Sometimes Gary Gross posting at his LibertyProsperty site gets me going. From time to time his site is consulted as a form of opposition research; in that he seems attuned often to Republican talking points, sometimes ahead of others, sometimes in the wake of others. He posted:
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And, yeah, I toggled the link to find:
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Or as we might say, "yaddita, yaddita." This is looking at what the man says and stages, not at who he is. Who he is in major part, is what he does with and for money - for his campaign, moreover, where and how he is a fiduciary.
The Benjamins:
From Gary's post, first step, websearch = ron desantis brags which returned:
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The first return, Daily Beast, with that blurb and that image, even before rollingstone.com, caught attention.
Backstep a bit -
Start by recalling last election cycle, Julie Blaha seeking reelection as Minnesota Auditor, and her Republican opponent, I forget his name, ragging that the pension fund needed a better rate of return, suggesting he, somehow, might deliver such.
Blaha noted she did not want her pension in private equity or hedge fund gambling hands and preferred cautious, prudent investment to crypto adventure - something like that.
Of major importance, the notion - look at it and hope to find something corrupt somehow, to smear, but absent that if management was squeaky clean, dump on rate of return. I.e., emphasize the money, follow the money. It might lead somewhere. With that background, Crabgrass sought out the DB post:
A few weeks ago, news quietly emerged that Florida had been reallocating massive amounts of public employees’ pensions to money managers who had contributed to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political campaigns. That sounds like the usual swamp-dealing, you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours arrangement that ordinary folks often describe as “corruption.”
Before getting to the highly unethical and possibly criminal nature of this behavior, let’s get some background.
The Florida State Board of Administration (SBA) is responsible for investing the proceeds of Florida’s state employee pension plan and other statewide investment programs. In total, the SBA manages over $228 billion—$180 billion of which belongs to the Florida Retirement System Pension Plan, making it the fifth-largest pension plan in the nation.
The Pension Plan is the retirement plan for more than 1 million current and former state employees: police, teachers, etc. The SBA has an executive director who reports to the Board of Trustees, but the Trustees, in concert with legislative directives, have “ultimate oversight” for SBA’s overall strategy. The Board of Trustees consists of DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and state Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis.
As with just about any large retirement fund, the Pension Plan invests in a variety of assets, including U.S. stocks, foreign stocks, real estate, fixed income, and cash. The SBA’s Annual Report goes into considerable detail—nearly 30 dense pages filled with small font text and colorful graphs—explaining the Pension Plan’s investment strategy, risk analysis, returns, and allocation of assets, including all the different money managers who have pieces of the $180 billion portfolio. The extensive list of several hundred money manager accounts includes familiar names like Morgan Stanley ($1.85 billion) and less familiar ones like Tiger Iron ($228 million), all of whom receive a fee as compensation for their services.
Nothing in the annual report looks out of the ordinary. But [...] in recent years the SBA has transferred more than $1 billion of pension funds to money managers who made substantial political contributions to the Republican Governors Association (RGA), money that later flowed to the Friends of Ron DeSantis political committee. [...]
[...] Federal securities laws prohibit any money manager from receiving compensation from a government entity within two years after making a contribution to that official. (There’s an exception for contributions of less than a couple of hundred dollars.)
Willful violation of this so-called Pay-to-Play Rule is a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison for each offense. Although the Pay-to-Play Rule is aimed at money managers and other investment advisers, anyone who intentionally helps a money manager commit a crime has also committed a crime. That the money managers who received a slice of the Pension Plan apparently contributed to the RGA—and not directly to DeSantis—cuts against any illegality, but it is not a perfect defense.
Giving money to a third party knowing that it will go to the intended beneficiary (to whom you can’t give directly) is a way to conceal transactions, often called money laundering. At this point, there is no known evidence to accuse anyone of a crime. Of course, that’s what investigations are for.
The article concludes that the SBA’s decision to invest in “donors’ high-fee, high-risk” investments cost state employees about $10 billion in returns. It quotes Kathleen Clark, an ethics expert and professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law: “From a distance, it sure looks like the pensioners are getting hurt here. It certainly seems like it raises the distinct possibility that the decisions that the pension board is making may be serving DeSantis’ political interests and not the pensioners’ interest.”
Beyond the potential harm to state employees—the hardworking Floridians whose retirement should never be risked in order to funnel business to campaign donors—there is a billion dollars’ worth of irony in DeSantis’ SBA. After all, the governor rails against the “elites,” claims to represent middle-class families, and brags about draining the swamp in Tallahassee. But his administration has been steadily sending middle-class workers’ savings to the elites who bankroll his campaign, a tailor-made example of the swampy transactional nature of politics that Americans loathe.
[links in original] You get the drift.
Hence, websearch = DeSantis Florida pension fund benjamins (past year)
and from returns, thinking, refining -
Websearch = florida pension fund management by DeSantis and Republican Governors donors (past year)
You can give those searches a try. One result, David Sarota, wrote May 16, at his site "The Lever" which might be an item where DB gave a link that would not work for me:
As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis positions himself for a presidential bid, his state’s Republican-controlled legislature just sent him a bill that could enrich prospective Wall Street donors he may need to finance his campaign. That includes a GOP mega-donor who DeSantis recently met with as the bill advanced.
But if DeSantis does try to make a fundraising play off the new pension investment bill, it could put him on a collision course with federal regulators — if those regulators decide to enforce a longstanding anti-corruption rule that has previously hindered other governors considering a White House bid.
At issue is a new bill empowering the Florida State Board of Administration — which is run by DeSantis and two other Republican officials — to move an additional $18 billion of the state’s pension fund out of traditional stocks and bonds and into hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and real estate firms. Such “alternative investment” firms often charge high fees and deliver weak returns — while many of their executives make big political campaign donations. The legislation passed even as other states’ pension funds are considering pulling back on such investments in the face of potential losses.
The GOP-controlled legislature sent the bill to the governor’s desk on Tuesday, shortly after DeSantis reportedly met with Republican financier Steve Schwarzman, whose private equity firm already manages — and reaps fees off — more than $800 million of Florida pension money.
That includes a new $150 million tranche that Florida officials delivered to a Blackstone green-energy fund one day before DeSantis signed a bill to block state pension money from going to companies that prioritize environmental considerations in their investments.
“There Is No Way Around It And There Are No Loopholes”
Schwarzman’s meeting with DeSantis generated headlines because of the billionaire’s subsequent decision to not financially back the governor’s presidential bid, which was cast by the political press corps as a no-confidence vote in his prospective candidacy.
But that decision may have been due to something much more legalistic: Donating directly to DeSantis could violate the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) longstanding pay-to-play rule, which was designed to restrict campaign contributions from financial executives to state officials who control pension investment decisions.
As one of three Republican officials overseeing Florida’s $180 billion pension fund, DeSantis is explicitly covered by the rule.
Republican private equity donors have so far been able to get around the rule by donating to the Republican Governors Association (RGA), a group serving all GOP governors, which then siphoned some of the cash into a political committee that boosted DeSantis’ election bids. In doing so, they have relied on SEC regulators refusing to enforce the rule’s anti-circumvention provision prohibiting “acts done indirectly, which, if done directly, would violate the rule.”
On Tuesday, The Lever reported that $1 billion in Florida pension money had been directed to firms whose executives donated to the RGA, which spent more than $21 million supporting DeSantis’ reelection campaign in 2022.
That same time frame when Sirota wrote, Jacobin carried reporting from The Lever, May 17, and May 18, closing the loop.
Moreover, Sirota appeared June 5, on Amy Goodman's Democracy NOW! broadcast, with the full transcript online here.
So as best as Crabgrass can reconstruct things, Daily Beast last Sunday carried its report of Sirota's earlier DeSantis-related disclosure from last month, or a report tracking what Sirota had uncovered.
Yes, it is circumstantial - direct contributions barred, Republican Governors get a ton of donated money, giving a big share to DeSantis, and the donors get hands on managing Florida pension money.
MSN carries yet another Jacobin report from a Sirota writer, here.
And then there's Russia.
Opinions always can differ, but Crabgrass sees slime to the DeSantis bragged image of unimpeachable rectitude. Slushing around with pension monies, or having the appearance that slushing is happening, is a rock DeSantis will have to push uphill.