Let public broadcasting try living without government subsidy

By Chris Powell

Why shouldn’t the Corporation for Public Broadcasting be able to survive without the $500 million subsidy it has been getting every year from the federal government, a subsidy President Trump and the narrow Republican majority in Congress have just taken away?

Why all the hungry children? And raises devour rehabilitation money

Will Connecticut keep fighting immigration law enforcement?

Connecticut’s racial gap in education is actually a welfare problem

Most of that money has been distributed to the corporation’s local affiliates of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, like the Connecticut Public broadcasting operation, which has been getting $2 million per year. That’s less than 10% of Connecticut Public’s revenue and the network plans to cover the loss through more fundraising. 

Maybe some budget cuts will be required at Connecticut Public, but as this column reported in May, Connecticut Public has plenty of room to economize, with its chairman, Mark G. Contreras, being paid an annual salary of more than $600,000 and with 10 other officers and executives being paid between $204,000 and $321,000. These salaries are more like government.

But despite the recent controversy over public broadcasting’s finances, Connecticut Public seems never to have reported its own extravagant salaries. That’s not so “public.” 

The controversy over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR, and PBS has centered on their leftist bias in news and general programming. They deny it but unpersuasively so, since nearly all Democrats love NPR and PBS and nearly all Republicans hate it. 

Two years ago when Connecticut state government, an overwhelmingly Democratic regime, gave Connecticut Public a grant of $3.1 million to renovate its headquarters, it wasn’t because Connecticut Public had been so critical of the regime. It was because Connecticut Public was so supportive of what the regime purports to stand for.

Indeed, Connecticut Public long has been the voice of political correctness. 

But public broadcasting’s leftist bias isn’t its biggest problem. Public broadcasting’s biggest problem is that it would be compromised by its huge subsidy from the government even if it wasn’t overwhelmingly biased toward one side or the other politically.

Privately owned television and radio stations, newspapers, and news-oriented internet sites survive without financing from government, though for various reasons, including public education’s determined dumbing down of the population, the news business has gotten much harder lately. Privately owned news organizations find themselves competing with NPR and PBS not just for audience but for advertising as well. (Advertising on NPR and PBS takes the form of announcements thanking corporations and foundations for their donations.) 

Competition with government is seldom fair to the private sector.

Government at all levels — federal, state, and municipal — is full of publicists. (Indeed, Connecticut now may have more government publicists than private-sector news reporters.) Government also does a lot of advertising. Since government can rely on taxes for revenue, it always has the resources to get its message out on its own. So public broadcasting is not the necessity its advocates claim it to be.

Of course public broadcasting does some good things. But if they are good enough they should be able to find public support without government subsidy. To make up for that subsidy, the good things might command more candid and lucrative advertising.

More emphatic appeals by public broadcasting for donations might be successful, especially if they are combined with those of the Democratic state and national committees.

NOT JUST BILLIONAIRES: Democrats in Connecticut and nationally have been shrieking that the new Republican federal spending and tax law is going to help only millionaires and billionaires.

But the National Association of Realtors reported last week that the new law will provide a huge tax break to 18% of Connecticut’s homeowners — people whose municipal property taxes exceed $10,000, the current limit for property tax deductibility from federal income taxes. The new law raises deductibility to $40,000.

Even residents of impoverished Bridgeport will share in the increased tax break, since 39% of the city’s homeowners pay more than $10,000 in property taxes.

Increasing the federal tax exemption may not be good policy. Given the soaring federal deficit, no tax breaks may be good policy. But at least this one exposes Democratic demagoguery.

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

Larson, his four challengers, and ambition without issues

By Chris Powell

Like vultures circling above wounded prey, four ambitious Democrats are threatening to challenge U.S. Rep. John B. Larson as he seeks nomination to a 14th term next year in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District, the Hartford area. 

Why all the hungry children? And raises devour rehabilitation money

Will Connecticut keep fighting immigration law enforcement?

Connecticut’s racial gap in education is actually a welfare problem

Though Larson remains vigorous and articulate at 76, in February he froze up while speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives, suffering what was apparently a bad reaction to medication. The incident seems to have caused his aspiring rivals to suspect or hope that he could keel over at any moment and become a rung on their ladder to political advancement.

The problem is that no Democrats can identify anything Larson has done wrong other than having suddenly found himself in the way of a few Democrats who would like to represent a district that hasn’t elected a Republican in 69 years. His votes in Congress have been reliably Democratic, he has led nationally on the issue of strengthening Social Security, and his office is renowned for constituent service. 

Larson’s potential challengers aren’t exactly superstars. 

The most prominent, Luke Bronin, served two terms as mayor of Hartford and wanted to run for governor if his friend Ned Lamont wasn’t going to seek renomination. That Bronin now has set his sights on Larson instead indicates confidence that Lamont will run again.

The most memorable event of Bronin’s mayoralty may have been his quick capitulation to the anti-police protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. An angry crowd gathered at Bronin’s home and demanded that he defund the Hartford Police Department. Accordingly he went along with the City Council in cutting the police budget by 4%. He insisted that this wasn’t defunding the police department but “reimagining” it. 

However its police have been “reimagined,” Hartford still has the usual shootings and stabbings every month and its school system keeps disintegrating and this year became famous worldwide for graduating an illiterate. Indeed, it’s hard to see how the city is any better for Bronin’s mayoralty or anyone else’s mayoralty in several decades.  

Of course it’s hard to see how Hartford has been improved by Larson’s 13 terms. He got nowhere with a proposal to relocate the city’s highways into tunnels, which would have been impossibly expensive without ever addressing the city’s overwhelming problem, generational poverty. But then as a member of Congress he has a much wider focus than any mayor.

Another potential challenger to Larson’s renomination is West Hartford state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, best known for her advocacy of legalizing late-term abortion and her support for transgenderism — men in women’s bathrooms, sports, and prisons, and so forth. In debate in the state House in June, Gilchrest asserted that there is an “infinite” number of genders. She meant an “infinite” number even outside the Democratic Party.

Also seeking to take the nomination away from Larson are two unknowns — a member of the Southington Town Council and a member of Hartford’s hapless Board of Education, a position in which it would seem impossible to claim credit for anything.

If Democrats, overwhelmed by Trump Derangement Syndrome, want to keep running off the rails to the left, maybe a majority of primary voters can be found to retire Larson, on the assumption that the 1st District will elect anyone on the Democratic line, no matter how crazy.

Still, 1st District Democrats might want to look at the latest national congressional polling from Rasmussen Reports. 

Rasmussen finds that while public opinion of the Democratic Party nationally has seldom been lower, Democrats now hold a 46-42% lead over Republicans on a generic ballot for the U.S. House. If that lead and the historic pattern of mid-term elections hold, the Democrats easily will retake the House majority next year, and, given his seniority, Larson could become chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. 

But if some other Democrat is elected from the 1st District, he or she will be lucky to be appointed to the Committee on Bathroom Cleanliness.

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

Why all the hungry children? And raises devour rehabilitation money

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s summer meals program for children is being treated by state government and news organizations as a sort of triumph. Necessary as it may be, the program is actually a sign of disaster.

Will Connecticut keep fighting immigration law enforcement?

Connecticut’s racial gap in education is actually a welfare problem

Why would Democrats dump Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro?

The program, operated by the state Education Department, Connecticut Foodshare, the U.S. Agriculture Department, and municipal governments, serves free breakfasts and lunch every day at 600 locations around the state — schools, parks, and community facilities — to an estimated 37,000 children 18 and under, no questions asked.

Connecticut News Junkie reports that the program is meant to substitute for the free breakfasts and lunches provided at schools during the school year. Additionally, during school vacation state government has authorized an extra $36 million in welfare benefits to households with children. 

Discussing the program the other day, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said, “One in six of our kids are food insecure. The summer months are a strain on family budgets without access to those free meals.”

If one out of every six children is “food insecure” — unable to be fed reliably at home — that’s nearly 17% of Connecticut’s children. That sounds like poverty approaching depression levels. Even greater poverty is indicated by the estimated 40% of births in the state that are being covered by Medicaid, welfare medical insurance. How are people on Medicaid prepared to have children?

The lieutenant governor noted that heavy participation in the free meals program clashes with Connecticut’s image as a wealthy state. Indeed, it should clash enough to prompt an investigation by the General Assembly as to the causes of all this poverty. 

Simply appropriating more and more money to ameliorate poverty shouldn’t be enough. Why can’t so many parents support their children? 

Failing to ask about and act against the causes of Connecticut’s deepening poverty guarantees that it will get worse still.

* * *

When prisons in Connecticut release inmates, the former offenders aren’t necessarily set free. They are usually delivered into poverty. Most never had much in the way of work skills to begin with, many are mentally ill, and few jobs except menial ones are available to unskilled and mentally ill people with prison records.

For 150 years Community Partners in Action, formerly the Connecticut Prison Association, has provided transitional services to former offenders returning to society, helping them find housing, jobs, and mental health and addiction treatment, as well as providing moral support. 

The organization operates “re-entry welcome centers” throughout the state, in large part with grants from state government, since rehabilitating and resettling former offenders is really government’s obligation — not just its obligation to the former offenders but its obligation to society generally, which is in danger if former offenders return to crime.

So to help released prisoners achieve a decent life, state government should provide them with a year of basic housing, medical insurance, and a job at minimum wage or better. They could do plenty, if only by collecting roadside litter — if the state employee unions wouldn’t be overcome by jealousy.  

But last week the Connecticut Mirror reported that the new state budget has erased the $1.5 million grant Community Partners in Action was scheduled to receive next year. As a result the organization will curtail accepting new clients. 

House Speaker Matt Ritter says the grant was removed to help keep the new state budget within spending limits but legislators hope to revisit the issue in a special session this fall. 

How much more hypocritical bleating about the poor will Democratic legislators do before then?

At least one group won’t have to worry about its appropriations. 

Last week Governor Lamont said he is confident his administration will reach agreement with the state employee unions on new contracts. The governor reminded the unions that $100 million for raises already has been budgeted, and the contracts probably will provide raises around 5%. 

Since next year is a gubernatorial and legislative election year, that $100 million is a lock, and for the moment it could seem as if state employee raises devoured the prisoner re-entry centers and some other more compelling things.

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

Will Connecticut keep fighting immigration law enforcement?

By Chris Powell

What will become of Joel Alexander Caiza-Nishue? What should become of him? Who will be responsible for what becomes of him? And who, besides himself, is responsible for what he is charged with doing?

Connecticut should think about these things.

Connecticut’s racial gap in education is actually a welfare problem

Why would Democrats dump Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro?

Are Connecticut Democrats as far left as Gov. Lamont’s rival?

Caiza-Nishue is the 18-year-old accused of reckless driving, traveling too fast for conditions, and operating without a license after crashing into and injuring two state troopers on Interstate 91 in Enfield last week. Federal immigration authorities say he is an illegal immigrant from Ecuador who entered the country in 2023. He is reported to be a high school student in Waterbury.

The feds have told state authorities they want Caiza-Nishue detained so they can take custody of him and, presumably, deport him. State authorities seem unlikely to cooperate. So presumably the feds will be waiting for Caiza-Nishue if he ever appears in person in state court.   

Will court authorities object then? Will the advocates and apologists for illegal immigration, of whom Connecticut has many, protest at the courthouse? Will some even try to obstruct Caiza-Nishue’s apprehension? 

Will the protesters include Governor Lamont, Attorney General William Tong, state legislators, and other officials who support illegal immigration and want to make sure that state government refuses to cooperate with immigration law enforcement in regard to any misconduct short of murder?

Or will the Caiza-Nishue case prompt some reconsideration of Connecticut’s official extremism on the immigration issue? That extremism maintains that nearly everyone who enters the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law.

At Caiza-Nishue’s first appearance in court, made by video from a state jail, his public defender argued that his case is just another car accident. It is hard to imagine that, whatever his recklessness, Caiza-Nishue meant any harm. 

But it’s also hard to imagine that the troopers he is charged with injuring don’t resent that he may never have gotten a proper review by immigration authorities and that he entered and remained in the country illegally. Similar resentment is felt by the thousands of victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, no matter that, on average, illegal immigrants may be no more criminally inclined than the native-born. 

For citizenship inevitably exempts the native-born from such vetting while the federal government owes the country a proper review of everyone admitted from outside — an obligation that was deliberately forfeited by the previous national administration on a massive scale in a scheme to devalue citizenship and change the country’s political demographics.

Advocates and apologists for illegal immigration fairly complain that immigration law enforcement is full of violations of due process of law. 

This month a U.S. citizen who is an Army veteran was arrested by immigration agents as he arrived for his job at a marijuana farm in California during the chaos of a raid in which dozens of illegal immigrants were being arrested. His car windows were smashed, he was hauled out at gunpoint, and he was jailed for three days before his citizenship was established and he was released. It was outrageous.

Yet this environment was created by the advocates and apologists for illegal immigration. They didn’t object to the previous administration’s failure with the due process of law — the failure to enforce immigration law at all. To the contrary, as in Connecticut, they incentivized and facilitated illegal immigration, providing illegal immigrants with identification documents, driver’s licenses, medical insurance, food, and housing, and promising to obstruct immigration authorities with Connecticut’s so-called Trust Act. 

In doing all this, the advocates and apologists for illegal immigration have assumed dangerously that the intentions of all illegal immigrants are good.    

The advocates and apologists for illegal immigration say the country’s immigration system is broken. Indeed, and they were the ones who broke it, deliberately. Now, with an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants in the country, painstaking due process is impossible with any effective immigration law enforcement. 

Regaining control of the border will require years of deportations to undo and deter more of what the advocates and apologists engineered.  

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

Connecticut’s racial gap in education is actually a welfare problem

By Chris Powell

Connecticut long has been notorious for its big racial performance gap in education. State government should be equally notorious for not having figured out what to do about it even as the solution has been obvious to anyone taking the trouble to look at the failing students.  

Why would Democrats dump Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro?

Are Connecticut Democrats as far left as Gov. Lamont’s rival?

Hartford, Bridgeport schools urgently need state takeover

State government has had two primary responses to the gap. 

First, the state has established dozens of regional “magnet” schools that, while created for racial integration, were also seen as mechanisms for improving education for racial minorities. But the regional schools seem mainly to have stripped city neighborhood schools of their better students. They haven’t reduced the gap.

Second, the state has appropriated a lot more money for education in the mistaken belief, arising from the Education Enhancement Act of 1986, that student performance is a mainly matter of per-pupil spending and teacher salaries. This hasn’t reduced the gap either, though at some point there must be a link between teacher salaries and student performance in impoverished cities whose schools always have many staff vacancies because teachers don’t want to deal with so many poor students.

The problem always has been not per-pupil spending but per-pupil parenting. Teachers of the youngest students in poor areas quickly perceive this. Many students come to school without knowing letters, numbers, and colors, have limited vocabularies, and don’t know how to behave. Even in kindergarten many of them are already grades behind. 

Programs like Head Start and the universal pre-school for which Connecticut has started to save money alleviate these deficits but not for long when the kids keep returning to neglectful homes. The biggest advantage of these programs seems to be political, insofar as they are only remedial. Since the programs increase government spending and employment without solving the problem, they become self-perpetuating — perfect for those who run them. 

Decades of social science have shown that children generally do best after being raised in a two-parent household. But this month the great superiority of intact families for education was driven home by a study that was organized by the University of Virginia and drew participation from politically diverse organizations.

The study, “Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids — The Importance of Fatherhood in Virginia,” found that children tend to do much better in school when their fathers live with them and their mothers or at least are heavily involved in their lives.

Writing at the education news internet site The74Million.org, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former teacher, noted that the study addressed the racial performance gap particularly.

“Most striking,” Pondiscio wrote, “is the report’s finding that there is no meaningful difference in school grades among demographically diverse children raised in intact families. Black and white students living with their fathers get mostly A’s at roughly equal rates — more than 85% — and are equally unlikely to experience school behavior problems. 

“In other words, the achievement gap appears to be less about race and more about the structure and stability of the family.”

That is, the achievement gap in school has little to do with school.

Unfortunately the study’s recommendations are not strong. Among them are to adjust education to include more elements appealing to boys, to hire more male teachers to provide role models, to increase school recess and physical education time, and to teach the “Success Sequence” of life — get a good education, get a decent job, and marry before having children.

While the “Success Sequence” is at the heart of the education problem, for many students teaching about it in school may be undone by the example set for them when they get home. 

The challenge of the racial performance gap in education isn’t to keep raising spending and placating the teacher unions. It is to discern and eliminate, over time, what encourages, facilitates, and subsidizes childbearing outside marriage: the guaranteed income government provides for harmful behavior. 

That is, the racial performance gap is mainly a welfare and culture problem, not an educational one.   

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

Why would Democrats dump Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro?

By Chris Powell

Why are the three most senior members of Connecticut’s all-Democratic five-member delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives apparently facing primary challenges for renomination next year?

Are Connecticut Democrats as far left as Gov. Lamont’s rival?

Hartford, Bridgeport schools urgently need state takeover

State government’s growth causes record spending on lobbyists

In the 1st District, the Hartford area, a member of Hartford’s Board of Education, Ruth R. Fortune, unknown outside the city, has filed to deny the Democratic endorsement to U.S. Rep. John B. Larson. Former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, a heavy hitter politically, is said to be thinking about trying to do the same thing.

In the 2nd District, eastern Connecticut, Kyle Gauck of East Hampton, another unknown, wants to wrest the Democratic nomination from U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney.

In the 3rd District, the New Haven area, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro is being challenged for another Democratic nomination by a lawyer from the city, Damjan DeNoble.

Why? 

The challengers haven’t criticized the incumbents on issues or ideologies. Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro are traditional liberals in the Democratic mainstream with long records of success in their districts. Larson is in his 13th term, Courtney his ninth, and DeLauro her 17th. Only one seems ever to have had a close election for Congress, Courtney’s first in 2006. Any substantial dissatisfaction with them in the party has yet to manifest itself.

If there will be issues for a primary, one could be age. Larson is 76, Courtney 72, and DeLauro 82. 

Yet all three remain vigorous. In February while speaking in the House, Larson froze briefly as if he was having a stroke. But he said it was an adverse reaction to medication and he has manifested no problem since.

Thomas Jefferson was thinking about a politician in Connecticut in 1801 when he wrote what was turned into the aphorism “Few die and none resign.” But at least until the era of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, age often correlated with wisdom rather than senility. In any case in Congress seniority usually correlates with power. 

Larson serves on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and is the ranking Democratic member on its Social Security subcommittee. The primary legislation that would strengthen Social Security is his doing. It would be nice if he could see it through.

Courtney is on the House Armed Services Committee and ranking Democratic member on its subcommittee with jurisdiction over the submarines that get built in Groton back in his district.

DeLauro is ranking Democratic member of the House Appropriations Committee, which she chaired when the House majority was Democratic. She might be chairwoman again. Immense patronage is dispensed there.   

Are their constituents tired of all the goodies Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro have brought home over the years? Any Democrats replacing them might have similar ideologies but would start at the bottom.

Then there is the pitch for “generational change.” New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, seeking the Republican nomination for governor, is making it, as is DeLauro challenger DeNoble, who says DeLauro has done a good job but isn’t the right person to represent her district for the next 15 to 30 years. Insofar as DeLauro would be at least 97 or at most 112 then, she probably wouldn’t argue. Maybe that’s why she has sought only two more years at a time.

Indeed, the “generational change” pitch is used by candidates who have nothing relevant to say about the issues, if they even know any issues.

Of course there are many issues Republican challengers might use against Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro — inflation, illegal immigration, taxes, transgenderism, poverty, social disintegration, and such. But that’s only if well-informed Republicans could be found to run and raise enough campaign money to be heard. 

Courtney’s district, the 2nd, can be competitive for an open seat but still would lean Democratic. The Hartford-area district hasn’t elected a Republican since 1956 and the New Haven-area district hasn’t elected a Republican since 1980. Despite any policy successes President Trump may achieve, his bad manners won’t make things easier for Republicans in Connecticut next year. 

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

-END-

Are Connecticut Democrats as far left as Lamont’s rival?

By CHRIS POWELL

Campaigns for next year’s elections in Connecticut for governor and Congress have begun already, 16 months ahead of Election Day. That gives them plenty of time to be meaningful. 

Hartford, Bridgeport schools urgently need state takeover

State government’s growth causes record spending on lobbyists

Does Trump’s budget really spell doom for Connecticut?

Because four incumbents on the Democratic side may face primary challenges — Governor Lamont and U.S. Reps. John B. Larson, Joe Courtney, and Rosa DeLauro — those campaigns could have plenty of meaning, though the challengers to Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro are unknown. 

Distressed that Governor Lamont doesn’t go along with the far-left elements of the Democratic Party enough — just most of the time — Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott this week formally announced his candidacy to replace the governor as the party’s nominee. Unlike the other challengers who have recently declared, Elliott has plenty of issues and admits that he hopes mainly to push the Democrats even more to the left but not to do anything that would impair Lamont’s chances of re-election if the governor is renominated.

Indeed, Elliott’s challenge may help Lamont in the general election campaign by making the governor seem more moderate than he really is.

Elliott objects emphatically to the governor’s recent vetoes of a wide-ranging housing bill that would have restricted suburban zoning and extended rent control throughout the state, and a bill qualifying strikers for unemployment compensation.

Elliott wants state government to spend a lot more money on social programs and pay for it by raising taxes on the wealthy.  

Lamont, Elliott complains, makes it “very difficult for the legislature to get big ideas through under the ruse of the necessity of austerity, when we have billions of dollars of additional revenue coming in every year that, ultimately, only bring down the date of payment on pensions by a couple of years.”

Of course it’s all how one looks at it. “Only a couple of years” of payments to the state employee pension funds mean billions of dollars, which even a few liberals still think is a lot of money. Elliott’s observation might prompt some people to wonder why defined-benefit state employee pensions continue to have such priority in public finance and why they shouldn’t be phased out. 

But like all liberals, if Elliott is forced to choose between the genuinely needy and unionized government employees, his party’s political army, he will choose the unions every time.

Elliott sees Lamont standing in the way of a “fair” tax system. What is “fair”? Higher taxes, of course, preferably on a small minority, since social programs in Connecticut are not yet successful enough to convince most people that their own taxes should go up to pay for them.

Elliott says: “We’re cementing a class structure in Connecticut, as opposed to helping people get into the middle class.” Yes, poverty in Connecticut has been worsening, in large part because of the shortage of housing.

But Elliott has yet to explain how people are helped to reach the middle class by the state’s main policy of public education, social promotion, which is graduating illiterates and near-illiterates from high school, or by welfare policy, which subsidizes childbearing outside marriage, deprives many children of fathers, and pushes them toward generational poverty. Like other liberals, including the governor, Elliott doesn’t notice those problems.

Even so, many Democrats are now so outraged at the prospect of any financial restraint in government that Elliott just might reflect the views of a majority of active party members, the ones who will vote in primaries. Republicans may hope so.

On the Republican side for governor, New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, and Westport First Selectwoman Jen Tooker are the likely contenders so far. 

Stewart offers remarkable political success in a Democratic city but has yet to say much about state issues and offers only a promise of civility, which is just an evasion of issues. Tooker is little known. Fazio has made a good impression in his short time in the legislature and seems to be the one most likely to say something that matters.     

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

-END-

Hartford, Bridgeport schools urgently need state takeover

By Chris Powell

How could Aleysha Ortiz go through the Hartford school system and be given a high school diploma without ever learning to read and write? Who exactly was responsible in every grade that advanced her anyway?

State government’s growth causes record spending on lobbyists

Does Trump’s budget really spell doom for Connecticut?

Protests haven’t explained what ‘free Palestine’ means

Maybe Ortiz’s lawsuit in Superior Court seeking $3 million in damages from the city will extract some answers, though more likely it will be settled to prevent accountability.

Rather than answer for what happened, Hartford Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez is retiring in a few weeks.

State Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker hired consultants to look into the Ortiz case but won’t answer specifically about it either. The commissioner’s excuse is what she calls Ortiz’s right to privacy, as if the young woman didn’t forfeit that right with the sensational interview she gave to the Connecticut Mirror last September and with her lawsuit.

Privacy? News of the scandal already has gone around the world. 

Of course the only people the commissioner is protecting are Hartford educators.

If not for a few Republican state senators who keep pressing the commissioner about the case, it would have been forgotten long ago despite its horrible implication. 

Democratic legislators and Governor Lamont, also a Democrat, act as if they have not noticed the case, even though the report submitted by the commissioner’s consultants and her use of the report as a substitute for specific accountability imply that the girl isn’t the only illiterate or near-illiterate to have been graduated by Hartford’s schools lately.

The report cites the Hartford school system’s severe shortage of staff, especially “special education” staff, with Hartford leading the state in educator vacancies — more than 200, including 50 “special education” teacher positions and 80 “special education” “para-educator” positions.

But the report adds that the problem in Hartford’s schools goes far beyond “special education,” since many students who are not disadvantaged and handicapped enough to be classified as “special education” are still slow learners and need extra help when none is available. They are referred to “special education” staffers who are already overwhelmed.

Of course this doesn’t mean that no students are coming out of Hartford’s schools with an education. It means that no academic data produced by Hartford’s schools can be trusted.

What will be done about it? Probably not much. The commissioner says the state Education Department “will intensify our support and targeted monitoring activities” in Hartford’s schools. But she doesn’t say how.

Will the department ensure that the vacant teaching positions are filled? Will the department require that all Hartford students are tested every year to prove they can read and write? 

Or will the department, the legislature, and the governor just keep waiting for the scandal to fade away?

The department says it is already giving extra scrutiny and support to the equally dysfunctional school system in Bridgeport, which has gone through five superintendents in seven years and where “special education” is also a mess. The department should have taken control of both Hartford and Bridgeport school systems long ago. Their problems are too big, their competence too small. 

But state government lacks the courage for that, since it would require removing all impediments to vigorous administration in the interest of the public and students. It would require taking responsibility.

Fixing city schools would require regular proficiency testing for all students, including a test for graduation. (Students who failed the test could be given certificates of attendance — if they really did attend much.) It would require holding parents responsible for their children’s excessive absences. It would require ending social promotion. It would require accountability at all levels.

More than that, state government also would have to take responsibility for the worsening social disintegration throughout the state. It would have to explain the soaring need for “special education.” It would have to ask the biggest and most uncomfortable questions: 

How are uneducated young people supposed to support themselves? Where are all the neglected and troubled kids coming from? And what turned the cities into poverty factories?

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

-END-

State government’s growth causes record spending on lobbyists

By Chris Powell

Lobbyists in Connecticut have a bad reputation, and it may get worse with the recent report from the Office of State Ethics that spending on lobbyists exceeded $28 million in the first quarter of this year and may reach a record high by the end of the year.

Does Trump’s budget really spell doom for Connecticut?

Protests haven’t explained what ‘free Palestine’ means

Bears are likely to triumph long before ‘affordable housing’ does

Why is there so much lobbying? 

Mainly because there is so much government.

A telling clue is that that the organization spending the most on lobbyists in the first quarter was the Connecticut Hospital Association at $1.45 million. Other big spending on lobbyists in the first quarter also involved medicine: the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, representing hospitals, medical insurers, and drug manufacturers, at $349,000; Hartford HealthCare at $248,266; the Connecticut Association of Health Plans at $230,370; Elevance Health and Affiliates with $214,940; and Yale New Haven Health System at $214,447.

Again, this spending was just for the first quarter.

No businesses are more subject to government spending and regulation than hospitals, medical insurers, and drug manufacturers. Modern medicine is now largely a matter of price-fixing and cost-shifting by government, what with Medicare, Medicaid, and legislative and regulatory mandates.

Even a small change in law, regulation, or government policy can have huge financial impact on the components of medical care, and, of course, huge impact on patients and policyholders.

Whether these laws, regulations, and policies are good or bad, they are pervasive, and so all the entities affected need to watch the government around the clock and intervene urgently on behalf of their interests. 

Legislators and governors are supposed to represent the public interest, but the lobbyists work at the state Capitol nearly every day while their constituents are just trying to make a living and to get home in time for dinner and some television. The programs they watch are not about public policy.

Many lobbyists are often well paid for subverting the public interest in favor of a special interest. So special interests sometimes provide disguises for their lobbyists. 

That’s why the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future doesn’t call itself what it really is — the Partnership for the Prosperity of Hospitals, Medical Insurers, and Drug Manufacturers — and why the Connecticut Education Association doesn’t call itself the Connecticut Teachers Union.  

Even so, lobbyists are crucial to democracy and the legislative process, especially on the state level. For while the governor and legislative committees can draw on expertise from the Office of Legislative Research and state government agencies, lobbyists often have much relevant information that government doesn’t have — and not just information but insight about policies and how they are likely to be received not just by special interests but the public as well.

Thirty-seven years ago, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in Washington, the General Assembly and Gov. Ella T. Grasso seemed to think that lobbyists were the nexus of political corruption. So a law was enacted requiring lobbyists to register with the Office of State Ethics and wear special badges on the job. The implication was that lobbyists had the plague and legislators shouldn’t want to be around them.

Caution was in order but it wasn’t because lobbyists had the plague and weren’t identifying themselves. It was because legislators had a sort of plague — the desperate craving for campaign contributions — and were easily tempted to seek them first from the special interests represented by the lobbyists. Tagged with badges, lobbyists became easier to shake down. 

Indeed, years ago neophyte candidates for the legislature who sought advice about raising campaign money were urged to visit the Office of State Ethics, ask for a list of all the lobbyists, and start there.

Things are a bit better now. Campaign contributions from lobbyists are restricted, and the state has a program of public financing of campaigns that diminishes need for special-interest money. 

But special-interest money still abounds in politics, and, as always, the best defenses against bad law and corruption are vigorous news organizations and an attentive public. They are much weaker these days.

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

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Does Trump’s budget really spell doom for Connecticut?

By Chris Powell

According to Governor Lamont, the federal budget just enacted by the Republican majority in Congress and President Trump is nearly the end of the world.

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The governor says the budget will have “devastating impact on millions of Americans for years to come and was passed for the sole purpose of giving tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. It will amount to a massive income transfer from the poorest and most vulnerable Americans to the wealthiest.”

But Dan Haar of the Hearst Connecticut newspapers reports that, by quadrupling to $40,000 the federal income tax deductibility of state and local taxes — the “SALT” deduction, which Democratic leaders in Connecticut and other high-tax states long have supported — the new budget will substantially reduce federal income taxes for hundreds of thousands of middle- and upper-middle class Connecticut households.

As for the “massive income transfer from the poorest and most vulnerable Americans to the wealthiest,” the poor don’t pay federal income taxes, nor, in Connecticut, state income taxes. The “income” for the poor about which the governor is worried is actually what in a less politically correct era was called welfare.

The governor says the new budget will “bankrupt” the federal government by running a deficit in the trillions of dollars, requiring borrowing to cover the gap. But the federal government long has run huge deficits under Democratic administrations as well, which never bothered Democrats in Connecticut. Besides, since the government can create money out of nothing, it can never go bankrupt; it can only continue to devalue the dollar — something else that has never bothered Connecticut Democrats.

The new budget, the governor says, “slashes critical safety-net programs, particularly Medicaid and SNAP” — food subsidies — “that so many hard-working American families need for their health and survival.”

Yet in recent days there have been reports from all around the country about massive fraud in the Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP programs — some involving providers in Connecticut.

Indeed, a few months ago the governor’s own public health and social services commissioner retired after it was disclosed that she had countenanced the termination of an audit of Medicaid fraud in which the governor’s former deputy budget director and a former Democratic state representative have been indicted and a Bristol doctor has pleaded guilty.

Just last week state prosecutors charged an acupuncturist from Milford with defrauding Medicaid of $123,000.    

All this fraud doesn’t mean that the Republican administration in Washington or the Democratic administration in Connecticut will be competent and determined enough to substantially reduce fraud in Medicaid, Medicare, and food subsidies. But maybe a reduction in those appropriations is necessary to provide some incentive to look harder.

“With a federal administration insistent on eliminating critical safety nets,” the governor said, “it is going to be nearly impossible for any state to backfill the billions in federal cuts we are going to face. … We will be meeting with our colleagues in the General Assembly to discuss next steps.”

Those next steps may be interesting. 

Will the federal cuts in Medicaid and food subsidies be so compelling as to cause the governor and legislators to cancel any of the grants they grandly announce practically every week for all sorts of inessential projects around the state?

Will the cuts be so compelling as to cause the governor to reconsider the blank check his administration has issued for illegal immigration? 

Will the cuts be so compelling as to cause the governor to reconsider the pledge he made to the state employee unions in April? “Every year that I’ve been here you’ve gotten a raise,” he told the unions, “and every year I’m here, you’re going to get a raise.”

Raises despite the cuts in the safety net? Despite natural disasters? Despite plague? Despite nuclear war?

Or will the cuts prompt the governor to call the legislature into special session, proclaim that state government simply can’t economize, and propose to raise taxes going into an election year?

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

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