Political correctness flusters response to assault in school

By Chris Powell

Three principles of Connecticut’s political correctness have collided sensationally in Waterbury, where two middle school students recently assaulted two other students. The victims, twin 13-year-old sisters new to the school, are of Arab descent and wore Muslim hijabs that were ripped off, so the alleged perpetrators, ages 12 and 11, are suspected of religious or ethnic prejudice. That would make the assault a “hate crime,” and a political fuss is being made about it.

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A sanctimony city and a sanctimony state milk politics for patronage

Where did the parents go? And is poverty forever?

Children are often cruel and stupid and pick on others simply for being different. So it’s just as plausible that the assault was motivated by ordinary cruelty and stupidity rather than any serious animus toward religion or ethnicity. Waterbury police are investigating and maybe they’ll find out, though the public may not be told, because of those colliding principles of political correctness.

Those principles are:

1) Perpetrators of “hate crime” should be more severely punished than perpetrators of ordinary crime because ordinary enforcement of criminal law doesn’t demonstrate political correctness.

2) Short of murder, children misbehaving in school shouldn’t be charged criminally or even punished at all, just referred to social work.

3) Crime by juveniles should be handled secretly so there can never be any accountability for them or the government.

The collapse of discipline in public education argues for serious and visible punishment of students who commit assault — something more ominous than the Waterbury middle school principal’s squishy statement about “respect, inclusivity, and kindness,” something requiring suspension from school and reparations to the victims.

But in the end little can be done with 11- and 12-year-olds except to watch them grow up. School authorities should be held to account but the “hate crime” crowd should can its bluster.

CANNIBAL WATCH: Questions posed by Republican state senators to the state Psychiatric Security Review Board about the murderer-cannibal the board recently paroled have turned out to be good ones.

In response last week, the board’s executive director, Vanessa Cardella, confirmed that despite the heavy supervision the parolee is receiving at the group home where he has been placed — six state employees or contractors are keeping an eye on him — he still will have plenty of time to be out and about on his own. Cardella didn’t know how much the supervisors will be paid for working on the parolee’s case, but it seems likely to be many thousands of dollars a year.

Most people may not understand the necessity for the murderer-cannibal’s parole and its expense. Indeed, they may be shocked and appalled. But they shouldn’t blame the board, for it is only following the law, which calls for the perpetrator’s release if the board thinks he’ll be fine if he adheres to the conditions of his parole, which include medication.

Of course there can be no guarantee. Serious risk to the public will continue, which is why a better outcome would have been to keep the man residing in a comfortable room at the state’s high-security mental hospital. This probably would be less expensive as well.

But that better outcome requires changing the law about acquittals by reason of insanity. The law simply shouldn’t allow release of murderers prior to their old age. Republican legislators, a small minority in the General Assembly, should submit such legislation even though the Democratic majority will reject it. For at least then some Democrats may be asked to explain why people should feel good about the outcome of the murderer-cannibal’s case.

THE PERFECT TAX: A recent study by the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services found that people addicted to gambling constitute less than 2% of Connecticut’s population but produce more than half the state’s sports betting revenue and a fifth of its revenue from all forms of gambling.

While the department sees this as a problem with a huge human cost, elected officials see it as a political solution — the perfect tax. A tiny and disparaged minority finances a disproportionate share of state government and that human cost is not on state government’s books.

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

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Plenty of ideas for taxes but few for economizing

By Chris Powell

Members of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly have a new tax idea. They would impose a 28-cent tax on every delivery of a retail product. Anything that comes to your door from Amazon, Walmart, UPS, Federal Express, Door Dash, pizza shops, and other restaurants would be charged. 

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Where did the parents go? And is poverty forever?

‘Mean’ is not an argument in transgender controversy

The idea is copied from Colorado, which has imposed such a tax to raise money for transportation infrastructure. Connecticut’s Special Transportation Fund is said to be in good shape but the Democrats are concerned that it may be drained in a few years — a fair concern if the Democrats continue to control the state.

But since money is “fungible” — that is, easily moved around — there is no guaranteeing that it will end up being applied as advertised. The delivery tax revenue might continue to be placed in the transportation fund but other revenue now deposited to the fund might be diverted.

Democratic legislators are proposing at least two other dedicated taxes: a tax on telephone lines to replenish a workers’ compensation fund for firefighters with cancer, and a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages to finance free meals for public school students.

The Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator reports that the state already imposes a dedicated tax on certain medical insurance policies. The tax helps finance the state Insurance Department, the state Office of Health Strategy, the Office of the Healthcare Advocate, and certain government health initiatives. It’s not clear why medical insurance policies, already so expensive, should be made still more expensive with a tax. Nor is it clear why this tax should apply to some medical insurance policies but not others. 

Did legislators think that they more easily could get away with taxing medical insurance policies if the tax didn’t apply to everyone’s policies?

Democratic legislators say they’re just studying the retail delivery tax. Well, of course — every tax starts as a study. What is more disturbing is what is not being studied by the General Assembly: the efficiency and priorities of state government.

Legislators seem happy to leave to Governor Lamont any initiatives to reduce spending, so the governor is taking the heat for noting that the state colleges and universities system should economize as enrollments decline. 

The governor also is taking heat for noting that as the Trump administration rampages through the federal government with Elon Musk’s chainsaw, Connecticut should be extremely cautious financially as federal financial aid is likely to be cut. While the governor is a Democrat, only members of the small Republican minority in the legislature seem to have appreciated his warning.

Many compelling human needs in Connecticut are not being met even as state government remains full of inessential and overgenerous appropriations. It is a fair suspicion that, forced down to its last several hundred million dollars, state government would spend them all on raises for its unionized employees.

A perfect political system for Connecticut in its current circumstances would go far beyond the controversial “fiscal guardrails” now being subverted. It would require reducing state government spending by 5% each year for five years. For eventually this would induce the people clamoring to spend more on the human needs that seem compelling to them to begin scrutinizing the budget for items that are not so compelling and could be canceled. That is, a perfect political system for Connecticut would require people who consider themselves liberals to become liberals and show some respect to the private sector, which pays for all government.

Instead what passes for liberalism in Connecticut is mainly whining, like the complaint the other day from the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities that state financial assistance to cities and towns isn’t keeping up with inflation. CCM doesn’t seem to have noticed that most private-sector incomes haven’t kept up with inflation either even as government-sector incomes have kept up just fine.

If municipal officials don’t want to keep asking their constituents for property tax increases, they should stop whining and pursue efficiency in government — that is, making choices more in the public interest.

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

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A sanctimony city and a sanctimony state milk politics for patronage

By Chris Powell

Two more tedious but true tales from the Sanctimony City and the Sanctimony State unfolded last week.

In New Haven dozens of people gathered at Trinity Church on the city’s green to mark the 200th anniversary of the last recorded sale of slaves in the city and Connecticut — two women who were paraded to the green and purchased by an abolitionist who eventually set them free. Last week’s gathering called itself a “service of lamentation and healing.”

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Meanwhile at the state Capitol a legislative committee considered a resolution to condemn the Treaty of Hartford of 1638, which marked the end of the war between the Pequot Indian tribe and its adversaries — the English, Mohegan, and Narragansett tribes. The war killed most of the Pequots and the treaty sought to nullify the few who were left, bestowing them on their adversaries as slaves and prohibiting the tribe’s reconstitution.

Last week’s events implied that modern society bears some enduring guilt for the abominations of centuries past. Indeed, establishing this guilt seems to have been the political objective. This was mistaken and ironic.

Americans like to believe in their country’s exceptionalism, but slavery was and remains a worldwide phenomenon going back millennia and transcending nations and races. The slaves brought to the United States and delivered to white masters had been sold first in west Africa by other Black people. To some extent slavery continues today in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. 

So in the larger context Connecticut’s connection to slavery may be more remarkable for the efforts to overthrow it than to sustain it. In any case no country ever fought a more devastating war to destroy slavery than the United States did.

But even as New Haveners gathered to “lament” and “heal” from the wrongs of two centuries ago, the city remained the scene of a devastating wrong for which no sanctimonious services of lamentation and healing are ever held. That is, most of the city’s children — members of racial and ethnic minorities, far more numerous than there were ever slaves in the state — lack parents, live in poverty, and fail in school. New Haven’s schools have the worst chronic absenteeism in the state and many of those schools are in terrible repair. Many of their students, undereducated and demoralized, graduate to a more subtle but far more prevalent form of slavery.

As for the Indian wars of almost four centuries ago, they were full of atrocities, though today it is politically correct to remember only those of the winning side. 

The massacre of the Pequots in May 1637 in what is now Groton was the most horrible thing ever to happen in Connecticut. But the Pequots started the war. The tribe’s very name meant “destroyers” and they already had made deadly enemies of the Mohegans and Narragansetts long before attacking the English settlement in Wethersfield in April 1637, killing nine unarmed people, including three women, kidnapping two women, and killing the settlement’s cattle. 

So a month later the English, Mohegans, and Narragansetts united in a conclusive slaughter.

While the Treaty of Hartford fairly can be called genocidal, it was itself a response to genocide in an era when genocide was common.

No morality is taught by the sanctimony that evoked these horrors last week. Slavery has had no constituency in Connecticut since those last slaves were sold in 1825. Nor is there any constituency here for genocide, though in modern war civilians are often killed.

But there is a selfish political constituency for mobilizing the horrors of the past. 

Sanctimoniously reminding people of slavery can intimidate them out of opposing the claims of racial minorities for more government patronage, though that patronage isn’t righting any wrongs.

And sanctimoniously reminding people of the Treaty of Hartford may insulate the absurd patronage enshrined in state law whereby the ultra-distant descendants of the ancient Pequots, the victims of genocide, share a casino duopoly with the ultra-distant descendants of the ancient Mohegans, that genocide’s co-perpetrators.

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

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Where did the parents go? And is poverty forever?

By Chris Powell

Every few weeks some government agency or news organization in Connecticut reports that members of racial minorities are more afflicted than whites in some respect. Two weeks ago it was the state child advocate’s office, which said children from racial minorities are far more likely to die from gun violence than white children.

This is supposed to be shocking. But the reaction it deserves is just: Uh, duh.

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A member of the child advocate office’s Child Fatality Review Panel — Pina Violano, a nursing professor at Quinnipiac University — says: “This is a tragedy every day in our neighborhoods that we are normalizing. We need to draw more attention to this. We need wraparound services for these kids. We need for them to be in school. We need mentors and we need mental health programs.”

No, thank you. 

The murder of children is mainly the consequence of generational poverty. It won’t be addressed until generational poverty is addressed and particularly not until government examines why decades of poverty policy and its billions of dollars in spending have failed to reduce generational poverty and improve living conditions in the cities. Until that failure is addressed, please, no more “wraparound services,” “mentors,” and “mental health programs,” all the bromides of ineffectual social work, the nanny state, and bloated government.

If, as Professor Violano notes, children who are especially at risk are often not in school and in places where they shouldn’t be, what they need most is parents, who were omitted from the professor’s list of needs. Parents are “wraparound services,” or are obliged to be.

Most minority children in Connecticut’s cities live in single-parent households. Some are being raised by a grandparent. Many are neglected and when they get to school they don’t know how to behave. The misbehavior of neglected children has made hiring and retaining good teachers extremely difficult for city schools.

Within living memory nearly all children in Connecticut had two parents. So why do so many more children in the state, especially in the cities, no longer have two or even one? What happened in society, law, and government policy to change that? What might reverse the disastrous trend?

The child neglect of generational poverty, not gun violence, is the big tragedy Connecticut has been normalizing. Indeed, a whole industry has developed to normalize it, to try to remediate rather than eliminate it, and the more that gets remediated, the more that is produced to be remediated. All because no one in authority dares to ask: Where did the parents go? What destroyed the family?

Meanwhile state legislators are again contemplating whether Connecticut should give up on expecting members of racial minorities to comply with ordinary motor vehicle rules. 

Last week the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee held another hearing on a bill to prohibit police from stopping motorists for equipment violations — broken headlights and taillights, improperly displayed license plates, and such.

The complaint behind the bill is that such enforcement disproportionately targets racial minorities. Is this disproportion a matter of the racism of police officers, or is it, like the disproportion in child murders, a matter of racially disproportionate poverty — a matter of people who can’t as easily afford to keep their cars in good repair or who, being poor, lack respect for society and the law?

In any case there was testimony at the hearing that stops by police for auto equipment violations can get drivers violent and lead to shootings — either shootings of police by angry drivers or shootings by police of angry drivers who threaten them.

Of course no motorist likes being pulled over by police. But the premise of the legislation is that members of racial minorities simply can’t be expected to follow the law as everyone else is expected to do, so the law should not be enforced anymore.

That premise is disgraceful, demoralizing, and — yes — racist, but it may make sense if Connecticut believes that it will never alleviate poverty and the disproportions it imposes throughout life.

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

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‘Mean’ is not an argument in transgender controversy

By CHRIS POWELL

According to the leader of the Democratic majority in the state Senate, Norwalk’s Bob Duff, Republican legislators are “mean” for proposing legislation to prevent boys from participating in girls’ sports when the boys think of themselves as girls.

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“Mean” is pretty tame as Democratic criticism of Republicans goes these days. At least Duff didn’t call the Republicans racist, misogynist, or right-wing extremists, as is commonly done by many Democrats without prompting other Democrats to call them “mean.” These days anyone who suggests, for example, that state government shouldn’t be controlled by the government employee unions anymore is bound to be called one of those things, maybe all three. For as Lenin or some other totalitarian is supposed to have observed: If you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it.

Calling Republicans “mean” for wanting to keep males out of female sports is not an argument. It is a distraction, because there is no argument against keeping males out of female sports, except that doing so may hurt the feelings of the males who think of themselves as female.

But keeping those males out of female sports doesn’t deny them the ability to participate in sports, as is sometimes alleged, since they remain free to participate in male sports. 

If anyone really needs reminding, the premise of segregating the genders in sports is that on average males are larger, stronger, and faster than females, and that only such segregation can assure equal opportunity for females, which the 1972 amendments to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were meant to achieve.

But now that the transgenderism cult has taken over the Democratic Party, the party maintains that physical differences between the sexes have disappeared and there is no unfairness in requiring females to compete against males, even as males competing as females have famously robbed the latter of deserved victories in Connecticut and throughout the world, sometimes inflicting physical injuries on the females.

That unfairness is what is “mean,” though Duff affects not to see it.

If a male can deny biology and merely think himself female and induce government to compel everyone to pretend along with him, what becomes of reality? After all, if the adage is true — that you’re only as old as you feel — how can adults be prevented from playing in Little League and lording it over the kids there?     

Most people know that the transgenderism cult in sports is nonsense but are reluctant to say so lest they risk having the cult’s many demagogues call them “mean” or something worse. After all, they may figure that there is only a little injustice here — to the few females who lose to the males who purport to have transcended their gender and its physical advantages. 

Even so, it’s injustice all the same, and resolving the issue in favor of justice might be easy in Connecticut if a team competing against the University of Connecticut’s beloved women’s basketball team recruited a transgender player or two who proceeded to knock the UConn women around in a blowout on television.

The resulting popular indignation might give Connecticut Democrats some political courage.

The Biden administration turned Title IX on its head, the Trump administration is striving to put it back upright, and a few Democrats may be realizing that the country is not inclined to keep pretending along with them that males belong in female sports, bathrooms, and prisons, nor to pretend that immigration law enforcement should stop. Indeed, only such Democratic nuttiness could have brought Donald Trump back to the presidency.     

California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who aspires to his party’s next presidential nomination, appeared to have deduced this the other day when he told an interviewer that male participation in female sports is unfair. This was amazing, since California is where most nuttiness originates.

If Newsom can repudiate the nuttiness, could Senator Duff and other Democrats in Connecticut repudiate it someday as well? Or would that be too “mean”?    

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

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Rent control won’t build the housing Connecticut needs

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s cost of living is high, in large part because of housing prices, and nearly everyone says the state needs much more housing, especially “affordable” housing — most of which is rental housing. But whether everyone who says the state needs more housing really believes it is a fair question.

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That’s because most of the housing legislation proposed in the General Assembly wouldn’t increase the supply of housing at all. Most proposals would just scapegoat landlords, though more rental housing requires more landlords. Other proposals would just increase the dependence of renters on government. 

State government action that might actually get any “affordable” housing built remains too controversial, even for many Democratic legislators who ordinarily prattle about helping the poor even as Democratic administrations lately have been grinding the poor down with inflation, high electricity prices, and ineffectual schools.

For example, Democratic legislators want a big increase in state government rent subsidies to tenants, which turn housing into political patronage and take tenants hostage.

Democrats want to forbid landlords from evicting tenants at the end of their leases without “just cause.” End-of-lease evictions undertaken so landlords can raise rents would be prohibited. This would be rent control, which never got any housing built but only destroyed the private sector’s incentive to build rental housing.

Democrats want to forbid landlords from charging more than a month’s rent for a security deposit, as if landlords shouldn’t have the right to judge how much of a deposit is necessary to protect their property against damage by tenants. 

Democrats want to restrict the rent increases that can be charged upon sale of a property — more rent control.  

Democrats want to require even smaller towns to establish “fair rent commissions” — still more rent control.

Legislation called “Towns Take the Lead” would require towns to set housing construction goals, but there would be no firm enforcement mechanism for achieving them.

Democrats want state government to increase its obstruction of federal immigration law enforcement and provide more medical insurance coverage to illegal immigrants, thus incentivizing more illegal immigration, even as state government has never made any provision for housing Connecticut’s estimated more than 100,000 immigration law violators.

The most helpful of the Democratic housing proposals may be the one that would formally authorize homeless people to live, eat, and sleep on public land. Connecticut has many destitute, addicted, and mentally ill people, and some of them panhandle and live largely out of sight in the woods or underbrush, but so far the state lacks anything like the sidewalk tenting camps of Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. Maybe that kind of visibility for the destitute and disturbed is necessary to get Connecticut thinking seriously about its housing policy, social disintegration, and declining living standards.

The only sure way to get a substantial amount of new housing in Connecticut is for state government to commission it directly and let landlords charge market-rate rents. 

Connecticut’s cities, with their populations impoverished by state welfare and education policies and their governments surviving mainly on state financial aid, are already wards of the state. They also have large tracts of decrepit industrial and residential property already served by water, sewer, gas, and power lines and public transportation — property that practically begs for redevelopment, especially mixed-use redevelopment, with commerce at street level and residences upstairs, redevelopment that doesn’t worsen suburban sprawl.

A state redevelopment authority could be authorized to purchase or condemn such properties and provide them to developers, specifying their development format and completion schedules, while leaving rents to the market so the new properties won’t become more government-engineered slums. Cities might resent their loss of control to the state redevelopment authority but then few cities are operated well enough to deserve control of state housing policy any more than suburbs deserve to control it with their exclusive zoning.

Any new middle-class housing will help bring down the cost of all housing nearby, and the cost of living generally. If Connecticut’s decentralized political system can’t get housing built, state government will have to do it.       

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

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Homelessness, mental illness invite a ‘town farm’ approach

By Chris Powell

Maybe someday housing prices in Connecticut will come way down and housing construction will go way up.

Maybe someday the state’s economy will be stronger. 

Maybe someday inflation will be repealed as federal government policy. 

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Maybe someday the state will restore standards in public education and stop graduating so many uneducated young people qualified only for menial work. 

Maybe someday the state will reform its welfare policies so it does not produce so many fatherless, neglected, demoralized, and disturbed children.

But in the meantime Connecticut has a growing population of people who are not able or inclined to fend for themselves, or to do it honestly. Homelessness and mental illness are worsening and government is not prepared to deal with them. Their burdens keep falling mainly on the cities and inner suburbs, since that’s where the shelters, public housing, least expensive private housing, and social services are.

While Governor Lamont’s administration will facilitate construction of private, multi-family housing where there is little political opposition, the governor is not inclined to support legislation that would force more housing on municipalities that don’t want it and override more of their zoning. So it may take many years before the economy, education, housing construction, and welfare policy manage on their own to reduce homelessness and mental illness. 

But these problems are urgent and should be addressed comprehensively by the whole state. For Connecticut has thousands of damaged lives needing repair.

Poverty, homelessness, and mental illness are not new in Connecticut. The state has faced them for almost three centuries. Indeed, to address them today the state might do well to look back to the policy response of olden times — the “town farm.”

Town farms were more than shelters for the homeless. They were big rooming houses operated by municipal government and situated on substantial agricultural acreage. Town farms would house and feed the indigent and mentally ill but also require them, insofar as they were able, to contribute to the production and maintenance of the farm — to earn their keep. While town farms were primitive, they could make money and teach their residents job skills and to take responsibility for themselves.

Surely government today could do better with a town farm approach than by shuffling the homeless and mentally ill among the streets and overcrowded shelters. Connecticut already has some “supportive housing” operated by social-service organizations for people recovering from drug addiction and mental illness — efficiency apartments in buildings equipped to provide medical and counseling services to tenants. The Lamont administration proposes to open hundreds more such units for people recovering from addiction.

The state might establish similar facilities that would put the homeless in efficiency apartments, give them some privacy, stability, and peace of mind, feed them, treat their ailments consistently, and provide day care for their children — on condition that the tenants work to maintain the facility or get jobs or training outside the facility, pay rent, and restore themselves.

Of course such facilities would have to be closely supervised, and the disruptive mentally ill excluded. But an enhanced sort of town farm might help rebuild lives far more than mere shelters can.

Municipalities won’t undertake such projects, lacking both the resources and inclination. State government would have to handle siting, construction, and operation of new town farms, though their operation could be delegated to capable social-service organizations.

Since supportive housing facilities have been established in some places without much controversy, maybe enhanced town farms might be established without much controversy too. But controversy would always be a risk, and rehabilitating the homeless and mentally ill will always require the governor and state legislators to spend political capital along with state money.

With a high approval rating, Governor Lamont has such capital to spend. The longstanding Democratic majorities in the General Assembly may have such capital as well. Some of it should be deployed on homelessness and mental illness, especially since winter still has weeks to run.

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

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Must nearly all Connecticut be on government’s payroll?

By Chris Powell

Are annual incomes of $250,000 a year for a couple and $100,000 for a single person not enough to support a family in Connecticut?

That’s the implication of legislation proposed by many state legislators that would pay people $600 every year for each of as many as three of their children. Along with the so-called earned income tax credits offered to the working poor by the federal government and state government, this kind of thing is starting to look like a program of guaranteed annual income.

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The original idea of earned income tax credits was to increase the incentive to work of poor people who were receiving welfare benefits. But welfare benefits for people earning more than $100,000 a year imply that poverty and inflation in Connecticut have exploded even as state and federal elected officials have been proclaiming prosperity.

This implication is strengthened by clamor in the General Assembly to require the state’s Medicaid program to provide free diapers to insured infants — and it is estimated that 40% of births in Connecticut are now to women covered by Medicaid. That is, women on welfare.

The cost of living has soared in recent years. But it has not yet occurred to elected officials that the poor might be helped most simply by stopping inflation, not by creating more welfare, which adds to inflation if it is not matched by an increase in economic production.

Poor people also might be helped still more by improving their education and work skills. But Connecticut has given up on education, having replaced it with social promotion, thereby guaranteeing that every year thousands of young people reach adulthood qualified only for menial work — and needing more welfare.

DeLAURO’S KICKBACKS: The federal government is the biggest business in the world and very lucrative for those in power.

Take Connecticut U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, now serving her 34th year in Congress. When Democrats have held the majority in the House of Representatives, DeLauro has been chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Now that Republicans hold the majority — just barely — DeLauro is the committee’s “ranking” member, the leading member of the minority party, who still may retain great influence over appropriations. 

Simultaneously DeLauro has been national finance chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and has just been elected to another term. 

So if you want money from the government, DeLauro is a good person to befriend, and one way of befriending her is to donate money to the Democratic fundraising committee she runs. 

This is a kickback operation. DeLauro didn’t invent it but gets much credit for distributing federal money throughout Connecticut and the country for all sorts of goodies financed not by taxes but by borrowing and money creation — that is, inflation money.

Apparently someone else in the government is in charge of inflation, though DeLauro acts as if she has no idea who it is.

WE STARTED IT: Right as he is to want to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine, President Trump overdid it the other day when he accused Ukraine of starting the war. That was ridiculous, since the United States started it.

For first the U.S. helped overthrow Ukraine’s Russia-friendly regime. Then the U.S. encouraged Ukraine’s idea of joining NATO to gain military allies against Russia. Then the U.S. armed Ukraine and put spy facilities there.

This is exactly what Russia did with the revolution in Cuba in the early 1960s. The U.S. responded by invading Cuba and then blockading the island to expel Russia’s nuclear missiles there. Few Americans are aware of this. They don’t know that their country is far more of an imperial power than Russia is. 

After promising Russia, upon the reunification of Germany, that NATO would not expand eastward, the U.S. pushed NATO into the Baltic nations, right up against Russia’s border. U.S. meddling in Ukraine was the final provocation for Russia, so it attacked.

The United States owes Ukraine peace, and reparations for provoking the war with Russia.

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

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Undo corrupt deal on PURA; and UConn’s bigger scandal

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont and the leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly have just made state government look pretty sleazy. 

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They made a deal to reappoint the controversial chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission, Marissa Gillett, fill two vacancies on the commission the governor had not wanted to fill, reclassify the commission as a “quasi-public” agency, and give one of the vacant positions to veteran state Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, who would be constitutionally disqualified from the position if the commission remained a regular state agency.

While the deal will do nothing to reduce Connecticut’s high electricity prices —  that can be achieved only by increasing the state’s supply of natural gas and removing the “public benefits” charges from electric bills — it apparently will make the Democrats feel better about high prices.

But the deal is doubly an outrage. 

It’s an outrage first because it would evade the constitutional rule preventing legislators from serving simultaneously in the executive branch of government, thereby giving Fonfara a huge raise on top of his $40,000 annual salary as a senator. As a PURA commissioner he would be paid an additional salary of between $152,000 and $207,000, which would qualify him for a big state pension.

The deal is secondly an outrage because, as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported last weekend, Fonfara has a longstanding personal conflict with the utilities commission. An electric company he founded, now defunct, is facing more than a million dollars in fines and penalties levied by the commission arising from the company’s failure to pay a $57,000 fee in 2023.

Fonfara plausibly disputes the fee and fine. The fee was imposed just before the senator’s company went out of business, and he says it never should have been charged because it was meant to cover costs of a billing system his company hadn’t used and couldn’t use. 

Nevertheless, the dispute creates a conflict of interest for Fonfara’s prospective service on the commission, and he should have made it public it before seeking a commissionership. 

Fonfara has some expertise in utility regulation and the electricity business but that’s not what his prospective appointment is about. It’s about lucrative patronage that would come at the expense of integrity in government. If the governor and Democratic legislative leaders knew about but concealed their knowledge of Fonfara’s conflict of interest when they decided to put him on the commission, this affair would be triply outrageous.

The PURA deal should be repudiated by its participants and different arrangements made, this time to serve the public, not the politicians.

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Corruption isn’t the big issue in the larceny charge brought last week against a University of Connecticut professor who is alleged to have used more than $50,000 in university money to take as many as a dozen personal and vacation trips while she was supposed to be teaching. A university investigation concluded that to justify the trips she also provided misleading or false information.

Corruption happens everywhere. Instead the big issue in this latest case of misconduct in Connecticut’s higher education system is the continuing lack of financial controls. Just as nobody at the State Board of Regents for Higher Education noticed the many self-serving expense claims submitted by the board’s chief executive officer, Chancellor Terrence Cheng, until the state auditors discovered them, the UConn professor had to take many improper trips at UConn’s expense, missing classes, before the university questioned them, and then, apparently, only because of an anonymous tip.

Of course the professor has not yet been convicted of anything. But given the attitude of state government, here is a plausible scenario: The professor will be put on paid leave for a year or two during which her prosecution will crawl through court, whereupon she will be offered and accept a plea bargain in which she pleads guilty to a reduced charge — maybe littering — and repays misappropriated money out of the income from her paid leave. 

Meanwhile nothing will be done about higher education’s lack of financial controls.

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

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Hold prisons accountable; and money isn’t education

By Chris Powell

Bad stuff happens in prison. Prisoners assault each other and guards, and guards get too rough with prisoners. Not enough people are watching. Prison security makes it almost impossible for the public or journalists to watch, and secrecy breeds criminality.

Psychiatric Security Board did its job but insanity law is crazy

Cheng is still pleading poverty; and what do illegals cost?

Connecticut’s sanctimony cities show we could use Elon Musk

That’s why in 2022 the General Assembly and Governor Lamont heeded appeals from prisoners and their families to re-establish the office of prison ombudsman, make it independent of the Correction Department, empower it to investigate prisoner complaints, and bring some accountability to the department.

But the governor and legislature failed to appoint an ombudsman for two years, and now that he is in the office, DeVaughn L. Ward is all alone with more than 350 prisoner complaints to investigate and more sure to come. While $400,000 has been budgeted for the ombudsman, authority to hire wasn’t granted until December and no job opening has been advertised yet.

The governor doesn’t think the ombudsman’s work is important, and most people probably would agree with him, though most prisoners will be released eventually and any injustice they endure in confinement may be reflected in their behavior back in society. Indeed, most people released from prison in Connecticut are in trouble again in two or three years.

Ward would like a staff of 16 to cover Connecticut’s 10 prisons and their 10,000 inmates. He’d like to have regional offices too. That would push the office’s annual expense beyond $2 million, and it’s not going to happen.

But before Ward’s idea is dismissed completely, legislators might want to watch the Correction Department’s video recording of the fatal beating of prisoner J’Allen Jones by guards at the prison in Newtown in 2018. Jones was tied up, an irritant-soaked mask was placed on his face, and he was held down as guards beat him, seemingly even after he had been subdued. The department says Jones was handled appropriately except insofar as guards waited too long to try to revive him. His heart disease is said to have contributed to his death. 

His estate is suing the state for damages.

Maybe the beating was justified but a fatality is the kind of thing for which the Correction Department should answer to something other than itself. It won’t be surprising if the state offers Jones’ estate a financial settlement to foreclose accountability.

Connecticut recently established an inspector general’s office to conduct independent investigations of deaths caused by police. It has worked well and the same principle should apply with the Correction Department. So the prison ombudsman’s office should be given enough resources to do some serious work.

*

Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on Education has reported what it thinks is needed to improve the impoverished city’s horrible schools: a lot more money.

While predictable, the commission’s recommendations are reasonable. More money would compensate for the financial drain on the city’s schools caused by regional schools that remove students from the city school system. State government would pay more for “special education” students, of which Hartford and other poor cities have so many, an issue now being disputed by the legislature and the governor. There would be more state funding for students who don’t speak English, many of whom are illegal immigrants, another disproportionate burden borne by cities.

But even if state government provided all the extra money, it would make no difference to education in Hartford. For no amount of money ever makes any difference with education in the cities. More money just increases staff salaries. Education is mainly a matter of parenting, and the cities lack parents.

State government has been throwing more money at schools since the state Supreme Court’s decision in the school financing case of Horton vs. Meskill in 1977, and city schools have only gotten worse. Only better population demographics — the dispersal of poverty — could ever improve city schools.

The Hartford commission’s recommendations are worth considering only because they might allow the city to reduce its excessive property taxes and, over many years, encourage more unpoor people to live there.

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

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