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Our Culture Of Corruption

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JOHN REINIERS More Than Words

The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 13, 2009

The American creed is to be honest in all your dealings. And if you can fake that, you've got it made.

In recent years, we have been told about entitlement corruption, such as with Medicare, welfare cheats and the perennial parade of politicians marching off to jail. What an "honest" lot we are. Now lately, our attention has been diverted to the subprime mortgage shenanigans starting with "liar" loans, crooked appraisers and real estate agents, along with lenders who looked the other way while these loans were being bundled up and peddled off globally to unsuspecting suckers who thought they were financial geniuses.

Somehow, the dishonest employee has fallen under the radar. We prefer to focus on shoplifters even though recent retail theft surveys show dishonest employees steal more than shoplifters. It seems as though we have an epidemic of employee dishonesty. (On a per thief basis, crooked employees steal 8.6 times the amount stolen by shoplifters - $847 vs. $98.)

What caught my eye recently about employee chicanery was the surge in fraudulent retired job-related disability claims. Some years ago I was at a wake in New York City along with a contingent of the city's finest. These cops were talking about how they intended to retire with disability and were chuckling over the fact that even way back then, 40 percent of the force had managed to do just that.

Some years went by when I happened to be in a showroom with a group of guys standing around - most of whom were from the same family. I knew one of them. A Long Island Rail Road (L.I.R.R.) retired family member was bragging to his kinfolk about some scheme he employed where he would clock in on two jobs in one day. If memory serves me, he said during a lunch break he'd go over to another building to clock in for a different job. (You would think it would violate the union contract.) No one knew if he was actually on the other job. There was so much down time that these guys hardly worked.

Now here we are in 2008 and the corruption continues. The New York Times reported on dozens of retired L.I.R.R. golfers on the Sunken Meadow golf course in Long Island - all disabled. "At an age when most people still work, they get a pension and tens of thousands of dollars in annual disability payments - a sum equal to the base salary of their old jobs. Even the golf is free, courtesy of New York State taxpayers." (New York is another Democratic stronghold like California - which is also broke - looking for a federal bailout.)

Now get this: "Virtually every career employee - as many as 97 percent in one recent year - applies for and gets disability ... soon after retirement ... Since 2000, ... a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. Employees ..." (Compare this with the backlog of 400,000 honest military disability claims the VA is struggling to reduce.) Union contracts inflate operating costs through work rules, which increase paychecks, "boosting pension and disability payments in turn." (The highest paid earn more than $200,000.) Here's what jogged my memory about that L.I.R.R. guy I met some years before who said he worked two jobs at the same time: Michael Quinn, general chairman of the union brotherhood said, "There are maybe nine different ways to show up at work and get two days' pay without doing anything extra."

Not to be outdone by New York, The Los Angles Times reported "three-quarters of the Los Angles County firefighters and lifeguards ... successfully claimed they were disabled on the job and won enhanced pension benefits... That's a far higher rate than at the Los Angles Fire Department, where 21 percent ... received disability benefits."

Even the California Highway Patrol - at the highest levels - is not spared from fraud allegations. ABC News reported "possible abuse ... specifically among its highest ranking officers. Most startling of all, 80 percent of assistant chiefs retired on disability - almost as many deputy chiefs ... 68 percent of assistant CHP commissioners were disabled when they retired. Investigators found that the CHP had the highest rate of disability retirements in state government."

Now let's go to Montgomery County on the east coast just north of Washington, D.C. - one of the most affluent counties in the U.S. - because it is loaded with government employees. Examiner.com reports that "40 percent of ... public safety employees earn extra money for work-related disabilities, compared with 3 percent of similar retirees in Fairfax County."

As the old Scottish proverb instructs us: "Feather by feather the goose is plucked." Of course, we all know who the goose is: We are.

Obviously, this crisis of corruption goes beyond employee dishonesty. We are scammed by everyone - retailers, corporations, lawyers - the list is endless. What can we do?

In 1982 James Q. Wilson and George Kelling suggested that focusing on minor misdemeanors could help reduce more serious crimes - or what they labeled as the "broken windows" hypothesis. They suggested that vandals were more likely to vandalize a building with one broken window than a building with none. Similarly, they said that if a community tolerates misdemeanors, it signals that it doesn't care, and then more serious crime will soon follow.

William Bratton, New York City's chief of transit police put this theory into practice by going after panhandlers, petty criminals and the like. It worked. Some years later, Mayor Rudy Guiulani also put this theory into practice and the city saw serious crime plummet.

The lesson is that the culture of a community defines what type of behavior it will accept. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, it takes a "village" to breed corruption.

Studies suggest that the answer to a culture of corruption lies with education. Getting back to New York City with its many United Nations diplomats, because of diplomatic immunity, those from more corrupt countries ignore parking tickets. On the other hand, diplomats from Japan, Canada or Denmark either obey the laws or pay the parking tickets promptly. Why is this so with these guys? The answer is simple. The idea of right or wrong comes from their educational process, starting at home and with grade school.

Rather than teaching moral certainty, the liberal culture permeating our public school system today is to teach moral relativism - no bright lines. Behavior is not a question of moral duty for the student. It is all about their rights. To paraphrase Ayn Rand - ever since the permissive educators of the counterculture '60s divorced reason from reality, their intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.

John Reiniers, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill.

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