See 1/16/09 addendum at bottom The dream of every machine politician is to have his city controlled by those who work for him. Unfortunately, every city has citizens who don’t work for the city administration. Or so I thought until I learned about Vernon, California. Vernon is “an exclusively industrial city,” which is a fancy term for one big conflict of interest. Here’s how it works, according to the Economist and a wonderful fictional dialogue by public administration professor H.

Last year, soon after I contracted to act as Administrator to the New Haven Democracy Fund, a new public campaign financing program, the Executive Director of Connecticut Common Cause called me (I sat on the board of CT Common Cause). He said that he had been asked to write a report about the Fund for the national office. My response was that I had to write a report to the State Elections Enforcement Commission, so why should he bother to write another? My report could serve both needs. He wanted me to resign from the board, and I thought that was silly.

Recently, Google has taken what appears to be a distinctly less transparent and open approach to their news distribution search engine. Matthew Lee maintains a small blog/website called http://www.innercitypress.com/ and has a reputation for hounding the UN - specifically the UNDP about what he considers corruption. Recently though, google announced a partnership with the UNDP and here is what happened next: (it seems that) "...