I was “invited” by the US Attorney, Matt Whittaker, and his office to testify for the prosecution in the CIETC trial of multiple defendants. The testimony was directed at three defendants, but not the CIETC CEO Romona Cunningham. Her trial would be separate, if she ever was to have one.
Something occurred to me during my testimony for the US Attorney’s office and their prosecution of the CIETC 4 minus 1. It was; how do people get involved in something like this? Obviously, no one sets out to be publically humiliated on their way to prison. No one ever sets out to spend time in prison, in the first place. Not exactly a resume’ builder, putting it kindly.
But, with our impeccable 20-20 hindsight, it sure looks like, where CIETC is concerned, there were enough really idiotic decisions made that one could almost make the case that somebody wanted some time behind bars. If that was someone’s objective, it appears that was one tight game plan. It’s going to work.
But, as we all know, that wasn’t anyone’s game plan. It’s just the debris from one bad decision after another. Bad decision. That term hardly captures it. A bad decision is taking I80 west when you meant to go east but were daydreaming. That’s a bad decision. It’s grabbing the pepper shaker and using it when you meant to grab the salt. Those are bad choices.
It always makes me grimace, putting it kindly again, when some feel-good social worker, in a TV interview, says that mom and sleaze ball dad/boyfriend made some “bad choices” on the way to murdering their defenseless 2 year old kid with a hammer or something just as heinous. That’s not a bad choice, that’s having an IQ of about 61, no appreciable education, no parental support and the presence of pure evil. That’s a lot more than a bad choice. Those terms seek to minimize one’s behavior. Sadly, they also have the effect of minimizing the punishment and any tiny chance of rehabilitation that the wrong doer may eventually somehow get.
So it goes with CIETC. At some point in the journey, they went from “bad choices” to outright malevolent behavior. But, how, I wondered, did they get there in the first place?
I know government and constituents pretty well by now. If the Executive Director of CIETC, Ms. Cunningham, had just stayed with her $187,000 salary, she could’ve gotten away with it forever. People may have scoffed at it and grumbled about an under-educated hayseed making more than the Governor. They may have speculated about “who’s she sleeping with?” but, that’s about it. We’d have thought it sucked, but we’d sigh and say, well, that’s our stupid government for you. Then, we’d have gone on to wonder about this year’s Hawkeye football team or something like that. That party would’ve never ended. But, it wasn’t enough, I guess.
Ramona, we now know, had some apparently unique talents and used them to, ultimately, over-reach. It wasn’t enough to be making more than the managing partner of a huge downtown Des Moines law firm. It wasn’t enough to be making more than almost every college president in the state. Somewhere in there, she had to have more. Why? Somewhere along the line, the list of people with sticky fingers began to grow. Why?
Did somebody say, “I know what you’re doing and I want mine?” Evidently, we can now say with some certainty that no one said, “I know what you’re doing and you need to stop because it’s wrong.” No, they never said that. They said: we want ours, too.
People say, ah, everyone does it…we shouldn’t be surprised. Let me tell you something. You should be surprised. Real surprised. Because no one does this. I serve on tons of non-profit boards and commissions and this kind of thing just does not go on. Period. If one wants to be hip and cynical, they can say it does, I suppose. But, the truth is, it doesn’t. This CIETC thing is a class one five alarm scandal. It would be anywhere.
This scandal would be page one in any metropolitan area in North America. There is no doubt about that. This isn’t some guy charging off his chap stick on the city expense report while he’s out of town. That’s the kind of “scandal” we’re used to seeing around here. No, this one is the big leagues. This one is the 1927 Yankees of political scandals.
It has seven figure misappropriation of funds, personal payoffs, embezzlement, sex, more sex, multiple partners, girls gone wild and all masterminded by people with barely more than a high school education. Makes you grateful they weren’t Harvard MBAs doesn’t it? Of course, if they were, they’d be Dennis Kowslowski and Jeff Skilling…and they’re spending time behind bars, too. So, who says you can’t play with the big boys with just a high school GED?
Somewhere along the line, I have been thinking, somebody had to make the conscious decision that we, the co-conspirators, aren’t satisfied with huge salaries; we want to inflate them with huge bonuses, too. Not only that, we want to spread those bonuses around a little, too. At some point somebody had to be thinking, well, we’ve gotten away with this much; it looks like we can get away with a lot more.
Oops.
But why? Too many trips to Prairie Meadows? Gambling losses? Was there a drug addiction? Were they all playing each other against one another with payoffs to everyone to keep the house of cards from getting too noisy?
One thing that never entered into anyone’s thinking, apparently, was of the $1.3 million that got siphoned off, that was $1.3 million that was never going to help one single displaced worker, one single re-training of anybody, one single human being anywhere…except, of course, those who were scamming the system. What sort of mental gymnastics do you have to do to rationalize that in your own mind? We now know what kind of sexual gymnastics it takes to make it all work; but, still…you have look into the mirror everyday, don’t you?
Maybe it all boils down to what you see in that mirror every morning. If you see a face you’ve come to loathe so much you have to just shut your eyes when you walk past the mirror; maybe that’s the face of someone that can remorselessly walk off with millions of dollars that were put in front of you to help your fellow human beings. On the other hand, if you see a decent human being in there…one that is struggling to make it all work, but struggling honestly, at least; that’s not such a bad face to look at every single day. That’s a face you could wake up next to in bed every day. And, it wouldn’t be attached to a body holding documents for you to sign, either.
