On Sunday, it took Mr. Kibaki more than 10 minutes to read aloud the list of ministers and assistant ministers, totaling 94 people, nearly half of Parliament. It is the biggest cabinet Kenya has ever had.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., might be correct that electricity is best provided in Chile by means other than hydroelectric dams (Letters, April 8). His presumption, however, about the source of prosperity casts doubt on the quality of his argument.
Mr. Kennedy opposes dams because he wants to protect "nature's bounty." But nature is not bountiful. If it were, human history would be one of prosperity and long, healthy lives rather than one of oppressive poverty and short, miserable lives. Nature is miserly. The bounty that Mr. Kennedy presumes comes from nature is, in fact, the relatively recent product of human creativity and industry unleashed by free markets - and now threatened by the mindless worship of nature.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Fifteen years old and in high school, Dorothy Wade — all copper curls and who speaks in a flat mumble from the side of her mouth — has an 11-month-old baby, Santiago. He sometimes turns blue with asthma. Between school and this nighttime job, Dorothy sees him too little.
At home, her own 32-year-old mom, with three kids and now a grandson, sits on the couch recuperating from an operation to cut a tumor from her spine. Because of the surgery, she’s been out of work for two weeks, unpaid and unable to go to her $8.50-an-hour midnight job where she ships packages. The phone company shut off service.
As for the baby’s father — an illegal Mexican day laborer who flirted with Dorothy in Kansas City — the last Dorothy heard, he had been shot in Mexico. She suspects it’s a lie to shield a deadbeat dad.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, is reported to have said in 1947: "In due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims - not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state.
Summary: Social cohesion - that is, the inclusiveness of a country's communities - is essential for generating the trust needed to implement reforms. Citizens have to trust that the short-term losses that inevitably arise from reform, will be more than offset by long-term gains. However, in countries divided along class and ethnic lines, and with weak institutions, even the boldest, most civic-minded and well-informed politician (or interest group) will face severe constraints in bringing about policy reform. The authors hypothesize that key development outcomes (particularly economic growth) are most likely to be associated with countries that are both socially cohesive and governed by effective public institutions. They test this hypothesis for the sample of countries with available data. The authors develop a conceptual framework based on the idea of social cohesion, then review the evidence on which it is based. While several earlier studies have shown that differences in growth rates among developing countries are a result of weak rule of law, lack of democracy, and other institutional deficiencies, the authors focus on the social conditions that give rise to these deficiencies. They also seek to establish empirically a causal sequence from social divisions to weak institutions to slow growth. The essence of their argument, supported by new econometric evidence, is that pro-development policies are comparatively rare in the developing world less because of the moral fiber of politicians (though that surely matters) than because good politicians typically lack the room for maneuver needed to make desired reforms. This lack of maneuverability is a product of insufficient social cohesion and weak institutions. The authors also explore the determinants of social cohesion, focusing on historical accidents, initial conditions, and natural resource endowments. Social cohesion should not be seen as a concern primarily of developing and transition economies. Indeed, it is important in the United Kingdom as in Ukraine, in Canada as in Colombia, in the Netherlands as in Australia.
"The amount of money raised through the public financing system may be substantially lower than the amount of money that can be raised over the Internet, which presents candidates then with some pretty tough decisions in terms of how they want to move forward if they want to compete in as many states as possible," he told reporters while campaigning in Indiana.
QUESTION: I remember sitting here a year ago and you saying that you did not think that the financial tail would wag the economic dog. Now, today, you are saying that the world faces a one-in-four chance of a recession. How are we to know that you are not being overly pessimistic this year while you were being overly optimistic last year?
MR. JOHNSON: Well, I think that is a fair question. I think that we make a forecast and any forecast can be wrong; most forecasts presumably are wrong. We are giving you an honest assessment of how we see the world today.
I think that everyone has learned a great deal about financial dogs and their tails, and how exactly those worked over the past year. So, on the basis of what we know today, this is our best forecast. Do ask me again next year about how we have done.
Throughout the last four decades of the 20th century, young people's engagement in American civic life declined year after year with depressing regularity. In fall 1966, well before the full flowering of Vietnam War protests, a UCLA poll of college freshmen nationwide found that "keeping up with politics" was a "very important" goal in their lives for fully 60 percent.
Thirty-four years later that figure had plummeted to 28 percent. In 1972, when the vote was first extended to 18-year-olds, turnout in the presidential election among 18- to 24-year-olds was a disappointing 52 percent. But even beginning at that modest level, rates of voting in presidential elections by young people steadily fell throughout the '70s, '80s, and '90s, reaching barely 36 percent in 2000. National commissions bemoaned the seemingly inexorable increase in youthful apathy and incivism. The National Commission on Civic Renewal said, "When we assess our country's civic and moral condition, we are deeply troubled. . . . We are in danger of becoming a nation of spectators."
Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a national tragedy, but also a vivid reminder that we are all in this together. Civic seismometers across the land showed a sharp spike in virtually every measure of community-mindedness. It was, I wrote at the time, not only a tragedy, but also the sort of opportunity for civic revival that comes along once or twice a century. Just as Pearl Harbor had spawned the civic-minded "Greatest Generation," so too Sept. 11 might turn out to produce a more civically engaged generation of young people.
For most Americans the half-life of the civic boomlet after the attacks was barely six months. Within a year measures of civic engagement had returned to the previous levels, from which they have barely budged since. Except among young people.
Among the cohort of Americans caught by 9/11 in their formative years, the effects of the attacks on their civic consciousness were more enduring. The annual UCLA chart of interest in politics jumped upward in 2001 for the first time in decades and has kept rising every year since.
Last month the UCLA researchers reported that "For today's freshmen, discussing politics is more prevalent now than at any point in the past 41 years." This and other evidence led us and other observers to speak hopefully of a 9/11 generation, perhaps even a "new Greatest Generation." In the 2004 and 2006 elections, turnout among young people began at last to climb after decades of decline, reaching the highest point in 20 years in 2006. As we approached the presidential season of 2008, young Americans were, in effect, coiled for civic action, not because of their stage of life, but because of the lingering effects of the unifying national crisis they had experienced in their formative years.
The exceptionally lively presidential nominating contests of this year - and, it must be said, the extraordinary candidacy of Barack Obama - have sparked into white hot flame a pile of youthful kindling that had been stacked and ready to flare for more than six years. The 18-year-olds first eligible to vote in 2008 were in sixth grade when the twin towers fell, and their older sisters and brothers who were college seniors in September 2001 are now 28 or 29. It is precisely this group, above all others in America, that has pushed participation rates in this spring's caucuses and primaries to record levels. Turnout in this spring's electoral contests so far has generally been higher than in previous presidential nominating contests, but for twentysomethings the rise has been truly phenomenal - turnout often three or four times greater than ever before measured.
The 2008 elections are thus the coming-out party of this new Greatest Generation. Their grandparents of the original Greatest Generation were the civic pillars of American democracy for more than a half-century, and at long last, just as that generation is leaving the scene, reinforcements are arriving. Americans of every political persuasion should rejoice at this epochal swing of the generational pendulum, for it portends precisely the sort of civic renaissance for which Jeremiahs have been calling for many years.
This, then, is what is at stake in the otherwise inside-baseball controversies about superdelegates and pledged delegates and the uncontested Florida and Michigan primaries - controversies now roiling Democratic party leaders. If the results of the caucuses and primaries are, despite record-breaking rates of popular participation, overturned by unelected (though officially legitimate) superdelegates or by delegates from states that all candidates had previously agreed not to contest, the lesson for the young civic stalwarts would be unmistakable - democratic politics is a sham. Politics is actually controlled by party bosses behind the scenes. Civic engagement is for suckers.
From Little League to student council races, we all learn to accept defeats we have lost fair and square. But losing in a contest in which the rules can be rigged teaches that the game is not worth the candle. Who can honestly doubt that if the Democratic presidential candidate preferred by a majority of the delegates elected in this spring's competitive contests (and by the overwhelming majority of young voters) were to be rejected solely by the power of unelected delegates (or those "elected" without any serious competition), the unmistakable civics lesson would be catastrophic for this incipient cadre of super citizens?
So as the superdelegates, the two campaigns, and Democratic Party leaders contemplate how to resolve the procedural issues before them - what to do about Michigan and Florida, and how superdelegates should vote - let's hope that they weigh the consequences not merely for their own candidates this year, and not merely for the Democratic prospects in the fall, but for the future vitality of American democracy.
Among the profound — and mundane — questions they are confronting: How do 530 priests and deacons give communion to 57,000 people in 14 minutes?
In creating Catalist, Mr. Ickes, who was deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House, has formed a rare entity on the political scene, a for-profit limited-liability corporation that allows wealthy Democratic donors to help progressive organizations and candidates by investing in the company. And if Catalist, which has data on 230 million Americans, is successful as a business, these donors-turned-investors stand to reap financial returns from using their money to help elect Democrats.
But some campaign finance watchdogs say they wonder whether Catalist was established not so much to make money but to find a creative way to allow big-money liberal donors to influence the election without disclosing the degree of their involvement or being subjected to other rules that would govern spending by an explicitly political organization.
Catalist has raised over $11 million in venture capital, including more than $1 million from the billionaire financier George Soros, according to his aides. It also counts on such large unions as the Service Employees International Union and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., to buy its products and create revenues. And it plans to be the go-to source for voter data for a broad swath of groups often aligned with Democrats — like the Sierra Club, Emily’s List and Clean Water Action — as they embark on ambitious get-out-the vote efforts this fall.
These liberal clients will buy lists of likely voters based on information that Catalist has gleaned from voter registration files and commercial data providers. For instance, Catalist computers will take voter registration information along with data from appliance warranties, hunting and fishing licenses, charitable memberships and other data points to draw models of potentially sympathetic voters that these clients can approach.
Catalist grew out of the embers of two groups that Mr. Ickes headed in the 2004 election, Americans Coming Together and the Media Fund, which, in part, conducted strong get-out-the-vote efforts. But when the Democrats failed to take the White House in 2004, wealthy donors believed that one reason they had failed was that Democrats lacked the sophisticated voter databanks of the Republican Party, its celebrated “voter vault” that can pinpoint likely supporters.
Out of that analysis came a decision to set up a Democratic voter databank outside the formal party apparatus and structured as a business, with investors and customers drawn from the same pool of those who had worked closely together in 2004.
“We wanted to come at this differently,” said Laura Quinn, chief executive of Catalist. “We needed people with a business background and a political background. Putting together a business model was critical to our effort, but we also needed someone who understood the political space, and that was Harold.”
To help progressive organizations realize measurable increases in civic participation and electoral success by building and operating a robust national voter database of every voting-age American; by offering tools and expertise that allow clients to use that data to improve fundraising, organizing and communications; and by updating and refining that data on a continuous basis.
Raul Castro has issued a decree enabling Cubans to acquire titles to housing they currently rent from the state, according to a US media report.
He sidestepped that one, talking in general terms about creating better communities and forgiving enemies, and expressing hope that the world will see more compassion with more female leaders.
"Generally, females are more sensitive, there's a greater potential to develop compassion,"
Beatie, 34, from Oregon, looked like a chirpy chap with a light beard. Much to my relief, it turned out that he'd started life as a girl, but felt that he was actually a man trapped in a girl's body. So he, or she, took a course of testosterone and had an operation to remove his, or her, breasts. Having dragged himself across the threshold of maleness, he got married to a woman. She'd had a hysterectomy. They wanted a baby, so he was doing the decent thing.Wasn't he?...
Watching all this, I began to have a certain amount of sympathy for him. But I still hoped it was a hoax. I thought of James Frey, who had also been a guest on Oprah when he wrote about his addictions to alcohol and crack. Frey, it turned out, had written stuff that wasn't strictly true. Later, he made another appearance on the Oprah show, this time to apologise. News headlines about Beatie's case invariably included a couple of queasily sceptical quote marks - as in ' "Pregnant" man appears on Oprah'.
No offence to Beatie, but those quote marks should actually be around the word 'man'. His female reproductive organs are still intact; legally he's a man, but biologically, in many ways that count, he's still very much a woman. And he's not even the first transgender male to become pregnant - that honour belongs to Matt Califia-Rice, who gave birth to a baby boy back in 1999. Despite the headlines, the world is still waiting for the first true male pregnancy.
A professor of economics at Connecticut College and a widower, Walter plods through an existence that looks comfortable and easy enough, but also profoundly tedious. He recycles old syllabuses and lecture notes for his classes, and suffers through piano lessons in a half-hearted effort to sustain some kind of connection to his wife, who was a classical concert pianist.
Early in “The Visitor,” Tom McCarthy’s second film as writer and director (the first was “The Station Agent”), it seems inevitable that something will come along to shake Walter out of his malaise. And sure enough, when he reluctantly travels to New York to deliver a paper at a conference, Walter finds that the Manhattan apartment he keeps but rarely visits has been surreptitiously rented to Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a drummer from Syria, and Zainab (Danai Gurira), his Senegalese girlfriend, who sells handmade jewelry at flea markets. Walter’s initial dismay and irritation gives way to an instinctive flicker of compassion, and he invites the couple to stay, at least for a short while.
The curious thing about “The Visitor” is that even as it goes more or less where you think it will, it still manages to surprise you along the way. Tarek and Walter quickly become friends, though Zainab is more reserved and also clearly more suspicious of her new housemate and benefactor. Walter takes up drumming, and begins to feel his zest for life and his appreciation of New York returning after a long period of dormancy...
To summarize Mr. McCarthy’s film as I have is to acknowledge some of the risks he has taken. It is possible to imagine a version of this story — the tale of a square, middle-aged white man liberated from his uptightness by an infusion of Third World soulfulness, attached to an exposé of the cruelty of post-9/11 immigration policies — that would be obvious and sentimental, an exercise in cultural condescension and liberal masochism. Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to imagine it any other way.
Prices of bread, rice, maize products, milk, oil, soybeans and others basic foods have increased sharply in recent months in a number of developing countries, despite policy measures -- including export restrictions, subsidies, tariff reductions and price controls -- taken by governments of both cereal importing and exporting countries to limit the impact of international prices on domestic food markets.
Food riots have been reported in Egypt, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Haiti in the past month. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to avoid seizing of food from the fields and from warehouses.
“Food price inflation hits the poor hardest, as the share of food in their total expenditures is much higher than that of wealthier populations,” said Henri Josserand of FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning system. “Food represents about 10-20 percent of consumer spending in industrialized nations, but as much as 60-80 percent in developing countries, many of which are net-food-importers.
Finally, in conclusion, I would like to say that my blog at IMF.org is again up and running. Please invite your readers and listeners to ask questions or post comments there. To make things a little more interesting, while I have been speaking, I have put up a post regarding what I regard as the key messages from this morning's discussions. Thank you very much.
Finally, let me comment briefly on some policy implications of this global assessment. A key message is that, with continuing tensions and uncertainties prevailing in global markets, policymakers in both advanced and emerging economies need to respond to a potentially quickly changing balance of risks. In addition, in our view, now is the time when prudent governments will draw up contingent plans to guard against deeper "tail risks."
Priority must be given to containing financial disruptions in a durable manner. As was discussed at yesterday's press conference on our Global Financial Stability Report, a key focus must continue to be recognizing losses quickly and rebuilding financial capital.
Macroeconomic policies can play a complementary role in supporting demand and limiting the negative interaction between financial markets and the real economy.
Monetary policy remains the first line of defense. Central banks in several advanced economies, notably the United states, have appropriately eased policy rates as their growth outlooks have worsened, and may need to continue easing until their economies find a firmer footing. In the Euro Area, current inflation remains uncomfortably high, but we expect that inflation will come down over the relevant roughly two-year policy horizon in the context of slower growth. This should provide some room for future policy easing on the part of the European Central Bank.
Fiscal policy is the second line of defense. The U.S. fiscal stimulus, for example, looks likely to provide timely support in the second half of this year. However, the use of fiscal space, where available, should be temporary and not jeopardize efforts aimed at consolidating public finances over the medium term.
Given the risk of negative interplay between housing and credit markets, the so-called third line of defense—namely, the use of public sector balance sheets—may be needed to support housing and financial markets.
In the United States, steps have already been taken to ensure the availability of mortgage financing and to stem systemic risk, but more may be needed before financial and housing markets find completely stable ground.
We also cannot ignore the international aspects of the current financial crisis. Given the cross-border dimensions of exposures and counterparty risks, solutions implemented in national silos may not be adequate to resolving an underlying global problem of capital adequacy in the financial system.
In many emerging and developing economies, the challenge remains to manage inflation and overheating risks, but it will be important to respond flexibly if global downside risks intensify.
Finally, as a way to reduce global pressure on food and energy prices, more open trade policies in those products would be a good start. Less insular biofuels policy in advanced economies would help relieve some pressure. At the same time, we encourage countries to avoid raising taxes or imposing quotas on their food exports. These reduce incentives for domestic producers and also increase international prices.
Immigration has become highly significant to the UK economy: immigrants comprise 12% of the total workforce—and a much higher proportion in London. However, we have found no evidence for the argument, made by the Government, business and many others, that net immigration—immigration minus emigration—generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population.
Overall GDP, which the Government has persistently emphasised, is an irrelevant and misleading criterion for assessing the economic impacts of immigration on the UK. The total size of an economy is not an index of prosperity. The focus of analysis should rather be on the effects of immigration on income per head of the resident population. Both theory and the available empirical evidence indicate that these effects are small, especially in the long run when the economy fully adjusts to the increased supply of labour. In the long run, the main economic effect of immigration is to enlarge the economy, with relatively small costs and benefits for the incomes of the resident population.
The economic impacts of immigration depend critically on the skills of immigrants. Different types of immigrant can have very different impacts on the economy. The issue is not whether immigration is needed but what level and type of immigration is desirable. In this context, net immigration from the EU—which we expect to remain positive—cannot be controlled. The question then is whether additional immigration from elsewhere carries benefits or disadvantages.
Many businesses and public services at present make use of the skills and hard work of immigrants. But this is not an argument for immigration on a scale which exceeds emigration and thus increases the population of the country. We do not support the general claims that net immigration is indispensable to fill labour and skills shortages. Such claims are analytically weak and provide insufficient reason for promoting net immigration. Vacancies are, to a certain extent, a sign of a healthy economy. Immigration increases the size of the economy and overall labour demand, thus creating new vacancies. As a result, immigration is unlikely to be an effective tool for reducing vacancies other than in the short term.
We also question the Government's claim that immigration has generated fiscal benefits. Estimates of the fiscal impacts are critically dependent on who counts as an immigrant (or as a descendant of an immigrant) and on what items to include under costs and benefits. The overall fiscal impact of immigration is likely to be small, though this masks significant variations across different immigrant groups.
Rising population density has potentially important economic consequences for the resident population, including impacts on housing, as well as wider welfare effects, especially in parts of England where immigrants are most concentrated. Although immigration is only one of a number of factors affecting the demand for housing, it does exert a significant impact on the housing market in particular areas. Some of the wider impacts from rising population are hard to measure and highly regional. Some, such as the impact of increasing population density on the cost and speed of implementation of public infrastructure projects, remain poorly understood.
Arguments in favour of high immigration to defuse the "pensions time bomb" do not stand up to scrutiny as they are based on the unreasonable assumption of a static retirement age as people live longer and ignore the fact that, in time, immigrants too will grow old and draw pensions. Increasing the retirement age, as the Government has done, is the only viable approach to resolving this issue.
There are significant unknowns and uncertainties in the existing data on immigration and immigrants in the UK. There are insufficient data about people leaving the UK and about short-term immigration to the UK. Existing data do not allow for accurate measurement of the stock of immigrants at national, regional and local levels. Inevitably, even less is known about the scale of illegal immigration and illegal employment of immigrants. The gaps in migration data create significant difficulties for the analysis and public debate of immigration, the conduct of monetary policy, the provision of public services and a wide range of other public policies.
Our overall conclusion is that the economic benefits to the resident population of net immigration are small, especially in the long run. Of course, many immigrants make a valuable contribution to the UK. But the real issue is how much net immigration is desirable. Here non-economic considerations such as impacts on cultural diversity and social cohesion will be important, but these are outside the scope of our inquiry.
Against this background, we have identified the following priorities for Government action. The Government should:
* improve radically the present entirely inadequate migration statistics;
* review its immigration policies and then explain, on the basis of firm evidence on the economic and other impacts, the reasons for and objectives of the policies, and how they relate to other policy objectives such as improving the skills of the domestic workforce;
* better enforce the minimum wage and other statutory employment conditions, with effective action taken against employers who illegally employ immigrants or who provide employment terms which do not meet minimum standards;
* clarify the objectives and implications of the new, partially points-based immigration system. It is far from clear that the new arrangements will in fact constitute the radical overhaul of the present system suggested by the Government;
* monitor immigration by publishing periodic Immigration Reports giving details of the numbers and characteristics of non-EEA nationals entering the UK under each Tier of the new system;
* give further consideration to which channels of immigration should lead to settlement and citizenship and which ones should be strictly temporary;
* review the implications of its projection that overall net immigration in future years will be around 190,000 people. The Government should have an explicit and reasoned indicative target range for net immigration and adjust its immigration policies in line with that broad objective.
Yesterday, for example, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told a Senate panel that conditions in Iraq were improving, except where they weren't. "Developments which are on the whole positive can still have unanticipated . . . consequences," Crocker said.
Abstract: Pakistan, like many LDCs, derives most of government revenue from indirect taxation. However, the system of taxes and subsidies has grown up piecemeal over the years. Previous exercises in price reform for Pakistan have been forced to make very restrictive assumptions about consumer preferences, and have typically used demand systems that prejudge what are the desirable directions of price reform. In this paper, the methodology of Deaton (1988, 1991) is extended and applied to the 1984-85 Household Income and Expenditure Survey. A theory of quality variation based on separable preferences is developed, and the implications for welfare and empirical analysis laid out. The prices of oils and fats and of sugar do not vary very much in the survey data, and the symmetry and homogeneity restrictions from the theory play an important part in obtaining sharp estimates of own and cross-price elasticities. The parameter estimates suggest that there are significant cross-price elasticities between the high-calorie foods and the presence of these substitution patterns means that the effects of potential price reforms are quite different from those that would be estimated using the traditional assumptions. Based on demand patterns alone, it would be desirable to raise government revenue by raising the consumer price of rice. However, in Pakistan it is not generally possible to decouple the producer and consumer prices of rice.
This paper presents empirical evidence on the extent to which zakat---a form of religiously-mandated charity under Islam---achieves its intended objective in Pakistan. Detailed income and expenditure data from Pakistan's Household Income and Expenditure Survey for 1987-88 are used to construct two income distributions---one containing the distribution of income which would have obtained if relevant forms of charity were not given, and one containing the distribution of income which obtains under a regime in which such charitable giving takes place. Atkinson-Kolm-Sen (AKS) ethical relative indices of income inequality are computed for Pakistan and each of its four provinces, for each of these two income distributions, and are compared over a range of parameter values. Evidence is found that zakat does redistribute from the better off to the worse-off, and so achieves some reduction in measured income inequality in Pakistan. Both intra-province and inter-province components of over-all inequality decline, though the amount of change is generally small. These conclusions are shown to be robust to a wide range of normative values the investigator may select.
This paper examines the distribution of income in Pakistan, and in each of its four provinces, from an explicit and formal Islamic perspective. A cardinally significant Atkinson--Kolm--Sen relative index of inequality reflecting that perspective is proposed and computed from the full HIES data series for the years 1984-85, 1985-86, 1986-87, and 1987-88. There is evidence of a significant decline in overall inequality in Pakistan from 1984-85 to 1987-88, but the level of inequality remains very high. Inter--province and inter--urban/rural differences in inequality profiles within Pakistan and each of its provinces are found to be generally less significant than intra--province and intra--urban/rural differences.
Case Studies at the World Bank
Michele Alacevich (World Bank)
The Spread of Institutionalism in Italy: the Case of Mr. Amintore Fanfani and the "Catholic University of the Sacred Heart"
Giovanni Michelagnoli (University of Rome, PhD. Candidate)
Rawls + Economics = Buchanan
Jacco Van Seumeren (University of St. Gallen, PhD. Candidate)
Men Talk Samuelsonian Men Austrian
Deirdre McCloskey (University of Illinois at Chicago)
In her evolution from a campus activist nicknamed Mad Dog to the first female speaker of the City Council and a likely candidate for mayor, Christine C. Quinn has taken care to project an image of reform and an openness about the workings of government.
Since taking office in 2006, Ms. Quinn has devised a more public system for reporting pork-barrel spending and has muscled tough new restrictions on lobbyists through a resistant Council.
But Ms. Quinn, facing her first significant embarrassment as speaker, has spent much of the last 48 hours trying to explain how the Council ran what many government experts have called a strange and even disturbing system for stashing away taxpayer dollars. For years, the Council budgeted millions of dollars for dozens of fictitious community organizations and used the money later for grants to favored neighborhood groups.
The Citizens Budget Commission, an independent watchdog organization, was bluntly critical of the practice on Friday: “There is no excuse for fictional items in a budget,” the commission said in a statement. “All elected officials bear responsibility for the budgets that they adopt, and Speaker Quinn, in particular, should be held accountable for the City Council’s fiscal practices.”
Ms. Quinn, despite her reputation as a focused manager with an understanding of the levers of city government, has said she knew nothing of the unorthodox budgeting practice. She and her staff have gone to great lengths to show that she had tried to put an end to it but was stymied by staffers she forced out.
For the moment, no one has stepped forward to contradict her account, and there is no evidence that anything about the system was illegal or that any money was misspent. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has expressed confidence in her, calling her “the most honest person I know.”
But Ms. Quinn’s defense hinges largely on her assertion that when she learned about the practice she immediately ordered it to cease, only to learn that her staff disobeyed her and carried it on for several more months.
“There were meetings, there were oral conversations,” Ms. Quinn, a Manhattan Democrat, said Thursday. “There were many people in the numerous meetings with myself and the finance staff during the budget process, with many people in the room who can confirm that.”
On Friday, however, when Ms. Quinn’s office was asked to produce some of the “many people” who could confirm it, only her chief of staff stepped forward, saying he had remembered her noting in one meeting that they would no longer use the reserve system.
And numerous former and current City Council officials said Ms. Quinn had during her tenure taken an unusually active role in overseeing the budget, leaving them wondering how she could not have known or, if she had truly objected to the practice, authoritatively ended it.
“It’s an off-line extra budget slush fund within the city’s budget, and it’s used at the discretion of the speaker,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of the Citizens Union, who joined Ms. Quinn to overhaul the lobbying rules and is now calling for all future Council appropriations to be monitored by an outside agency. “Given the speaker’s drive to create more transparency about the Council’s own budget and member items, it would have been appropriate to go public with this bad practice even if it did shine a bad light on the Council.”
Indeed, the revelations have been particularly troubling for Ms. Quinn, consultants said, in part because she has made open government a mantra of her tenure as speaker.
“She’s no Eliot Spitzer,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican political consultant, “but we have a very recent example in the governor’s precipitous fall from grace that the more you crusade as someone having a transparent budget, open to the public, governing according to ethics, then the higher those accountability standards will be.”
