Easley weasels out of corruption fine | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    This story should be required reading for every eligible voter in North Carolina. It perfectly illustrates how absolutely rotten our State Government has become and if the good people of North Carolina don't do something about it they have no one to blame but themselves. What has become clear to us is that the politicians--of either party--are not going to fix it.

    Here's the essence of it.

    The way The System is set up there are laws against improper campaign finance activities. But there is no enforcement mechanism that goes beyond simply being a pretense for accountability. Consider this fact. The way it works is that if a politician takes illegal money and gets caught he/she has to pay it back. Very much like the police taking the money bag a robber took from the bank. But then all the politician's got to do is declare that his campaign does not have any more money and he walks free. Never mind that he's sitting on a stash of hundreds of thousands of dollars elsewhere.

    Mike Easley was charged with taking illegal campaign contributions. He blamed his campaign officials. He was order to pay a $100,000 fine. He has paid $5,335. Now his "campaign" says that he has no more money. But while he was being given time to pay the fine he paid off a $494,000 mortgage on a waterfront lot that he acquired under, shall we say "questionable" circumstances. Click here to read the details.

    The sitting Governor did much of the same kind of things Easley did--accepted airplane rides without reporting them as required by law. Her defense? You guessed it. "Didn't know what was going on. Not my fault."

    And we just learned that disgraced former House Speaker Jim Black traded a piece of real estate as payment for a fine assessed against him. No problem with that, except the lot was not worth as much as the fine. Less than half as much.

    This system has got to be changed. When a politician violates the law he/she must be held accountable. And a politician is accountable for what those working for him/her do or fail to do. The buck stops at the top.

    The second thing that must be done is to make the politician personally responsible for the payment of any fines or penalties.

    The third thing that should be done is to put these people in jail. What they are doing is stealing. But it is worse than just stealing money. They are stealing the public's trust. That should extract a long jail term.

    And while they are at it, if any of them ever get the guts to do the right thing, they should adopt an "honest services" law in North Carolina similar to the federal statute.

    Something's got to be done. And it needs to be sooner rather than later.