‘Rubber rooms’ in schools: Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?

By Chris Powell

A member of Enfield’s Board of Education is sore that the school system has eliminated a hundred staff positions as well as sports for many students but is increasing the number of school “seclusion rooms” at a cost of about $4,000 each. The rooms, whose walls are padded, are used for the emergency confinement and isolation of students who have episodes of incorrigibility and can’t be controlled — like the “rubber rooms” of mental hospitals.

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Six of Enfield’s 12 school buildings have “seclusion rooms” and there are 11 rooms in total, so some schools have more than one such room, presumably because the schools sometimes need to confine more than one child at a time.

This suggests an epidemic of incorrigibility.

The board member complaining about the seclusion rooms, Philip Kober, seems not to realize that maintaining order in a school is a prerequisite of education. But his complaint at least may remind Connecticut about the explosion of mental illness among its children and about state government’s insane expectation that schools should double as mental hospitals.

Connecticut very much needs such reminding, and Enfield School Superintendent Steven Moccio isn’t helping. He refused to tell the Journal Inquirer which schools have seclusion rooms and refused to allow the newspaper to view and photograph them, as if the schools aren’t public institutions and if public inspection would somehow endanger national security. Inspection of the rooms would facilitate raising an issue the superintendent wants to suppress. 

Moccio’s unaccountability is another reminder that a big problem of public education in Connecticut is that it often isn’t really public at all but the private fiefdom of its administrators and teachers. Enfield’s school board should disabuse the superintendent of that notion and order him to open the seclusion rooms to inspection.

Enfield’s is hardly the only school system in Connecticut to have seclusion rooms or to have had them recently until controversy erupted, with parents not wanting their incorrigible children to be treated as incorrigible.

So some schools now have their own mental health clinics, and last year the state Department of Children and Families opened four regional psychiatric crisis centers for children, locating them in Hartford, New Haven, New London, and Waterbury. Necessary as these clinics may be, they are still only remedial. They don’t look to the causes of the problem. 

Educators in Connecticut like to blame the recent virus epidemic for everything that ails the schools, but the epidemic is long over and student performance began its decline much earlier. The breakdown of the family under the pernicious incentives of the welfare system may have something to do with mental illness in children, along with, more recently, the strains put on the working class by severe inflation even as the Biden-Harris administration has been telling people that they never had it so good economically and they should disregard the evidence of their own lives.

But these explanations for the child mental illness epidemic are just educated guesses. State government should seek to know what is causing the explosion of mental illness among the young.

Knowing requires a formal inquiry by the General Assembly: a committee directed to find out, public hearings with testimony from expert witnesses and ordinary people whose children developed mental health problems, and then a considered judgment on what can be done about the causes.

Of course discerning the causes would be a lot harder than doing what state government usually does with problems: throwing ever more money at mere remediation that doesn’t solve the problem. Discerning causes also might risk controversy if government policy and parental irresponsibility were implicated. Would the governor and state legislators be prepared to change policies that contribute to mental illness among children if those policies have accrued their own constituencies?

Or would they prefer not to know where all the disturbed children are coming from and instead satisfy themselves with tours of the nice new psychiatric clinics and rubber rooms?

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

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Holiday congestion at Tweed indicates airport’s potential

By Chris Powell

Amid the crush of holiday travel last week few people were calling the revival of Tweed-New Haven Airport a great success. 

Passengers and neighbors alike were sore about the traffic jams on the narrow streets of New Haven’s eastern neighborhood abutting the side of the airport where the terminal is. The streets around Tweed are little different than they were when the airport opened almost a hundred years ago. 

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When passengers at last got into the terminal they weren’t much happier, since it is old and small — far too small to handle a holiday crush. 

Neighbors are always complaining not just about the airport traffic but also about the noise of the airplanes. While the airport began operating in 1931, long before anyone now living nearby was around, in recent decades scheduled service there has always been erratic, with airlines coming in and then disappearing after a few years or even just a few months, so neighbors got accustomed to Tweed’s half-heartedness.

But rather suddenly Tweed isn’t half-hearted anymore. It’s on the verge of being a real airport. 

In the last three years Tweed has added two ambitious start-up airlines, Avelo and Breeze, which offer direct flights from Tweed to 34 destinations in the country, as far west as Dallas and St. Louis. With Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit, and Washington’s Dulles airport, Tweed now offers practical connections to international flights. Air travelers in the New Haven area are being liberated from the struggle to reach the four New York metropolitan airports.

This doesn’t make Tweed’s revival a success yet.

As startups, Avelo and Breeze are more vulnerable to changes in business conditions than established airlines are. They could fail. 

Much of the airport’s property is across the city line in East Haven, which doesn’t like the idea of building a bigger terminal and better access roads on that side of the airport. Such improvements will mean redirecting through East Haven the traffic now heading to Tweed through New Haven. (To reduce traffic, New Haven is running shuttle buses from downtown to the airport. At least college students may avail themselves of this service.) 

Lawsuits are always popping up around the airport, brought by people who want it to go away.

Being only 12 feet above sea level, Tweed seems more afflicted by fog and flight diversions than other airports, and last week fog caused diversions to Albany, Syracuse, and Providence. New Haven isn’t such a haul from Providence, but Albany and Syracuse are. Of course diversions to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks would be so much better, even if Bradley can have bad weather too.

But if last week’s surge in passengers doesn’t prove Tweed’s success, it strongly suggests that the southern Connecticut market can support the airport sufficiently if politics allows it to keep improving as contemplated.

New Haven owns the airport property and it is controlled by the New Haven Airport Authority, whose board includes members from both New Haven and East Haven. The authority has contracted Tweed’s operation to airport-management firm AvPorts, which runs 10 other airports. This arrangement may not be so efficient while the airport’s improvement requires expansion amid multiple jurisdictions and hostile interests.

That’s why it might be best to transfer the airport to the Connecticut Airport Authority, which operates and has greatly improved Bradley. As a state agency the authority could override local objections in pursuit of the broadest public interest.

Of course such a change could not happen without more leadership and courage than are usually available in state government. But if, in pursuit of economic development, improving southern Connecticut’s quality of life, and fairness, state government ever wanted to commit to giving the southern part of the state as good an airport as the northern part has, it at least might start appropriating funds for government’s gradual acquisition, through negotiation or eminent domain, of the residential and other properties adjacent to Tweed.

After last week’s surge in passengers, there’s no excuse for failing to fulfill the airport’s potential.

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

Reconsidering fluoridation; and are we having fun yet?

By Chris Powell

About 90% of Connecticut residents and 63% of U.S. residents are served by fluoridated water. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to become secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, considers fluoridation unsafe and aims to stop it. Kennedy has his eccentricities but that doesn’t make him wrong on fluoridation. Indeed, increasingly he seems to be right.

Fluoride, a mineral, began being added to public water supplies decades ago when it was found to prevent tooth decay in children. Back then the opposition to fluoridation was ridiculed because some people called fluoridation a communist plot to wreck the country’s health, as if the country wasn’t already doing a pretty good job of that with cigarettes and liquor. But now there is evidence that fluoride in drinking water harms children’s brain development, contributes to attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and causes cognitive impairment and skeletal weakening in older people. 

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This year the National Institutes of Health linked higher exposure to fluoride with reduced intelligence in children, and a federal court ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider fluoridation. In 2015 the federal government ordered a reduction of fluoride levels in public water supplies, so the issue is legitimate and properly a matter of medical and political judgment.

How much dental cavities are reduced by fluoridation is also disputed among experts. With fluoride now being added to toothpaste and mouthwashes, many developed countries that don’t fluoridate their water have shown declines in tooth decay similar to the declines in countries with fluoridation. Alternative access to fluoride diminishes the need for it in drinking water.

But another argument against fluoridation is more compelling. It is that fluoridation constitutes essentially a mass drugging of the population by the government, a serious violation of individual rights to achieve a marginal social benefit. If, as it seems, the dental benefits of fluoridation, such as they are, can be achieved without fluoridating everyone’s water, then fluoridation should stop. 

After all, unlike childhood vaccines, about which Secretary-designate Kennedy is also critical, fluoridation doesn’t prevent communicable or life-altering diseases. 

If under the Trump administration the federal government comes down against fluoridation, the states will follow, since some, like Connecticut, have laws requiring them to heed federal guidance on the issue and others will fear liability for disregarding federal policy. The federal government’s questionable and sometimes mistaken and contradictory policies on the recent Covid-19 epidemic suggest that its medical policies should be questioned and criticized as vigorously as its policies that give the country stupid imperial wars and massive illegal immigration.

*

Connecticut’s ever-troubled cities always deserve criticism as well, along with state government for ensuring that they stay troubled. But the criticism New Haven and Bridgeport got the other day from the financial services internet site WalletHub was stupid.

A survey by WalletHub ranked 182 U.S. cities for how much fun they provide, and New Haven came in 154th and Bridgeport 175th. Las Vegas came in first.

Asked about the study, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker dutifully disputed it, detailing the city’s attractions, though he had just had to deal with three more murders of young men. But responding as he did, the mayor dignified the survey when, under the circumstances, he might as well have told inquiring journalists where they could put it. 

Perhaps more wisely, Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim had nothing to say about the survey. But Ganim or other mayors of low-ranking cities could have replied that providing fun to visitors is not city government’s objective. Their proper objective is to provide safe and livable conditions to a largely impoverished population. If New Haven and Bridgeport ever were safe and livable for their residents, they would be triumphs even if no one ever visited them.

The advertising slogan for Las Vegas used to be, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” invoking not just gambling but also casual sex, various forms of exploitation, recklessness, empty transiency, and other things one might be ashamed of later. To many people New Haven and Bridgeport look better than that even now.

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

-END-

Puzzle isn’t Musk but Biden; and state should take over failing city schools

By Chris Powell

Democrats in Connecticut and throughout the country are seeking laughs by asserting that the political noise being made by zillionaire Elon Musk shows that he is not just an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump but the de-facto president-elect.

Musk is an odd duck in some respects. But he seems to have gotten rich at least in part by adding value to the world, and his space exploration business lately seems more successful than the government’s own. The people who mock Musk and the president-elect’s other super-rich pal, Vivek Ramaswamy, for being the president-elect’s choices to lead a Department of Government Efficiency are perfectly happy with government bloat.

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Since Trump is careless and prone to go off on crazy tangents — like the supposed necessity for the United States to acquire Greenland — the new administration is likely to provide plenty of material for ridicule. 

Yet Trump isn’t back in the Oval Office yet. Joe Biden remains there, at least when he’s not resting at home in Delaware, and the people guffawing about whether Trump or Musk will run the government seem not to have noticed the Wall Street Journal’s lengthy Dec. 19 report showing that Biden didn’t come down with senility just before his disastrous debate with Trump in June.

The Journal reported that Biden was senile almost from the moment he took office four years ago, with his staff and his party’s members of Congress concealing it, making excuses for his inability to handle regular business meetings, and, with the cooperation of most national news organizations, lying about his incompetence. According to the Journal, for years nearly everyone in close contact with the White House knew that the president wasn’t well.

So who has been de-facto president for the last for years? Who is de-facto president today? The president’s wife, “Doctor” Jill Biden? Vice President Kamala Harris? Secretary of State Anthony Blinken? The president’s influence-peddling son and bag man, Hunter Biden? A cabal of shadowy aides? 

Democrats questioning the power dynamic between Trump and Musk while ignoring the mysterious power dynamic of their own administration are complicit with the fraud.

*

Bridgeport’s school system has just lost its fifth superintendent in 10 years, as the city’s Board of Education has agreed to pay Carmela Levy-David $140,000 to go away. While Levy-David had repeatedly declared that she planned to stay in Bridgeport for 10 years, she lasted 16 months.

Levy-David leaves the school system with a $39 million deficit, which the board hopes to close by laying off dozens of administrators.      

Meanwhile architects hired by the board say the school system’s old buildings will need as much as $700 million in repairs and improvements over the next decade. 

The city’s population remains overwhelmingly poor, and so of course student performance remains terrible.

The state Education Department has taken notice. It has summoned the board’s chairman and acting superintendent to come to Hartford next month to discuss the big deficit, conflict among board members, and — oh, yes — student performance.

It’s hard to imagine how this meeting will accomplish much. The chaos in Bridgeport’s schools is longstanding and arises from the city’s poverty and low capacity for self-government, a problem shared with other cities in the state.

School administration is also chaotic in Hartford and New Haven. Hartford has just been shown to have passed an illiterate girl through 12 grades through high school graduation, and surely there are others like her, while New Haven’s schools have the state’s highest rate of chronic student absenteeism, 37%.

What does the state board expect the Bridgeport school officials to say at next month’s meeting? That another $100 million or so in state aid to the city’s schools every year will turn them around when the city itself will remain so dysfunctional? 

Where is the evidence of any substantial improvement in Connecticut’s city school systems in the last decade?

It is long past time for state government to take control of the worst city school systems and sweep aside all impediments to administration in the public interest.

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

-END-

Lamont, legislators minimize college arrogance, hypocrisy

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont is right that the expense account exploitation perpetrated by the chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, Terrence Cheng, and his fellow top administrators is “small ball,” insofar as the financial expense goes. It doesn’t compare to the hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns incurred in the New London state pier project by the Connecticut Port Authority, which haven’t offended the governor either.

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Even so, there is much to be offended about in the CSCU system, and it goes beyond Cheng’s awarding himself the perks of royalty on top of a salary and benefit package worth a half million dollars annually while constantly pleading poverty for the higher education system, which chronically operates at a deficit and is always asking for more money.

Cheng’s arrogance and hypocrisy are not “small ball” but major-league.

So is the unaccountability of the college system, which is supposed to answer to its 15-member Board of Regents. While the board includes former state House Speaker Richard J. Balducci, a Democrat, and New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, a Republican who may run for governor, it did not rush to investigate when Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers exposed Cheng’s exploitation of his expense account. Instead the governor had to ask state Comptroller Sean Scanlon to investigate, apparently assuming that the Board of Regents is just for show and its members are airheads. (The governor might know, since most of the regents are his appointees.)

The regents have escaped critical questioning not just by the governor and the comptroller but also by news organizations covering the expense-account scandal. How did the regents fail to learn how Cheng and his gang were abusing their expense accounts while pleading the college system’s poverty? If Cheng and his gang weren’t reporting to the regents, to whom were they reporting? Who was supposed to supervise their expense claims? Apparently no one.

How do the regents justify the half million dollars in compensation conferred on Cheng every year? What is so special about his leadership? Why do they continue to let Cheng live out of state, far from his workplace? What do the regents think about the example the Cheng gang has set? 

The regents are off the hook until someone bothers to ask.

Having decided to minimize the scandal, the governor probably won’t be asking. 

The leaders of the Republican minority in the General Assembly, Sen. Stephen Harding of Brookfield and Rep. Vincent J. Candelora of North Branford, declared that Cheng should be fired, but Democratic legislators said only that they’d welcome proposals for tighter standards for purchases by college administrators. The arrogance, hypocrisy, and bad examples of the administrators seem not to bother the Democratic legislators any more than they bother the governor.

During the legislature’s budget deliberations in a few weeks will the Democrats even remember the high living of the Cheng gang when they show up again to ask for more money?

BREAK THE LIQUOR LOBBY: When the legislature convenes next month Connecticut’s supermarkets again may ask to be allowed to sell wine along with the beer they already sell. Most state residents would like the convenience, which is enjoyed in 42 other states. Again the problem will be the liquor stores and particularly the “mom and pop” stores, which fear that ordinary free-market competition will put them out of business.

So what if it does? Supermarkets and other retailers in Connecticut fail and close all the time and no legislators propose to restrict competition in those businesses. But the liquor stores purport to be special and to deserve protection against competition. They get this protection not only through the ban on supermarket sales of wine but also through the state’s grotesque system of minimum prices for alcoholic beverages, which assures retailers a profit and customers high prices.

Most legislative districts have at least several “mom and pops” and statewide they form a powerful lobby against the public interest in more competition and lower prices. Will legislators dare to stand up against this special interest next year?

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

It’s a wonderful life — and a political one

By Chris Powell

Frank Capra’s 1946 film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to be broadcast again Christmas Eve at 8 p.m. by NBC television, is loved most for its personal message of discovery at Christmas: that its hero’s life has been, unbeknownst to him, crucial to his family, friends, community, and even his country.

Such general encouragement may seem more needed than ever these days; indeed, this may be, sadly, the cause of the film’s popularity. But “It’s a Wonderful Life” may be more important still for its overlooked lesson in democratic economics, a lesson arising from the struggle for survival of a combination credit union and savings bank, the Bailey Building & Loan in the Everytown of Bedford Falls.

The Building & Loan’s founder and chief executive, Peter Bailey, has died and its board of directors is deciding the institution’s future. The richest man in town, Potter, a misanthropic banker, cruel landlord, and board member, played by Lionel Barrymore, proposes dissolving the Building & Loan, and his callousness angers Bailey’s elder son, George, played earnestly by Jimmy Stewart, who has been working as assistant to his father.

* * *

POTTER: Peter Bailey was not a businessman. That’s what killed him. Oh, I don’t mean any disrespect to him, God rest his soul. He was a man of high ideals — so-called. But ideals without common sense can ruin this town. Now you take this loan here, to Ernie Bishop. You know, the fellow who sits around all day on his … brains, in his taxi. I happen to know the bank turned down this loan. But he comes here, and we’re building him a house worth $5,000. Why?

GEORGE BAILEY: Well, I handled that, Mr. Potter. You have all the papers there — his salary, insurance. I can personally vouch for his character.

POTTER: A friend of yours.

BAILEY: Yes, Sir.

POTTER: You see, if you shoot pool with some employee, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas. Now I say. …

BAILEY: Now hold on, Mr. Potter. Just a minute. Now you’re right when you say my father was no businessman — I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante building-and-loan I’ll never know. But neither you nor anyone else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was. … Why, in the 25 years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never thought of himself. Isn’t that right, Uncle Billy? He didn’t save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me, but he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. Now what’s wrong with that? Why, you’re all businessmen here. Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? You said that … what did you say a minute ago? “They have to wait and save their money before they even think of a decent home.” Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken-down that they. … Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this “rabble” you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. …

* * *

At the board’s insistence, George Bailey takes over in his father’s place to keep the Building & Loan going, and soon he forestalls a run on it, part of a general financial panic, by putting up the money he has saved for his honeymoon and by preaching to a mob of frightened depositors about how they should not withdraw their money but instead have faith in the institution, because their money isn’t kept in cash in the safe but rather is invested in the houses, the mortgages, the very lives of their neighbors.

Of course this is Capra’s metaphor for politics and the world: that there is progress when everyone is given a chance, a little capital and credit, when people play by the rules, look out for each other, and don’t take too much more than they need, and that selfishness is the ruin of everything.

Something like this — more or less a policy of helping to make middle-class everyone who aspired to it and would indeed play by the rules, a policy of democratizing capital and credit — made the United States the most prosperous country and the most successful in elevating the human condition.

But for some decades now the price of obtaining and maintaining those “two decent rooms and a bath” and the middle-class life to go with it has risen as real wages have stagnated, largely under the pressure of government’s unrelenting taxes and inflation in the name of services that have not really been rendered, a welfare system that has subsidized what somehow is not permitted to be called the antisocial behavior it is, and a plutocracy that has gained control of the economy and both major political parties.

There seem to be more people who, if too confused or demoralized to be dangerous, are still closer to being a “rabble” than the country saw even during the Great Depression.

Even at its best now Christmas is seldom more than an itinerant charity that, necessary as it may seem, tends to suppress the great political question of the day after Christmas, the Feast of Stephen — the question of how things can be organized to ensure that everyone has a good chance to earn his way in decency. But the joy of Christmas is that the answer has been given, that we are not lost, that the country was shown the way and can recover it — that society can work for all, that it really can be a wonderful life if enough selfless people make it a political one.

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

Senator Murphy, safely re-elected, attacks medical insurers

By Chris Powell

The assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan on Dec. 4 has sparked political hysteria, most of all from Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy.

In a video he posted on social media two weeks later, citing the assassination, Murphy, a Democrat re-elected in November, turned vulgar, asserting that the medical insurance industry “mostly doesn’t give a —-” about sick people and that people are angry about their coverage.

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The senator added: “The business model of the health care industry is to deny care to people who need it and force them into bankruptcy, or, worse, let them die in order to grow profit.”

Is Thompson’s assassination really evidence for these accusations?

The country and the senator have just come through a heated political campaign in which medical insurance was hardly mentioned. Opinion polls about the issues most on people’s minds cited inflation, illegal immigration, and government’s strange enthusiasm for transgenderism. Medical insurance didn’t even make the list. Flawed as the medical insurance system may be, most people seem satisfied with what they have, especially government employees like the senator, whose policies are gold-plated.

Of course insurers make money by economizing with claims, not by overpaying, and some claims always will be matters of judgment and some judgments may be cruel and corrupt. (Meanwhile government’s business model often seems to be to waste as much money as possible, knowing that, no matter how inefficient, government is forever.)

Their burgeoning welfare state is conditioning Americans to think that someone else should pay for everything they want, but until people are angels, insurance will remain a racket in which providers, policyholders, and their lawyers scheme to beat each other out of every cent possible.     

In any case Connecticut remains home to a large medical insurance industry, and United Healthcare has offices in a skyscraper in Hartford emblazoned with the company’s name. Yet as he sought re-election Murphy led no protest march there.

If United Healthcare and other medical insurers in Connecticut have really been cheating their customers to death, during his campaign Murphy did not lecture them and their thousands of employees about how despicable they are. Indeed, he probably got most of their votes. Now they’re the big problem.

Any such lecture from the senator might have caused him to be questioned about how exactly medical insurance should be changed.

In the past Murphy has spoken favorably about expanding Medicare, the government medical insurance for the elderly, to all people who might want it in place of ever-more-expensive employer-provided group insurance or individual insurance. But in his social media hysteria the other day the senator offered no alternative.

Medicare is popular with its recipients because it is not just a cost-shifting system, as most insurance is, but a system of generational cost shifting from the old and mostly retired to the young and mostly employed. Since nearly everyone will go through those stages of life, this cost shifting seems fair to most people. 

But Medicare shifts costs in another big way. It underpays medical providers and expects them to recover the underpayments by overcharging other patients, insured or uninsured. Underpayments by Medicaid, government’s insurance for the indigent and those nearly indigent, are even worse, and it is often hard for Medicaid recipients to find doctors willing to treat them.   

So to whom would costs be shifted under “Medicare for all,” if not to the inflation under which everyone is already chafing and to the foreigners who are already buying fewer U.S. government bonds so as not to pay as much for the goodies Americans claim and then presume to charge to the world?

Murphy’s social media hysteria was ironic in another respect. He said, “People in America today feel ignored, they feel scared, they feel alone, feel that the system intentionally grinds them down.”

Just a few weeks earlier he was urging people to give another presidential term to his party, which was telling them they never had it so good even as they were being ground down all along. 

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

If new oversight committee is serious, where should it begin?

By Chris Powell

Because of the state government scandals uncovered recently by the state auditors, and maybe because of the ones uncovered recently by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers, the Connecticut Mirror, the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator, and the New Haven Independent, leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly are creating another legislative committee — a committee on government oversight. The new committee will more or less restore the Program Review and Investigations Committee, which the legislature abolished a decade ago with predictable results: more scandal, incompetence, policy failure, and official indifference.

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Not that the old committee accomplished much. It was usually timid and trivial, mainly just impersonating concern about wrongdoing and failure in government. The committee’s abolition signaled that the legislature no longer wanted even to pretend to be concerned.

It’s unclear how seriously the new committee will take its assignment. The legislature’s dwindling Republican minority hopes that the new committee will follow the old committee’s bipartisanship by alternating its chairmanships between Democrats and Republicans. Since Republican legislators seem not to have been consulted about the committee’s restoration, the Democrats may be planning only more pretense. 

The House chairwoman of the new committee will be a Democrat beginning her fourth term in the legislature, state Rep. Lucy Dathan, D-New Canaan, who has experience as an auditor and financial officer. But the Senate chairwoman will be Sen.-elect Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, D-Trumbull, a rookie legislator and college professor. Neither brings political clout to the committee, though to do the job right, committee members will need to be tough and ready to make and overawe their enemies, not to be ciphers hoping to make friends. 

Probably no legislator with any clout and ambition wanted to chair the new committee. But the committee just might be the place for legislators seeking to pursue the public interest rather than the special interest. State government, usually shameless, badly needs to be embarrassed frequently — that is, forced to acknowledge the messes all around it.

Where should the committee start? Options are too numerous. 

Recent investigations by the state auditors have found gross overpayments to employees in the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the Correction Department, and especially in higher education, where many perfectly authorized salaries are wildly excessive anyway. 

The subsidies for the Hartford-to-New Britain bus highway, the New Haven-to-Springfield CT Rail service, and the Shoreline East railroad should be calculated and publicized, since the state Transportation Department won’t do it.

The criminal-justice system’s coddling of repeat offenders and its dismissal of most gun law violations deserve detailed examination to make clear how public safety is betrayed and how advocacy of more gun control by legislators is so phony.

The expensive incompetence and corruption at the Connecticut Port Authority needs extensive investigation and publicity.

Inadequate discipline throughout state employment should be reviewed, as indicated again recently by the failure of the state police to impose serious discipline on troopers who falsified traffic ticket data. Also escaping discipline lately is the employee of the Department of Administrative Services who leaked promotion test questions to a colleague but will have been kept on paid administrative leave for 13 months at an annual salary of $146,000 before being allowed to retire without rebuke. 

If Democratic legislators ever change their minds about flooding Connecticut with illegal immigrants, the new committee could investigate the marriage frauds recently perpetrated at city halls in New Haven, Bridgeport, and elsewhere by the vice chairwoman of the Bridgeport Democratic committee and others.

But probably the most compelling subject for the new committee to start with would be the Hartford school system’s graduation this year of a student who in September confessed to being illiterate. 

The state Board of Education and the Hartford school superintendent promised investigations about this but after 2 1/2 months have reported nothing, apparently expecting the scandal to be forgotten even as some educators acknowledge that graduation of illiterates is common in the state despite ever-increasing appropriations in the name of education.

The comprehensive repeal of educational standards is the scandal of scandals.   

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

Connecticut’s congressmen are even nuttier than Trump

By Chris Powell

Some of President-elect Donald Trump’s personnel selections for his new administration are worrisome. But then some of Joe Biden’s personnel selections are worrisome too, like the defense secretary who entered a hospital for treatment of a longstanding medical condition without informing the White House of his whereabouts, and the Supreme Court nominee who, under Senate questioning, affected not to know what a woman is. (That nominee, now a justice, has just accepted a part in a Broadway play celebrating transgenderism.)

Supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut’s left cuts wages

Rell’s capital went unspent; and choices take courage

Terrible policies created Connecticut’s underclass

Both major political parties have plenty of nuttiness. Having discarded impartiality, mainstream news organizations are just far better at reporting Republican nuttiness than Democratic nuttiness.

In any case it’s not necessary to leave Connecticut to find nuttiness in high office. The state’s seven members of Congress, all Democrats, are enthusiastic supporters of their party’s worst nuttiness, starting with the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. 

What could be nuttier than poking the Russian bear by expanding NATO right up to the Russian border in Ukraine, having already done that in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia? What could be nuttier than having U.S. military personnel launching and guiding rocket bombs from Ukraine into Russia, as President Biden recently authorized?

When, in 1962, Russia installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from Florida, the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, by which the U.S. claims military authority over the entire Western Hemisphere. Then the U.S. imposed a naval blockade against Cuba and threatened war against Russia if the missiles were not removed. Russia capitulated.

Now Russia has claimed along its border a tiny bit of the authority the United States long has claimed along its border. Russia’s claim applies to territory that long had been and until recently was part of Russia itself, including territory where most residents speak Russian, not Ukrainian. In response to Russia’s claim, Connecticut’s members of Congress have affected to be outraged — even though Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, repeatedly warned the U.S. and its allies that their continued meddling in Ukraine would mean war.

What could be nuttier than admitting as many as 15 million foreigners in just a few years outside normal immigration procedures without making any provision for their housing, medical care, education, policing, and cultural and political assimilation, and, nuttiest of all, without evaluating their character and intentions?

Of course unleashing illegal immigration has made perfect sense for drastically changing the districting of the U.S. House of Representatives in favor of the Democrats. Dump most of the illegal immigrants in largely Democratic metropolitan areas, and even if they aren’t allowed to vote, after the next federal census they will cause the creation of two dozen or more solidly Democratic districts at the expense of Republican and competitive districts. 

To the Democrats the costs of massive illegal immigration — the great increase in housing prices and crime and the severe burdening of schools and hospitals — are small prices to pay for permanent control of the House.

Connecticut’s congressional delegation supports all this illegal immigration.

What could be nuttier than requiring schools to let males who imagine themselves to be females play on female sports teams, use female restrooms, and, when imprisoned, be placed in women’s prisons? Were society’s recent premises mistaken about establishing equal opportunity for girls and women in sports? Are males on average no longer bigger and stronger than females?

What could be nuttier than allowing sex-change drugs to be given to children and sex-change operations to be performed on them when, because of their age, they cannot give informed consent for such life-altering actions?  

But Connecticut’s congressional delegation supports all this transgenderism too.

What good would be done by all the programs and policies advocated by the Democrats if aggravating Russia over what it considers its vital security interest, as Russia aggravated the United States in 1962, escalates into nuclear war?

Nutty as Trump can be, the Democratic nuttiness is far worse and far more urgent, and Trump says he wants to end it. So Inauguration Day can’t come soon enough. 

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

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Supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut’s left cuts wages

By Chris Powell

On some days Connecticut’s political left argues for raising the minimum wage on the grounds that no one can support a family of four on the salary of a janitor or a fast-food drive-through window attendant. (The left doesn’t think wages should be related to the actual value of the labor provided. No, all jobs should be required to pay enough to support a family of four.)

Rell’s capital went unspent; and choices take courage

Terrible policies created Connecticut’s underclass

If free speech is criminal, there really will be ‘hell to pay’

But on other days Connecticut’s political left argues for demolishing the wage base of the low-skilled by declining to enforce immigration law against the millions of illegal and unvetted entrants who have no special job skills, speak little if any English, and are desperate enough to work “off the books” for unscrupulous employers at less than minimum wage. The more illegal immigrants are hired, the lower the de-facto wage base goes, the more child labor is used, and the more welfare expenses rise.

Two weeks ago there was one of the latter sort of days as two leading Connecticut leftists, nullifiers, and insurrectionists — Attorney General William Tong and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker — spoke in New Haven to a group that facilitates illegal immigration, Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services.

According to a report in the Connecticut Centinal, the attorney general and the mayor promised to do everything they can do legally to obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law under the incoming administration of Donald Trump, who was elected on a pledge to deport everyone who entered the country illegally under the open borders policy of his predecessor.

The attorney general articulated the leftist hallucination that the country can’t function without illegal immigrant labor.

“Half of farm workers and meatpacking workers are undocumented,” the attorney general said. “If you won’t eat anything touched by an undocumented worker’s hand, you’ll be pretty hungry.” 

Connecticut is estimated to have more than 100,000 illegal immigrants, and Tong added, “If you take 100,000 people out of Connecticut’s work force, we’re toast.”

Not really.

Yes, Connecticut’s manufacturers and restaurants do report great difficulty in finding workers. But the manufacturers are looking for skilled people and they provide good salaries and benefits. Their problem is that the state’s schools are not producing enough graduates with manufacturing skills or, really, any skills. Few illegal immigrants are qualified for the manufacturing jobs. 

As for the restaurants, it’s a tough business, the work is usually part-time, pay is low, and the availability of illegal immigrants drives it lower. The attorney general implicitly acknowledged as much, noting that many restaurants employ illegal immigrants as dishwashers. 

Though Tong seems not to have noticed, for months the Dalio Education philanthropy has been lamenting that Connecticut has more than 100,000 “at-risk” or “disconnected” youth who have dropped out of school or are in danger of dropping out or are unemployed or unemployable. Welfare benefits sustain many adults and young people in dissolute lifestyles in Connecticut, but lower welfare benefits and higher wages in entry-level positions might re-engage them. 

But why bother if there never is to be any enforcement against illegal immigration? In that case the wage base for the low-skilled can be held down forever and the state’s population can be driven up with more people who will never be able to afford decent housing.

If, as the nullifiers and insurrectionists contend, there should be no immigration law, in a year or two half of Central and South America could be living in Connecticut and receiving state medical insurance and other subsidies.

The attorney general said of illegal immigrants, “We can’t live without each other.”

The heck we can’t. What Connecticut can’t and must not do is let the education and work skills of its citizen population keep eroding and its “disconnected” population keep sulking when there is always entry-level work to do, learn from, and advance from. The state also must not forget, as Tong and Elicker have done, the atrocity of Sept. 11, 2001, and the danger of failing to evaluate all immigrants and visitors individually.

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