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Pay-to-play politics all relative
(by Dave Lange - September 07, 2012)
Pay-to-play politics all relative
The world is now safe from former Cuyahoga County Commissioner and county Democratic Party Chairman Jimmy Dimora, who has been sentenced to 28 years in prison as the key figure in a mediagenic corruption scandal.
That probably amounts to a life sentence for the unhealthy 57-year-old who, according to testimony in U.S. District Court in Akron, ran wild with prostitutes, aces in the hole and a belly full of lavish dinners provided by contractors seeking county business. Mr. Dimora was accused of taking more than 100 bribes, having free or cheap work done on his home and even trying to fix court cases. But he couldn’t fix his own.
Dozens of contractors, politicians, accomplices and even a loyal driver have gone down in this scandal, which everyone knows is nothing unusual for the kind of politics that infects big cities run by Democrats.
Not so usual, however, is a 28-year prison sentence for criminal behavior that didn’t involve mass murder or mass millions.
We’ll never know how many millions of our tax dollars were spent to investigate and prosecute this case, but we can safely assume that Mr. Dimora didn’t collect too many millions worth of quickies, craps, tenderloins and home improvements.
His take was nothing compared to that of former Gates Mills resident Frank Gruttadauria, for example, who got a mere seven-year sentence for bilking clients of some $125 million, much of it when he was a broker for Lehman Brothers, Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s former employer.
But, hey, government bailouts helped many Wall Street crooks get big bonuses instead of prison terms.
Regardless of the many favors he received, Mr. Dimora’s assurances that contractors received no favors on county projects are every bit as believable as the insistence that the infamous Halliburton Co.’s no-bid contracts during the Iraq War had nothing to do with its former CEO, who then was Vice President Dick Cheney. It must have been pure patriotism that prompted Halliburton to charge the Pentagon $27.5 million to ship $82,000 worth of cooking and heating fuel to our troops.
No one is suggesting that state Rep. David Hall, R-Millersburg, is a betting man like Mr. Dimora, but we might wonder why his political fundraising suddenly tripled to $128,000 in the second half of 2011, when he wasn’t up for re-election. Well, most of it came from the oil and gas industry, which is investing millions to stonewall regulations on hydraulic fracturing. There aren’t any fracking wells in Mr. Hall’s Holmes County yet, but he happens to be chairman of the committee responsible for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which does a pretty meager job of regulating the industry.
The International Bottled Water Association is another organization that’s paying big bucks for political connections. One of its board members happens to be state Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon, who, along with former state Sen. Timothy Grendell, R-Chester, championed a recent bill that allows industry to suck 2.5 million gallons of water out of Lake Erie every day.
Somehow, Jimmy Dimora got this strange notion that government and private business have a pay-to-play relationship. Now, he’s paying with a life behind bars, but many others are still playing.
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