A good question was posed by bud on this last post. He asked for names. Well, at first I was at a loss, because if you want to know whom to blame for the "Competitive Grants" boondoggle, you pretty much need to blame the whole Legislature. They passed it. As for whose idea it was to start with, I still don’t know.
However, I can tell you which lawmakers were sponsors for each of these individual grants. When I set out to do this, I thought it would be hard. I thought I’d have to sift through individual grant applications to find the sponsors. I was prepared to do that.
But when I asked Michael Sponhour over at the Budget and Control Board how I might track down the info, he wrote back 11 minutes later to say,
Brad,Here is an excel spreadsheet with all competitive grant
applications and awards with sponsors.Let me know if you need anything else.Mike
So that wasn’t so hard. Enjoy perusing.
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Ask former reporter for The State, Michael Sponhour, why the Budget & Control Board does not respond to FOIA requests from mere taxpayers?
For 20 years, I have been going there to ask for detailed budgets, and they give me spreadsheets, which are not detailed at all. Their idea of detail is a line item for an agency, or $100,000,000 for a pile of road construction projects.
Congratulations to Representative Dan Cooper, King of the Competitive Grants! (Harrell was only 2nd?)
Cooper, Rep. Dan 1,439,143
Harrell, Rep.Bobby 778,080
Mitchell, Rep. Harold 656,323
Neal, Rep. Joe 600,000
Hayes, Rep. Jackie 485,000
Limehouse, Rep. Chip 465,000
Lucas, Rep. James H. 341,784
Littlejohn, Rep. Lanny 275,000
Martin, Rep. Becky 248,000
McConnell, Sen. Glenn 239,000
Jefferson, Rep. Joe 200,000
Howard, Rep. Leon 200,000
Hosey, Rep. Lonnie 200,000
Leventis, Sen. Phil 175,000
Moore, Sen. Tommy 169,900
Peeler, Sen. Harvey 166,994
Rhoad, Rep. Thomas 160,000
Malloy, Sen. Gerald 159,000
Hawkins, Sen. John 142,863
Pinckney, Sen. Clementa 124,500
McGill, Rep. Yancey 115,000
Scott, Rep. John 100,000
Richardson, Sen. Scott 100,000
Land, Sen.John 100,000
Trying to be objective, most of the grant recipients seem to be worthwhile projects, and not excessive.
I think it’s the process that needs to be fixed– even if it is just more open. I have no problem with a mechanism to fund modest requests for innovative programs or cultural events.
Cooper is listed first, but looking at it closely, he probably signed on behalf of others as a member of the Budget and Control Board.
I think this is good reporting and blogging.
I am so tired of hearing the excuse for corruption, “We just need to tweak the process.”
Baloney!
These handouts were garbage, to enrich individuals, with little or no public benefit.
Apparently each succeeding generation becomes more tolerant of corruption and graft, accepting the last generation’s criminal government as today’s norm.
Warren Bolton’s article on the PayDay Loan sharks was real dynamite. Turns out that many politicians have taken the shark money (but not Sanford of course) and the head of the Dem party in SC (Erwin) is the president of the primary marketing company for the payday corporations. And Joe Biden took money from them to come to SC and speak at an NAACP meeting. You can see the predators (sharks) feeding their own victims (poor blacks) before the kill. Warren continues to impress me. Excellent reporting.
Dave, can you provide a link to info on Erwin accepting this money?
If true, that’s a major conflict of interest IMO and terribly dissappointing.
NEVER MIND Dave, if I’d spend a minute thinking… Bolton’s article spells this out.
No wonder politicians are viewed so poorly. Erwin ranks down there with the worst of them, in my book and I’m a democrat.
Dave, Sanford didn’t take the shark money?
Others who have received contributions include Gov. Mark Sanford…These lenders aren’t simply trying to help the best candidates win. They’re fighting to keep their gravy train rolling in South Carolina, where they can still rip borrowers off with little regulation…Advance America is active — and connected — inside and outside the State House:…including candidate Mark Sanford…it provided flights for former House Speaker David Wilkins, now U.S. ambassador to Canada, and Gov. Sanford to Utah and Seattle, respectively.
These loan sharks are legally not making loans, thanks to loopholes constructed by your corrupt legislature.
The dirty fact that Warren Bolton and The State don’t want to touch is that they are owned and financed by the major banks and all those worshipped executives who hand out pittances to the art museums and a few charities.
Lee and Dave, I’m disappointed in your anti-capitalist sentiments above. These lenders are just capitalists fulfilling a need in the market.
To think that you’d advocate the gubmint interfere with a legit bidness might make one wonder about your belief in free markets.
Lee, I’m particular shocked at you joining the lynch mob mentality of the nanny-state folks. After all, the people who need these lenders obviously have defective character and probably are sinners. (Since their poorness ipso facto means that they are sinners or, at least, moral weaklings.)
Or illegal aliens, I expect. Aren’t they the cause of all of our problems, anyway?
There are two sides to this lending issue, the other being that some people want to borrow money, and have no intention of paying it back, and the other is that that there are a lot of people who borrow $500 for a week, and pay it back. It isn’t always that easy to get a loan from a bank, either, especially for just a few days.
Aaghh. What I meant to say was that both things are part of the “other side.” It isn’t all just people ripping off someone else.
Yes, the victims are not usually blameless. They let themselves get in position to be preyed up by a conspiracy of bankers, politicians and loan sharks.
You folks probably are too young to know how banks used to work, or you have limited experience because you are not business people.
—- short history of personal loans ———
Banks used to make personal loans. Then they figured out they could just issue credit cards and let screened borrowers issue and pay back revolving loans. Until the late 1970s, your credit card had a fixed rate of interest.
Then the bankers bribed Congress and the legislators to let them alter the terms any time unilaterally. The cardholder has no real contractural rights.
Then the commercial banks bribed Congress to change the tax valuation rules overnight and render most S&Ls insolvent. Banks like NationsBank and First Union bought the assets for pennies on the dollar, investors lost their life savings, and taxpayers ponied up the money to pay of small depositors.
With the S&Ls out of the mortgage market, the commercial banks finished replacing personal loans with home equity lines of credit.
Now the commercial banks are charge $35.00 for a bounced check, which only costs them $2.00 to process and collect.
They lend money to check cashing loan sharks at 100%, and the sharks lend the money to working people at 350%. When someone has an NSF, the bank sends their name immediately to their loan shark partner to generate a sales letter.
…. just a few items I have learned from consulting to banks over the years, directly and from the bankers and other consultants on the inside.
Add banking consultant to Lee’s long resume of accomplishments.
As with everything else Lee puts the blame for every failure on the government. As well as I can remember the S&L scandal was at least partially the result of de-regulation by the Reagan administration. This makes for an interesting research topic.
bud, you don’t remember anything about the S&L scandal, because you didn’t know anything to begin with. You just have a simplistic impression put their by sound bites from Big Media pundits, 85% of whom admit to voting Democrat all the time.
The Democrats, like John Spratt, John Glenn, and Dan Rostenkowski, and others caught in banking scandals, were the ringleaders in deliberately bringing about the S&L collapse. There were shoddy S&Ls, and crooked ones. Now they have been replaced by a handful of big, shoddy, crooked commercial banks.
What a coincidence! Another Bush participated in another raid on the public treasury.
WashPo
[Neil Bush married Sharon Smith in] 1980 and moved to Denver, where Neil got a $30,000 job negotiating mineral leases for Amoco. Denver was an oil-fueled boomtown, and soon the handsome son of the vice president was charming the swells at the soirees of Denver’s social set.
In 1982, Neil and two co-workers quit and formed an oil exploration company, JNB Exploration. His partners were geologists; Neil was in charge of raising money.
“Neil knew people because of his name,” one partner, Evans Nash, said later.
[Traded on his Daddy’s name. Just like another failed Bush “bidnessman.”]
Among the people Neil knew were two high-powered Denver real estate barons — Bill Walters and Ken Good. Walters was a flamboyant Rolex-wearing, Rolls-driving mogul known as “the Donald Trump of Denver.” Good owned the largest home in Colorado, a $10 million mansion with a special plumbing system that pumped Scotch, gin and vodka throughout the house.
After listening to Bush’s sales pitch, Walters invested $150,000 and set up a $1.75 million line of credit for JNB at a bank he owned. Good invested $10,000 and pledged loans worth $1.5 million. Good also lent Bush $100,000 to gamble in the commodities market and said Neil didn’t have to pay it back unless he made money.
[And, the Rethugs hippocritically complain about Hillary’s futures.]
“It was,” Bush later admitted, “an incredibly sweet deal.”
He set up an office, decorated it with a bust of his father and paid himself $66,000 a year — double his Amoco salary. But JNB floundered. In five years, the company drilled 26 wells in four states, but it never found a drop of exploitable oil. JNB would have gone bankrupt if not for the money from Walters and Good.
[Just like li’l bro, Dubya, in Arubusto. But the money guys didn’t lose out due to Neil recognizing the opportunity to help his cronies raid an S&L presented by St. Ronnie’s “deregulation.”]
But Bush was able to help the men who helped him. In 1985 he joined the board of Silverado Savings and Loan, which had already lent millions to Walters and Good. Over the next three years, Silverado lent an additional $106 million to Walters and $35 million to Good, although the two men’s real estate empires were collapsing.
Good used some of that money to buy JNB, although it was still losing money. He raised Bush’s salary to $120,000 and awarded him a bonus of $22,000. He also hired Bush as a director of one of his companies, at a salary of $100,000.
Neither Good nor Walters ever repaid a nickel of their Silverado loans, and in 1988 Silverado went belly up, leaving U.S. taxpayers holding the bag for $1.3 billion in debts.
Picking through the wreckage, regulators from the federal Office of Thrift Supervision concluded in 1991 that Bush’s deals with Good and Walters while serving on Silverado’s board constituted “multiple conflicts of interest.” Bush became a public symbol of the $500 billion savings and loan scandal. Protesters picketed his home and pasted mock wanted posters around Washington: “Jail Neil Bush.”
Bush proclaimed his innocence, declaring at a news conference that “self-serving regulators” were persecuting him because he was the president’s son. But when he appeared before the House Banking Committee in 1990, he admitted that some of his deals looked “a little fishy.”
Ultimately, Bush paid $50,000 as his part of a federal lawsuit against Silverado and was reprimanded by the OTS. Good and Walters ended up declaring bankruptcy, and JNB, which had never found oil or made money, quietly perished.
Not as big a haul as John Glenn and some of the Democrats made out of the S&L debacle, which they created by changing the laws regarding valuation of collateral.