By Chris Powell
Since the government of Saudi Arabia is repressive, should people care that the Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, has been doing consulting work for a Saudi company in which the Saudi government is invested?
Maybe people should care, but not before they decide whether they care that so many of the consumer goods they buy come from China, whose government is even more repressive than Saudi Arabia’s.
Leading Connecticut Democrats criticizing Stefanowski for his Saudi business, including Governor Lamont, are missing the irony of their criticism.
Stefanowski says his Saudi business involves a hydrogen-based “green” energy project that would cut use of oil-based fuels that produce pollution and are believed to accelerate climate change.
Meanwhile President Biden, a Democrat, having pledged to ruin the U.S. oil industry, lately has asked not just Saudi Arabia but also Venezuela, another government with a repressive regime, to increase oil production so the United States doesn’t have to. The president’s appeal to those repressive regimes in pursuit of more oil hasn’t bothered Connecticut Democrats at all.
Apparently Saudi Arabia is bad when a Republican pursues “green” energy there but not when a Democratic president goes there for oil.
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GUNS AREN’T THE PROBLEM: A few weeks ago a statement from Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign promised “four more years of gun safety.” But Connecticut hasn’t had even one year of gun safety, no more than the rest of the country has had one.
For too many guns are already in private hands and the underlying problem isn’t guns at all.
Last week two Bristol police officers were shot to death and a third wounded by a drunken madman who set an ambush for them. Also last week four people were shot in separate incidents in a 36-hour period in Hartford, and three people were shot, one fatally, in downtown Bridgeport.
On top of that, police throughout the state told the Meriden Record-Journal that Connecticut’s new juvenile crime law isn’t reducing juvenile crime, particularly the epidemic of car thefts.
The law allows police to keep arrested juveniles in custody for eight hours, an increase of two, while police seek a detention order from a court. But Meriden Police Chief Roberto Rosado says this only consumes more police resources, forcing officers to spend more time watching the juveniles in custody.
The courts, the governor, and the General Assembly don’t want juveniles confined but instead referred to “the help they need.” But young troublemakers laugh at this, and the “help” they actually [ITALICS] get [END ITALICS] is often ineffectual. Locking them up longer may be the only way to deter them.
“Sometimes,” Chief Rosado says, “we’re seeing juveniles arrested multiple times on stolen motor vehicle charges and they continually get released from our custody to their parents.” That is, of course, if the juveniles even have parents in the normal sense, which they often don’t.
State law also prohibits police from chasing a juvenile offender in a car unless a violent felony has been committed. That may be sensible for public safety but Wallingford police Sgt. Stephen Jaques says juvenile offenders now know the police can’t chase them when they speed off in a stolen car.
From the shootings to the car thefts to the rise in reckless driving and bad behavior generally, these problems indicate social disintegration, hastened by government’s crippling response to the recent virus epidemic. Ordinary legislation isn’t likely to fix them.
Nor are the problems likely to be fixed by the hundreds of millions of dollars recently appropriated by government in the name of mental health care and training for people to become counselors.
Amid the “great resignation,” government’s paying people not to work, and the growing desire of people to work from home rather than at an office or factory, there is not enough labor. There are many job openings but the labor participation rate remains low.
The country seems increasingly zombified, with people suddenly going nuts. Legislation attempts remediation but is not succeeding, so where is the investigation into the problem’s cause? And without an investigation into the cause, how can there be confidence that any policy response will be relevant?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 