"The economic and social costs of cronyism are paid by society. In the form of reduced business opportunity for the majority of the population, reduced competition in the market place, inflated consumer goods prices, decreased economic performance, inefficient business investment cycles, reduced motivation in affected organizations, and the diminution of economically productive activity. " Click here for source.
Because of cronyism in crime scene cleanup, the public suffers; friends and relatives of the deceased are cheated by cronyism. Also, honest crime scene cleanup companies lose needed revenue to service the public's need for professional death scene cleaners.
Cronyism in crime scene cleanup means that (usually) coroners' employees receive money from a crony crime scene cleanup company (green/blue above). In return these government employees give special favors to these companies, like the telephone numbers of crime scene victims and others needing professional death scene cleanup.
Sometimes coroners' employees start their own business with their privileged information. This privileged information is about who died, how, when where, and the telephone number of the deceased's family and friends.
Again, for example, in crime scene cleanup, coroners' employees give the public (bereaved) telephone numbers to crony companies for cleaning services. The crony companies get rich because they charge the public whatever they want. They have few real competitors. These companies are cronies because the coroner's employees give their telephone numbers to friends and relatives of the dead. The crony coroners' employees also get rich by selling their information to crony crime scene cleanup companies. The public pays more because of this unethical business between private companies and tax payer paid government employees. In a sense, the tax-paying public pays twice because of cronyism.
Crony's competitors and the public then suffer, we see. We can see how cronies gain much money, power, and influence while the public gets cheated. How would you like to pay more money for a service because your government favors one company over others? We know for a fact that this happens in many places.
We see that bureaucracies (like the coroner's office) in local, county, state, and federal governments hurt the public. Cronyism has crippled, in part, the Russian economy. So we can see again how cronyism steals from the public because it destroy free enterprise.
Bureaucracies become self-serving. Some even forget who they were created to serve. Add cronyism to this self-serving tendency, and we see again how free enterprise suffers as well as the public good. In regards to crime scene cleanup and cronyism, we can see how some coroners' employees work to benefit from their inside, special information.
After time, sociologically speaking, these relationships reflect an abbreviated form of fascism, but without government sanction.
Note: Legally, for a government agency to exclude one company for the benefit of a quasi-monopoly requires open-bidding for a contract. A contract all are entitled to bid for.
More though, in some areas coroners' employees have seized control of referrals for the benefit of relatives and friends who have started crime scene cleanup businesses. Callers have actually, gleefully, confirmed that they were to receive all or most of the referrals from those in control of referrals. It is like these callers had no idea that they were, in part, no different than cronies in the late Soviet Union.
These relationships cause one to wonder if there are many other ways that the US reflects Russian bureaucracies' cronyism. How else is free enterprise perverted by our various government agencies?
Eddie Evans
Crime Scene Cleanup School
