Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft -- George Plunkitt of Tammany Hall
Corruption,
we know, is a staple of kingly arrogance. In a unitary one party
state, corruption corrupts absolutely, for obvious reasons. When power remains
undivided in a state, the only guard against political corruption, so we have
been told, is a vigilant media.
A
nudge from the Feds and a six month old attempt by Connecticut Republicans to
reform the state’s earmarks structure has awakened the virtuous juices of a
handful of Connecticut’s reporters.
About
six months ago, Republican leaders in the General Assembly – state
representative in the House Vince Candelora and state senators
Rob Sampson and Steve Harding -- issued a mini-manifesto on earmarks and ended
by “proposing the following legislative reforms which would apply to all
grant recipients receiving a grant-in-aid earmarked from a state appropriation
or bond allocation from the state. They include:
Transparency
of Purpose
As a
condition of receiving funds, grant recipients must submit a written request to
the Appropriations Committee which shall include the following information:
The
amount of funds requested
The
necessity for and intended use of such funds;
A
clear description of the public purpose furthered by the granting of such
funds; and
The
legislator/requestor who made the initial request for funds, including a
certification that they, their family members, or any business with which they
are associated, have no financial interest in and will receive no financial
benefit from the grant of funds.
Such
information shall be publicly posted online.
Grant
recipients must participate in a public hearing conducted by the Appropriations
Committee, which shall also include the agency of cognizance (DECD, DSS, etc),
to give the committee an opportunity to gather additional information and
solicit public input.
Grant
recipients must disclose any convictions of its officers or board members of
any financial related crimes and any cases where an officer or board member was
the defendant in a lawsuit related the handling of funds or the discharge of
fiduciary duty.
Grant
recipients must submit to random state audits and financial reconciliations to
verify that the funds are being used as intended.
Transparency
in Reporting
Prior
to receiving an initial grant and annually thereafter, no later than 60 days
before the end of the fiscal year in which the funds were received, the grant
recipient must submit to the Appropriations committee a certified, detailed
accounting of the recipient's budget for the previous fiscal year that
includes:
Each
amount spent on administrative costs; each amount spent on lobbying, political
and advocacy activities, including but not limited to, funds paid to any
tax-exempt organization recognized under IRS Code 501(c)(4); a detailed
reporting of all sources of income, in addition to the state funds; a detailed
accounting of all disbursements; if applicable, a detailed accounting of how
third-party and subsequent grant recipients expended the funds they received; a
list of all current Board Members.
The
Republican leaders also included in their manifesto a few pertinent remarks
that might have caught the eyes of federal investigators/prosecutors:
The
budget bill which passed this year included $13.3 million in Fiscal Year 26 and
$5.6 million in Fiscal Year 27 for legislatively directed appropriations under
the Youth Services Prevention and Youth Violence Initiative lines.
There
are 289 separate lines which list only the organizations' names and amount
appropriated to each.
There
are multiple organizations listed twice. Some organizations are either
misspelled or have incorrect names. Some of the organizations have little to no
information available online.
Examples
of the grantees include:
“Sports
Academy” is receiving $250,000. It is unclear what “Sports Academy”
is, or does. The only organization with an exact match of this name that
registered with the state was dissolved in 2021.
Blue
Hills Civic Association, Inc. is receiving $20,000. This organization has been
under FBI investigation since December of 2024. The organization has
received $14.42 million from the state since 2016 with a vast majority coming
in the past four years.
The
lawmakers also highlighted a Special Act which passed this year that directs
state funds to a long list of nonprofit groups (attached).
We
hope these common sense reforms receive bipartisan support, and if we are
called into Special Session this month, we urge Democrats to add these good
government solutions to the list of action items to vote on. We urge Democrats
to work with us in bipartisan fashion on these ideas. We should be
spending taxpayer money as prudently and as transparently as possible. The
candy store Connecticut government giveaways must end."
The
earmarks presently under scrutiny by the Feds may be the tip of a very large
and menacing iceberg. Bob Swick, who has been ringing Connecticut’s fraud alarm
bell for two decades, notes in Connecticut Centinal: “Looking at the
Governor and his dealings, he represents all that is bad in our political
system. One can safely state this as the corruption does get answered about
“Thermo Fisher Scientific’, ‘Sema 4’, ‘Core Infomatics’, ‘Centrellis’,
‘Ocrulus’, ‘Urjanet’, ‘1life Healthcare’, ‘Galileo Health’, ‘Castlight Health’,
"‘Paladina Health’, and "‘VillageMD‘, the Lamont-related Cayman
Island partnerships, large Cayman Islands deals such as the ‘Horsebarn Hill
Investment Fund’ hiding in the UCONN Foundation, and other deals working
through ‘quasi-public’ organizations such as Lamont-connected (and covert)
‘Connecticut Innovations’”.
In a
recent Hartford Courant story, reporter Chris
Keating noted: “Prompted by an FBI investigation and complaints by legislators
[for the most part, aggressive, morally awake Republican Party leaders in the
state’s General Assembly] about state spending, the state House of
Representatives voted unanimously for a reform bill that calls for greater
oversight for nonprofits that collectively receive millions of dollars annually
in state funding.
Keating
noted in his story, “Some lawmakers [chiefly Republicans] said the measure,
known as House Bill 5039, was not as strong as it could have been. First, the
judicial and executive branches, which are separate branches of government, are
not included in the bill, despite millions of dollars that often flow to
nonprofits. Second, Lamont’s proposal to include the name of the legislator who
proposed the specific earmark was dropped from the bill.”
In
his remarks on Tammany Hall, boss George Plunkitt makes a
careful distinction between honest and dishonest graft:
EVERYBODY
is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody
thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft.
There’s all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men
have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortune out of the
game, and I’m gettin’ richer every day, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest
graft—blackmailin’ gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc.—and neither
has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics. There’s an honest
graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by
sayin’: I seen my opportunities and I took “em.”…
Every
good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn’t isn’t likely to be
popular. If I have a good thing to hand out in private life, I give it to a
friend -- why shouldn’t I do the same in public life?
Another
kind of honest graft. Tammany has raised a good many salaries. There was an
awful howl by the reformers, but don’t you know that Tammany gains ten votes
for every one it lost by salary raisin’?
Now,
in conclusion, I want to say that I don’t own a dishonest dollar. If my worst
enemy was given the job of writin’ my epitaph when I’m gone, he couldn’t do
more than write:
“George
W. Plunkitt. He Seen His Opportunities, and He Took ‘Em.”
The
more things change, the French say, the more they remain the same.
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