2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: He's a fucking SOCIALIST for Christ's sake! [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)On the other hand, he repulsed the Spanish from their colonies in South and Central America and from the Philippines.
One thing Teddy Roosevelt liked was the idea of a civil service.
He entered the legislature of New York as a young man partly in order to rid it of corruption, and he achieved a lot in that regard at the state, New York city and federal levels.
And today, we are facing so many of the problems that Teddy Roosevelt dealt with.
One of the major ones is whether and to what extent privatization has actually taken us back to a sort of modern day Tammany Hall situation.
Cooperation between the public and private sectors has been a good thing in many areas, but it is fertile ground for corruption and what the Germans call Freundlwirtschaft -- in which people, in this case people in the government, do favors for their friends and get favors in return. Literally, the economics of friendship or business among friends. Great in the private sector, but not democratic in the public sector and what's more often wasteful and very corrupt.
In my view, the Clintons do a lot of that sort of politicking.
I would like to see a study on the extent to which that kind of politics in which government contracts are given based on friendships or custom and not on a really competitive process is the rule.
One of the aspects of this kind of giving contracts, grants, government money awards to your friends, your buddies, the people who always get them, is in grants that are written specifically to the description of a project that the people in charge in the government wanted the money to go to in the first place. In other words, requests for proposals that are written up with a particular winner or recipient in mind so that competing companies or projects cannot quite fit the criteria.
Closed bidding for contracts is a dangerous thing because it can be used to reward the donors or cronies of the politically powerful.
I really like Teddy Roosevelt.
I think Bernie is just a bit like him.