{"id":181727,"date":"2016-04-03T19:18:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T00:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/04\/03\/this-is-not-a-surprise-4\/"},"modified":"2016-04-03T19:18:00","modified_gmt":"2016-04-04T00:18:00","slug":"this-is-not-a-surprise-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/04\/03\/this-is-not-a-surprise-4\/","title":{"rendered":"This is Not a Surprise\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
Sacramento Mayor, former NBA star, and spouse of School privatization bunco artist Michelle Rhee, has left an amazing trail of corruption in his post basketball career<\/a>:<\/div>\n

Back in the fall of 2014, Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson was unstoppable. He\u2019d pushed through a $300 million city subsidy for a new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings. He\u2019d helped elbow out racist Los Angeles Clippers team owner Donald Sterling, and grabbed a little of the spotlight for himself in the process. He\u2019d been named president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. <\/p>\n

He and his wife, Michelle Rhee\u2014once the brightest star in the corporate-backed \u201ceducation reform\u201d movement\u2014showed up at the White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner. An adviser told Johnson\u2019s hometown newspaper, the Sacramento Bee<\/i>, that the couple was a \u201cmodern-day version of Bill and Hillary Clinton.\u201d There was talk about a run for California governor or U.S. Senate. <\/p>\n

At his peak, KJ was a figure to behold, an urban policy entrepreneur and brander-in-chief selling #Sacramento 3.0, a \u201cworld-class\u201d city where kids would take Uber vehicles instead of buses to their charter schools, \u201cnever check out a library book,\u201d and have \u201cmore smart devices than toothbrushes.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

By the fall of 2015, Johnson\u2019s political career was effectively over. He was under scrutiny, again, for allegedly molesting a sixteen-year-old girl two decades before. And he was facing a new allegation of sexual misconduct; a city employee had filed a sexual harassment complaint. The City of Sacramento\u2019s legal advisers warned Johnson not to hug or touch anyone at city events. So Johnson, deciding two terms in office were enough, announced that he will not seek reelection this November. His exit will coincide with the opening of the new arena, easily his most significant mayoral achievement. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, debt service on the bond-financed arena will reach about $18 million a year, draining money from the city treasury. Sacramento\u2019s city finance department is warning that the city\u2019s spending is already \u201cunsustainable\u201d and budget deficits are imminent. For now, however, Johnson is being credited with a dramatic makeover of the new arena district\u2014where a decaying shopping mall had been before.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It goes on and on, and it gets more petty and sordid.<\/p>\n

It’s not surprising.  At the core of his political success has always been the Hope Academy charter school, which much like most of the charter school empires, is built on a foundation of broken promises and dubious statistics.<\/p>\n

H\/t Atrios<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sacramento Mayor, former NBA star, and spouse of School privatization bunco artist Michelle Rhee, has left an amazing trail of corruption in his post basketball career: Back in the fall of 2014, Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson was unstoppable. He\u2019d pushed through a $300 million city subsidy for a new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[966,970,1002,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charter-schools","category-corruption","category-good-writing","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181727"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}