Give it up for former Councilmember Blondell Reynolds Brown for so succinctly summing up the state of politics:
“It’s nobody’s business but mine,” she said in January when asked about whether she would apply for the controversial Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP).
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Brown had previously shunned the program, which allows elected officials to “double-dip” by simultaneously earning salaries and accruing pension payouts. This past week, Brown changed her mind and applied for DROP.
As my colleague Sean Collins Walsh reported, the city can’t calculate Brown’s expected DROP payment yet. But given her final salary as a councilmember was $137,000 and the $102,000 annual salary she makes now in a newly created position in the Office of the Register of Wills, it’ll likely be somewhere between cha-ching and daaamn.
Certainly, the nothing-to-see-here attitude of Philly politicians and public officials isn’t new. Years before Brown’s about-face, she was fined for lying about using campaign funds to pay off a personal loan from the son of then-Congressman Chaka Fattah. Father and son both ended up in prison.
But in the spirit of all-politics-is-local, Brown’s Nobody’s Business explanation also goes a long way in explaining the state of national politics:
Donald Trump not releasing his taxes.
Bernie Sanders not releasing specifics on his heart troubles.
Mike Bloomberg refusing to discuss those nondisclosure agreements. After Sen. Elizabeth Warren eviscerated him on the subject during last week’s Democratic primary debate, he said a few days later that he would allow his company to release three women from the agreements.
But that didn’t stop his longtime partner Diana Taylor from jumping to his defense.
“Get over it,” Taylor said. “It was a bro culture.”
Oh, like the bro culture — or “locker-room banter” — Trump and his apologists referred to when a hot-mic recording of his interview with Access Hollywood caught him saying you can grab women by the p— ?
Or the toxic bro culture from Sanders zealots — including a staffer who was fired for mocking and degrading other candidates — that’s routinely unleashed on anyone who fails to worship at the altar of Bernie?
Locally, it’s the Larry Krasner bros who go ballistic anytime anyone dares question or criticize what some, including families of murder victims, have characterized as one-sided criminal justice reform.
But then politics — local, regional, or national — has always been about choosing sides and then doing all the mental gymnastics necessary to defend or apologize for your pick.
Whatever it takes:
It’s racism!
It’s sexism!
It’s a witch hunt!
Sometimes. But other times it’s just a way to excuse bad — if not straight-up criminal — behavior, all while the enabled elected official plays the victim.
Days after former State Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell pleaded guilty to state corruption charges, Kenyatta Johnson joined Bobby Henon as the second sitting member of Council to be indicted. Johnson-Harrell, if you recall, won a special election to replace another disgraced politician, former Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown, who resigned under protest after she was convicted on bribery and other charges.
And let us never forget Desiree Peterkin Bell, the hashtag-happy member of former Mayor Michael Nutter’s cabinet, who eventually pleaded guilty to stealing and misusing funds from a city-operated nonprofit, despite the mayor’s ride-or-die defense.
On Twitter last year Bell thanked God and tweeted an image of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa under the words: “Life’s not about how hard of a hit you can give… it’s about how many you can take, and still keep moving forward.”
Meanwhile, public officials routinely brush off the public part of their jobs as some pesky annoyance.
In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania lawmakers are claiming “legislative privilege” for shielding records that show how it spends $360 million in taxpayer money it receives each year.
Speaking of tax dollars: On Friday, the city’s Department of Revenue held its annual Taxpayer Appreciation Day. Property owners who paid their 2020 real estate tax bill by Saturday got a whopping 1 percent discount. Compare that with $237 million to $277 million dollars DROP has cost the city from 1999 to 2015.
But hey, there was music and refreshments at the appreciation event held at the Municipal Services Building, so taxpayers got to wash all that political hypocrisy down with a free drink.
