This week, in Ohio, the First Energy federal corruption trial begins.
Measured in terms of alleged bribery of a public official, it’s being called the biggest corruption trial in Ohio history.
But viewed through the lens of how so-called “policy” gets formulated here in Ohio—and countless other states—it’s business as usual. We can only hope this trial opens eyes to the far greater crisis in broken and corrupted states.
In its case against the former Ohio House Speaker (Larry Householder), the federal government will seek to show that the company lavished millions upon Ohio public officials in order to secure a billion-dollar bailout as well as backward-looking energy policies, all footed by Ohio ratepayers. They will also allege that Householder funneled some portion of those funds for his own personal use.
The case is worthy of attention because the dollars involved are enormous, and the alleged behavior and greed involved grotesque.
But no one watching should conclude that the bailout here was an anomalous, one-time hijacking of a statehouse for private ends. Sadly, it’s one of too many examples that that has become standard operating procedure in gerrymandered statehouses: namely, 1) an unaccountable and rigged political system gives away public assets and public goods to connected private players, 2) some portion of those dollars flow back, through a variety of channels, to the politicians who made it happen, 3) the public pays the price for it all.
A pattern, you question? Yes, as clear as can be.
Just THIS week, the Washington Post exposed to its national readership how other energy interests lavished money on Ohio politicians to have them declare that natural gas is a form of “green energy,” while facilitating accelerated drilling in state parks. Again, public assets being tapped for private gain.
And last week, the Associated Press detailed how gambling interests funneled more than $1M into Governor DeWine’s re-election effort to get their desired “policy” outcome—a law unleashing a flood of Ohioans’ dollars into their hands.
Recent years in Ohio have also seen everyone from private for-profit schools, to payday lenders, to student and medical debt collectors, and many more getting their way in Ohio by lavishing big bucks on so-called “policy makers,” politicians, and third-party groups that funnel money their way.
They may label what results from all this “policy,” but it’s definitely not public service. It’s the opposite.
Just as with First Energy, the consistent theme of “policy” emerging from statehouses like Ohio’s is a massive transfer of goods and assets from the public to the private. And a portion of that privatized benefit funnels back into the politicians’ hands through a flood of campaign dollars—“purchasing” those policy outcomes in the first place.
Not a surprise, as those public funds and goods are redirected into private hands, Ohio public outcomes continue to decline by almost every measure. One painful example: as the statehouse has redirected public school funds into the hands of low-quality for-profit players (who then lavish some of those funds back upon the politicians that made them available), the quality of Ohio’s system of public education has plummeted over the past 12 years (from 6th to the mid-20s).
In a world where lifting public outcomes is the goal, such a decline would of course lead to a reversal of a failed policy. But when the mission of the place has itself been corrupted—where it has gone from being about serving the public good to lavishing public goods upon those well-connected private players—poor public outcomes don’t change a thing. They are in fact the inevitable consequence of the corrupted system. They are the price of it, paid by the public, “sold” by the politicians.
Until there is real and consistent accountability brought back into the politics of states like Ohio—accountability under the law (through trials such as this, whether or not the scam happened to involve personal bribes) and accountability directly by the people themselves, demanding that public assets be used for their benefit and not for the benefit of a well-connected few—this broken system and its failed public outcomes will continue.
