Clash on school library books shows Connecticut Democrats hate democracy

By Chris Powell

What is both most laughable and scariest about the Democratic Party in Connecticut is its hatred for democracy, which came up this week as the state House of Representatives debated the state budget written by the Democratic majority’s caucus.

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To avoid debate on their bill to obstruct challenges to sexually themed, vulgar, and graphic books in public school libraries, the Democrats had tried to hide it in their budget bill. Rep. Anne Dauphinais, a conservative Republican from Killingly, wasn’t fooled. She rose to complain about such books and began quoting sexually vulgar dialogue from one, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” a book that became controversial in Guilford’s school system two years ago. 

Deputy House Speaker Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven, who was presiding, interrupted Dauphinais and asked her to make her point without words that shouldn’t be used around faint-hearted people and children such as those present in the Hall of the House or watching on television.

If Dauphinais had meant to bait Candelaria, he quickly fell into her trap, making her point for her by trying to shut her up. She replied by noting that the sexual vulgarity she had read aloud and to which Candelaria had objected was the same sexual vulgarity that school librarians in Connecticut were already providing to children of all ages. If this was objectionable in the House, how could it be less objectionable in school?

For years similarly ironic incidents have been happening around the country at school board meetings as parents have objected to sexually explicit, vulgar, and graphic books stocked in school libraries. It’s a perfectly fair issue: Exactly what sexual content is appropriate for what ages, and who decides?

Of course there is a big difference between reading silently and reading aloud, as Dauphinais did. But that wasn’t the objection Deputy Speaker Candelaria made. He declared the words objectionable in themselves for young audiences, though Dauphinais had no other effective way of sharing them with the House and the public.

Even so, conservatives should acknowledge that sexual and even racist language may have a place in literature, especially “coming of age” literature for older children. 

Indeed, what may be the most moving passage in American literature, from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” involves the “N word” even as the character uttering it repudiates racism. Yet some people who consider themselves politically liberal want “Huckleberry Finn” removed from school libraries as much as some conservatives want “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” removed.

The stocking of libraries is a matter of judgment. The issue lately before the General Assembly has been something else: Whether the public should have the right to influence such judgments, either directly or through elected school boards, or whether school librarians should be formally declared unchallengeable experts, answering to no one, as Democrats wanted to arrange with their legislation.

The Democratic bill signified the party’s hatred of democracy. Drunk with arrogance in their one-party state, the Democrats want to stifle political incorrectness everywhere just as Deputy Speaker Candelaria did with Representative Dauphinais.

If democracy is to be sustained in a big federal republic like the United States, some school libraries will stock not just “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” but also homosexuality manuals and paeans to transgenderism, and some won’t. Meanwhile, in another irony missed by Democratic legislators, the biggest censors or “book banners” aren’t people who complain about particular books but librarians themselves.

For librarians have limited space on their shelves while the number of books is practically infinite. So librarians have to choose, and a librarian’s choosing which books to exclude is no different from a parent’s objecting to a sexually explicit, vulgar, and graphic book that might get into the hands of a 6-year-old. School and public libraries should answer for their choices. 

Librarians may have degrees in library science and may be members of the American Library Association, but, in the end, as George Bernard Shaw said, all professions are conspiracies against the laity — that is, against democracy. 

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

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Rowland’s pardon means little; and Looney cites bad parenting

By Chris Powell

As a practical matter President Trump’s pardon of Connecticut’s disgraced former governor, John G. Rowland, means little beyond restoring his right to possess firearms. 

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Rowland already completed his two federal criminal sentences for various acts of political corruption and faced no additional punishment that could be rescinded. Having been released, he already had regained his right to vote in Connecticut, and since he is an elector again, the state Constitution would qualify him to hold any elective office in the state, though the state Supreme Court, contrary to the state Constitution, pretends that only lawyers who have practiced law for 10 years can serve as attorney general.

While Rowland remains popular in his hometown, Waterbury, and it’s not impossible to imagine the city electing him mayor, he has moved to Clinton and it is  impossible to imagine Connecticut electing him to state office again.

Of course the pardon can’t restore to Rowland the more than three years he spent behind bars. It can’t make anyone forget his offenses, or remove from the historical record the disgrace he inflicted on Connecticut as the state’s first governor to be convicted for offenses in office. 

The pardon is just a proclamation of forgiveness by the federal government under the administration of a president who may be even more challenged ethically than Rowland was. Presumably Rowland’s pardon, like the many other questionable pardons Trump has issued in the first few months of his second term, makes the president feel powerful and magnanimous and will make Rowland feel better about himself, though there was nothing unfair about his convictions and he didn’t deserve the formal forgiveness of a pardon more than any other former offender.

That is, Trump pardons people not so much because they deserve it but because he can. 

Trump isn’t the first president to use his pardon power for political patronage rather than for redressing injustice. In recent decades presidents of both parties increasingly have turned pardons into patronage. After repeatedly promising he wouldn’t do it, Trump’s immediate predecessor, Joe Biden,  notoriously pardoned his dissolute son, Hunter, the central figure in the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling business. 

This bipartisanship in pardons doesn’t make them right; it just further disgraces the people for electing such grifters to the country’s highest office.    

Nor will the pardon relieve Rowland of having to live with himself. But he is a healthy 68 and still has time to earn more forgiveness than Trump’s pardon can convey, even if few Democrats in Connecticut will forgive anyone these days simply for being a Republican.

More charitable people will not hector Rowland but instead will wish him luck in avoiding a third conviction and prison term.

*

Shepherding another big and expensive social-services bill to passage in the state Senate last week, Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, made an acknowledgment that was stunning coming from a Democrat: that neglect of children at home is the primary cause of educational failure.

“Five-year-olds who come to school without adequate preparation,” Looney said, “are in effect isolated and doomed to failure except in a few rare cases where there may be an intervention in their behalf that might help them catch up. It’s a terrible thing to see.” 

He added: “My daughter-in-law and my niece both teach in inner-city schools and they have seen heartbreaking cases of young children whose preparation is so deficient, coming from homes where there is inadequate parenting.” 

This was Looney’s argument for big new state appropriations for pre-school and “special education.”

Of course Democrats see every social problem as a reason for enlarging government rather than correcting mistaken policies. But the legislation Looney was advocating is at best remedial. It doesn’t get to the cause of the problem, the cause the senator acknowledged: inadequate parenting.

So what is the cause of inadequate parenting? And since, as Looney says, “it’s a terrible thing,” why doesn’t government treat it as child neglect or abuse? 

It wouldn’t have cost anything to ask — and maybe that’s why it wasn’t asked.

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

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Connecticut devalues education while throwing more money at it

By Chris Powell

Except to the teacher unions, Connecticut’s Linda McMahon is a big relief as secretary of the U.S. Education Department, mainly because her predecessor, Connecticut’s Miguel Cardona, was such a disaster.

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Cardona spent most of his time pandering to the unions. In contrast, the other day McMahon celebrated National Charter Schools Week, applauding competition among schools and the reduction of union influence, which has dumbed down education while inflating its costs.

As long as the teacher unions control a major political party and are the foremost special interest in politics in most states, as in Connecticut, there’s no chance of saving public education, and alternative schools may be the only way of preserving any education at all.

Still, it would be nice if somebody tried to restore public education. For public education often used to accomplish what private education seldom could and usually didn’t even try to do: integrate society comprehensively — racially, ethnically, religiously, economically, and by all levels of student intelligence. 

Of course children would and will always be bratty, snobby, cruel, and cliquish much of the time, but even then public schools still can introduce them to different kinds of people and force them to deal with differences and thereby get a hint of the need to unify the country.

Regional “magnet” schools in Connecticut and elsewhere were meant to increase racial integration by putting city and suburban students together across municipal boundaries. But there aren’t enough “magnet” schools to achieve much integration, and, as Hartford’s experience has shown, the integration achieved by “magnet” schools has led to greater segregation of the urban underclass. For the “magnet” schools have drawn the more parented and engaged students out of neighborhood schools in the city, leaving the students in those schools even more indifferent and demoralized.

The urban underclass is the essence of the education problem. Many people naturally want to escape it and place their children in schools that aren’t dragged down by their demographics. That means “magnet” or charter schools or, most of all, fleeing the city for the suburbs, not that all suburban schools are so much better.

The only way to recover the integrative influence of public education may be to try to improve public education everywhere at once, first by recognizing that student learning correlates far more with parenting than with school spending. Parenting has declined not just because welfare policy is so pernicious, subsidizing fatherlessness and child neglect, but also because government and schools have let parenting decline by eliminating behavioral and academic standards for both parents and students.

There are no penalties for parents who fail to see that their children get to school reliably. There are no penalties for parents who avoid contact with their children’s teachers when something is wrong. There are no penalties for parents or students when students fail to learn. 

Indeed, Connecticut’s only comprehensive policy of public education — social promotion — destroys behavioral and academic standards. It proclaims to parents and students alike that there is no need to learn and that school isn’t important. Thus Connecticut devalues education even while increasing its cost. 

Connecticut’s underclass has figured this out. The underclass knows that no student needs to earn a high school diploma, and that people who have children they are unprepared to support will be subsidized extensively by the government in a fatherless home — subsidized enough to avoid starvation but not enough to get a proper upbringing.

But if even ignorant students must be graduated from high school, at least their dismal academic records could be printed on their diplomas so a diploma might mean something again, if only a horror story. 

Making failing students repeat grades, as was done before self-esteem trumped learning, would have even more impact. Limiting students to two repeated grades before graduating them early but ignorant would have still more.

Until society forcefully demonstrates its respect for education and realizes that just throwing more money at it doesn’t work, the underclass won’t respect it either.

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

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Distinguish among immigrants; and Pratt’s gradual departure

By Chris Powell

Leftist research and social-service groups are working with news organizations to blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. 

It happened again last week as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers touted a report from Data Haven and the Connecticut Immigrant Support Network about the contributions of immigrants, legal and illegal alike, to the state’s economy.

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The report says: “Policies that deter immigration, including those targeted at people who are legally authorized to work in the U.S., will harm the Connecticut economy. In particular, deporting undocumented immigrants, who comprise 3% of Connecticut’s total population (about 117,000 people), would potentially wipe out tens of thousands of jobs, given that 87% of these immigrants are working age.”

This is triply misleading. 

First, the report falsely suggests that there is clamor in Connecticut to expel legal immigrants. To the contrary, Connecticut is happily full of citizens and legal residents of all sorts of foreign ancestry. 

Second, the jobs held by illegal immigrants in Connecticut would not necessarily disappear if illegal immigrants disappeared. That’s because the labor participation rate in Connecticut — the percentage of the adult population in the workforce — has been declining for decades, from 71% in 1991 to 65% as of April, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is, there is slack in the state’s workforce, and while many state residents are not highly skilled, a labor shortage might raise wages and draw unemployed people back into the workforce.     

Third, the report holds that, insofar as they are working, legal and illegal immigrants are and should be considered the same.

But they’re not the same. 

Legal immigrants have been reviewed by immigration authorities for suitability to enter the country — reviewed in regard to their intentions, behavior, health, ability to support themselves financially, associations, and any past immigration law violations.

But illegal immigrants typically have not been reviewed at all. Some probably have heard that state government in Connecticut obstructs and tries to nullify federal immigration law and provides financial and other benefits to illegal immigrants — that the state believes that anyone who breaks into the United States illegally and reaches Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law.

That is the big issue here — not the supposed economic benefits to the state from having a class of unenfranchised serfs working under the table, lowering wages for unskilled labor, but whether everyone entering the United States should be vetted and immigration law enforced or whether the borders should be open again as they were during the Biden administration.

But in debate in the state House of Representatives the other day, Democratic Majority Leader Jason Rojas argued that no distinction should be made between legal and illegal immigrants. “We should reject referring to them as illegal,” he said.

Journalists covering the immigration issue in Connecticut seem to agree. They never put the question of undifferentiated immigration to its advocates — not even to the governor, members of Congress, and Rojas and other state legislators.

*

During the recent strike at Pratt & Whitney, a member of the machinists union wrote to the Waterbury Republican-American complaining that the company has been transferring jet engine parts manufacturing work out of Connecticut to a new factory in North Carolina, threatening job security for the company’s workers here. 

This is actually an old story. Sixty years ago Pratt & Whitney had more than 20,000 employees in Connecticut. Today it has only half as many in the state but 43,000 around the country and worldwide.

Expanding elsewhere has been the company’s policy for decades. Part of it is economizing, since labor is usually cheaper and taxes lower outside Connecticut. But the bigger part of it is the politics of being a major military contractor needing to build congressional support throughout the country. Whether a weapons system works well can be less important than which states profit from it.

Loyalty to one’s origins doesn’t mean much in big business anymore. It doesn’t help that state government, ever oblivious, keeps making Connecticut more expensive. 

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

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CT Public’s wild salaries; and make school answer

By Chris Powell

This column’s recent criticism of the Connecticut Public radio and television organization for repeatedly refusing to respond to inquiries about its executive salaries and federal tax return induced the organization to come out of hiding.

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‘Rule of law’ advocates have many blind spots

Connecticut Public isn’t public about its salaries

Insisting that Connecticut Public is really transparent and accountable, the organization’s chief financial officer last week provided an internet link to its 2024 return. The return is not at Connecticut Public’s internet site at all but at National Public Radio’s. It can be accessed from Connecticut Public’s site but is well concealed, since searches on Connecticut Public’s site for “tax return” or “Form 990” don’t produce it.

The salary information in the return may explain why the return is not easily located. It shows that Connecticut Public’s chief executive officer, Mark G. Contreras, was paid $614,759, that 10 other officers and executives were paid between $204,000 and $321,000, and that seven of those received more than $240,000.

No wonder Connecticut Public needs so much money from the state and federal governments and is always asking viewers and corporations for more.

CEO Contreras’ salary exceeds by about $150,000 the salary of the (sort of) departing chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System, Terrence Cheng, who abused a whopping expense account besides. But Connecticut Public employs fewer than 200 people, the college system more than 14,000.

Since Connecticut Public is “regime media,” a news organization whose politics aligns closely with that of the party controlling state government, state government is spending $3.1 million to renovate the organization’s headquarters in Hartford. Meanwhile some private-sector news organizations in Connecticut can’t afford offices anymore. Their employees work from home.

In a recent essay published by newspapers in the state, Contreras appealed to the General Assembly to preserve state tax credits that bring Connecticut Public as much as $800,000 per year. The newspapers that published Contreras’ essay have not yet questioned state government’s financial support for an organization that, while purporting to serve the public, pays its executives so extravagantly.

In any case, if Governor Lamont and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly ever want to reconsider their principles for writing a state budget — that everything on which state money is spent is essential forever, that no expenses ever can be reduced, and that nothing can be audited for results — Connecticut Public’s tax return might be a good place to start.

*

If the worst non-sequitur in government in Connecticut is that something can’t be discussed because it’s a personnel matter, the second worst is that something can’t be discussed because there’s a lawsuit about it. For nearly everything in government involves a personnel matter or a lawsuit.

The lawsuit excuse for unaccountability was the response of East Hartford town government to a report last week by WTNH-TV8’s Kathryn Hauser about an East Hartford school’s repeated abuse of a young autistic student. Supported by many surveillance videos taken in the school, WTNH reported that while the boy didn’t seem to be unruly or misbehaving, in December and January school staffers repeatedly dragged and manhandled him and pinned him up against the wall of a seclusion room.

With politically correct euphemism, the school calls the seclusion room its Mindfulness Center. People who are actually mindful call such places “rubber rooms.”

WTNH said an investigation by the state Department of Children and Families substantiated misconduct against the boy by six school employees and one was fired, two resigned under investigation, and the others were demoted, reassigned, or placed on leave. But because the boy’s mother is suing the town, East Hartford Mayor Connor Martin and School Superintendent Thomas Anderson refused to answer questions about the misconduct.

This is a scandal requiring urgent accountability to the public, not just to the abused boy and his mother. Having already acted against the staff members involved, the school administration knows what happened and should have nothing to hide. East Hartford’s Board of Education should insist on accountability. It’s just custom, not law, that school boards in Connecticut are secretive, cowardly, and feckless.

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

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Democrats would abolish public control of schools

By Chris Powell

In Connecticut it’s nearly impossible for municipal school boards to fire teachers, and Democratic state legislators have set about to make it even harder.

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Connecticut Public isn’t public about its salaries

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The Connecticut Mirror’s Jessika Harkay reports that the Democrats have pushed through the state Senate a bill that would require school boards to show “just cause” for firing a teacher, a provision that would allow any appeal procedure to substitute someone else’s judgment for the board’s. The bill also would transfer to a supposedly impartial arbiter the ultimate power of firing.

In effect, school boards and superintendents would no longer be even technically in charge of the most basic personnel management of school systems. Unelected arbiters would be in charge. 

The reasons given for the legislation are just pretexts. 

The bill’s foremost advocate, Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, says, “We have teachers who could be terminated by a decision of a board of education, and in these very politicized times, that might not be neutral, and impartial, and a fair process.”

But school boards, elected by the voters of their towns, always have had the power to fire their employees. People always may disagree about what’s fair, but having elected officials make decisions is democracy. If a school board should be disempowered because an employee might disagree with it, democracy would be abolished.

The Democratic majority leader in the Senate, Bob Duff of Norwalk, says teachers are “under assault” these days. But while controversy involving teachers has increased, this doesn’t mean that teachers who are criticized are always right and their critics always wrong. Indeed, despite recent criticism of teachers, proponents of the legislation offer no evidence that it has resulted in any firings of teachers in Connecticut. Indeed, teachers in the state qualify for tenure after four years on the job, whereupon as a practical matter they can’t be fired for anything short of rape or murder.

As always the big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it really isn’t public at all. It is run mainly for the benefit of its own unionized employees, because those employees constitute the political army of the majority party, whose objective is to stamp out public administration.

NEXT CHANCELLOR CONTRACT: The Republican minority in the state Senate, most of whose members opposed the legislation to make firing teachers virtually impossible, is striving to restore a little public administration to the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System, which recently was scandalized by the expense account abuse committed by its grossly overpaid chancellor, Terrence Cheng, abuse that wasn’t caught by the system’s Board of Regents.

The college system is now doubly scandalized because, while the regents recently wanted to dismiss Cheng, they decided that his contract prevented his dismissal until June next year. So the regents made a deal to move Cheng out of the chancellor’s job but keep him on the payroll as a “strategic adviser” for another year at his current salary, $450,000. The regents haven’t yet figured out what their “strategic adviser” is to do besides collect his spectacular severance pay.

Since the regents are so incompetent, four Republican senators — Stephen Harding, Henri Martin, Heather Somers, and Rob Sampson — have asked the regents for a little protection against more incompetence. The senators want the regents to publicize, before it is ratified, a draft of the contract they propose to give the next chancellor, so the public can review and comment on it.

The Republican senators proposed this idea as legislation a few weeks ago but the Democratic majority in the Senate objected. The Democrats don’t want the public to see state government’s extravagance until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Will the contract for the new chancellor bring the position’s salary down from outer space? Will it liberate the regents to replace the new chancellor at any time for a simple loss of confidence without extra expense?

It should. If the regents want to regain some respect and make amends, they should promise the transparency the Republican senators have asked for. 

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

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‘Rule of law’ advocates have many blind spots

By Chris Powell

Hooray for the 500 lawyers who this month formed the Connecticut Rule of Law Committee, reprimanded President Trump, without quite naming him, for his recklessness about due process and his bullying of the judiciary, and righteously recommitted themselves to the rule of law. Trump often deserves scolding, even if it has yet to do much good.

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But the chest-thumping of the lawyers might have seemed a bit hollow to those who can see other problems.

It might have been nice for the state to have had a rule of law committee when President Biden stopped enforcing immigration law and opened the borders, flooding the country with millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom came to Connecticut. Much of the financial emergency just declared by Governor Lamont, a deficit of nearly $300 million in the state’s Medicare program, involves coverage for illegals, for whose medical care and housing government made no provision.

It might have been nice for Connecticut to have had a rule of law committee when political correctness took over and caused state government and many municipalities to adopt “sanctuary” policies obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law — a form of nullification.

It might have been nice for Connecticut to have had a rule of law committee when the state didn’t just repeal its criminal penalties for possession of marijuana but also thrust state government into the marijuana business, though the drug remains prohibited by federal law — more nullification.    

Unfortunately there was no rule of law committee when the Connecticut Supreme Court, partly on the absurd basis of opinion polls, declared capital punishment unconstitutional though both the state and national constitutions expressly authorized it and continue to do so — still more nullification.

Even now the General Assembly is preparing legislation to postpone for another four years enforcement of Connecticut’s law requiring a little racial integration of schools. Supposedly racial integration of schools has been constitutionally required since 1954. The Rule of Law Committee hasn’t gotten around to this one yet either.  

All these issues are controversial, and lawyers throughout the state were involved with them, but none seems to have perceived their relation to the rule of law.

Quite apart from its many blind spots, there’s a self-serving element to the Connecticut Rule of Law Committee. Explaining the committee, one of its founders, James Glasser, cited “our desire to make sure people know that especially here in Connecticut, we’re particularly blessed with an outstanding judiciary.”

Well, maybe. But then how can a lawyer who makes his living by practicing before Connecticut’s judges characterize those judges — in public, anyway — as anything less than “outstanding”? A lawyer’s candor about the shortcomings of the judges before whom he practices might be bad for business. Indeed, expect the Rule of Law Committee to issue a thousand more reprimands of Trump before its first public criticism of a Connecticut judge.

PARENTING, NOT SPENDING: As usual Bridgeport’s schools are failing and short of money, and the other day the vice president of the city’s Board of Education, Joe Sokolovic, remarked that the school system would need tens of millions of dollars more to match the per-pupil spending of the wealthy towns nearby, like Greenwich. 

But as long as disparities in per-pupil spending remain part of the discussion of school performance in Connecticut, schools will never improve. For Greenwich could cut its per-pupil spending in half, or state government could force Greenwich’s schools to do that, and Greenwich’s students would still far outperform Bridgeport’s. That’s because, unlike Bridgeport’s students, most students in Greenwich have parents who can support their children adequately.

Connecticut should have realized decades ago that the education problem isn’t per-pupil spending but per-pupil parenting. Elected officials press the spending issue precisely to avoid the parenting issue.

CORRECTION: Endorsing legislative testimony by former South Windsor Police Chief Matthew Reed on a freedom-of-information issue, this column recently also identified him as a lawyer for the state Freedom of Information Commission. Reed has moved on from that position and is now Ellington’s town administrator.  

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

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Connecticut Public isn’t public about its salaries

By Chris Powell

Connecticut Public, the state affiliate of the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio, may be a bit ill-named.

It calls itself as “Connecticut’s only statewide, community-supported public media service,” striving “to be an essential source for truth and ideas.”

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Connecticut Public gets money from state government and the federal government. Two years ago it received a state grant of $3.1 million to renovate its headquarters in Hartford. Last week newspapers throughout the state published an essay by Connecticut Public’s chief executive officer, Mark G. Contreras, asking state government to maintain its tax credit for broadcast productions, without which, Contreras wrote, Connecticut Public might lose as much as $800,000 a year, revenue extremely difficult to replace.

Of course Connecticut Public is always soliciting donations from viewers and corporations as well.

Being underwritten financially as it is, being a federally tax-exempt charitable organization, and having “public” in its name, Connecticut Public would seem obliged to reciprocate with transparency and accountability to the public.

But transparency and accountability were impossible to find last week when this writer repeatedly telephoned and e-mailed Connecticut Public and CEO Contreras in pursuit of basic corporate information. That is, what are the salaries of Contreras and Connecticut Public’s four other highest-paid employees? 

No phone calls, messages, and e-mails were even acknowledged.

Ordinarily such financial information must be available to the public via a tax-exempt organization’s federal income tax return, which federal law requires tax-exempt organizations to provide upon request. Transparent and accountable tax-exempt organizations typically post their tax returns on their internet sites. Connecticut Public doesn’t seem to do that. 

Just as strange, the most recent tax return for Connecticut Public posted at the Internal Revenue Service’s internet site is for 2022, and it reported Contreras’ annual salary as $696,000 — $200,000 more than the salary that recently shocked Connecticut, the salary of the expense account-exploiting chancellor of the State Colleges and Universities System, Terrence Cheng, who will be getting another $450,000 in severance pay.

Why won’t Connecticut Public disclose the salaries of its top executives? Has Connecticut Public filed tax returns since 2022? If so, where are they? If not, why not?

The news organizations that recently published Contreras’ appeal for continued subsidy for Connecticut Public from state government may be obliged to follow up here. 

Possibly also obliged to follow up are Governor Lamont and the other state officials who arranged Connecticut Public’s $3.1 million state grant, as well as state legislators, since they may be voting on the tax credits Connecticut Public wants to keep.

Or do Connecticut Public’s leftist politics, so congenial to those in charge of state government, exempt it from accountability to the public?

In any case state legislators lately are demonstrating laughable cowardice on other matters.

The General Assembly is advancing legislation to impose another delay in enforcement of Connecticut’s law requiring a little racial integration in public schools. If enforced, the law would require school systems to keep the racial minority student population of each school within 25% of the racial minority population of their school system as a whole. The pending legislation would delay enforcement for another four years, until 2029. Even then the law would require no more of school systems than the filing of a mere plan for integration.

Particularly hoping for delay in enforcement are school systems in Fairfield, Greenwich, Hamden, and West Hartford, nominally liberal towns where integration is great in principle but practice is something else.

Having long been intimidated out of sensible policy by the powerful bear lobby — yes, the bear lobby — state legislators seem about to punt the bear-hunting issue to Governor Lamont and the state Department of Energy and Environment Protection. Pending legislation would authorize the governor and the department to decide if bear hunting is needed to protect the public. Legislators wouldn’t have to take direct responsibility.

If Connecticut fails to reduce its bear population, each town soon will have at least several bears and eventually many more as disruptive residents. That’s not the integration the state needs. 

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

-END-

Connecticut fails to notice that poverty is exploding

By Chris Powell

Clamor at the state Capitol for more money for various social programs suggests a comprehensive problem that has yet to be recognized by anyone in authority.

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Contradictions snare Democrats with police accountability and Pratt strike

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Many state legislators are supporting more state tax credits to help households support their children — tax credits not just for low-income households but also for households with incomes as high as $250,000 a year. Such tax credits — payable in cash if households don’t have enough income tax liability to offset them — are a more sophisticated form of welfare.

More money is being sought to cover the rising numbers of people requiring state Medicaid insurance — medical insurance for the indigent — and to raise doctor payment rates that haven’t been substantially adjusted for inflation for 17 years. About 22% of Connecticut’s population is covered by Medicaid and about 40% of births in the state are to women on Medicaid. 

State government recently established a “baby bonds” program for children born on Medicaid. The program assumes that without “baby bonds” the children will be raised in poverty and remain poor when they reach adulthood. So now state government is appropriating $3,200 for each child born on Medicaid and investing the money in the expectation of giving such children $11,000 or more when they reach 18. 

Many legislators and Governor Lamont support a vast expansion of state-funded day care for households that can’t afford it and even for households that can. Last week rallies were held throughout the state in support of state government subsidies for day care. As traffic went by advocates waved signs reading “Honk if you want affordable child care.” That is, “Honk if you’d like others to pay for your kids.”

Two months ago the General Assembly and Governor Lamont enacted an emergency appropriation of $40 million for schools to cover the rising numbers and costs of students needing “special education,” many of whom are victims of neglect at home.

More money is being sought to help food banks assist the rising numbers of households that can’t afford to feed themselves. Last week Connecticut Foodshare said food insecurity in the state increased 10% in the last year, with more than a half million people not sure of where their next meal is coming from.

The Covid-19 virus epidemic is long over but chronic absenteeism in the state’s schools remains high. In New Haven’s high schools it has reached 50%.

All these developments proclaim that poverty is overtaking Connecticut, which still likes to think of itself as a prosperous state.

While elected officials and social-service groups recognize the increasing needs, they aren’t linking them and wondering about the underlying causes. No one in authority is asking: Where are all these people who can’t support themselves and their children coming from?

The sharp rise of inflation in housing, food, and energy prices during the Biden administration is a big factor. But poverty was worsening in Connecticut long before the inflation of the Biden years — along with open borders and transgenderism — caused voters to repudiate the administration in last November’s election.

Of course elected officials must be sensitive to the growing inability of people to support themselves. But throwing subsidies on top of subsidies doesn’t address the causes of impoverishment. Indeed, it may worsen inflation.

Any inquiry into the worsening impoverishment should ask questions that go far beyond inflation and additional subsidies. 

For example, how does a welfare system that for decades has been destroying the family, robbing children of fathers in their home, help them grow up?

How are children helped by social promotion in Connecticut’s schools, which now happily graduate illiterates and near-illiterates in the belief that self-esteem is more important than learning enough to become self-sufficient?

How is the cost of living reduced by letting municipal zoning impede development of less-expensive housing?

If, as the clamor at the Capitol suggests, Connecticut is falling apart under the weight of social disintegration, people in authority should summon the courage to acknowledge it and pursue its causes and not just keep trying to remediate its effects.

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

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Defeat police cover-up bill and stop flagpole propaganda

By Chris Powell

State government’s retreat from accountability for its employees and municipal employees is continuing, as legislation that would conceal accusations of misconduct against police officers is working its way through the General Assembly without any critical reflection by legislators.

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The bill, publicized by Connecticut Inside Investigator’s Katherine Revello, was approved unanimously by the Senate and would prohibit the release of complaints of misconduct against officers prior to any formal adjudication of the complaints by police management.

Of course that’s an invitation to police agencies to conceal all complaints of misconduct and delay formal adjudication of them.

Yes, there can be false or misleading complaints against officers, and maybe disclosure of such complaints will unfairly harm some officer’s reputation someday. But the chances of that are small. News organizations aren’t likely to publicize such complaints without doing some investigation themselves, and the local news business is withering away.

But police misconduct is always being covered up somewhere, Connecticut has a long record of it, going back to the murder of the Perkins brothers by four state troopers in Norwich in 1969, and chances that government will strive to conceal its mistakes and wrongdoing are always high, just as the chances that the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration will nullify any serious discipline for government employees are always high.

Testifying against the secrecy legislation, former South Windsor Police Chief Matthew Reed, also formerly a lawyer for the state Freedom of Information Commission, noted that the bill would impair the high standards Connecticut purports to want in police work. Reed cited the state law that prohibits municipal police departments from hiring any former officer who resigned or retired while under investigation. If such investigations are kept secret, that law may become useless. 

Government employees in Connecticut are always seeking exemption from the scrutiny guaranteed by the state’s freedom-of-information law, and imposing secrecy on complaints against police is likely to lead to requests from other groups of government employees for similar exemptions.

Even the state senators from districts with large minority populations who have supported police accountability legislation in the past seem to have given the complaint-secrecy bill a pass. Maybe they are tired of being criticized as anti-police when they are really pro-accountability. Will there be enough pro-accountability members of the House of Representatives to stop the cover-up enabling act?

* 

To help save it from itself, Connecticut could use a few more gadflies like T. Chaz Stevens, a Florida resident who used to live in Shelton and who keeps an eye out for government’s excessive entanglement with religion.

Stevens is the founder of what he calls the Church of Satanology and Perpetual Soirée, and the other day he scolded the Hartford City Council for having flown a Christian religion flag at City Hall in April. In response Stevens wrote to Mayor Arunan Arulampalam asking that City Hall also fly the flag of his church, thereby complying with the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that if government buildings grant requests to fly non-government flags, they have to grant all such requests, lest they violate First Amendment rights.

If Stevens’ request is denied, he could sue and well might win. 

The Hartford Courant reports that two members of the Hartford City Council, Joshua Michtom and John Gale, both lawyers, saw this problem coming and voted against flying the Christian flag. Other cities in Connecticut recently have made the same mistake by flying a Christian flag on government flagpoles: Bridgeport, New Britain, Torrington, and Waterbury.   

No matter how the Constitution is construed, government flagpoles should be restricted to government flags, which represent everyone. Anything else allows the government to be propagandized by groups with political influence. That is especially the case with the continuing efforts around the state to fly the “Pride” flag on government flagpoles.

The national and state flags already represent freedom of sexual orientation. But the “Pride” flag is construed to represent letting men into women’s restrooms, sports, and prisons, politically correct silliness about which there is sharp division of opinion.

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

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