Political Corruption and the FOI Act

Many people, like me, look at television shows such as Heroes and love them because these characters are going out of their way to do the right thing. In the television series Wonder Woman, in the first season, it was about ending the corruption of the Nazi’s upon the world. Yet it seems that we are plagued with our own political corruption.

We are reminded when we see the 1991 movie JFK that there is corruption as Garrison sets about to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John F. Kennedy. It was a set up done by our own government. They had to get rid of him because he aimed at stopping the war and stopping the people who started it.

In my own hometown of Old Saybrook in the Police Department there is corruption. How do they find out it is there? A little thing called the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. This is not something make up; Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is investigating it. In this story, it all surrounds a charity, the McMurray-Kirtland fund that everyone in town contributed too frequently.

It is unfortunate but many of us do not know the information held in government archives. It is not until you start looking for the information and actually requesting and then are told the words “NO” that many begin to question. That is what happened in Old Saybrook. Two people requested information on the McMurray-Kirtland fund and it was learned that it was a private fund and not registered as a charity fund with the government. True I don’t know what Attorney General Richard Blumenthal will find but I do know that the expenditures of buying the Connecticut Chief of Police Association lobster dinners does not fit under the idea of charity. I do not know about you, but if this were money I donated, I would not want it to go to police chiefs for lobster dinners.

At the end of the JFK movie, they express that information concerning the death of John F. Kennedy was shredded so that no one could request the information and investigate. What does that say for the town of Old Saybrook and their situation? I cannot say because I am using information that I learned from reading articles as reported in The New London Day and base my own opinion, which is the same thing that you as readers or viewers can do. It is this kind of information that makes me ask is there political corruption in our government.