Connecticut’s Anti-Business Advocate

March 6, 2008

It’s only March, but it would be safe to hand out the award for 2008’s “Most Egregious Hypocrisy by a Connecticut Pol” right now. The honor goes to Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who’s peeved over AT&T’s recent decision to lay off over 200 call-center employees in Meriden, Hartford, and New Haven.

As usual, Blumenthal’s offered heated windbaggery over a private enterprise daring to make decisions without consulting him first. The AG’s carefully crafted image as a “working man’s hero” is more than a little ironic, since it’s likely that no pol has done more to harm the Nutmeg State’s economy than Richard Blumenthal.

Savvy AT&T customers, shareholders, and workers are well aware of the AG’s crimes against capitalism. In 2006, when the state Department of Public Utility Control (DPUC) decided that the company didn’t need a cable license for its new U-verse television service, Blumenthal filed suit in federal court to block the ruling. (It wasn’t the first time he sued a state agency that had the audacity to disagree with him.) Using the class-warfare skills he’s honed to perfection, Blumenthal accused AT&T of “redlining” -- i.e., selling its service to only affluent suburbs while ignoring urban and rural towns.

As one columnist put it, the DPUC “caved like a whipped puppy” to Blumenthal’s tactics, and reversed its decision. But last November, AT&T prevailed, when Superior Court Judge Robert F. McWeeny ruled that a pro-competition law adopted by Connecticut’s Democratic Legislature and Republican governor exempted the company from cable licensing.

Blumenthal’s legal thumping recalled the fiasco that was his $125 million suit against Ted Forstmann, a finance guru hired to grow the state-employee pension fund. When the investments Forstmann’s firm made in high-risk telecom companies failed, Blumenthal saw yet another opportunity to grab headlines. But in July 2004, jurors ruled that Forstmann didn’t owe Connecticut a dime, since state officials were fully aware of the risks associated with the tech sector.

Even when the attorney general “wins” a case, taxpayers lose. Case in point: the dispute over the merger of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Connecticut with the Indiana-based Anthem Insurance Companies, Inc. In 1999, Anthem agreed to create a $40 million “charitable” foundation, in exchange for Blumenthal dropping -- you guessed it -- his lawsuit against the company. Press accounts at the time claimed the new organization would “help the needy, uninsured and under-insured in Connecticut.”

By 2004, the Anthem Foundation of Connecticut had morphed into the “Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut,” the leading voice for socialized medicine in the Nutmeg State. On its website, the organization admits it “believes that health care is a fundamental right” and sees “its work as part of a larger movement for social and economic justice.” So far, the foundation has disbursed millions of dollars “for initiatives including community organizing on health care at the local and regional levels throughout Connecticut.”

The price we pay for Blumenthal’s ambition extends to energy policy. At a time when gasoline and electricity are sapping the purchasing power of Connecticut consumers, he’s pursuing litigation that would make energy even more expensive. Blumenthal’s office is squarely behind states’ activism on the “global climate change” hoax. He joined other state AGs in suing the federal government to force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the non-pollutant carbon dioxide. He’s also a key player in the attempt by California, Connecticut, and a dozen other states to seize the federal government’s power to regulate the tailpipe emissions of cars and trucks. (It’s worth noting that the size of Blumenthal’s “carbon footprint” is enormous, since the round-trip commute between Hartford and his home in Greenwich is 160 miles.) A “windfall profits tax” on electricity suppliers is another of his prescriptions that’s sure to generate unintended consequences.

Connecticut’s AG still receives fawning coverage from the state’s media, but his reign of legal and regulatory terror hasn’t gone unnoticed elsewhere. Last year the D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute named Blumenthal the nation’s worst attorney general. He scored an “F” in all four categories of AG chicanery: use of office to “promote personal gain or enrich cronies or relatives”; advocacy of judicial rewriting of statutes; filing “lawsuits that usurp regulatory powers granted to the federal government or other state entities”; and attempts to prey “on out-of-state businesses that have not violated state law and have no remedy at the polls.”

Hypocrisy is never in short supply in the world of politics. But for duplicitous posturing as a friend of workers, consumers, and taxpayers, it’s hard to beat Connecticut’s attorney general.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and public-policy researcher. He can be reached at muskacolumn@cox.net.

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