D.C. Taxi Scandal: Now With More Bribery!

Katherine Mangu-Ward | September 24, 2009

Ah, yesterday. It was a more innocent time. Back then, my colleague Ron Bailey could write this:

Two exceptionally stupid and mendacious DC City council members, Jim Graham and Muriel Bowser, want to impose a medallion system on DC taxis. 

Ron's naivete turns out to be utterly charming in retrospect. As a story in today's Washington Post reveals, he clearly should have added "corrupt" to the list:

Ted G. Loza, [chief of staff to D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1)] was taken into custody at his home in the 1400 block of Columbia Road NW and is scheduled to make an appearance Thursday in the District's federal court. A dozen federal agents raided Loza's offices at city hall just hours after arresting him.

The charges stem from alleged bribes Loza took from an unidentified person in the taxicab industry, court papers show.

Someone identified in court papers as "Individual Number 1" wanted to limit the number of taxi licenses, in order to make a planned exception for hybrid cars more valuable.

Councilman Graham initially said he was worried that the city would be "overrun" by cabs. Hooey. There is one reason, and one reason only, to favor licensing schemes like this one—if you are an industry insider who wants to keep competition out.

Wait, scratch that. There's one other reason: If you're getting "a stream of things of value" including "cash, the use of vehicles and trips," from the folks in reason number one, you'll probably back a licensing plan, too.

More on the stupidity of occupation licensing here and here. And for God's sake, must D.C. lag behind even Havana on this economic liberty issue?

Adding to Ron's tally of "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" items, this is Edition 5,243,683. Stay tuned for for the inevitable edition 5,243,684 in this ongoing series.

Comments

|9.24.09 @ 8:08PM|#

The charges stem from alleged bribes Loza took from an unidentified person in the taxicab industry, court papers show.

And I called this just yesterday. I await your congratulations, all.

|9.24.09 @ 8:13PM|#

Congratulations on discovering your annual acorn, Epi.

|9.24.09 @ 8:32PM|#

I LOOM LARGE

Joe M|9.24.09 @ 8:59PM|#

Well played, sir, well played.

Paul|9.24.09 @ 9:08PM|#

My predicton: This will not only fail to halt the notion of taxcab licensing, it will accelerate it.

|9.24.09 @ 9:41PM|#

Congratulations on discovering your annual acorn, Epi.

Hey, I'm no fan of Bill Ayers' organization, but it's a bit premature to refer to any instance of liberal corruption as an "acorn".

mainstream media|9.24.09 @ 9:44PM|#

We should not let this unfortunate sideshow distract from the merits of maintaining an orderly marketplace. There are still the merits to consider, and we should still evaluate the issues at the center of the debate: too many taxis; too few properly insured taxis, too few properly trained drivers.

The focus on the specific politicians involved is essentially an ad hominem attack, and sheds no light on the real issue - it is just another unfortunate example of the coarsening of our political dialog.

mainstream media|9.24.09 @ 9:45PM|#

Here to discuss the issue of our coarsening politics, David Gergen.

|9.24.09 @ 9:47PM|#

I'm shocked. SHOCKED.

ok, not that shocked.

BlogDog|9.25.09 @ 7:47AM|#

Tulpa, (polite golf applause) well played. Well played.

|9.25.09 @ 8:10AM|#

I occasionally use DC cabs. The drivers are some of nicest and screwed over people I have ever met. The meters have reduced their income. Now they want make taxis more of a monopoly.

|9.25.09 @ 9:25AM|#

I am shocked, shocked that this post did not have a single Mr T reference. All discussions about DC cabs must contain at least one Mr T reference. Where did you get your journalism license, anyway?

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|9.25.09 @ 12:35PM|#

ACORN?!,, did someone mention ACORN?! Never heard of 'em.

OsamaHusseinIslamObama 2012′
(the terrorist-Uighur-ACORN-media choice)
-It's never too early to campaign-

Thom|9.25.09 @ 12:39PM|#

This is just another right-wing attempt to discredit Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats.

mark|9.25.09 @ 12:59PM|#

To reiterate from yesterday: Cap and trade, in action!

mark|9.25.09 @ 1:17PM|#

And there's a valuable (if obvious and repetitious) lesson to be learned here: Don't trust politicians who claim to be able to "regulate" markets. The rhetoric sounds awfully nice:

And you know, I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the markets came up with the notion that, "You know what? If you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives, for businesses - let them figure out how they're going to, for example, reduce pollution," and a cap and trade system, for example is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient.

Don't believe the hype.

|9.25.09 @ 1:54PM|#

mark:

The SOX and NOX cap-and-trade regimes do work much better than command-and-control. They provide the same benefits for less cost. (Or more benefits for same cost.)

However, the argument breaks down for CO2. Among other things, the harmful effects of SOX and NOX generally stay in-country. With CO2, all postulated ill effects are global (heck, local CO2 could increase plant growth). That means that a US cap is really just directly growth to China and India. The idea that our own cap will get China to change is silly; our own cap actually makes it more profitable for China to not have a cap.

mark|9.25.09 @ 2:06PM|#

Good point. I wonder though, whether a straight tax is not more efficient anyway. Then when an emitter gets an exemption, it's explicit, rather than handing out valuable permits to favored industries. A 100% permit auction, as candidate Obama suggested last year, would be lower-case ok, compared to 1000 page cap-and-handout bill.

But even then, you're right about the incentives it would give to China.

Rebecca|10.26.09 @ 8:18PM|#

In the two decades, following the collapse of Communism and the emergence of the New World Order, two major groups of nations have swept into the international scene. The first group includes nations that have embarked on the path of democracy and a free market economy with the concomitant reward of peace, stability and sustained economic development. The second group of nations is composed of countries that are ruled by corrupt tyrants whose governance is characterized by gross human rights abuse, economic polarization, ethnic conflict and political intolerance.

Yet, the dictators in this group are aware of the new wave of world politics. They know that they cannot continue to blatantly deny freedom and democracy to their people while receiving the lion’s share of their annual budget from democratic countries. As a consequence of this awareness, almost all of these dictators have become turn coat democrats and hold sham elections to satisfy the demand of donor nations. The reality, however, is that they never respect election results, or care for democracy.

A perfect example of one such government is the illegitimate regime of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia that drove the people to degrading actions like the DC Taxi bribery scandal that included intent to eliminate FBI informants finally. TPLF deviously preaches democracy, but has ruled the country with an iron fist for the past 18 years. The Zenawi regime has held three elections [1995, 2000, and 2005], and in each case, either the process has been grossly flawed or the election results have been famously rigged.

Five years after overturning the results of the ill fated election of 2005 and killing more than 200 peaceful demonstrators, Ethiopia’s long-ruling ethnic regime has promised yet another sham election in 2010. Inevitably, as in the past, Zenawi’s henchmen, once again, will stuff ballot boxes to ensure another victory for the incumbent regime.

Many Ethiopians who still suffer from the trauma of the 2005 election have concluded that any election under the Tigrai People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) regime is an absolute farce. Even those who are sympathetic to the regime have conceded that free and fair election is impossible as long as Meles Zenawi and the TPLF cabals remain at the helm of political power in Ethiopia.

Many members of opposition parties - including Unity for Democracy and Justice party Chairwoman Birtukan Mideksa, who is languishing in jail - have been excluded from participating in the 2010 election by arbitrary and self-serving decisions of the ruling regime. Earlier last month [September 2009], 480 members of the newly formed alliance, Forum for Democratic Dialogue in Ethiopia (FDDE) were arrested, joining thousands of political prisoners who are suffering in Ethiopia’s notorious jails.

In the last five years, Zenawi’s regime has used physical violence, a docile judiciary, extensive police powers, and executive decrees against political opponents in an effort to shape the outcome of the 2010 election. This is in addition to the massive political repression, state patronage, media monopoly and the stuffing of ballot boxes the regime used in 2005 and still at its disposal to subvert any election outcome that does not guarantee the continuance of the minority ruling party (TPLF) in power. Meles Zenawi’s rubber stamp parliament has already passed three major legislations (The Media and Freedom of Information Proclamation Law, The Charities and Societies Law and the Counter-terrorism Law) to criminalize any and all dissent, thereby, creating a one party police state.

Recently, Ethiopia’s ruling coalition party, Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Forces (EPRDF), declared that Meles Zenawi will remain the Prime Minister of the country until 2015. This bizarre and blatantly undemocratic declaration has forced international human rights advocates and many in the diplomatic community to believe that, in Zenawi’s Ethiopia, anything even close to a semblance of electoral freedom will be unthinkable. Ethiopia’s next scheduled national election might only be seven months away, but Ethiopia as a nation is years away from conducting anything that looks like free and fair election. Most Ethiopians, at present, fear the word “election” because past elections under the TPLF regime have always been associated with widespread harassment, mass arrest, and indiscriminate killings.

In order to overcome this public apathy and cynicism and to hold a truly free and fair democratic election, the ruling regime in Ethiopia must fulfill the following pre-conditions. First and foremost, to have a meaningful election process in Ethiopia; all political organizations that were forced to take their resistance of the TPLF regime outside Zenawi’s jurisdiction must be made part of the democratic process. All the preconditions set below must be met and accepted by all stakeholders and all negotiations and dialogue between the incumbent regime and opposition parties must be overseen by a credible independent group or an all-inclusive body.

01- The National Election Board must be reorganized as an independent entity.
02- There must be a free and independent media that serves the public interest.
03- There should be a clear delineation between the ruling party and the state, all political activities of the ruling party must be handled and financed by the party only.
04- The Judiciary must function independent of the Executive Branch.
05- The Armed Forces, the Intelligence, and the Civil Administration must be free from any type of overt political control.
06- The state media and all other public resources must be shared by all competing parties equally.
07- Freedom of speech and freedom of the press must be respected
08- The election must be free for national and international monitors and observers.
09- Freedom of assembly, freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join any party must be respected.
10- All political prisoners including UDJ leader, Birtukan Mideksa, must be released