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| Blumenthal and Harris |
One has to search long and hard to find any negative news
reports on Senator Dick Blumenthal, even in Connecticut's media morgues.
Blumenthal recently has hitched his star to President Joseph Biden's presidential
juggernaut as a consumer protection chieftain in the U.S. Senate. The two are
old friends, and Blumenthal during the past four years has become unfailingly
partisan.
Just as a rising tide lifts all the boats, President John
Kennedy’s formulation, so a rising Democrat election tide has lifted
Blumenthal’s dingy. “Blumenthal
heads Senate consumer protection committee, giving him key perch for business
oversight” screams the
headline in the Hartford Courant. Blumenthal has been down this
yellow brick road before.
One of the reasons for tender treatment by Connecticut’s press
is that Blumenthal has been, over the years, adept at massaging his state’s
media, which often dumped Blumenthal’s press releases into their various
formats without the usual, critical cross-examination. In essence, Blumenthal
was allowed to write his own press stories, nearly all of them, unsurprisingly,
positive. It was George Bernard Shaw who said that the only accurate biography
of Napoleon Bonaparte would be one written by his butler. Everyone else during
the great man’s rise to power was busily bowing at the throne, and his butler,
of course, would have been familiar with the great man’s foibles. Blumenthal,
though a millionaire, has no butler.
If Blumenthal had made any mistakes during his two decade
stint as Connecticut’s crusading Attorney General, they were carefully buried
and stowed away in caskets in the deep, overgrown forest of media
accommodation. And, of course, his small-fry
victims, many of them driven out of business by Blumenthal’s often
tendentious news releases, hadn’t the resources to defend themselves after they
had been stretched out on the usual AG rack.
For these reasons, it was refreshing – not to say shocking
-- to read, way back in 2010, an exceptional piece in the Connecticut Post, “Blumenthal The ‘A' in AG is for Activist,”
that might have been written by Blumenthal’s unassuming butler, if Blumenthal
had a butler who had, perhaps inadvertently, turned the tables on his boss. The
Post piece was the single notable exception that proved the rule, the rule
being that no one in Connecticut’s left of center politics has enemies to the
right.
The Post story, after noting that Blumenthal had changed the
mission of Connecticut’s AG office, “moving away from the traditional role of
state attorney to one of citizens' advocate,” noted in passing three of
Blumenthal’s small-fry victims.
One case involved Gina Malapanis of Computer
Plus Center, whom Blumenthal accused of “failing to deliver on a state
computer contract… She was arrested by state police and charged with 5th degree
larceny months after her computers, company records and office safes were
seized. Initially, Blumenthal “sought $1.7 million in reimbursement and
penalties from Malapanis,” a charge that later was “dismissed after the state
offered Malapanis accelerated rehabilitation, which she accepted.”
Using the state’s media to soften his targets, over-charging
and then reducing the over-charge were common proceedings in Blumenthal’s AG
torcher chamber. However, “Malapanis countersued the state, claiming
Blumenthal's actions, including huge liens placed against her business and
property, destroyed her company. Six years after Blumenthal sued Malapanis, a
jury awarded her $18 million in damages. That award was reduced to $1.8 million
a few months ago, and Blumenthal continues to appeal.”
Chris Healy, chairman of the Republican Party at the time, said
of Blumenthal that he had “wielded the blunt instrument of his office against
an entrepreneur, destroying her business and even trying to get her thrown in
jail, on accusations a jury found so unfounded she deserved compensation 61
times the amount she was accused of stealing. No one should entertain the hope
that other businesses, from small, startup electronics outfits to Pratt &
Whitney, are unaware that a job-destroying, anti-business atmosphere pervades
Connecticut, or that it wears the face of Dick Blumenthal."
The Post, in a contrarian mood, noted, “Blumenthal's office,
by its own count, participates in 45,000 to 50,000 legal cases a year before
federal and state courts. There are some 32,000 cases now pending. Although
most of those cases relate to child protection and support issues, a sizable
number involve consumer protection.”
And the cases involving consumer protection were not Big
Tobacco cases. Many of them were small bore complaints, molehills that
Blumenthal through his contacts in the media had blown up into mountains. Both
the Post and Connecticut Commentary mentioned other cases here.
George Jepsen followed Blumenthal into the AG’s office. The
new AG dismissed more than 200 cases that Blumenthal had for years left frying
on his burners. These were people, many of them small business owners whose
assets Blumenthal had commandeered so that, driven to the point of bankruptcy,
they could not properly defend themselves against Blumenthal’s charges and were
forced to pay fines in “settlements” that might have been arranged before
Blumenthal had stretched them out on a media rack that destroyed their
reputations and their businesses.
Stretching his limbs as the Democrat’s Inspector Javert,
Blumenthal is quoted in a recent news report on his new responsibilities as head the Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee
on Manufacturing, Trade and Consumer Protection.
“The exciting part of this new responsibility is in fact the
breadth of subjects that we can go after,” the old fox said Friday in a telephone
interview, licking his chops.
Blumenthal brings to his new responsibilities all the
instruments of forced persuasion he had deployed so successfully for 20 years
as Connecticut’s consumer protection Attorney General. It will be like watching
a young boy with two stomachs raiding a candy store and eating up the profits.
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