Grant Smith-Ellis has yet another update on the agency
He writes
“We’re talking about a fundamental rebuild of this entire agency.”
If you’re interested in learning more, from a 30,000 foot perspective, as to what I think is coming with the Massachusetts CCC (amid a conflagration of chaos consuming the Commission), here is a video with background.
Some quotes below;
“I have reported a very small amount of what I have been told…because I think there is an element of discretion in this situation (that is quite active).”
“What’s really going on is that there’s a reckoning coming for this commission. I’m not going to get into the details, but all this work is going to be for nothing.”
“This is not the Gaming Commission. This is far more complex, far more nuanced, and far too political. And it really comes down to Ava Concepcion and Nurys Camargo, unfortunately.”
…
“…to bring this all together, what’s so concerning here. I don’t know if it’s dirty money. I don’t know if it’s the revolving door, power and influence, or a little bit of all of that.”
“But there’s something fundamentally rotten at Union Station in Worcester. I think that it is mostly based on the personalities involved and the politics of it all. It’s not necessarily because the structure that the legislature has built is deficient.”
“However, what I would advise is –in light of the lessons learned about the way overlapping concentric social circles can subvert the functioning of an ostensibly independent regulatory apparatus– the question becomes;”
“How can the structure be updated to guard against and ward off the acquisition of power by moneyed factions? And this really goes back to Madison’s Federalist 10.”
“We can’t control the causes of faction within the Union. Those causes are latent to the human condition. You can have friends, you can make money. Factions will exist.”
“Therefore, we must design our organs of representative democracy to guard against the undue influence of these factions within the lawmaking and regulatory process.”
“We do that by having cogent discussions about how those factions influence and undermine the integrity of those processes, by adapting our legislative and regulatory schemas such as to ward against that behavior, and also having some sense of that shared public morality which birthed this beautiful republic as the last vestige of the intellectual enlightenment’s legacy onto the world scene.”
“We’ve completely lost that shared morality. That ship has sailed. the Overton window –because of certain politicians and the way they have debased political discourse in this country– has allowed for this other, perhaps less directly harmful but certainly as insidious, if not more so, behavior to take hold within our public sphere, in particular among certain sectors of the civil service arena.”
“And the only way we can stop it is to refocus that human morality as a check and balance on the very worst inclinations of some of these human beings. That is what will fix this agency.”
