By Chris Powell
How righteous Connecticut Attorney General William Tong sounds as he rails against M&T Bank for its defective integration of accounts from People’s United Bank, which M&T acquired in April. Tong also fears that M&T isn’t preserving as many jobs from People’s United as planned.
These problems shouldn’t be so surprising. Both banks are big enterprises, so their combination should have raised antitrust law concerns in the attorney general’s office as well as with federal and state banking regulators. Indeed, quite apart from those regulators the attorney general well might have prevented the merger on his own just by challenging it with an antitrust lawsuit in state court.
But antitrust law enforcement and banking regulation have not been taken seriously lately by either the federal government or state government. Big banks almost always get what they want.
Even now M&T’s dealing with the attorney general over his belated concerns won’t be hurt by the bank’s recent hiring, as a senior vice president, of Max Reiss, Governor Lamont’s former communications director. Banks know how to get what they want.
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Kevin Ollie didn’t coach the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team long enough to get rich on the job, but now he has gotten rich from the university’s incompetent firing of him four years ago.
On top of the $11.2 million UConn paid Ollie this year to make good on what remained of his contract when he was fired, the university now will pay him another $3.9 million for lawyer fees and damage to his reputation, making more than $15 million altogether. Ollie’s lawyer seems to be more competent than all the lawyers who advised and represented the university on the issue.
The university’s incompetence here was in at least three parts: giving Ollie a multiple-year contract; allowing him to join the professors union, which increased his protection against dismissal; and then treating Ollie more severely for violations of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules than the university treated his predecessor, Jim Calhoun.
But UConn long has cared far more about appearances than about costs, and why should UConn care about its costs when Governor Lamont and the General Assembly don’t? At UConn $15 million is chump change, and it will remain chump change until the governor and legislature hold the university accountable for anything.
There has been and will be no investigation of the Ollie disaster, and UConn may be lucky that the costly disaster of its football team has just flared up again to distract from the costly disaster with Ollie.
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THE PARTY’S OVER: Four years ago the Republican candidate for governor, Bob Stefanowski, who is also this year’s Republican candidate, got more than 25,000 votes on the ballot line of Connecticut’s Independent Party. Stefanowski won’t be getting them this year, since, after some cheating and double voting at its convention, the party decided by one vote to nominate its own candidate rather than cross-endorse Stefanowski again.
This may not be as big a blow to Stefanowski as it is being construed as he challenges Governor Lamont, the Democratic nominee. For Stefanowski almost certainly brought more votes to the Independent Party line four years ago than the Independent Party line brought to Stefanowski. His votes on the Independent line came from people who wanted regime change but didn’t want to risk getting tainted as partisans.
Indeed, the platform articulated by the Independent Party’s candidate for governor, Rob Hotaling, sounds Republican, as it stresses reducing Connecticut’s cost of living and taxes. So why not cross-endorse the Republican candidate again? After all, the Independent nominee isn’t going to win but will split the vote aligned with the party’s nominal objectives. Under the system of ranked-choice voting lately being discussed in Connecticut, most of the Independent candidate’s second-choice votes would go to the Republican nominee.
This makes the Independent Party’s separate candidacy for governor a vanity project. Connecticut’s other two minor parties, the Working Families Party and the Griebel-Frank Party, are serious, cross-endorsing the governor.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 