State scorns addiction business while operating two of its own

By CHRIS POWELL

Every individual and business in the news and entertainment media tries to entice an audience to return — to addict it, more or less. Meta Platforms, operator of the Facebook and Instagram social media outlets, last week agreed to pay nearly $17 billion to settle multi-state federal lawsuits charging that the company has been too successful enticing young people, addicting them and causing a national epidemic of mental illness.

Polite society mustn’t discuss transgender players in sports

Hartford mayor’s solution is to wait for more bailouts

Behind chronic absenteeism; and two mistaken rebuttals

Since they are by nature self-absorbed, insecure, and neurotic, young people surely would do better to be less involved with social media. But almost any product can be abused, and blaming social media companies for the abuse of their products is a stretch that disregards First Amendment rights even as the best solution is close to home.

After all, social media companies don’t give mobile telephones, computers, and internet connections to minors and then fail to monitor what they make of them. Their parents do. The settlement with Meta Platforms is essentially a substitute for parenting.

The likely disposition of the $265 million Connecticut is expected to receive from the settlement suggests as much. Governor Lamont says the money will be spent on “mental health and crisis intervention, after-school and summer school programming, and implementation of phone-free school zones.” 

There is much mental distress among young people in Connecticut, but with about a third of the state’s children living in single-parent households — in the cities the figure is 60% or more — little of that distress begins with social media. Rather, youthful obsession with social media may be more a consequence of that distress, a consequence of parental neglect.

In any case state government’s concern about social media addiction is laughably hypocritical.

Connecticut has legislated some restrictions on how social media companies engage with minors but they will have little effect if parents fail to monitor their children’s activity on social media and internet. The restrictions Connecticut has enacted are just substitutes for parenting.

Meanwhile state government itself has thrown itself into the addiction business — first with casino gambling and internet gambling, from which it collects tens of millions of dollars each year through tribute from Connecticut’s two Indian tribal casinos, and second through licensing retailers of marijuana products and taxing their sales.

Gambling addiction has devastated thousands of lives in the state and has caused much embezzlement and theft. 

Frequent use of marijuana is addictive and often leads to addiction to more dangerous drugs. 

But now that state government itself is in the gambling and drug business, the only addiction about which the governor, Attorney General William Tong, and state legislators get indignant is addiction to social media. With the settlement of the Meta lawsuit, state government soon will be making money off social media addiction as well.

The most timely and compelling question in American society may be: Where are all the disturbed kids coming from? Some of Connecticut’s windfall from the Meta lawsuit settlement could be used to investigate that issue — or maybe to hire some parents for the many kids who lack them.

ELICKER’S COWARDICE: Another New Haven police officer accused of misconduct and hastily fired for his role in the Randy Cox case four years ago, Luis Rivera, has been reinstated by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration, which found that the officer was not to blame for Cox’s crippling injury. The board already had reinstated Officer Oscar Diaz for the same reason. The appeal of a third fired officer is pending while the firing of a fourth has been upheld.

The board found that Cox’s injury almost certainly had nothing to do with how he was handled by police after his arrest but was entirely a matter of the lack of seatbelts in the police van in which he was being transported when it stopped abruptly to avoid a crash.

Cox is Black and there were false shrieks of racism when he was injured, and Mayor Elicker lacked the courage to stand up to them and insist on due process.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Polite society mustn’t discuss transgender players in sports

By CHRIS POWELL

Polite society isn’t supposed to talk about whether the women’s national professional basketball league, the WNBA, should admit transgender players — that is, men who “identify” as women. 

Hartford mayor’s solution is to wait for more bailouts

Behind chronic absenteeism; and two mistaken rebuttals

Only one rationale remains for casinos in Connecticut

A few weeks ago a WNBA player, Sophie Cunningham, calmly expressed opposition to letting males participate in women’s sports. While there was nothing hateful about what she said, she was denounced around the country and within the league itself.   

Many people who seemed to know that transgenderism in sports is crazy, or who seemed to know at least that most people consider it crazy, argued that it isn’t worth discussing because the WNBA’s labor contract restricts participation to women. But the contract doesn’t define “woman.” Can biological men become women just through thoughts and feelings?

That’s the heart of the issue — an issue U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson purported to be stumped by during her Senate confirmation hearing in 2022. Jackson testified that she couldn’t say what a woman is because she’s “not a biologist,” even as tens of millions of Americans who are neither biologists nor judicial nominees can give an adequate answer.

Prominent among those who want to avoid discussing the substance here is the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball coach, Geno Auriemma. In a recent interview he lamented that the issue distracts from the achievements of WNBA players, and he dismissed it as a mere “hypothetical.”

But it is far more than hypothetical. 

For starters, two former players in the National Basketball Association — the men’s league — are pranking the WNBA by declaring themselves transgender and candidates for the women’s league’s draft. They may figure that with their stronger frames they could demolish female competitors. 

The prank may prompt the WNBA to take courses in biology and political correctness. Even if the league peremptorily dismisses the pranksters, it will be making a decision, if an incomplete one.

And surely Auriemma is aware of Connecticut’s own recent controversy over transgenderism in high school girls track — the victories in 2018 of two transgender runners. A federal lawsuit brought by the girls who otherwise might have won is challenging the policy of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference to allow biological males to compete as girls.

Always politically correct, state Attorney General William Tong has put state government on the side of the transgender athletes. After all, it is said, there are only a few problems like this in Connecticut high schools, only a few girls were deprived of championships by biological males, and those girls are somebody else’s daughters whose rights to equal protection of the law may be sacrificed to the fashionable belief that biology and gender are mere fictions.

The audiences of high school track events may be too small to worry about politically. But the more that transgenderism in sports is indulged, the more there will be, and there are already many transgender issues in bathrooms and prisons around the country.

No one involved in this issue, especially not in Connecticut, a socially libertarian state, is attacking transgender people. They have the same rights as everyone else. But biological and gender differences are real, males have physical advantages over females, and girls and women will not have equal opportunity in sports if they don’t have their own leagues or divisions. That’s why federal law was enacted to require as much.

The transgender issue is narrow: gender separation in sports and gender privacy and safety in bathrooms and prisons. Transgender athletes can compete in sports with their biological gender.

Most people know as much even as they don’t want to risk being called names. But politically the issue may not be settled sensibly in Connecticut until a transgender player applies for the UConn women’s basketball team or joins one of UConn’s rivals. Then the issue will make national television and games will hinge on it. Women’s basketball is big in Connecticut and gaining adherents nationally, and transgender players will make it ridiculous.

If that is what is required to restore sense and fairness, may it happen soon.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Hartford mayor’s solution is to wait for more bailouts

By CHRIS POWELL

Despite the claim made by former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin’s congressional campaign that he had “straightened out” the city, his successor, Arunan Arulampalam, has found himself with a lot more straightening out to do. Hartford’s financial condition remains dire even after the $500 million state governor bailout enjoyed by Bronin’s administration.

Behind chronic absenteeism; and two mistaken rebuttals

Only one rationale remains for casinos in Connecticut

Here’s what Lamont calls ‘safe’; and Fazio’s half-hearted tax cap

Arulampalam fears that the city’s property revaluation, due to take effect in October, will devastate what’s left of Hartford’s homeowners, whose numbers city government is striving to increase.

The problem isn’t Arulampalam’s fault. It’s mainly a matter of inflation, technology, and state government’s mistaken policies. 

Inflation has driven up residential property valuations, which homeowners like in theory until they realize that they can’t benefit from a higher valuation until they sell their homes, until which time they must pay more in property taxes.  

State government’s long failure to facilitate enough housing construction has also driven up residential property values. After all, everyone who owns residential property has a financial incentive to keep housing scarce.

Then there is the simultaneous collapse of commercial property values as white-collar workers increasingly work from home. Downtown Hartford’s office towers are now half empty and while demand for housing is high, converting office buildings to housing is difficult and expensive. 

The collapse of office building valuations might not be so bad in Hartford if the Lamont administration hadn’t just defaulted again to the state employee unions about “telework,” failing to achieve a new master union contract that would have authorized state agencies to require employees to come back to their offices. The Lamont administration’s nominal policy is that state government employees are so efficient that they don’t need in-person supervision. The administration’s real policy is that it must capitulate to the unions on anything important to keep them supporting the Democratic Party in an election year.

Then state policy — collective bargaining for state and government municipal employees and binding arbitration of their contracts — makes it almost impossible for Hartford city government and all municipal governments to economize with their biggest expense, employee compensation. In effect state government policy is that when times get tough economically, financial sacrifice must fall exclusively on taxpayers. 

When he was Hartford’s mayor Bronin tried to get financial concessions from city employee unions, and he was denounced for it by his rival in the recent primary campaign for Democratic nomination for Congress in the 1st District. Bronin was called an enemy of organized labor for seeking those concessions, as if the only labor that counts is members of government employee unions, not people who work in the private sector, unionized or not. Bronin easily survived the charge and won the primary.

Quite apart from the impediments in state labor law, Hartford city government doesn’t try too hard to reduce its own expenses, as shown by the recent scandal in City Hall, where the recently resigned treasurer spent tens of thousands of dollars on luxury junkets. 

But Mayor Arulampalam’s solution to the looming disaster of Hartford’s property revaluation is just to delay it by a year. State government has authorized the delay and now it’s up to the City Council. This would perpetuate the unfairness to owners of business property, risk more real estate bankruptcies, and discourage business relocations to city properties whose valuations remain artificially high. 

Since business owners are a minority, they are easily sacrificed to solve the political problem. But sacrificing them won’t solve the city’s financial problem. The city always operates at a loss, dependent on frequent bailouts from state government through increased financial grants, often euphemized as “aid to education.” 

Arulampalam seems to think that if the revaluation is postponed a year, safely past this November’s state election, the city will get more bailouts from state government without having stirred up controversy and taxpayer fears and resentment during the campaigns for governor and the General Assembly, thereby helping the Democrats to retain power. The mayor may be right, if not courageous or imaginative. But then no hardly anyone in authority in Connecticut is.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Behind chronic absenteeism; and two mistaken rebuttals

By CHRIS POWELL

Chronic absenteeism in Connecticut’s schools fell substantially in the school year just ended, state officials announced last week. But their data shows the problem remains at what should be appalling levels in many places, especially the state’s cities, and the official diagnosis of the problem is incomplete.

Only one rationale remains for casinos in Connecticut

Here’s what Lamont calls ‘safe’; and Fazio’s half-hearted tax cap

Like Groucho, Connecticut won’t let education encroach on football

Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% of their school days, and the new state average for chronic absenteeism is down to 16.4%. Officials attribute the decline in part to the state’s Learner Engagement and Attendance Program, in which school employees visit the homes of chronically absent students, inquire about problems, and offer help. It’s basically social work. This is said to address the “root causes” of chronic absenteeism.

As might be expected, the new data shows that chronic absenteeism correlates heavily with a community’s poverty. Hartford’s rate is 33%, New Britain and Bridgeport are at 30%, New Haven 28%, Norwich and New London 25%, and Waterbury 22%. In turn poverty correlates with family dysfunction and demoralization.

But Connecticut and the country have always had poverty, and today’s high levels of chronic absenteeism are new. So what changed?

First, government stopped enforcing student truancy laws and policies. Today there are no penalties for parents who fail to see that their children get to school. 

And second, educational standards were eliminated and replaced with social promotion. Now there are no tests for advancement and graduation. Nearly all students are advanced from grade to grade and given high school diplomas irrespective of learning, and they and their parents know this. While schooling grows ever more expensive to taxpayers, there are no reprimands or penalties for treating it with contempt.

So why should the demoralized attend school consistently if advancement and graduation will follow anyway if they don’t? This policy may be the biggest “root cause,” but educators and elected officials don’t dare to address it.

* * *

Two recent columns of mine were criticized falsely last week in replies by elected officials.

The first column, questioning whether southeastern Connecticut is ready for the massive expansion of employment for submarine construction at Electric Boat, was criticized in an essay by U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney. Courtney’s essay stressed the region’s efforts with workforce training. But my column never cited workforce training. Its references to unpreparedness involved only housing and transportation.

The second column, criticizing Connecticut’s new law restricting police officers from getting near polling places, was denounced in an essay by Stamford state Rep. Matt Blumenthal.

Blumenthal wrote: “Powell writes that our new law ‘forbids police officers from getting within 250 feet of a polling place.’ Not so. State and local police can do their jobs just as they always have. The law’s catch-all exception says just that: All a department or officer needs is the permission of the moderator or the secretary of the state.”

But the column explicitly acknowledged the exception. It said: “The law forbids police officers from getting within 250 feet of a polling place unless they are responding to a serious emergency or their presence is approved by an election moderator.” Blumenthal deceptively omitted the latter part of that sentence.

Continuing, Blumenthal claimed that the new law has no application to state and local police. He wrote: “What does the law actually do? It stops federal agents and troops — people with no lawful role in Connecticut elections — from being stationed at polling places to intimidate voters.”

But Blumenthal simultaneously noted that Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas issued state and local police a partial exemption from the law. She wouldn’t have done that if the law didn’t apply to state and local police, an application Blumenthal now strangely denies.

In any case state law can’t restrict the disposition of federal agents and troops, since the Constitution establishes the supremacy of the federal government in such matters. Otherwise General Sherman never would have taken Atlanta and the South would have won the Civil War with a simple court injunction.

There was nothing inaccurate or misleading about either column.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Only one rationale remains for casinos in Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

Back in the 1990s several rationales were offered when Connecticut approved its two Indian tribal casinos following enactment of the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

Here’s what Lamont calls ‘safe’; and Fazio’s half-hearted tax cap

Like Groucho, Connecticut won’t let education encroach on football

Public campaign financing has yet to improve the state

First was that since neighboring states had no casinos and did not seem to want any, Connecticut’s casinos might draw far more customers from out of state than from in state and thus collect more gambling tax revenue from them than from the state’s own residents.

Second was that the casinos, opened on tribal land in the sparsely populated eastern part of the state, would boost the area economically.

And third was social justice. The casinos were portrayed as mechanisms of reparations for the mistreatment of the ancient Pequot and Mohegan people by the European culture that nearly destroyed them.

The third rationale was bogus. The last Pequots and Mohegans who had been mistreated by the Connecticut colony and its successor state died a century or more before Indian casino gambling was established. While members of Indian tribes in Western states were still suffering segregation and poverty, people of Indian descent in Connecticut long had been integrated into society and were living like everyone else.

But that didn’t matter, for the social justice rationale corresponded with the advent of political correctness and gave people the impression that casinos were good if their owners were distant descendants of people who had been treated badly. Political correctness also gave the impression that anyone who objected to government’s basing patronage on ethnicity was racist. This was intimidating and effective.

Now the first and second rationales for casino gambling in Connecticut have collapsed as well.

There are 20 other casinos in New England — two in Maine, 13 in New Hampshire, three in Massachusetts, and two in Rhode Island. There are five in New York State. Connecticut’s two casinos increasingly draw their patrons from within the state’s own borders.

As a result, they have started taking more out of the state’s economy than they add to it. The two casinos still have thousands of employees, but they are sustained mainly by tens of thousands of customers who are Connecticut residents, people who, but for casino gambling in the state, might spend their entertainment money elsewhere in the state or at out-of-state casinos — or even save it.

Casino gambling always has been a mechanism of taking money from the many and giving it to the few — casino owners and their employees, with government skimming some in taxes. Connecticut got around that at the outset with its regional monopoly on casinos. But no more. Economically Connecticut’s casinos now redistribute money from the bottom to the top of the income scale in the state as most forms of gambling do — and the other day the Hearst Connecticut newspapers calculated that the money being redistributed is in the many billions of dollars.

According to the Hearst report, legal gamblers in Connecticut have lost at least $56 billion since 1993, an amount that doesn’t include casino table games. Now that Connecticut has authorized internet gambling — from which the Indian casinos are paid a tribute for sharing their duopoly — Hearst calculates that in the last five years gamblers in Connecticut have lost $922 million via FanDuel, Draft Kings, and Fanatics.

Since politics in Connecticut is so left-wing and sanctimonious, it might be expected to ask a few questions here, what with billions being transferred from the many to the few in an undertaking that produces so little value, and with gambling addiction exploding, destroying lives and families and causing ever-more bankruptcies.

But no questions are asked, perhaps because, as the Hearst report notes, state government’s total take from gambling — from the state lottery, started in 1972, to the slot machine tax — has reached $22 billion, and gambling revenue is now 2.5% of the state budget.

That much money for government seems able to salve most liberal consciences, no matter how it’s obtained. It’s now the only rationale for casino gambling in Connecticut. 

—

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Here’s what Lamont calls ‘safe’; and Fazio’s half-hearted tax cap

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont’s campaign in the Democratic primary for governor often broadcast a television commercial emphasizing a comment he made during his welcoming address to the General Assembly in February. Referring to agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, the governor commanded: “ICE, go home! We’re keeping Connecticut safe without you.”

Like Groucho, Connecticut won’t let education encroach on football

Public campaign financing has yet to improve the state

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

Within a week of the governor’s easy victory in the primary, these headlines appeared in Connecticut newspapers:

Hartford Courant: “One person gunned down, four others also shot amid ‘very large crowd’ in Hartford.”

New Haven Independent: “2 die in 2 unrelated downtown stabbings.”

New Haven Register: “New Haven man accused of killing ex-girlfriend threatened to stab her days earlier.”

Connecticut Post: “Person slashed in Bridgeport attack on Railroad Avenue” and “17-year-old charged with murder in killing of Connecticut basketball standout.”

Of course this was just another week in Connecticut and the horrible incidents it produced are considered normal. So while the state may not need federal immigration agents to keep it safe, maybe only a governor seeking re-election could imagine that the state is any safer under his administration than it was under his predecessors, or any safer than it would be with someone else as governor.

Meanwhile the Republican candidate for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, has been saying he wants to “cap” municipal property taxes. It’s a lovely idea but there’s not much capping in his proposal.

With property tax rates varying widely, a single rate for all municipalities would either devastate high-taxed municipalities by draining their revenue or provide little restraint to municipalities with low or average rates. So Fazio proposes that state law limit property tax increases to the rate of inflation or 2% annually, except when a municipal referendum votes by a supermajority to suspend the limit for a year.

This wouldn’t really “cap” property taxes. At best it would just slow their steady rise.

Neither Fazio nor most others who complain about property taxes note the bigger underlying issue. That is, most property tax revenue is used to pay unionized municipal employees. If property taxes were ever really “capped,” then the compensation of those employees would be capped as well, provoking controversy, insofar as municipal government employee unions are the largest and most influential local special interests.

Fazio’s proposal dodges the big issue of the local tax burden. 

If referendums on larger property tax increases are OK, why not just require referendums on all property tax increases and even municipal employee union contracts? This would be far more effective in restraining and democratizing property taxes. Transferring the taxing power directly to the people would also relieve municipal elected officials of a big responsibility they don’t want, and diminish the power over them held by the special interest.

The ultimate reform for municipal government in Connecticut would be for state law to create in every city and town the elected office of arbiter of government employee union contracts. Under Connecticut’s binding arbitration law, such contracts now can be settled by unelected arbiters who almost always favor unions over taxpayers. 

That is, in Connecticut the biggest expenses in both state and municipal government, and the biggest political issue in municipal government — property taxes — are removed from the ordinary democratic process and settled by someone who answers to no one. 

This system — a system of taxation without representation — was in effect in Connecticut 250 years ago and the colony joined a revolution to overthrow it, only to disenfranchise itself two centuries later. 

The public needs some clarity on these issues and only Fazio can provide it during the campaign. 

Last week he and the governor spoke to a convention of state employee union leaders. The public and journalists were excluded but Fazio says he stressed a governor’s responsibility to taxpayers. The unions constitute the Democratic Party’s army and the governor promised them raises every year forever.

If Republicans think that trying to make nice with the other side’s army will help them, they have already lost the election.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Like Groucho, state won’t let education encroach on football

By CHRIS POWELL

Having smiled benignly at Hartford Public High School’s graduation of an admittedly illiterate and innumerate student two years ago, Governor Lamont and the General Assembly this year passed a law formally lowering academic standards in public high schools.

Public campaign financing has yet to improve the state

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

It was almost as if they were re-enacting the 1932 Marx Brothers movie “Horse Feathers,” in which Groucho becomes a college president and declares to the faculty: “This college is a failure. The trouble is, we’re neglecting football for education.” He proceeds accordingly.

But “Horse Feathers” was a parody. Governor Lamont and state legislators are supposed to be operating in real life.

Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported last week that the new law forbids public high schools from enforcing academic standards for student athletes that are higher than the standards set by the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, standards that are laughably low. The CIAC standards require student athletes to pass just four classes per grading period even as most students must take six classes in a grading period if they are to graduate on time. Under the CIAC standards, a student taking six classes can receive four D grades and two F grades and remain eligible for varsity sports.

But until now Connecticut high schools have been free to enforce higher standards, and many have done so, as by requiring a minimum grade average of C or by disqualifying students if they fail even one class. 

Under the new law, higher standards will be forbidden.

State Rep. Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, the House majority leader, says the lower standards are necessary to be fair to students from poor households and to encourage them to stay in school to preserve their connection to the one thing they like about it — sports. 

But what is the point of staying in school if a student is going to graduate uneducated? What incentive does a sports-loving student have to become educated when standards for participation are essentially eliminated? Only one high school athlete in a thousand has a chance of making a living as a professional athlete even for a few years.

The new law emphasizes to student athletes what most high school students in Connecticut already know: that they will be advanced from grade to grade and given a diploma even if they learn nothing. Now student athletes will be told that they can be completely ignorant and still enjoy the honor of wearing their school’s uniform.

Of course, as “Horse Feathers” suggests, this is an old racket. But back then it wasn’t as damaging. Sports were not as big a business, schools weren’t yet corrupted by political correctness, the world wasn’t as competitive economically with the United States, and society had self-respect. 

In his campaign commercials Governor Lamont proclaims that Connecticut has the best schools in the country. Someone should ask him how his assertion squares with the new law requiring high schools to dumb their students down. And even if Connecticut still has the best schools in the country, God help the country.

* * *

STATE ALREADY LOSES WEALTHY: Will wealthy people leave Connecticut if their taxes are raised substantially? 

The state’s 19 billionaires may be less sensitive to taxes to some degree, since they have so much money. But what is that degree? Tax too much and anyone will depart.

In any case Connecticut long has had a problem with people departing because of high taxes and the state’s high cost of living generally. Florida, with no state income tax, and other Southern states with lower taxes are full of former Connecticut residents from the middle and upper classes. Migration is not entirely a matter of warmer winters, since many former Connecticut residents keep their homes here and return in the summer.

Connecticut’s population wouldn’t be growing at all but for the illegal immigration state government facilitates.

Raising taxes isn’t the only way for state government to address more public needs. Improving government’s efficiency would be better, if politically impossible as long as state government operates mainly as a pension and benefit society.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Public campaign financing has yet to improve the state

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s system of “public” financing of election campaigns, the Citizens Election Program, established in 2005 under Gov. Jodi Rell, still sounds good in principle. Candidates for state office who restrict themselves to small donations and raise a threshold amount qualify for fairly substantial grants of campaign money from state government. 

Connecticut Democrats fear police at the polls more than lawbreakers

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

The idea was to encourage more people of ordinary means to seek public office and to discourage candidates from selling themselves for special-interest campaign money. It was hoped that the system would increase diversity among elected officials, especially state legislators, who had come disproportionately from the ranks of lawyers, bankers, business executives, and retired people, and increase political competition.

The system does seem to have increased the diversity of legislators a bit. But it has not made state politics more competitive, state government more effective, or legislators less susceptible to special-interest influence.

Indeed, Rell, who left office in January 2011, was Connecticut’s last Republican governor, and since the Citizens Election Program started Democrats have steadily controlled both the governor’s office and both houses of the General Assembly, with one slight exception, in 2017-18, when the Senate was evenly divided at 18. Then the two parties agreed to share Senate patronage, and the lieutenant governor was a Democrat who, as presiding officer, could decide ties in the party’s favor.

Just as disappointing, the legislature seems as submissive to special interests as ever, especially to the government employee unions, the Democratic Party’s army. State employee union support helps negate the small-d democratic aim of the Citizens Election Program, since union members provide campaign assistance that is often more useful than financial donations — the donation of personal time by union members to work in Democratic campaigns. State government employees receive huge amounts of discretionary paid time off, and when they use it to help Democratic campaigns, it’s both a kickback and a hidden and one-sided form of government campaign financing.

But people in Connecticut don’t seem as thrilled with Democratic administration as the party’s overwhelming control of state government suggests. Poverty long has been worsening and state government’s response has been only to put more people on welfare. Even ordinary Democrats are complaining about the state’s ever-increasing cost of living. (Housing costs cause many complaints, even as many complainers oppose housing construction anywhere near them.)

Connecticut’s Republican opposition is weak but largely because it has had little of substance to say. The cost of its employees is state government’s biggest expense and state employment is full of excesses that might offend voters if politicians highlighted them. But most Republicans are as scared of the unions as Democrats are subservient to them.

Maybe nothing will make any difference. But what would be the harm if a candidate for state office campaigned simply with 60-second television and radio commercials in which he made presentations about government policy and the choices necessary to improve Connecticut? No fancy graphics, happy or sinister sound effects, and no pandering, just an attempt to be thoughtful and candid and to discern and appeal to the public interest. 

It sure would be different anyway.

MORE ON CHILD FATALITY: A few weeks ago this column complained that the state Department of Children and Families and the Manchester Police Department had offered no account of their investigation into the death of a 3-year-old girl, Akari Cortes, who was struck and killed by a car as she crossed a street unaccompanied just before dawn on June 10. But DCF Commissioner Susan I. Hamilton made a statement last week:

“At the time of the incident, the department was investigating two reports alleging lack of supervision. During those investigations the family installed additional door locks to prevent Akari from leaving the home without adult supervision. However, there was continued lack of supervision resulting in this fatality, and the parents have been substantiated for physical neglect. The case remains open, and the other children are safely placed with a relative.”

So while journalism may have forgotten the little girl, at least DCF hasn’t.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Connecticut Democrats fear police at the polls more than lawbreakers

By CHRIS POWELL

Given Connecticut’s worsening social disintegration, most people are probably glad to see police officers  patrolling on foot or in cruisers. Residents of cities, where crime is worst, often ask for more police visibility.

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

Can eastern Connecticut get ready in time for its future?

But Connecticut’s Democratic state legislators and even Governor Lamont lately seem to consider police officers more as perpetrators of misconduct than as protectors against it. 

Last week the Hartford Courant reported about a new state law that got little attention when the General Assembly passed it and the governor signed it this year. The law forbids police officers from getting within 250 feet of a polling place unless they are responding to a serious emergency or their presence is approved by an election moderator.

The Democrats say ordinary police presence at polling places might cause disruption, especially because the Trump administration may send immigration agents there. 

While arrests by state or federal officers anywhere can be disruptive, officers are authorized to make arrests anywhere and polling places should be secure. In any case since Connecticut forbids state and municipal police from assisting federal immigration agents in most respects, disruption at polling places by state and municipal officers in immigration matters is not going to be a problem.

So the Democrats have to pretend that it would be. Stamford state Rep. Matt Blumenthal says that while “we have no reason to believe that state and local law enforcement would engage in any misconduct like that, we want to send a message here in Connecticut that this sort of conduct will not be tolerated.”

Apparently the Democrats could think of no way of letting police officers know that their misconduct at polling places would not be tolerated other than by prohibiting them from getting near one. So what about police misconduct at other places, like town halls, schools, supermarkets, and power and water plants? Should cops be banned there too? 

There are good reasons for police to patrol polling places. Politics can get heated. Arguments can develop between voters, between voters and poll workers, and between campaign workers for competing candidates. Crowded parking lots present easy targets for burglary and vandalism. After all, if cops on the beat are deterrents to crime, any location may benefit from having one around or stopping by.

So what’s really going on with the new law?

It’s the consequence of the Democratic Party’s having become, especially in Connecticut, the party of open borders and using illegal immigration to rig legislative districting in the party’s favor. So the Democrats purport to believe that the mere sight of a police officer at a polling place will scare away some of the party’s supporters. With the new law being so excessive and ridiculous, the Democrats protest too much. They have given their scheme away.

SEN. MURPHY’S RECKLESSNESS: President Trump started the war with Iran with a sneak attack and has been waging war with no more authorization than Congress’ refusal to cut off its money. This is typical Trumpian recklessness.

But too much can be made of it, since the United States and Iran long have been waging undeclared war against each other. Since Iran’s regime is theocratic and fascist, almost anything that destroys it would do humanity a favor, and whether Americans like it or not, the war is underway with much at stake.

That’s why Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s stance on the war is so irresponsible. He says the United States should end it “unilaterally,” giving Iran control of the choke points of the world’s oil supply and leaving longstanding U.S. allies at Iran’s mercy — not just those near Iran but all that import oil.

Murphy thus would facilitate the greatest victory for totalitarianism since World War II. 

Iran needn’t be militarily occupied. It should be neutered and blockaded until it gets a less threatening government. With some patience and courage the United States and its allies can accomplish that. 

Murphy imagines himself presidential timber while he is as reckless and weak as Trump and naive besides.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s largest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, has endorsed Governor Lamont for renomination in the Democratic primary and re-election in November. “Governor Lamont’s partnership with the education community has strengthened our schools and our profession,” CEA President Kate Dias says.

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

Can eastern Connecticut get ready in time for its future?

Will state ever reduce poverty or just keep manufacturing it?

Connecticut’s schools are always getting more money from state government. But whether that has “strengthened” them or just the teacher unions is a fair question, since in recent years student proficiency has correlated inversely with rising school spending and teacher compensation. 

The dirty little secret of education in Connecticut remains that student proficiency is mostly a matter of parenting and enforcement of academic standards, and no one who reveals the secret stands a chance in politics, since that would set both the teacher unions and parents against him. The governor won’t be revealing the secret, especially not while being challenged from his party’s extreme left by Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, who promises salvation to the government class — a lot more taxation and spending.

Indeed, most CEA members who are Democrats might vote for Elliott despite their union’s endorsement of the governor. 

The New Haven teachers union, an affiliate of the state’s second largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, has endorsed Elliott in the delusion that the city’s schools perform so terribly because of a lack of spending. 

But nearly a third of New Haven’s students are chronically absent from school and about half are living in single-parent households, so their academic performance would not improve even if their teachers each were paid a million dollars per year. Elliott wants them to keep dreaming that student proficiency is just a money problem, state government’s failure to liquidate Connecticut’s 19 billionaires.

All this is especially unfortunate, since teachers see the state’s social disintegration more intimately than anyone else except maybe police officers and social workers for the state Department of Children and Families. Teachers may be not only best-positioned but also most trusted to tell state residents what’s really going on, not just in schools but in homes and on streets, and to pose questions like: Why should kids go to school and why should parents bother to get them there when they will be promoted from grade to grade and given a high school diploma even if they learn nothing? 

You can keep telling parents that, as in Lake Wobegon, all their children are above average, but the more that parents are told this, the more of a shock awaits everyone when the kids reach adulthood and the real world. 

But then with binding arbitration of their union contracts, tenure, and exemption of their evaluations from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law, Connecticut’s teachers are as removed from accountability as students and parents are. Teachers have no incentive to change that for anyone.

Elsewhere on the social disintegration front, a member of the Hartford City Council, Alex Thomas, a former youth pastor, recently pleaded guilty to stealing $15,000 from his church and laundering the money. But he plans to remain on the council anyway. 

The judge suspended Thomas’ prison sentence, so he won’t have to miss any council meetings, and there is no clamor in the city for him to resign.

* * *

AUDIT FOR ILLEGAL VOTERS: Not that anyone in authority wants to find out, but there might be a simple way of discovering whether illegal immigrants have registered to vote in Connecticut. 

Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas could commission an audit of the more than 60,000 “drive-only” licenses issued by the Motor Vehicles Department to people who chose not to affirm that they are citizens. The audit would check the names and addresses on the licenses against the voter rolls. 

The same could be done with the more than 10,000 identification cards New Haven city government has issued to help illegal residents pose as legal. This audit might be more difficult, since city government keeps the ID card list secret to protect lawbreakers, but maybe it could be subpoenaed.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)