State CFO’s China business hunt is coming up short
Last spring, Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis launched a crusade:
He wanted to know how many Florida businesses with state contracts were secretly owned by commies in China. It was an odd question.
But President Donald Trump was blaming China for the coronavirus — and Patronis, who’d been the subject of unflattering accusations of a “pay-for-play” culture at his office, was eager to make headlines for something else.
So Patronis sent letters to 100,000 Florida businesses — everything from small businesses to big law firms — asking if they were “owned or controlled by the Communist Party of China.”
Many of the business owners were confused. Some were irritated. But so what? Patronis was able to score new media coverage.
Headlines like this one from 2019 — “‘Pay to play - or else:’ Florida’s banking regulator alleges CFO corruption” — were replaced with headlines like this one in 2020: “Communist influence? Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis on guard against Chinese government.”
Mission: accomplished … except for one little detail.
More than four months into Patronis’ commie-quest, he has found a grand total of zero state vendors owned by the Chinese government.
That’s according to WLRN, the South Florida public radio station, which reported Monday that the state was “unable to cite a single company owned or controlled by the Communist Party of China that it has identified through the effort.”
Seriously, Jimmy? Zero? You’re telling me you spent all this time and state money to go 0-for-100,000?
Well, not exactly. A spokesman for Patronis said most businesses didn’t even respond to the survey. And the CFO’s office hasn’t processed all the responses it did receive. But the office confirmed that Patronis has found no state contractors with commie, COVID-plotting connections among the thousands of responses the office has processed.
Whew.
Still, CFO spokesman Devin Galetta said: “This exercise has shed light on the need for more transparency and information on state vendors and where they are domiciled.”
Oh, and there’s one more thing the CFO’s office learned … that Key West isn’t owned by China.
Maybe you already know that. But WLRN also reported that Patronis’ office sent one of it’s Are- youowned-by-China letters to the city of Key West … which prompted a municipal staffer there to send a response that explained the “City of Key West is a US City Government entity.”
More rapid testing. Good
Florida got some good news this week when Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the federal government had agreed to send 6.4 million rapid COVID-19 tests to Florida.
As the Sentinel reported, DeSantis declared the news “an exciting day in terms of rolling out something new that I think will make a difference in coronavirus response and particularly for our most vulnerable populations.”
It is indeed good news — and seriously overdue.
Since the pandemic started nearly six months ago, many health experts agreed that plentiful, rapid testing was one of the keys to controlling the epidemic.
Yet, for much of that time, we’ve had no such thing.
Floridians who suspected they were infected often had to wait days to get an appointment and then several days more to get their results — leaving them possibly contagious for up to a week without knowing for sure. That’s a recipe for trouble.
With 700,000 diagnosed cases in Florida — and 14,000 deaths — anyone who suspects they’re infected should be able to find out ASAP. Not just for their sake, but for the sake of everyone around them.
Rubio sells ‘Notorious ACB’ T-shirts
And finally, we have a follow-up to last week’s item on U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio’s push to confirm President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, even though Rubio argued four years ago that it was improper for Barack Obama to do the same thing.
This week, Rubio is not only continuing to push for the confirmation, he’s now fundraising off it — with a T-shirt that parodies the nickname given to recently deceased Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The T-shirts feature Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett and play off the late Ginsberg’s nickname, “The Notorious RBG,” by calling Barrett: “Notorious ACB.”
Rubio’s campaign is selling the T-shirts for $30 apiece and giving purchasers the chance to donate up to $2,800 more to his campaign.
Rubio’s attempt to raise campaign money off a Supreme Court nomination process that he has described as a solemn obligation might seem a bit incongruous. And many have found the shirts in poor taste — including Rubio’s Senate colleague, Democrat Chris Murphy off Connecticut, who tweeted that the entire point of the T-Shirts was “just to be awful. To stick a finger in the eye of Ginsburg’s grieving family and anyone mourning her loss.”
But Rubio’s campaign disagreed, saying Democrats were also donating to political causes in Ginsberg’s honor and that “Team Marco is proud to show our support for Judge Barrett, the next United States Supreme Court Justice.”