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Friday, October 09, 2009Revolving Door: Who cares?
El Foresto tweets (and blogs): Why is Nobody Else Bothered By Rep. Holdaway's New Job?
Does anyone care? If certain legislative watchers were agitated about the revolving door last winter, why are they silent now? In City Weekly (City Weekly, for pete's sake. At least they call it like they see it): Conveniently EthicalFor the record, we all agree that Kory is a great guy. We're talking concepts here. Your thoughts?
posted by The Senate Site at 5:08 PM | Link
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7 Comments:
This is an excellent question, and one I have to admit I'm guilty of. I'm not sure why it didn't raise my "anti-revolving door ire," but I'll honestly admit it didn't.
Maybe there is something less offensive (to me at least) about someone stepping over to lobby for an education union as opposed to a "for profit" corporation.
I'll have to give it some thought, but either way, glad the question was asked.
Kory Holdaway is eminently qualified to represent the interest of Utah’s public schools being a special education teacher for 27 years and having served in the Legislature for 10 years.
In my thinking there is a difference between the high paid lobbyists for large corporations such as Energy Solutions trying to influence legislation to increase their bottom line profitability and a 27 year veteran teacher trying to encourage the legislature to provide adequate funding to reduce class sizes, provide competitive teacher’s salaries to keep the best teachers from leaving the state, and to pass bills that further the quality of public education.
It should also be noted that a legislator leaving the legislature and becoming a lobbyist is both legal and ethical under the rules set up by the legislature at the present time. It is also important to note that the UEA supports the entire concept of the Government Ethics Reform which includes much more than just the lobbyist rule.
This may seem hypocritical to some, but the alternative would be for the UEA to wait 2 years before hiring Kory Holdaway who is the most qualified person to fill the opening left by Vic Arnold even though it is not required by law just to appease those in the Republican party who might engage in hand wringing about the "hypocrisy of it all". To me that just doesn’t make any sense.
Fortunately for them, it will give the Republicans another "Red Herring" issue to glom on to in order to avoid having to discuss the rest of the elements in citizen ethics reform initiative which may just cramp their style if the initiative passes.
Since I'm one of the right-wingers that John is commenting about who has decried the hypocrisy of it all, I will say it's ridiculous to have a double standard. It's a rare day when I agree with City Weekly, but they pegged it right on. The very pushers of the so-called ethics initiative are the ones benefitting from the revolving door. So much for setting new ethical standards......
I blogged about it the day after it was announced.....
I am still waiting for a response from any Republican legislators or their supporters to my invitation to discuss any of the proposed ethics RULES contained in the initiative. So far the only comments I have seen about the proposed initiative have been about the members of the ethics committee they labeled "Czars", and the initial sponsors of the initiative they labeled "Super Czars".
A quote I agree with about "labels" is this:
"The problem with labels is they are merely shells that contain assumptions. When we are taken in by a label, we are taken in by opinions and beliefs. That is, we willingly accept statements without evidence of their validity. The assumptions become stereotypes, which soon become put-downs."
It seems that the opponents of the Government Ethics Reform initiative just can't get past their "labeling" to get to a meaningful dialog on the central elements of the initiative which are the proposed rules of ethical conduct themselves. This, of course, raises the obvious questions: "Why"? and "What are they so afraid of"?
The revolving door between the local mainstream news media and the State has been spinning pretty quickly as of late.
Debbie Dujanovic leaves KSL as an investigative reporter to flak for the Utah office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Lara Jones leaves KCPW to become the media director at the Salt Lake City Police Department.
Jennifer Toomer-Cook leaves the Deseret News as an education reporter to become the Director of Communications for the Canyons School District.
I'm sure other examples abound.
... and kind of confirms the perception that those working in the mainstream news media have a statist bias ... if for no other reason than to lay the groundwork for when they trade teams.
Looks like Dujanovic (Bertram), Jones, and Toomer-Cook spent years pushing a fear-based message to scare people into the control grid called the school-to-prison pipeline.
Nice work if you don't have integrity or a conscience.
To JB:
It's funny that you are concerned about "high paid lobbyists" for a corporation but not an organization that advocates for education dollars.
Your thinking is suspect and frightening. The single largest state expenditure is public education. The real debate is over how dollars are spent. There is nothing more high profile or critical than the money spent in an item as significant as public education.
It's either right or it's not. Truth be told, I don't have a problem with it but you can't have it both ways.
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