact 90% of Florida adults could not pass the tests required of high school students.

The fact is, you can throw up hurdles for students to jump; you can demand real rigor in courses in high school and college, which would separate those who are willing to sacrifice and work hard from the slackers,  without resorting to the use of arbitrary and meaningless hurdles such as solving polynomial equations.

It is any wonder there is anger in the heartland?  Can you blame people for voting against Hillary Clinton, who they see as someone who embraces all that is wrong with how one class, the Mandarins,  who are the professors of mathematics at elite institutions,  keep other classes of people down?

Math and the way math courses are used in America is really just the prologue for Hacker.  What he's really talking about is social injustice. It's about the process, now ubiquitous in America, of telling people who want to be veterinarians'' assistants, electricians, welders, paralegals, physicians, surgeons they don't have the "right stuff" when, in fact, the basis for making this judgment is fraudulent, and the fraud is obvious to anyone who has ever faced a 3/4/5 triangle question.

The tests used are obviously arbitrary and irrelevant to the jobs sought.   

Like Zinn, Hacker looks through the status quo and past the hoary visages of the eminent professors to the truth. 

Truth is actually a rare commodity in America today and Hacker uncovers a mother lode in "The Math Myth."

Learning to Love Rogue Politicians: Buddy Cianci as a Prequel to the Donald

Buddy Cianci started his career as an assistant prosecutor in Providence, Rhode Island,   with  the murder trial of Raymond Patriarca, the mob kingpin of Providence. 
It had all the elements of a Francis Ford Copolla production.
The key witness for the prosecution testified he was ordered by Mr. Patriarca to murder two rival gansters. Open and shut case.
Then the defense produced a Catholic priest, who testified he was visiting the cemetery with Mr. Patriarca at the time the mob boss was supposed to be giving the order.

Mr. Patriarca

As Cianci later said, it was up to the jury of twelve Catholics whether to believe the priest or the hit man.  Under cross examination, the priest admitted he might have been mistaken about the date, when the priest was shown to have been out of town on the date in question. The jury acquitted Mr. Patriarca anyway.


"He's a nice guy," the jury members of Mr. Patriarca. The mob boss sent turkeys to needy families at Christmas and walked the streets handing out cash and favors to local folks.


Later, when Mr. Cianci ran for mayor, Mr. Patriarca supported him, which meant he had his mob get out the vote for Cianci, who won and who kept his word to the boss to appoint his wise guys to city jobs which gave them control over a variety of key departments.  Patriarca gave away $15 turkeys personally, but he stole $1500 per person through the taxes which had to be raised to support payouts through city government to the mobsters in the garbage collection department, among others.


"That's the way business is done in this town," Cianci later observed.


He went from the anti corruption mayor running against the powers that be to the mob's mayor. 

Providence, Rhode Island

In between stints in "a federally funded gated community" as Cianci described  federal prison, Buddy did a talk show which the citizens of Providence loved, a sort of early version of "The Celebrity Apprentice."


The interesting thing about all this is the people who voted for him didn't take him literally. They shrugged a lot. 
Buddy did for them what they wanted from a mayor. He kept the snow plowed; he showed up at every parade; unroofed the Providence River so the water was again visible and it became a huge tourist attraction when they added gas flames along the river front and brought in entertainers for "River fire fest" during the summer. Business flourished and buildings got built. "Sure you have to pay bribes to get anything done here," one citizen noted, "But the fact is, things do get done. Buddy's been a great mayor."

Hizhonor the mayor

The doyens on College Hill, the east side of Providence may have been scandalized by this mayor who hung out with gangsters, who beat a man he thought was having an affair with his wife with a fire place poker, and Buddy had affairs aplenty of his own; he did not object to extra martial sex--only extramarital sex on the part of his wife.


But the proletariat was more worldly, some would say more cynical. They didn't care whether Buddy was an angel. Every one knew he was no angel. He was a good mayor.
He ran for re election after his original conviction at the hands of the feds, and he won again.

Buddy on the air

Maybe we ought to learn from the Providence experience.
Voters don't care about affairs with interns, don't care about unsavory mob connections. They care about what affects them--does the snow get plowed and the garbage get picked up?

 

Opening the river downtown