A Touch Of Tammany, The Real One Percenters And The Malloy Crony Capitalist Bank

“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’” -- George Washington Plunkitt

 “Malloy has said the party's standard will be accepting donations allowed by law. State contractors are banned from giving to state campaigns, but they are allowed to donate to federal campaign accounts” – CTMirror

“The books are always all right. The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft  -- George Washington Plunkitt 

The figures –and the money – are now pouring into Democratic Party coffers. And as the tide of campaign cash drowns Republican Party hopes in the upcoming Connecticut elections, the Democratic Party in the Gimme State resembles nothing so much as Tammany Hall in the early 1900’s . Governor Dannel Malloy has become the party’s George Washington Plunkitt, although the Tammany Hall boss, who operated from a bootblack stand at the New York County Court House, was far chattier and much more frank than the current governor.

According to a CTMirror report, “Connecticut’s Democratic Party raised $2.1 million through its federal account in 2013, buoyed by a roster of $10,000 donors that include the owner of the 2014 Republican convention venue, the Mohegan Tribe, and executives of companies doing business with the state. The GOP raised $528,501.

“In end-of-the-year federal reports filed over the weekend, the Democrats reported raising $137,646 in December, with six donors, at least three of whom are involved in state projects, giving $10,000 each, more than the entire GOP monthly collection of $44,986.”

If money is the mother’s milk of politics, Tammany Malloy is its milkman. Welcome to the one party state, where all the books are in order, the bulk of campaign cash flows to the party in power, and both the media and large campaign contributors find themselves jostling in the same warm and cozy political pockets. Everyone – but taxpayers, considered for purposes of campaigning a voiceless minority party – benefits from supping on the distended teats of the progressive, crony capitalist state.

There is in Connecticut no Thomas Nast, the cartoonist in the age of Tammany who almost singlehandedly brought the big city New York political machine to a grinding halt. Connecticut must make do with timid and cowed cartoonists and commentators. The yellow journalist newspaper editors of old have given way to weak-tea publishers of cash poor newspapers and reporters content to co-operate with the reigning power, however ruinous to the public good its policies may be.

Last week, in preparation for the Democratic Party’s upcoming off year elections, Tammany Malloy, the ex-officio head of Connecticut’s one party state, pulled a surplus out of his hat.  It was a slender thing, only a spare $506 million budget surplus in a budget amounting to about $20 - $23 billion for fiscal years 2014-2016. Almost immediately, commentators and some politicians began to dispute the existence of the surplus; the seeming black ink was a mirage, some said. Others familiar with dictionaries pointed out that a surplus is by definition the amount of money the state has overtaxed its citizens and as such should always be returned to taxpayers in the form of adjusted appropriations.   Pretty much everyone agrees that the surplus will herald future billion dollar deficits.

The Office of Fiscal Analysis has estimated deficits of more than $1 billion for three years running starting in 2016 if the state continues to spend at the same rate. Tammany Malloy decided to slice and dice the purported surplus. He decided to return $155 million to taxpayers by way of a modest one time only gas and sales tax refund. In addition, he dedicated a portion of the one-time surplus,  $100 million, to prop up a massive hole in a pension fund raided by – let’s get this straight, shall we? – a General Assembly that has been dominated by Democrats sometime before many present General Assembly big spenders were in diapers. Connecticut’s pension liabilities are “three times greater than the average of all states in 2011.”  Connecticut's unfunded pension liability, Moody’s  Investors Service found, “was 189.7 percent of its revenue,” according to a comprehensive report on state pensions in the New London Day. The governor also injected $250 million of the one-time only surplus into the state's rainy day fund.

Tammany Malloy decided to slice and dice the purported surplus. He dedicated a portion of the one-time surplus to prop up a massive hole in a pension fund raided by – let’s get this straight, shall we? – a General Assembly that has been dominated by Democrats sometime before many present General Assembly big spenders were in diapers. Connecticut’s pension liabilities are “three times greater than the average of all states in 2011.”  Connecticut's unfunded pension liability, Moody’s  Investors Service found, “was 189.7 percent of its revenue,” according to a comprehensive report on state pensions in the New London Day.

Tammany Malloy intends to return a sliver of the supposed surplus to taxpayers upon whom he and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly had levied the largest tax increase in state history. The ratio of new Malloy tax increases to tax money returned is $2.6 billion to $273.4 million.

Thomas Nast would have mined that emaciated giveback for half a dozen cartoons. And any yellow journalist worth his spit in the early 1900s would have laughed such pretentious nonsense to shreds. What is the exact ratio of tax surplus money returned against Democratic campaign contributions from donors Tammany Malloy has stroked and cultivated during his one-party rule?

The well-financed one party Tammany Hall state apparently is here to stay. Blue journalists in Connecticut even now are plotting to co-operate with it. What Connecticut really needs -- in addition to tax relief, more modest spending, less crippling regulations, smaller and more efficient government, schools that produce scholars at about half the cost of public education, politicians determined to restore Connecticut to its former glory as an economic power house and cities that are not given over to gangs – is a new form of yellow journalism barking at the feet of the new crony capitalist Boss Tweeds.

Soucy, Plunkitt And The Dovonan Sting Operation

The FBI’s singing canary in the Donovan probe, “labor activist” Ray Soucy, was not given prison time for the part he had played in the attempted corruption of former Speaker of the State House Chris Donovan.

The lede on a story in a Hartford paper ran as follows:

“A labor activist at the center of an attempt two years ago to kill a tax on tobacco by bribing a top state lawmaker with tens of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign money was sentenced Monday to three years probation, the first six months to be served at a halfway house.”

Connecticut’s majority Democratic Party is full of “labor activists.” It’s only a slight stretch to say Governor Dannel Malloy, who has marched on the picket line with union workers, is himself a “labor activist.” Mr. Malloy pledged his troth to unions when he was in the political nursery, and he has renewed his vows several times during his administration, most notably when his first budget was on the drawing boards.

However, few labor activists are as colorful as Mr. Soucy, Connecticut’s equivalent of George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall boss in New York City who ran his political operation from a bootblack stand. Mr. Plunkitt – “I seen my opportunities, and I took’em”  – was on his way out even before he was interviewed several times by reporter William Riordan, who later stitched together his embarrassingly frank interviews in a small book, “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.”  Mr. Plunkitt claimed he was a casualty of the then new civil service system, the bane and ruination of political parties. Mr. Plunkitt’s Democratic Party, it may be noticed, has since adapted to the new reality and now counts unions and civil service workers as the I-joist of the Democratic Party.

The FBI wired Mr.  Soucy and provided him with a script with which he might ensnare the people – some young, others inexperienced in the ways of political lifers -- who surrounded Speaker of the State House Chris Donovan, then running for a U.S. Congressional seat left vacant by Chris Murphy, now a U.S. Senator.  The rancid odor issuing from the FBI sting operation persuaded Mr. Donovan to withdraw his Congressional bid in favor of Democrat Elizabeth Esty. The small-fry were easily ensnared. At some point during the FBI sting operation, the cover was blown – when and by whom we may never know – and most of the incumbent big fish, with some effort, swam upstream.

Hauling in the net, the Feds successfully prosecuted Mr. Donovan’s campaign manager, lower level campaign workers, and some benighted smoke shop owners drawn into the sting by George Washington Plunkitt Soucy, who teased fraudulent campaign donations from them by explaining that money made the wheels go round at the state Capitol. Or, as Mr. Soucy colorfully put it, “Politics is about the Benjamins. [Ben Franklin’s mug is on the highly inflated hundred dollar bill] This game runs on one thing -- dollars."

Other Soucyisms:

 "Chris Murphy will do anything in the (expletive deleted) world for me because he remembers that I was the first one to believe in and invest in him. That's how the system works."

After Mr. Soucy tells a wired FBI informant, Patrick Castagna, that he has been sowing the political ground in $10,000 increments, Mr. Castagna, the FBI straight man, doubts whether $10,000 is sufficient to buy a Connecticut politician. Inflation, after all, has taken a bite out of the purchasing power of the dollar.

Says Soucy, “The $10,000 was to let him know you are serious....We're dealing with politicians. We're not dealing with the mob [pause]. It's a close second."

“Pictures [the Benjamins again] they're worth a thousand words. The guy running in the 5th District [former House Speaker Chris Donovan] he got 10 pictures [a $10,000 campaign contribution].”

When all the dirt was flushed down the drain, “the guy running in the 5^th District” gave up his campaign, and the FBI, thanks to the wired Soucy, managed to send a few Donovan subalterns to prison. But not Soucy the singing canary. The well connected union leader, now on probation, will spend six months in a half-way house because, according to one report,
“Soucy [sic] recordings and his help in raising and delivering about $28,000 in cash were instrumental in the indictments of two Donovan campaign officers and five roll-your-own owners or employees.”

The guys who got the Benjamins were inconvenienced but emerged unscathed from the FBI sting.

Mr. Plunkitt tells us why:

“Understand, I ain’t defendin‘ politicians of today who steal. The politician who steals is worse than a thief. He is a fool. With the grand opportunities all around for the man with a political pull, there’s no excuse for stealin’ a cent. The point I want to make is that if there is some stealin‘ in politics, it don’t mean that the politicians of 1905 are, as a class, worse than them of 1835. It just means that the old-timers had nothin’ to steal, while the politicians now are surrounded by all kinds of temptations and some of them naturally—the fool ones—buck up against the penal code.”

Roll Your Own Taxpayer

The Chris Donovan, “Roll Your Own” scandal is being judicially tucked to bed now that some principals in the scandal have been sentenced.  Most recently, Joshua Nassi, former state House Speaker Chris Donovan’s campaign manager, was sentenced to 28 months in federal prison by U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton.

Mr. Donovan was running for the U.S. House in Connecticut’s 5^th District when his campaign was rudely interrupted by FBI wired singing canaries, prominent among them former corrections union official Ray Soucy, a character who might have done well for himself during the good old days of Tammany Hall and George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall boss who always was careful to make a sharp distinction between honest and dishonest graft.

Connecticut’s Roll Your Own tobacco shops seriously undermined the state’s effort to reduce smoking by making tobacco prohibitively expensive through punitive taxation. The Roll Your Own product could not have been punitively taxed unless the General Assembly designated such shops as “tobacco manufacturers.” Slapping that designation upon an operation in which cigarette purchasers used a machine to roll their own cigarettes was, as Mark Twain might have said, a bit of a stretcher.

Right from the start, however, the political stars were aligned against the Roll Your Own Tobacco shops, which were springing up like poisoned mushrooms all over the state. And, unforgivably, these mushrooms were not subject to the same exorbitant tax levied on Big Tobacco.

While the tobacco tax is the state’s most egregious example of punitive taxation, Connecticut’s tax on gasoline – the environmentally bad stuff people put in their cars so they might get to work and pay more taxes – is the highest in the nation. The gas tax is actually two taxes: a tax paid at the pump and a gross receipts tax, hidden from purchasers, levied when the product arrives in port, both of which were supposed to be sequestered in a special fund for road maintenance. The so called road maintenance tax has long since been dumped into the state’s General Fund. Some voices in the state’s Democratic dominated General Assembly lately have been raised to resurrect tolls to pay for much needed road and bridge maintenance.

Always starving for tax receipts to pay for a budget that has increased threefold since former Governor Lowell Weicker and Democrats in the General Assembly imposed an income tax on the state, a bill was put forward in the General Assembly to designate Roll Your Own tobacco shops as “tobacco manufacturers.” So designated, the Roll Your Own shops would be subject to the same exorbitant and punitive taxes levied on Big Tobacco. This is the bill that became the snare that caught Mr. Nassi and others in its iron and unforgiving jaws.

Punitive taxes are always imposed under a flag of concern and compassion. Smoking is bad for your health, and it increases the cost of health care. Why should people who are not addicted to smoking pay higher insurance premiums because smokers choose to pollute their lungs? Who would mind paying exorbitant taxes on gasoline, if they could be certain the taxes would be dedicated to road and bridge repairs? Cars that do not depend on gasoline are more environmentally friendly, and high gasoline taxes are a way of driving up the cost of gas guzzling cars so that future purchasers would be more inclined to “invest in” more environmentally friendly modes of transportation. Better still, these tax dollars can be used to make necessary “investments” in public transportation such as the New Britain to Hartford fast-track bus line.

Such is the irresistible zeitgeist in Connecticut: What fool could possibly object to high taxes if it can be shown that the taxes are used for benevolent purposes by a prudent and compassionate state? Taxpayers in Connecticut should know their public officials will use such punishing taxes wisely. The benefits of high taxes far outweigh the disadvantages of high taxes. Any idiot can see that. And any idiot can see that low tax Roll Your Own smoke shops kicked against the pricks

What? A low tax tobacco product in Connecticut?  You gotta be kidding me. Why, everyone knows that low tax products drive from the market high tax products. And they rob tax resources from a benevolent Peter who is robbing taxpayers to pay Paul. Why, dear me, think of the collapse of benevolence that would occur if state government were deprived of tax resources.  Just to begin with, Governor Dannel Malloy would not be able to supply dwindling tax resources to multimillion dollar Connecticut based companies in order to bribe the companies to remain in Connecticut and refrain from moving operations to low tax, low regulatory states. In a low tax, low regulatory environment, tax consumers would have to do more with less. Where would we be then?

Low tax Roll Your Own smoke shops fell to this remorseless logic. They were doomed from the beginning. It only took a slight nudge and a little canary-wiring from the FBI to topple them over the edge.   

Tammany McDonald

When bright-eyed reformists of the early 1900’s were making a stab at political reform, George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall gave an interview with news reporter William Riordan and, making what he thought was a necessary distinction between “honest graft” and the usual garden variety, spilled the beans, as they say in the now smokeless filled rooms where political friends still scratch each other’s backs.

“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, saloon‑keepers, 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.'  Just let me explain by examples. My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place.

“I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. 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."

And here is Mr. Plunkitt on the value of political friendships:

"I've told you how I got rich by honest graft. Now, let me tell you that most politicians who are accused of robbin' the city get rich the same way. They didn't steal a dollar from the city treasury. They just seen their opportunities and took them. That is why, when a reform administration comes in and spends a half million dollars in tryin' to find the public robberies they talked about in the campaign, they don't find them.

"The books are always all right. The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft. Now, let me tell you that's never goin' to hurt Tammany with the people. 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?”

Someone in Connecticut – likely NOT in the Malloy administration – should give Dave Altimari of the Hartford Courant this year’s William Riordan award for honesty in Tammany Hall reporting.

Here is Mr. Altimari’s opener for a story on the “honest grafters” in the Malloy administration:

“As Pullman & Comley attorney John Stafstrom walked into a room to pitch his law firm's proposal to win a lucrative contract with the Connecticut Airport Authority, it was unlikely he worried about receiving an unfriendly reception.

“Sitting across from his six-member team at the Jan. 31 interview was authority member Charles R. Gray, a longtime friend who attended Stafstrom's wedding in June 2010.

“Gray attended with his spouse, Andrew J. McDonald, who at the time was a partner at the Bridgeport law firm and is now Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's general counsel. McDonald, in his capacity as a justice of the peace, married Stafstrom and Dennis Murphy, who went on to become the deputy commissioner of labor in the Malloy administration.”

Soon after Mr. McDonald was safely ensconced as Mr. Malloy’s general council, the lawyers at his former law firm, Pullman & Comley, saw their opportunities and took’em.

In vain will other lawyers and political watchers scout out illegalities in an insider arrangement that speeds cash from the state coffers to Pullman & Comley, the loamy and fertile political nursery bed from which Mr. McDonald sprang: “The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft.”

The books will be in order.

A Blumenthal-Schiff Cage Match

A debate card featuring Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now running for the U.S. Senate seat Chris Dodd intends to vacate at the end of his term, and Peter Schiff, Connecticut’s economic Cassandra, would be far more interesting than the debate concluded March 1 between Blumenthal and incrementalist averse Merrick Alpert.

Debates that include candidates on fire always are spectacles worth our time. Americans, certainly more often than the British, tend to confuse passion with authenticity, and there is little doubt that Alpert was, in his debate with Blumenthal, a man aflame. Perhaps fortunately for the attorney general, Blumenthal may not have to debate Alpert again.

When the Republican debate rolled around at the university a day later, media adepts who had been expecting rhetorical fisticuffs between senatorial hopefuls Linda McMahon and Rob Simmons, both of whom had been peppering each other with e-mails and press releases, were disappointed and deflated. They had been expecting Thermopylae and got instead, as one commentator put it, “a snoozer of a debate.”

It was generally agreed by commentators who had packed away their telltale preferences for the duration of the debates that Alpert won his and Schiff won his, both having been pronounced more authentic than their plasticine opponents. One commentator, an ardent progressive, confessed he found Schiff’s honesty refreshing, though he was anguished by his message.

Schiff is a man on fire. The calculating Blumenthal is very much like Sen. Joe Lieberman, sometimes called the Hamlet of the U.S. Senate. Hamlet was thought to be too thoughtful for his own good. But in the end, not an advocate of incrementalism, he turned out to be a decisive man of action and an accomplished murderer.

In the presence of Schiff, and perhaps some other Republicans, Blumenthal would not be able to get away with asserting, as he did in the Merrick debate, that the litigatory actions of his office “actually create jobs, because businesses actually welcome competition and a level playing field.”

To pick up on just one point, it is folly to think that businesses would appreciate the way Blumenthal has used fatally defective affidavits to secure from judges in ex parte proceedings the authority to seize the business assets of companies that find themselves on the wrong end of Blumenthal’s constitutionally disruptive litigation. While Blumenthal’s senatorial narrative is centered on the black dealings of large, greedy, socially semi-conscious and unscrupulous companies, such as lung damaging tobacco giants, a partial listing of corporations in which the plaintiff has had an AG appearance from January 07 to the present  contains upwards of 900 entrees.

In the Merrick debate, Blumenthal intended to speak over the head of his opponent to an audience that would vote for him the general election. His narrative was carefully crafted to this purpose.

Merrick threw a wrench into the narrative by insisting that Blumenthal’s backing of President Barack Obama’s venture in Afghanistan was a) too expensive at a time when federal dollars might better be devoted to knotty domestic problems, and b) Bush-like in its wrong-headedness.

Blumenthal was flustered by Alpert's charge that he was a prevaricator at a time when the entire country was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, an accusation that easily could be launched at Blumenthal from the Republican side by Schiff, whose solutions to the malingering recession are, Schiff insists, painful but effective and necessary.

Like most regulators and redistributists, Blumenthal has a tough time wrapping his brain around the notion that an increase in distribution levels cannot occur in when the revenue to be distributed is on the downslide, usually the case in recessions and mini-depressions. When there is no soup in the soup kitchen, it is idle to speak of distributing soup to the poor – or to anyone else. Neither does Blumenthal understand that a complex ever changing regulatory apparatus introduces uncertainty into business activity that results in depressed markets, or he would not have insisted, laughably, that his suits have the effect of increasing business in the state.

This is the worst kind of hokum, far more dangerous in its effects than the peculations of politicians like Tammany Hall chief George Washington Plunkett or, coming closer to the heart of the 21st century, his modern equivalent, U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel, who appears to have received a temporary indulgence from madam Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.

A cage match between Schiff and Blumenthal might even wake up the commentators in Connecticut’s media who think wrestling matches are real rather than highly scripted staged events.