Here's a similar story from South Carolina. One of the convicts is the sheriff who busted Susan Smith for murdering her kids and blaming it on a black man.

What's great about the story involving the City of Bell, which is located in Los Angeles County, is that this appears to finally signal the beginning of a law enforcement cycle.

As part of that cycle, last month the D.A. in Ventura County, along with the FBI, raided city hall in Oxnard, California.

I worked for the City of Oxnard in the mid-90s, and was fired for blowing the whistle on a corrupt redevelopment deal involving HUD financing. The D.A.'s excuse for not prosecuting city hall back then was that, in the wake of the O.J. Simpson case, all of the D.A.s in California had been directed to focus all of their resources on spousal abuse cases.

Hopefully, this new cycle of enforcement will soon spread to Oregon, in general, and Portland, in particular.

Back in New Jersey, the prosecutors have been taking down the mayors for years. At least 40 years.

But it can't happen in Oregon because human nature doesn't apply here. There is no corruption.

Where the Bell city council people screwed up is by not forming a public-private partnership. If they had done that then they would have been able to keep the money and avoid any public accountability.

Oregon Electric Co-operatives, state sanctioned monopoly power companies, are one such public-private partnership.
While the ratepayers pay all of the bills and are liable for all of the debts they rack up they have no control over anything the Co-operative does.

Oregon law allows Co-operatives to conduct rigged board of director elections, use the money they collect from ratepayers for any purpose and none of this is subject to any review.

Co-operative ratepayers legally "own" the company as stockholders but do not have the right to any information about the company - financial or otherwise. We cannot even get contact information (phone numbers and e-mail addresses) of the board members.

Yet the Co-operative can "feed back" the money they get from the ratepayers to the politicians to maintain this extraordinary privilege.

Read all about it at http://www.reformwascoelectric.com

I hate to say it, but it just seems like the pdx citizenry is too naive to realize how they are constantly being rooked by businesses and politicians. That and the fact that we are shameless apologists for any politician with a (D) after his name. They literally can do no wrong in this state.

Did Beau repay that $800 loan yet?

This puts me in a very happy mood. Very happy.

Almost as happy as when I was watching TV on jet blue a while back and saw the footage of the Hoboken mayor, the councilman, the rabbi, the state senator, and various other public figures being hauled in for racketing with stolen kidneys from Iran for the Israeli organ-transplant market. Something like that.

I was jubilant, didn't even notice the plane land, which was a lifelong first.

Jack, I beg to disagree. It's not about the lack of application of human nature. It's about the fact that the local version of Justice looks like this.... the blindfold is off Lady Justice, the scales are heavily tipped towards pols and their cronies, and the sword is at the throat of the little guys and gals and POCs and the mentally ill. Just sayin'

John Kroger? Anyone home? How about taking some tips from down south?