RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Dec. 17 to Dec. 23
Featured Investigation
On paper the plan makes sense: to create a leaner more efficient government, run it like a business, replace costly raises with merit-based bonuses that reward only the best performers while tamping down long-term obligations due to higher base salaries.
That’s not exactly how it’s working in Texas, where an increasing percentage of the Republican-run state’s 149,000 full-time employees have been deemed worthy of merit payments, even as many get regular raises too. Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations that bonus payments have more than doubled, from $22 million in 2007 to an annual average of $52 million since 2012. “A lot of these things are put in place by Republicans who want to run government like a business and incentivize people for performance,” said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of Open the Books, a Chicago-based watchdog group. “But what happens is that everyone happens to get a bonus because it’s government.”
Miller also writes:
Some employees, including those with six-figure salaries, routinely receive four-figure bonuses. Jena Abel, an attorney with the state Board of Nurse Examiners, was hired in 2008 and has received three bonuses since 2011, including a $6,541 payment in August. Mark Majek, operations director with the state Board of Nursing, received a bonus of $9,000, also in August.
He explained that the payments are made to individuals who meet specified achievement goals. “They are paid by both an agency policy – each agency has a policy – as well as according to state law that allows it,” said Majek, who has been with the state for 30 years and earns $150,007 a year. “Sometimes there is an across-the-board raise, and otherwise, the only way to raise salaries is [bonus] pay.”
The Texas Department of Transportation in 2014 handed out 10,266 bonuses totaling $20.5 million, including several five-figure payments. The agency has 12,064 employees – not the largest employee total in the state – and since 2012 has paid $37.9 million in bonuses to its workers.
The department's figures indicate in each of the past five years, a third of workers in the agency got a bonus.
Other Noteworthy Articles
For Iran Deal, Obama DOJ Let Hezbollah Run Cocaine to U.S.
Politico
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law-enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States. This article has prompted a congressional inquiry, a Department of Justice review and an effort by former Obama officials to control the media narrative.
Sexual Harassment and Abuse
RealClearInvestigations
Journalists Chris Matthews and Matt Taibbi, artist Chuck Close, renowned conductor Charles Dutoit, Federal Judge Alex Kozinski and the owner of the Carolina Panthers football team were among those in the news this week for alleged sexual misconduct. The New York Times also ran a story about the harassment of female workers at two Ford car plants in the Chicago area. See an archive of hundreds of stories RCI has linked to since the Harvey Weinstein revelations were first published here.
Firms Using Facebook Ads to Exclude Older Workers
ProPublica & New York Times
The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But the move by dozens of the nation’s leading employers – including Verizon, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself — to place recruitment ads limited to particular age groups is raising concerns about fairness to older workers.
The Myth of the Playground Pusher
Reason
All 50 states and the District of Columbia have laws on the books that provide for harsh sentences for people who buy or sell drugs near schools. Drug-free school zone laws, however, are rarely if ever used to prosecute sales of drugs to minors. Such cases are largely a figment of our popular imagination—a lingering hangover from the drug war hysteria of the 1980s. Yet state legislatures have made the designated zones both larger and more numerous, to the point where they can blanket whole towns. In the process, they have turned minor drug offenses into lengthy prison sentences almost anywhere they occur.
Why Americans Have More Pain Than Others Elsewhere
Atlantic
About a third of Americans said they feel aches and pains “very often” or “often”— more than people in any other country. Australia and Great Britain came close, but in the average nation only about 20 percent gave one of those responses. Why is life such a pain for Americans? One possible reason: high consumption of prescription opioids, which paradoxically heighten the perception of pain, rather than dulling it. Also: “Americans are fatter than everyone else, and pain relates to obesity,” says an economist. And surveys find Americans are growing steadily unhappier, meaning that achy feeling isn't getting them down, but more the opposite.
Death and Deliverance From 27,000 Feet
New York Times
Nepalese officials estimate that about 200 bodies remain scattered across Mount Everest. Most are far out of sight. Some have been moved, dumped over cliffs or into crevasses at the behest of families or Nepali officials who worry that the sight of dead bodies hinders the country’s mountain-climbing tourist trade. This well-written, beautifully illustrated article focuses on the efforts to retrieve the body of a Bengali police officer who died in 2016 while detailing the life-long dream that cost him his life.
