What do you have to look forward to in the new year, besides many, many Cohen columns?
Your gift from Connecticut will be Gov. M. Jodi Rell and Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, huffing and puffing about “ethics.”
When they both get hoarse, legislators also will assemble grandiose plans to goose up the ethics thing, to cross their hardened hearts and hope to die, if any bad stuff is left untouched by new and improved ethics codes and ethics agencies and ethics committees.
The results to date have been impressive. The old, boring ethics agency was replaced by a new, boring ethics agency, with an executive director so grandiosely awful that he was sent on his way in about 15 minutes, after a very ethical review of his performance.
State purchasing officials, terrified of Gov. Rell, confide privately that the new and improved ethics rules have been a logistical nightmare, with contract proposals brimming with incomprehensible, unenforceable reporting requirements that are chasing away many honest, small businesses — and costing taxpayers more through the lack of competition.
Even the most sophisticated state vendors giggle in private that the prohibitions and disclosure requirements are sufficiently weird and impossible to confirm so as to guarantee that every successful contractor is at best an unwitting perjurer.
In the end, what remains is the pretense that publicity-hungry politicians, befuddled ethics bureaucrats and cynical hangers-on at the government gravy train can design a system that can even define ethical behavior, yet alone enforce it.
For better or worse, much of the government enterprise, especially at the state and local level, is a coming together of friends and family and allies and pals-from-the-old-days. To pretend otherwise is to perpetuate the myth that what we all need is a constipated ethics code that pretends that everyone is a disinterested party driven by the urge to perform public service.
If, through some miracle, every gift, every favor, to the army of state employees, state political appointees, state regulators, vendors, consultants and lobbyists is identified and stamped out, what will be left is the appointment and employment game.
In Connecticut, former Lieutenant Governor and Democratic Party legislative leader Kevin Sullivan has wandered in recent years from being vice president in charge of government stuff for Trinity College, to the new CEO of the Children’s Museum of Connecticut.
For the most part, all of this friendly back scratching is legal, is “ethical” — as is the $6 million worth of slush fund, “funny-money” given to the Connecticut governor and the top two Democratic legislative leaders, to hand out as they see fit, in an ethical detached, merit-based process, devoid of political partisanship.
While Connecticut focuses on shutting down important ethics’ loopholes, such as the giving away of University of Connecticut football tickets to important pals of the university — the horror! — Congress managed to find more than $10 million in extraordinarily worthy “earmark” projects to fund in U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy’s Connecticut district, because he is a freshman and needs the boost. It is perfectly legal — and very, very ethical.
The “ethics” enforcement conspiracy cooked up by the politicians is designed to numb taxpayers to the real nonsense.
Exhibit A has been the revelation that state Sen. Thomas Gaffey of Meriden was chief cheerleader for a billion-dollar legislative boondoggle for the state university system, while he was in a “relationship” with the government relations staffer for the universities.
The mock shock was focused on the sex-stuff, rather than on the willingness of the General Assembly to approve an almost-no-strings-attached billion dollars in taxpayer debt. That was irresponsible. But it was ethical.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
