Occhiogrosso, Moving On Up, Or Down?

 

Roy Occhiogrosso, the Vice President for Global Strategy who has shuttled back and forth between Governor Dannel Malloy’s administration and his duties at Global Strategy, has now become, according to a short piece in CTMirror, “a consultant to the Connecticut Democratic Party.” Apparently, no one in Connecticut’s media knows whether Mr. Occhiogrosso’s new Position Of Influence (POI) within the Democratic Party’s lucrative off shore political operation is a lateral or a vertical move.

Is this a political promotion, or is Mr. Occhiogrosso simply biding his time until his former boss, Mr. Malloy, decides to enter the lists for governor? Mr. Malloy has said he would make an announcement concerning his re-election as governor sometime in the merry month of May, months after Republican gubernatorial contenders have bloodied themselves in pre-general election cat fights.

How much is Mr. Occhiogrosso and/or Global Strategy getting paid for the new consultancy? And, more importantly, what specific service has Mr. Occhiogrosso, once called Mr. Malloy’s “uber-flack” by CTMirror, performed for Connecticut’s Democratic Party? Even more importantly, has Mr. Occhiogrosso declared on his tax forms all emoluments he may have received from the party for which he may or may not have performed a service?

The Feds, as Mr. Occhiogrosso must know, are back in Connecticut. They are, according to a blog written by Kevin Rennie for the Hartford Courant, gathering data in a Grand Jury that could be used by prosecutors to cut short former Governor John Rowland’s career as a radio talk show host.

A conviction may turn on the question: Did Mr. Rowland in fact perform a service for Brian Foley, the owner of a number of nursing homes, for which Mr. Foley paid Mr. Rowland $30,000? The operative prosecutorial assumption is that Mr. Rowland had received a payment from Mr. Foley in exchange for a political favor extended to Mr. Foley’s wife, Lisa Wilson Foley, who had been running as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut’s 5^th District. Neither Mrs. Foley nor Mr. Rowland were politicians at the time of the possible political pay-off.

Nor is it certain that there was a political pay-off.  It has been said that Mr. Rowland had been critical of former State Senator Andrew Roraback on his program at a time when Lisa-Wilson Foley and other Republican contestants were involved in a struggle to obtain the Republican Party nomination for the 5^th District U.S. Senate seat. The nomination fell to Mr. Roraback, who thereafter lost the contest in a general election to Democratic Party nominee Elizabeth Esty. Ms. Esty prevailed over union favored Democratic candidate Chris Donovan following a federal investigation into campaign financing irregularities that had forced Mr. Donovan to vacate the field. After his loss to Ms. Esty, Mr. Roraback was appointed by Mr. Malloy to Connecticut’s Superior Court.

It cannot be said that Mr. Rowland’s criticism of Mr. Roraback resulted in any political harm to Mr. Roraback, who emerged as the nominee of his party.  Neither did Ms. Foley receive an effective political benefit from radio talk show host Rowland, and most grown-ups understand that conservative radio talk show hosts tend to prefer the less leftward leaning candidate in any Republican Party contest.

Some people regard Mr. Rowland as providing balance to Connecticut’s left of center media hegemon, which tends to support the most leftward leaning candidate in primaries and general elections. The Hartford Courant, for instance, supported Ms. Esty over Mr. Roraback in the general election, even though Mr. Roraback easily passed the paper’s several litmus tests: The Republican candidate was a social liberal and a fiscal conservative; he had far more practical experience in government than Ms. Esty, and he was just the sort of moderate Republican, occasionally favored by the Courant, who might have provided a necessary balance in Connecticut’s all progressive Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation.

As a practical matter, the Courant’s endorsement of Esty was more fatal to Mr. Roraback than was Mr. Rowland’s “attack” on Mr. Roraback before the Republican nominating convention had chosen him as its designated candidate for the 5^th District.

None of these quibbles would prevent a Grand Jury – essentially a prosecutorial Star Chamber operation – from returning an indictment against Mr. Rowland. A Grand Jury properly primed by an aggressive prosecutor is fully capable of indicting a watermelon on a charge of jaywalking. But the case against Mr. Rowland appears weak, if only because neither he nor Ms. Foley were active politicians in a position to dispense political favors and, bearing in mind Mr. Rowland’s public persona as a “conservative” talk show host, his negative endorsement of Mr. Roraback is not in the least surprising. How is a talk show “attack” on Mr. Roraback substantially different than an editorial attack on a candidate for office whose opponent is favored by the editorial board of a newspaper?

The notion that a radio talk show host would embrace a candidate for office, accept money from the husband of the candidate for a service that either was or was not performed, and then attack the favored candidate’s opponent is a shabby proposition. Some journalists would rightly and indignantly reject such an arrangement; so would honorable politicians. But jail time for a radio talk show host who pumps up an ideologically like-minded political wannabe – maybe not.

The failure to pay taxes for services rendered, on the other hand, is a whole different kettle of fish. Mr. Rowland’s tax payments had better be in order. And while prosecutors are on the hunt in Connecticut, Mr. Occhiogrosso’s tax representations also had better be able to pass the Mackerel in moonlight sniff test.

One can never be too careful.

Rowland On A River

As the John Rowland-Brian Foley FBI investigation unfolds, it will be important to bear in mind that neither Mr. Rowland nor Lisa Wilson Foley, Brian Foley’s wife, is an active politician.

According to a report in the Register Citizen,“A federal grand jury is investigating Rowland’s connections to the 5th District Congress campaign of Lisa Wilson-Foley. Rowland worked as an “unpaid volunteer” consultant to the campaign while at the same time being paid $30,000 by Apple Rehab, a company owned by Wilson-Foley’s husband.”

Mrs. Foley is running for the U.S. Congress and has not previously held office. Mr. Rowland is a radio talk show host for (WTIC) and an ex-felon who resigned his position as governor of the state. After having pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to steal honest service, Mr. Rowland spent a year in prison and four months under house arrest. Following his release, Mr. Rowland was hired by the Waterbury Chamber of Commerce to drum up business for the city, after which he became a successful radio talk show host for WTIC-AM. Mr. Rowland lost his Waterbury position after a change of mayors.

The political disconnect means that the FBI investigation will not focus on bill-rigging, since neither of the principles mentioned by the media in connection with an FBI probe of Mr. Rowland’s business relationship with Mrs. Foley’s husband could possibly have shaped legislation. Though FBI appearances may be exceedingly misleading at the opening of an investigation, it appears that the FBI probe of Speaker of the House Chis Donovan’s office does indeed center on possible bill-rigging. Unlike Mr. Donovan, Mr. Rowland’s influence over legislation is indirect, leveraged through his radio program, the same sort of influence exerted by political columnists, editors, reporters, television news readers and talking heads.

In some overheated brains, former Governor Rowland is the devil himself; but because Mr. Rowland is not an active politician, the corrupt influence he may exert over politics in his present position is no different in kind than that of a politically influential journalist. Journalism is full of worldly scribblers who have produced copy favorable to specific politicians, afterwards moving on to work for their darlings, in the course of which they are handsomely renumerated for their efforts. Moving from the world of journalism into politics, one leaves oneself open to the charge that the prospect of employment may have affected the journalistic product.

The Berlin Wall separating politics and journalism has in it a door that opens both ways. Some former journalists have moved into politics; some politicians have traveled in the opposite direction; both have occasionally set up shop as consultants. Just as war is diplomacy by other means, so consultancy is politics by other means.

Mr. Rowland’s route -- from politics to jail to journalism –is highly unorthodox, though not unprecedented. Forced to leave office after he pummeled a gentleman he had accused of stealing the affections of his wife, former Mayor of Providence Rhode Island Buddy Cianci found a soft berth in radio broadcasting, after which he ran for governor again and won. Providence bloomed under Mr. Cianci’s hand. Ten years later he was in jail, convicted on a single charge of racketeering conspiracy. Trial Judge Ronald R. Lagueux said of Mr. Cianci, “In this mayor's two administrations, there has been more corruption in the City of Providence than in the history of this state." Upon his release from prison, Mr. Cianci once again resumed radio broadcasting.

While comparisons have been made between Mr. Rowland and Democratic Party nominee for the 23rd State Senate District Ernie Newton, both of whom served time in prison, it is important to note crucial differences.

In Connecticut, where corruption should matter more than on the national stage – because this is where we all live — Republicans can no longer appreciably shape legislative bills and budgets or distribute political patronage. Since Republicans have lost the gubernatorial slot, Connecticut has become, for all practical purposes, a one party state. And this means that the kind of corruption one associates with pol;itically active office holders lies, except in the municipalities, almost wholly in the hands of Democrats.

At present, Mr. Newton is the Democratic Party candidate for the state Senate. Objections to his candidacy on the part of Democratic leaders in the General Assembly and the governor’s office have been muted to the point of indifference. Mr. Rowland is a talk show host whose ambitions for political office almost certainly would be rebuffed by his fellow Republicans.

Some friendly Republican would do Mr. Rowland a great service were he to tap the former governor the shoulder and whisper in his ear that large amounts of money honestly arrived at cannot be had in two professions – journalism or politics. There ain’t any gold in those mines.

Death Penalty Aftershocks

The repeal of the death penalty has produced some aftershocks. Of course, the real aftershocks will arrive after the next heinous murder, though it should be said that the multiple murders of Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky have set a high bar.

These two worthies beat a husband with a baseball bat, tied him in the cellar of his house, forced his wife to draw out thousands of dollars from a bank, raped her, raped one of the daughters, tied both daughters to their beds, set fire to both, sprinkled the house with gasoline and murdered all inside but Dr. William Petit, who managed to escape and afterward demand the death penalty for Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky, readily granted to him by two separate juries. In Connecticut, death penalty cases require both a jury trial and a death penalty hearing.

Somewhat like Ishmael of Moby Dick fame, Mr. Petit was a lone survivor, a rather chatty one, determined to seek justice for his wrecked Pequod. Anti-death penalty proponents found it difficult to empathize with Dr. Pettis’ thirst for justice, but they could not do other than to sympathize with his plight.

State Senator Edith Prague, long an opponent of the death penalty, sympathized enough to change her consistent vote against the death penalty, frustrating an earlier attempt to abolish it. Mrs. Prague emerged from a private conversation with Mr. Petit and pronounced the following doom upon Joshua Komisarjevsky, one of the two murderers, rapists and arsonists: He should be hung "by his penis from a tree out in the middle of Main Street.'' After the trials and sentences were imposed, the inertia of Mrs. Prague’s office as a reliable vote for abolition gave her second thoughts, and she voted in favor of a morally indefensible bill that abolished the death penalty prospectively, retaining it for the 11 prisoners awaiting death on death row.

The prospective abolition of the death penalty provided a political trap door for politicians who wanted – for all the wrong reasons – to abolish the death penalty without opening themselves to charges they were indifferent to Mr. Petit’s unfortunate ordeal. The juridical problem of executing in the future 11 men in the absence of a law authorizing execution was of little concern to the cowards in the legislature, many of them lawyers, who voted in favor of a partial, self-lapsing abolition that would cost them fewer lost votes.

Theoretically, it is possible to extend to murderers who commit heinous crimes a balm of mercy, sequestering them in prison for life without possibility of parole, a stiff punishment said by some to be worse than execution, but there are, after all, limits to mercy. It proved politically difficult for opponents of the death penalty to abolish capital punishment for the 11 men who actually, not theoretically, had committed heinous murders. The entire so called “debate” on abolition of the death penalty in the General Assembly was pushed forward by theoretical bullies. Theoretically, it is possible for an innocent man to be found guilty of felony murder – but this has not happened in Connecticut in the past half century, and no one in the General Assembly would vouch for the innocence of the two murderers tried, found guilty and executed within that time period. So with most of the other arguments put forward in the General Assembly favoring abolition, most of themaddressed in Connecticut Commentary.

The argumentative structure for abolition was little more than an elaborate theoretical Potemkin Village. Theoretically, all the houses and factories look like houses and factories; but no one can live or work in the structures because they are mere facades, theoretical constructs that allow legislators to abolish capital punishment and then execute men in the absence of a law prescribing death as a punishment for their crimes. In the real non-theoretical world, such actions of a lawless state would be called murder. In the real world, the abolitionists began by decrying just sentences as “state murder” and have ended by sanctioning state murder.

The theoretical has become the real, and the real has become the theoretical. This is what happens when professors and lawyers rather than shoemakers and chimney sweepers become legislators. It is why Bill Buckley used to say that he would rather be governed by the first hundred people picked at random from the phone book than the faculty of Harvard law school.

Republican endorsed candidate for the U.S. House seat in the 5th District Andrew Roraback wandered into this mare’s nest when he reversed his position on abolition and, surprising some, Mr. Petit among them, voted against the abolition bill. However, not all flips in politics are flops among the cognescenti. Wasn’t Mr. Roraback giving Dr. Petit exactly what he wanted, asked one liberal columnist?

No, thought Dr. Petit, roaring back at Roraback, “When we met with Sen. Roraback, we respected his initial position to oppose the Death Penalty. His comments Wednesday, in our minds, cast doubt on whether Sen. Roraback has any core convictions on important issues.”

Mr. Roraback voted against the bill, he said, not because he wanted to flip on an issue that was unpopular with Republicans delegates poised to vote for or against him in the nominating convention, but rather because the bill was a transparent fraud.

On a third vote by delegates at the Republican Party nominating convention, Mr. Roraback was chosen as the nominee for the 5^thDistrict Congressional by a very slender margin over his opponent Lisa Wilson-Foley, who had brushed up against the Democrat’s favorite tar baby, former Governor-And-Felon John Rowland.

Unlike former State-Senator-And-Felon-Ernie-Newton, who spent three years in the clinker for accepting bribes and is now running for his old seat in Bridgeport, Mr. Rowland, a conservative radio commentator, has yet to offer himself as Republican Party candidate for office. None of the tar from the Newton baby has rubbed off on Democratic politicians in the state, and the silence issuing from the moral epigones now roasting Mr. Rowland is deafening.

Huey Donovan

"We can tax the millionaires in Washington and we can make Connecticut a better place for working families” – 5th District Democratic U.S. House candidate Chris Donovan

"Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax the guy behind the tree"—Russell Long

Even the most progressive politician of his day, Russell’s father Huey Long, knew the scheme wouldn’t work; but it was a winner as a populist campaign pitch. Within the Democratic Party of his day, Russell was acknowledged as an authority on tax law. As such, he became an ardent advocate of tax breaks for business. “I have become convinced,” said Russell, most certainly not a chip off his father’s progressive block, “you're going to have to have capital if you're going to have capitalism."

One suspects that progressive leader of the state House of Representatives Chris Donovan knows this. However, the deathless scheme, endemic in the Democratic Party, to convince the tax paying public that someone may be found – perhaps hiding behind a tree in Washington – to pay debts incurred by reckless politicians marches on and on and on.

Even Governor Dannel Malloy, who styles himself a progressive, focused in his first budget on broadening the tax base. A revenue stream that depends chiefly on the ups and downs of Wall Street fed millionaires, a great number of whom in Connecticut are hedge fund managers, is doomed to fail. There are, in Connecticut and the nation, too few millionaires chasing too many debts.

Mr. Donovan is one of three Democrats vying for the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives soon to be left vacant by U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, who has set his sights on U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat. Former state representative Elizabeth Esty, whose husband Daniel was appointed Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) by Mr. Malloy last and Daniel Roberti are also announced candidates. On the Republican side of the barricades, Justin Bernier, a member of former Governor Jodi Rell's cabinet who ran for the seat in 2010, Mike Clark, chairman of the Farmington Town Council and a former FBI agent, businesswoman Lisa Wilson-Foley, businessman Mark Greenberg, who also ran in 2010, and state senator Andrew Roraback are campaigning for the seat.

Most Republicans running for office who have some personal experience with business are familiar with the principle underlying business flight, which may be stated as follows: Whatever you tax tends to disappear. If you tax millionaire hedge fund operators who live in Fairfield’s Gold Coast, both hedge fund businesses and its employees will leech out of the state in search of more favorable profit margins elsewhere. Mr. Malloy has been known to worry in public that Connecticut’s neighboring states would benefit from exorbitant taxes on hedge fund millionaires, however popular and politically beneficial the prospect of taxing millionaires might be to progressive politicians. Like water, businesses flow from high cost to low coast states, and taxes are one of the controllable components of the cost of doing business.

Mr. Donovan favors taxing millionaires to pay for a budget that has increased threefold since the last Democratic governor in Connecticut, William O’Neil, held office. And it is quite simply an exercise in futility to point out to him that the state is not suffering from a revenue problem. The threefold increase in state spending within a little more than two decades is undeniable proof that the state is suffering from a spending problem the present Speaker of the State House of Representative has no interest in addressing.

The same principle of disappearing opportunities applies to politically inspired increases in the minimum wage, a populist measure supported by Mr. Donovan, whose ambition it is to propel Connecticut into first place among states that impose the highest minimum wage. Beyond a certain level, the minimum wage forces companies that cannot afford it to cut back on employment or go out of business. Costly boosts in the minimum wage affects only those employers whose profit margins are slight. Capital rich mega-companies will be able to absorb Mr. Donovan’s impositions, but these are not companies that hire workers who have in the past been paid the kind of wages Mr. Donovan hopes to boost through his minimum wage legislation.

People with little or no working history are those most likely to be adversely impacted by Mr. Donovan’s bill. Low income workers and teenagers in blighted urban areas who hope to place their feet on the bottom rung of the ladder of success will find that the rungs have been hacked off by legislators in a Democratic dominated General Assembly who for reasons of political expedience had yielded to Mr. Donovan’s anti-business ideology.

A business that might hire a child of the city making his way valiantly and honorably through circumstances Mr. Donovan little understands needs capital to pay his workers’ wages. Mr. Donovan has yet to be convinced that you cannot have capitalism without capital. If he succeeds in making his way to the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, home of the magic money tree, it is possible he may never learn what children of the city already know: When the profit margins of businessmen who are likely to hire them is reduced, the prospect of their being hired is proportionally reduced.