About Me 0106: Making Money Job

This week the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in Malden,
Massachusetts, put a highly regarded teacher on paid leave after
the local Fox affiliate
revealed that he has appeared in several pornographic movies.
No one alleges that Kevin Hogan, a crew coach who is also head of
the school's English department, did anything illegal, and he gets
high marks as a teacher. Yet the school is investigating him,
ostensibly for giving an incomplete account of his work experience
prior to taking his current job. When it broke the story on
Tuesday, Fox 25 seemed mostly interested in titillation:

Kevin Hogan is an English teacher and crew coach at a top-rated
Massachusetts public high school, but he brings some unusual
experience to the job: until recently, he was starring in
pornographic movies....

He can also be found on the Internet and in adult entertainment
stores under his screen name: Hytch Cawke.

His movie credits include "Fetish World" and "Just Gone Gay 8,"
and FOX Undercover found his third movie, whose title is not fit to
reveal in a family news outlet, in a local adult store. It features
him answering an ad to have sex for money.

"Hi, I'm Hytch and I just answered the ad and now I'm here to
see what it’s like to be with a guy," he says to the camera.

But Hogan wasn't so talkative when FOX Undercover's camera was
on him.

To provide a fig leaf of legitimate public interest, the TV
station quoted three parents who were disturbed by the news for no
clearly articulated reason, one of whom also said: "The kids really
love him. He's been a great addition to the team." The story also
noted that Hogan had "flawless references."

In a follow-up segment the next day, Fox 25
reported that the initial piece "sparked a flood of responses,
many of them critical of the story. One tweet said 'Kevin Hogan did
not deserve that. He's a good teacher with students supporting
him.'" The headline on a
story posted this morning asks, "Are private lives of teachers
truly private?" Which seems like something Fox 25 should have asked
before ruining this guy's life.

The closest the station has come to an intelligible
justification for its exposé is this
quote from a spokesman for the state Department of Elementary
and Secondary Education, which also is investigating
Hogan: “We expect teachers to hold a very high moral standard.
They are role models for students."

So even if everyone concedes a teacher is good at teaching, he
is disqualified from the job if he behaves immorally off the clock.
Who decides what counts as immoral? Does it have to involve sex?
Promiscuity and adultery too, or just making porn? Does it matter
whether it is gay or straight porn?

Obviously, no one forced Hogan to make those movies. But should
he have taken it for granted that he was throwing away his teaching
career by doing so?

[Thanks to Andrew Friedrich for the tip.]

Don't worry about middle-class Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney—he doesn't have to rely solely on the millions he made during his time as a partner at private equity firm Bain Capital to get by while he's unemployed. In fact, he's still pulling in millions from the job-killing deals Bain does, more than a decade after his departure. The New York Times pieces together some of the details of Romney's continuing financial relationship with Bain, finding that:

Though Mr. Romney left Bain in early 1999, he received a share of the corporate buyout and investment profits enjoyed by partners from all Bain deals through February 2009: four global buyout funds and 18 other funds, more than twice as many over all as Mr. Romney had a share of the year he left. He was also given the right to invest his own money alongside his former partners. Because some of the funds and deals covered by Mr. Romney’s agreement will not fully wind down for several years, Mr. Romney is still entitled to a share of some of Bain’s profits.

That adds up to a lot of money:

...the family’s Bain holdings are still considerable: in his 2011 disclosure, Mr. Romney reported Bain assets between $12.4 million and $60.9 million, which provided between $1.5 million and $9.3 million in income. The blind trust for his wife, Ann, held at least another $10 million, generating income of at least $4.1 million. Because the campaign is required to provide only a minimum value for some Bain assets now held by Mrs. Romney, the total could be far more.

Romney's post-1999 take from Bain includes profit on the purchases of KB Toys and Clear Channel Communications, each of which resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs. Romney would, of course, point out that he didn't personally work on those deals. And it's true. He just profited from them—how much, we don't know, because he won't release his tax returns or detailed financial information—after having spent his career working on similar deals.

About Me 0106

Monday, December 26, 2011

Making Money Job

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