Just a "Mistake"? Nope, Governor...Far Worse
Selling Off Ohio to Private Bidders Has Been the Core Theme of a Generation
This week, when confronted with the latest bombshell in the First Energy scandal, Governor DeWine tried to dismiss it all as a mere mistake.
“We all make mistakes,” he said, as if this is a one-off problem. Somehow different from what he usually does.
But what’s obvious to anyone watching is that the giving away of core public functions and public assets to private bidders and private interests has been the driving theme of Ohio politics for a generation. And while everyday Ohioans have been paying a dear price for these giveaways all this time, the politicians in power today—and the ones now caught up in the FirstEnergy scandal—have spent their years benefiting from that very behavior.
So what DeWine and Husted did with First Energy—handing the reins of the PUCO over to the very company it was supposed to be regulating—was not an aberration. It was entirely business as usual. With the same predictable consequences as usual.
And this hasn’t been at all hidden. Heck, here are excerpts from my book Laboratories of Autocracy, explaining just this trend.
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Serving Private Interests With Public Assets and Power
“Just look at the trajectory of Jon Husted from young house member, to Speaker, to statewide office. He succeeded by building relationships with David Brennan and William Lager and Bob Murray and First Energy, not by standing up to them. And he built those relationships by doing what they wanted, when they asked. Writing the law that allowed their for- profit operations to start lapping up public education dollars. Eliminating the nagging agency that was warning about their problems. Gerrymandering the state behind closed doors despite promising reform publicly. And so on. All upside, no downside, even when it all explodes in scandal and lost public funds.
So, the decline in Ohio doesn’t just result from the fact that there’s no incentive to deliver positive public outcomes [due to gerrymandering]. It’s worse. Much of that failure results directly from powerful incentives to satisfy the private interests urging policies that undermine the public interest. Policies that drain public assets.
The rapid decline in Ohio schools? If your politicians are willing to pull money away from more successful schools and throw that money to scams like [ECOT — the “for profit” online “school”] and educational disasters like White Hat, of course your school ratings are going to fall. If leaders are willing to eliminate the agency that’s trying to fix the problem, of course there’s no accountability.
An economy struggling to compete in the 21st century? If your politicians are willing to smother emerging industries— like solar and wind—in the crib because dying industries like Murray Energy tell them to, of course you’re going to fall behind.
Ohio’s decline is not a policy problem, because policy is not the goal anymore.
It’s a pay-to-play problem. These [politicians] are catering to certain private interests that dominate Columbus and other state capitals, and those interests too often have their eyes on public assets they can tap into for their own gain. What the people actually want, and what would actually benefit the state, are, at best secondary; worse, wholly irrelevant; and worst of all, the exact opposite of what the private interests are demanding from government. And [the politicians] learn quickly that serving those private goals, even at the cost of public outcomes, strengthens their grip on power.
So, in the end, the incentive to please these private interests directly correlates with failure in public outcomes.
But there are other incentives that are just as poisonous.”
…
Corruption
I later talk about how the perverse incentives in broken states has eliminated the political disincentive from engaging in outright corruption:
“The conventional wisdom in politics is that battling corruption is a winning political strategy. And being corrupt is a sure-fire loser, especially if you’re caught.
But in Ohio, that’s no longer the case.
Over a decade of gerrymandering, with big interests helping politicians, it’s become clear that there isn’t even a political disincentive from engaging in egregious pay-to-play. (There may be a legal disincentive for those whose conduct is so egregious they get busted by the FBI, but not a political one).
Let’s revisit the First Energy scandal. The largest bribery scandal in the state’s history explodes as the 2020 election is taking place, and its quarterback was reelected with ease only months later. But it wasn’t just him. There was a motion to expel that Speaker in the July 2020. Almost every member of his GOP caucus voted NOT to expel him by tabling the motion. Not one of them lost his or her election. The only GOP statehouse member who lost his seat in 2020 was one who’d helped expose the scandal, and had voted to remove the Speaker in that July vote.219
Or let’s go back to Bill Lager [the founder of ECOT, that online “school” scam]. Over time, the politicians could see for themselves the results of Lager’s scam—the worst school in the nation. They knew the money from the operation came directly out of schools in their own district, and that the Lager schools were an educational catastrophe. But they also knew, and Lager knew, that almost no voters would figure it out, let alone hold them accountable for it. And they were right.
So right, that even when the scam went belly up, and the FBI swooped in, none has ever paid a price at the polls. Again, Jon Husted raked in dollars from for-profit charter school companies, intentionally tanked the oversight of those schools, then those schools went belly up after cooking the books. The FBI was all over it. Who cared? No one. With his honorary degree [from ECOT] in hand…
…Jon is now the lieutenant governor. And neither he nor any other politician has faced any accountability for being active participants in the largest scam in Ohio history. In fact, Ohio’s current governor, lieutenant governor, state auditor, and attorney general all played active roles at key moments when Bill Lager needed their help. And all received thousands of dollars, often around the time they took those actions.
In this way, corruption itself becomes calcified as a part of state politics. Even when you do it, you’re fine politically. And when there’s no accountability even for corruption, there’s also no incentive to do anything about it, especially if you’re vacuuming up gobs of money from those behind it.”
Finally, as I outline in “Saving Democracy,” this corruption—the heisting of the public sphere by narrow private interests—is not simply bad in its own right. It also leads to a decline in outcomes, just as we have experienced in Ohio in recent decades:
“[T]he decline of democracy in states results in the locking up of these governments by private interests, who seek private and narrow gain drawn from public goods and assets. With no accountability back to the public, the incentive system of these institutions warps, leading to the corrosion of public service, a broader corruption of the public space, and no brakes to stop the downward spiral.
And all of that inevitably leads to a dramatic decline in public outcomes for everyday Americans. From decaying infrastructure, to dying small towns, to regressive taxes, to sky- high student debt, to declining public health, to lower wages, to struggling schools. Some of the examples are outrageous: Brett Favre diverting money meant to lift poor Mississippians to build a volleyball stadium for his daughter’s team. Some re horrifying: Ohio’s legislature, awash in Norfolk Southern money, spending years blocking bills to improve safety on the state’s rail system.
All of these negative consequences and more inevitably arise once unaccountable state government has been hijacked by extremists and private interests who aggressively seek gains at the expense of the public. Those paltry outcomes are essentially what the private interests are purchasing from the politicians. That’s the grand bargain of these rigged and broken statehouses.
So to go on offense for democracy, focus on those indefensible outcomes. And how you’ll fix them….I promise you, if your state is enduring a hijacked, extremist, and anti-democratic state government, there will be painful stories to tell about public outcomes collapsing just like in Kansas [their schools collapsed]. Indefensible declines that everyday citizens feel directly. That they’re paying for dearly—through their pocketbooks, lost opportunity, lost security, environmental catastrophe, or even lives (e.g., the privatized power grid in Texas). All while someone like Brett Favre or some big business is benefiting.
Find the most potent examples, hammer away, and show how you’ll turn it around….”
Business as Usual for Ohio — And It Must End!
Folks, FirstEnergy was not a mere “mistake.”
It’s the ongoing mode of government practiced by DeWine, Husted and a generation of Ohio leadership. The results of this generation have been a steady—and in some cases precipitous—decline in almost every measurable public outcome.
This, along with extreme gerrymandering and the out-of-control extremism that accompanied it, IS their legacy.
Ohio....a wholly owned division of "Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe."
I'm out of state but got attached to Ohio as one of our Great Lakes states when I was doing my Great Lakes work. Your work is so important. Sharing with my Ohio friends.