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Malefactors of Great Power In Connecticut


The Coronavirus infestation has presented Governor Ned Lamont with an ethical tightrope, according to front page, top of the fold story in Sunday’s Harford Courant, “Lamont faces ethical tightrope.”

The governor married well. His wife, Ann Lamont, is a very clever financier; some even suppose she is the brains behind the Lamont Juggernaut. Mrs. Lamont is a co-founder and managing partner of Oak/HT/FC.

Gracing the front piece page of Mario Puzo’s Mafia epic “The Godfather” is a quote indirectly derived from Balzac – “Behind every great fortune lies a crime.” It is no less true that behind every great fortune lies a marriage. A 2006 New York Times story disclosed that Lamont's financial filings “show that $54 million to $193 million of the family’s wealth stems from Ms. Lamont’s work at Oak Investment Partners in Westport, Conn., while $1 million to $5 million is traced to Mr. Lamont’s stake in his Greenwich-based cable television company, Lamont Digital Systems.” 

By the by, Lamont is not the only Connecticut politician who has married well.  Two politicians in the state clothed in millions, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and US Representative Rosa DeLauro, have moneybag spouses. Blumenthal is married to the daughter of real estate magnate Peter Malkin&Son who owns, among other valuable New York properties, the Empire State Building. And DeLauro’s husband is Stan Greenberg, pollster and advisor to the national and international Democrat Juggernaut.

A few years ago, a surly critic thought he spied a loop between DeLauro’s political activities and her husband’s business activities. DeLauro was shipping large gobs of her excess campaign money to the Democrat National Committee, and the political nexus provided Greenberg with enumerative work. Because journalism is largely 10 percent thought and 90 percent repetition, the story went nowhere in Connecticut.

In 2013, an Associated Press story, “Empire State Building owner raises $754M in IPO”, an Initial Public stock Offering, noted in passing, “Real estate investor Peter Malkin bought the Empire State Building from Donald Trump and a business partner for $57.5 million in 2002. Malkin Holdings, which is run by Peter Malkin and his son Anthony, spearheaded a plan to take Empire State Realty public.” The tousle between Trump and the Malkins – at one point Trump claimed the Empire State property under Malkin had been poorly managed; rats had infested the building; the elevators didn’t work – helps explain the animosity between Trump and Blumenthal, Peter Malkin’s son-in-law. Not only is all politics local; all politics is personal as well.

The Courant gives us a rather vivid depiction of the Lamont tightrope. Mrs. Lamont’s business “as it happens, has its investments divided between the health care industry during a viral pandemic and financial technology while married to a governor pledging to drag a Luddite state government into the digital age.”

“Luddite state government” is a reportorial poetic touch indicating Connecticut aversion to modernization. We are, after all, “the land of steady habits,” and it is the business of those who worship at the altar of progress to drag the state, kicking and screaming, into a utopian future bubbling over with milk, honey and technological improvements.

But – there is the tightrope! Coronavirus has transformed the governor into a petit Caligula out-rigged with extraordinary powers that would bring a blush to the cheeks of Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars. Not even Augustus Caesar, a demi-god clothed with the sun and fairly worshiped by progressive, non-Luddite Romans, disposed of the emergency powers available to Lamont, a wealthy businessman.

The Lamonts, according to the Courant story, attempted to surround themselves with an ethical buffer to shield the governor from an appearance of self-dealing: Early in the new administration, the two “drafted an ethics plan that they believed insulates them from a variety of personal and state business decisions that could otherwise create an appearance of self-dealing.” The Lamont plan received a nod of approval from Connecticut’s Office of State Ethics.

The arrival of the Coronavirus infestation in the state, and the subsequent need for genomic testing, presented the Lamont’s with a new ethical wrinkle. Ann Lamont’s company is invested in Sema4, “one of the largest clinical geonomics laboratories in the world, located in Branford and Stamford, and Sema4 has been chosen by the Lamont administration as one of four companies designated to “run 100,000 [Coronavirus] tests a day on everyone in Connecticut.” And, as the fortunes of Sema4 increase, so will the fortunes of its investors – the Lamont’s.

But never mind the rub. “Upon finding out that the State Comptroller had awarded a contract to Sema4” – what a surprise! – “the governor and first lady wish to donate any benefits that they may derive to charity,” said one of the governor’s state lawyers. And the executive director of the state ethics staff said “ while the governor and First Lady are under no legal obligation to donate to charity the financial benefits” they may accrue from the deal , their decision “will address any appearance concerns, which, as you know, are beyond the scope of the Code of Ethics for Public Officials.”

Apparently, the principal operative doctrine of the Office of State Ethics is that appearances inconvenient to politicians who have established the office – why don’t we just abolish the office? – are benign and beyond the scope of ethical inquiry.

Here is the real rub: The ways of earning money, according to ethicist Henry David Thoreau, “usually lead downward.” But political power, not money, is the coin of the realm among professional political authoritarians, about whom Abe Lincoln once said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”


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