Hartford hints at best way to solve housing shortage

By CHRIS POWELL

State government and Hartford city government have figured out the easiest way to solve Connecticut’s desperate shortage of inexpensive housing. They just haven’t quite realized that they have figured it out.

More ‘public benefits’ bunk; and the big liability machine

A big payday for child neglect? And not all cruelty is Trump’s

If ‘public benefits’ require deception, get rid of them

The solution was presented at City Hall last week by Mayor Arunan Arulampalam and Governor Lamont, who announced a $4 million project funded jointly by the state and the city through what is called the Connecticut Home Funds initiative. The project is to turn 18 blighted and abandoned residential properties, condemned by the city long ago, into 20 units of new, owner-occupied housing.

The properties are to be sold to builders for $1 and the program will help them finance construction. The builders will be required to sell the new houses to people of moderate income at a price that will permit them to be mortgaged for a monthly payment close to the neighborhood’s apartment rents. The program aims to increase Hartford’s homeownership rate, the lowest in the state at only 23%. 

The price control involved, while likely to be popular, may be tricky to manage and is mistaken anyway, since it aims to prevent “gentrification” even as Hartford, terribly poor, needs many more residents with higher incomes. 

The program’s selection of builders also may be troublesome since it is likely to be heavily influenced by political patronage. 

But then Connecticut is a one-party state, nearly everything in its government is contaminated by patronage, and advocacy of the public interest is so weak here that it’s hard to accomplish anything good without patronage.

What is crucial about the Hartford project is its hint that the best way to alleviate the housing shortage isn’t to fiddle with zoning regulations and state financial incentives to municipalities but simply to build housing wherever it can be built without aggravating the neighbors too much.

Hartford is hardly alone in being full of dilapidated and underused properties. Connecticut is pockmarked not just with deteriorating tenements but also vacant former factories and commercial buildings. Many city office buildings are half vacant as well now that so many people work from home via the internet. 

Most of these properties would be infinitely more beneficial and attractive to their neighborhoods if replaced by  new housing, single- or multi-family, or converted to mixed commercial and residential use — so much more beneficial and attractive that even the worst snobs might not mind new people moving into town to replace the eyesores. Most of these properties are already served by water, sewer, and utility lines, so housing construction would not chew up the countryside with more suburban sprawl.

But transforming dilapidated and underused properties into the housing Connecticut needs won’t meet the urgency of the moment unless, as Hartford has done, government gains control of the properties and clears the way to their replacement.

No builder or developer wants to spend months or years haggling with a zoning board and pretty-pleasing the neighbors, just as no one who needs housing — including the children of the very people who object to new housing nearby — wants to wait months or years for a decent home he can afford.

So addressing the housing shortage with the necessary urgency is a matter of identifying the properties where any housing would be better than leaving the properties as they are. That approach might create more housing in a year than the housing law Connecticut enacted this year after such controversy.

So an amendment to that law is in order. The law authorizes the state Housing Department to build housing on state government property. The department also should be authorized to condemn and take control of decrepit or abandoned properties anywhere in the state and arrange construction of housing there, and to solicit municipalities to recommend such properties for conversion.     

Connecticut has many places where any housing would be better than leaving things as they are. Identify them, level them, build housing on them, and bring housing prices down along with the state’s high cost of living.

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

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More ‘public benefits’ bunk; and the big liability machine

By CHRIS POWELL

Hiding the costs of government social welfare programs in customer electric bills — the long-running scandal of Connecticut’s “public benefits” charges — is bad enough. But the other day Marc E. Fitch of the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator disclosed that one “public benefits” charge has allowed the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority to pay to have itself lobbied by groups purporting to represent poor people.

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Blumenthal chastises merchants who are more honest than he is

Something called the Nonprofit Accountability Group, based in Hartford, has been paid tens of thousands of dollars by PURA, money drawn from “public benefits” charges, to coordinate meetings involving utility rates, conduct outreach, and pay for transportation, child care, translation services, food, and even stipends for participants in its activities.

The money is paid through PURA’s Stakeholder Group Compensation Program, established by a state law enacted in 2023 to increase participation from “utility customers residing in an environmental justice community or receiving protection as hardship cases.”

But why should poor people particularly be trained to participate in PURA rate cases? Hasn’t the authority already discerned on its own that nearly everyone wants electricity bills to be lower? Doesn’t Connecticut already have an Office of Consumer Counsel and an attorney general’s office, amply staffed, to argue for holding utility rates down?  

And what about the conflict of interest the program creates for PURA? The agency is supposed to be an impartial judge in rate cases, balancing customer and utility company interests to achieve the public interest in adequate and efficient service and fair return on utility company investment. PURA can’t be considered impartial in rate cases when it is financing one side.

The Stakeholder Group Compensation Program looks like another patronage make-work racket like those lately contrived by state Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, and his girlfriend, the racket’s main beneficiary. 

The Republican leader in the state House of Representatives, Rep. Vincent Candelora of North Branford, wants a legislative committee to investigate the Stakeholder Group Compensation Program. But since the consumer counsel and attorney general are already doing the work at issue, the program should just be repealed. That will reduce utility bills more than the program itself does.

*

State government in Connecticut often seems like a big liability manufacturing machine, often getting sued over its negligence. The latest notable payout is $2.25 million to the family of visiting nurse Joyce Grayson, who was sexually assaulted and murdered in 2023 by paroled sex offender Michael Reese when she visited him at a halfway house in Willimantic to administer medication.

Reese probably never should have been at the halfway house. He had served 14 years in prison for stabbing and sexually assaulting a woman in New Haven in 2006, was released in 2020, and sent back to prison twice for violating his probation before being released again and murdering Grayson.

But Connecticut is the land of repeat offenders who are never put away for good until they kill or maim someone. So despite his probation violations Reese was released again with deadly results. In a plea bargain in August, Reese, 40, pleaded guilty and this time was sentenced to 50 years without probation or parole.

Grayson’s family has complained about state government’s failure to provide security to visiting nurses treating dangerous people outside prison. But the bigger failure here was the failure of the criminal-justice system, which could have imprisoned Reese longer after he twice violated his probation.

Grayson’s family sued state government, the visiting nurse company that employed her, and even the owner of the building occupied by the halfway house, and they appear to be sharing responsibility for paying the $2.25 million settlement. How much will be paid by state government isn’t clear. 

But in any case there is not likely to be any official attempt to calculate how much state government’s failure to deal properly with repeat offenders is costing Connecticut in lives and property. For the highest objective of criminal justice in Connecticut often seems to be only to keep criminals out of prison, reducing prison expense instead of crime.

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

A big payday for child neglect? And not all cruelty is Trump’s

By CHRIS POWELL

Everyone has heard the story about the boy who murdered his parents and then asked the court for leniency because he had become an orphan.

Connecticut now has a case that goes one better. 

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Blumenthal chastises merchants who are more honest than he is

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The “estate” of Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres — the 11-year-old whose decomposed body was found in a box in New Britain in October and who is alleged to have been fatally abused by her mother, Karla Garcia — is suing the state Department of Children and Families for $100 million in damages. Seventy-five million is for the fatal abuse of Jacqueline and the other $25 million is for abuse against her sister.

Who is Jacqueline’s “estate”?

It’s her father, Victor Torres, who lost custody of Jacqueline in January 2013 soon after her birth because he was in prison. After his release Torres regained joint custody with Jacqueline’s mother in May 2022. But he says he last saw the girl in June 2024, a few months before when police believe she was killed and her body stuffed in the box, which wouldn’t be discovered and opened for a year. Torres didn’t look very hard for her.

If Torres’ lawsuit is to be believed, the state Department of Children and Families owed the girl the care her own father failed to provide, having abandoned the girl. A real father might have insisted on being involved enough in her life to discover her abuse and avert her murder.

Now the $100 million claimed as damages by Jacqueline’s “estate” stands to reward Torres for his indifference and negligence.

The office of state Attorney General William Tong will defend the child welfare department against the lawsuit filed by Jacqueline’s “estate.” If the attorney general could take a break from joining federal lawsuits against the Trump administration, he might ask a state court to remove Torres as next of kin to the child he abandoned and from whose horrible death he now may imagine a spectacular payday.

* * *

From Tong’s bluster about the many federal lawsuits he has joined, people might think that all the neglect of the needy in Connecticut is the Trump administration’s fault.

But last week Connecticut Public Radio’s Sujata Srinivasan and Maysoon Khan reported about state government’s own neglect of hundreds of autistic children and their badly stressed parents.

The reporters found that a program underwritten by federal Medicaid provides respite care for parents of autistic children as well as live-in companions, job coaching, and other services. But state government hasn’t appropriated enough to cover all the 2,400 kids for whom such help has been requested, and the state Social Services Department has only about half the case managers it would need.

So some of the autistic children have been on a waiting list for 10 years.

Part of the problem is that the rates paid by state government to Medicaid providers remain disgracefully low and so people covered by Medicaid often have trouble finding health professionals to serve them. Even if the Social Services Department had all the case managers it would need to handle more services to autistic children, it probably would not be able to find many autism professionals willing to work for Medicaid rates.

Yet nearly every week state government announces millions of dollars in grants for less compelling things. 

Last month Governor Lamont said the state would give $121 million to QuantumCT, which he described as “a nonprofit that serves as the statewide coordinating body for advancing quantum technologies and convening industry and early-stage innovators, academia, and the public sector.” The General Assembly should check back in a year to see exactly what that meant and what, if anything, the money accomplished — after seeing if the Social Services Department has gotten around to the autistic kids. 

Meanwhile state employee unions are to be given raises of 4.5%, far higher than the raises being given in the private sector.

If these were Trump’s priorities, the people who run Connecticut would be screaming, “How cruel!”

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

If ‘public benefits’ require deception, get rid of them

By CHRIS POWELL

Misconduct by its recently disgraced and departed chairwoman, Marissa Gillett, has Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority on the defensive. Past utility rate decisions have been put in legal jeopardy, utility companies are getting angry and aggressive, Gillett’s Democratic allies in the General Assembly have been discredited for their complicity with her power grabbing and lies, longstanding criticism by Republican legislators has been vindicated, and state government’s infamous “public benefits charges” on electricity bills are becoming a political issue again.

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Some of those charges were recently removed by legislation with their financed transferred to state government borrowing, but most of the charges remain, comprising about 20% of customer electric bills, an estimated $1 billion annually. So at a Hartford Business Journal conference last month, a senior vice president of Connecticut’s largest electric utility, Eversource, Digaunto Chatterjee, called for removing the charges from electric bills entirely and financing their programs through the state budget.

For some time this has been the position of Republican legislators, who note that the charges function not only as a hidden tax but also as a tax on a necessity of life. But the electric companies, being heavily regulated and long having been scapegoated for Connecticut’s high electricity prices, had not been taking sides on the issue, lest they aggravate their adversaries.

Governor Lamont and most Democratic legislators are still resisting serious reform with the charges. The House chairman of the General Assembly’s Energy and Technology Committee, Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, says it makes little no difference how the programs financed by the charges are paid for — by footnotes on electricity bills or by regular state government appropriations and formal taxes.

Steinberg is wrong. For if the “public benefits charges” were eliminated, the programs they finance would have to start competing for appropriations along with everything else state government spends money on. They would become part of the budget process, where the items financed by the charges would get far more scrutiny from the governor, legislators, news organizations, and the public than they get now when they are buried in electric bills.

The HBJ reported last week that the “public benefits charges” consist of 63 fees that are summarized on electric bills in two line items, a format that virtually prohibits intelligent review. Of course that’s the way the governor and most Democratic legislators like it. They don’t think they would gain much politically from a billion-dollar reduction in electricity costs if it came with a billion-dollar increase in the state budget and taxes. Then they might face another billion dollars’ worth of controversy as they converted from a system where the charges and the programs they finance are hidden to a system where they would jostle against everything else government money is wanted for. Maybe in such a public process the governor and legislators would have trouble justifying some of the charges. Maybe they would feel compelled to reduce or eliminate some of the programs.

Moving the charges to the state budget would be best but it’s not the only way to increase transparency and accountability. A modest improvement might be for state government to keep the charges and their programs but to recover their costs with a formal sales tax on electricity — itemized in bold lettering at the top of all electricity bills.  

That would get people’s attention even if it failed to explain the programs being financed by the charges. 

Some of those programs may be necessary for the stability of the electrical system, but some are environmental niceties and nuttiness and some are simply welfare subsidies that are fairly resented by people who pay their own electric bills.

If the main objective of the “public benefits charges” is to pay for necessary things, they can be financed by the state budget and formal taxes. 

If the main objective of the charges is just to conceal government expenses and deceive people, nothing is worth that much and programs financed that way should be scrapped.

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

Blumenthal chastises merchants who are more honest than he is

By CHRIS POWELL

What would the holidays be in Connecticut without U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal warning his constituents about the perils of the season — dangerous toys, fraudulent business practices, Republicans, and the like? (Poking the Russian bear on its own doorstep has yet to make the senator’s list.)

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Last week the senator affected alarm about merchants who advertise products available for purchase with deferred payments — “buy now, pay later” promotions. People who purchase something by agreeing to pay in the future may find when the bill comes due that their financial situation has deteriorated. Worse, the senator notes, being late with a deferred payment may trigger penalty interest charges. 

Of course anyone who has graduated from high school might suspect these risks. But then maybe the senator understands that many Connecticut high school graduates can’t read, write, and do math at a high school or even an elementary school level. 

In any case the senator overlooks an argument in favor of “buy now, pay later” purchases, an argument that members of Congress especially should understand: inflation and the decline of the value of the U.S. dollar and wages paid in dollars. Amid inflation certain goods — if not worn out, damaged, or perishable — may actually increase in value and, when payment has to be made, may be worth more than their original price.

Indeed, Blumenthal misses the great irony in his warning people against deferred payment schemes: his having been for the last 15 years an enthusiastic supporter of the federal government’s own “buy now, pay later” policy. 

For the federal government increasingly finances itself with borrowing, and its total debt now exceeds $38 trillion, an unfathomable number. 

Government debt is not necessarily bad; it can be productive. But this is a matter of degree, and in recent years the federal debt has gone wild, as indicated by the country’s recent severe inflation and the heavy burden of federal government interest payments, estimated at about a trillion dollars annually and rising.

Most of this debt is not for long-lasting capital projects that will benefit the country for decades but for ordinary operating expenses and income supports, with the interest requiring payment far into the future by people who never benefited from the debt. 

This is borrowing for current expenses, which used to be considered immoral. But in national politics today, especially among Democrats like Blumenthal, money is believed to be infinite. (Most Republicans know better without acting much better.)

Today in Congress if any Democrat sees a need, actual or merely political, he’ll put it into an appropriations bill, and, if he’s friendly enough with the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, she’ll put it into the next federal budget with no concern about the federal debt, inflation, or interest burdens.

Congressmen love this system because it lets them distribute infinite goodies, essential or not, and pay for them indirectly, not with taxes but with inflation, a disguised tax few voters understand or can fix responsibility for.

That’s why the merchants promoting deferred payments are actually more honest than the senator who is warning his constituents against them. 

Stick to a merchant’s deferred payment plan and you’ll pay only as much as you signed up to pay. But with the federal government, whose costs are increasingly financed by borrowing, debt monetization, and inflation, you pay now, later, and — since the debt is never actually repaid at all, but just keeps rising — you pay for the rest of your life as well for what you get or once got from the federal government, and for what you didn’t get but others get or used to get.

So what’s really more dangerous — the toys Blumenthal is scorning, whose small parts a 2-year-old might pull off and swallow or stick in his nose or ear, or a government that, when the kid turns 18, will welcome him into adulthood largely ignorant and unskilled but, as a taxpayer, already heavily mortgaged?

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

There’s plenty of guilt by association to go around in Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s Democratic state chairman, Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves, thinks he has discovered the decisive disqualification for the two declared candidates for next year’s Republican nomination for governor — Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio and former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart — and presumably for any Republican seeking elective office in Connecticut.

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It’s a slight variation of the Democratic election strategy that has been in use for the last nine years: Just keep chanting: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

Alves’ variation on the theme is to ask Fazio and Stewart, as he did in a recent newspaper essay, whether they would still like President Trump’s endorsement, now that Trump and the Republican majority in Congress are reducing or threatening to reduce federal food and medical insurance subsidies.

Those subsidies raise an important question: Whether their excesses, which include a lot of fraud, some of which has been manifested in Connecticut, can ever be eliminated without harming the deserving poor. One incident of such fraud was publicized again last week when former Bristol Democratic state Rep. Christopher Ziogas pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges involving Medicare and Medicaid, fraud in which Governor Lamont’s former social services commissioner was implicated, soon after which she retired.

State authorities did not prosecute this fraud — federal authorities did. Indeed, it’s a fair question as to whether state government in Connecticut ever will get serious about eliminating excesses in social welfare programs without the pressure of sharply reduced appropriations.

Alves is pitching guilt by association: Trump is a cruel megalomaniac and a Republican, Fazio and Stewart are Republicans who voted for Trump, therefore Fazio and Stewart are cruel megalomaniacs, and so are all others who voted for Trump, even reluctantly, perceiving him as the lesser evil.

All’s fair in love, war, and politics, and of course in the presidential election last year Republicans campaigned against Democrats as Alves is campaigning against Republicans now. Democrats who were supporting their party’s presidential candidate, first President Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris, were accused of endorsing rampant inflation, illegal immigration, and transgenderism. Chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as Democrats did last year failed to address these issues.

As Democratic state chairman, Alves could be especially attached to the Trump-chanting strategy because it might help avoid what should be the main issue in next year’s election in Connecticut — the record of the Lamont administration as the governor seeks a third term, as well as the longer record of the Democratic administration of the state since its last Republican governor, Jodi Rell, left office 14 years ago.

Connecticut has many problems: its long economic decline relative to the rest of the country; its high cost of living, especially with housing prices; its worsening poverty; and its many scandals of mismanagement in state agencies, scandals suggesting that the governor doesn’t pay enough attention. Awful as the president may be, Trump is not responsible for these problems.

It will be good if Fazio and Stewart can articulate these issues and it will be better still if they dare to specify alternative policies, especially toward the housing shortage. While the housing legislation just enacted by the General Assembly’s Democratic majority and the governor is mainly a sympathetic pose and is not likely to get much housing built, the Republican position on the housing shortage is mainly fear of the underclass.

But if Fazio and Stewart want to play Alves’ game about Trump’s endorsement, they could ask Alves whether the governor wants the endorsement of, say, Ziogas; his former deputy budget director, Konstantinos Diamantis, also just convicted on federal corruption charges; his disgraced former chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, Marissa Gillett, who quit abruptly a few weeks ago when she was caught lying extravagantly; and former university Chancellor Terrence Cheng, who was removed for exploiting his expense account but still given severance pay of nearly $500,000.

Why can’t it just be taken for granted that both major political parties are terribly flawed? Maybe then there would be time to discuss issues.

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

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Get real about speed limits and student suspensions

By CHRIS POWELL

As most drivers in Connecticut have noticed, for a few years now the state’s highways have seemed full of homicidal maniacs, like the one who was arrested last week by a state trooper for going 127 miles per hour on the limited-access portion of Route 6 in Mansfield, nearly double the speed limit there.

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Apologists for government like to attribute this kind of stuff to the Covid-19 virus epidemic, just as educators like to blame the epidemic for the persistence of chronic absenteeism in schools. At least they’re not blaming it on Donald Trump yet.

More likely the increase in misconduct like this is being caused by society’s failure to impose adequate penalties for it. Hardly anyone is sent to prison for anything anymore so the governor and state legislators can boast about a falling prison population, and neither students nor parents are penalized for chronic absenteeism from school, unless a visit from a plaintive social worker can be considered punishment.  

But police traffic data from bucolic East Lyme may suggest that between a quarter and a third of the people in town may be trying to kill someone, since they are exceeding speed limits on local roads by 10 mph or more, even near schools. East Lyme’s police chief last week told The Day of New London that if the traffic-ticketing cameras that have been proposed for the town had been in place during a recent week and a $50 fine had been levied for driving 10 mph or more over the limit, the town would have been owed $1.3 million.

More likely the problem in East Lyme and elsewhere is that speed limits are set too low in ordinary settings — judging by the fudge factor East Lyme’s chief was using, at least 10 mph too low. As numerous as homicidal maniacs seem to be these days, they surely don’t yet constitute between a quarter and a third of the population. Most people driving 10 or 15 mph above the speed limit are doing so in their own neighborhoods, for which they may be presumed to have some respect, and they think their speed is safe.

The danger with adjusting to common practice is that if 30-mph limits are raised to a more realistic 40 mph, people may take it as license to drive 50. 

So maybe the most practical solution would be to raise most speed limits by 10 mph but also enforce the higher limits rigorously with traffic cameras everywhere. 

*

A week ago Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers thought it was big news that there are racial disparities in suspensions of students in the state’s public schools. That is, Black and Hispanic students are suspended more often relative to their numbers than white students are — Blacks three times as often, Hispanics twice as often. “Special education” students are also suspended far out of proportion to their numbers.

There’s a whole industry devoted to attributing these disparities to incompetent or racist teachers and administrators or a lack of programs for troublesome or handicapped children. But there is far more likely explanation.

For poverty and fatherlessness are racially disproportionate as well, and children who live in more prosperous homes and get more parenting tend to behave and perform much better in school, regardless of the quality of their teachers and administrators and the programs available to them.

Indeed, a study assembled this year by the University of Virginia found that the achievement and behavior gaps between Black and white students, gaps that long have been especially disgraceful in Connecticut, close completely for children who are raised in intact families or whose fathers are at least heavily involved in their lives.  

That is, the achievement and behavior gaps are not about race at all but about parenting, the structure and stability of the family, an issue that, because of its political incorrectness, cannot be discussed in polite company in Connecticut, and especially not in education, where it might overthrow everything.

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

Eastern Connecticut State University tries to revive the ‘noble savage’ myth

By CHRIS POWELL

Having realized that it had been overlooking a prerequisite of political correctness in academia, Eastern Connecticut State University this month adopted a formal “land acknowledgment” that will be ceremoniously proclaimed at the start of major university events.

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It reads: “We respectfully acknowledge that the land on which Eastern Connecticut State University stands, and the broader land now known as the State of Connecticut, is the ancestral territory of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, Mohegan Tribe, Nipmuc Tribe, and Schaghticoke Tribe, who have stewarded this land throughout the generations with great care. We honor their resilience, cultural heritage, and enduring presence. As Connecticut’s public liberal arts university, we are committed to fostering greater awareness of Indigenous histories and contemporary experiences, and to building relationships grounded in respect, reciprocity, and responsibility.”

And so the university now will perpetuate the myth and stereotype of the “noble savage”: that the Indians of old were good, one with nature, eternally peaceful, and uncorrupted by civilization, unlike the civilization that succeeded theirs, of which everyone should be ashamed.

Of course the struggle for land and sovereignty is not peculiar to Connecticut. While the struggle is fortunately concluded in the United States, it is the history of humanity and continues throughout the world. Even the “noble savages” of old, including those in what became Connecticut, struggled with each other for land and sovereignty before the European tribe came to dominate the area three centuries ago by making alliance with the Mohegans and Narragansetts to eradicate the troublesome Pequots.

The university says the Indian tribes of old “have stewarded this land throughout the generations with great care.” 

Huh? The tribes of old were mainly hunters and foragers, not industrialists. They didn’t build roads, dams, sawmills, schools, factories, and railroads. They didn’t make great advancements in medicine. They sometimes practiced slavery and polygamy. Any stewardship they performed ended centuries ago.

That is, they were people of their time and culture, as their adversaries were, and as everyone is. 

But now that some of their ultra-distant descendants have obtained lucrative state grants of exclusivity, their “stewardship” includes casinos, through which some of them have accumulated great wealth that is imagined to be reparations for wrongs done to their ultra-distant ancestors, even as their casinos nurture costly addictions to gambling, which an ever-ravenous state government happily whitewashes when it shares the profits.

Indeed, it’s unlikely that Eastern would nurture this obsession with ancestry if there wasn’t casino money in it, since ancestor worship is emphatically un-American. The Mother of Exiles says so herself from New York harbor: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp,” cries she with silent lips.

That is, in the civilization now operating in these parts one’s ancestry doesn’t matter any more than anyone else’s does, and everyone who has lived here a little while becomes as “indigenous” as everyone else is. Despite its many faults, the current civilization at least has greatly diminished if not quite eliminated tribalism, what with Eastern and other institutions of higher education trying to revive it with “land acknowledgments.”

Contrary to Eastern’s implication, no one today is guilty of the injustices of the distant past, and even back then there was plenty of guilt to go around. If guilt is to be imposed, the present offers injustices enough. They won’t be corrected by the politically correct posturing that is sinking higher education.

ARE THEY US?: A few days ago Connecticut got another invitation to take a good look at itself. 

State police said a pedestrian was killed on Interstate 95 in Stamford when he was struck by four cars — and the first three drivers fled the scene. Maybe the fourth would have fled as well if his car hadn’t been disabled in the collision.  

Could all the drivers really have thought that they had hit a deer or a bear, not a person? Who are these people? Are they us? 

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

Poet explains to Senator Murphy why some others don’t side with him

By CHRIS POWELL

Those six Democratic members of Congress who last week managed to provoke more hysteria from President Trump by noting that American soldiers can disobey “illegal orders” would have been far more helpful if they specified the illegal orders they fear Trump may issue.

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After all, there’s really nothing to argue here. “Illegal orders” are illegal orders. 

Trump chose to ignore the “illegal” part and misconstrue the congressmembers to be advocating disobeying his orders as commander in chief generally. Only in that sense could he accuse them of “sedition” and approvingly quote a social media post: “Hang them.”

The congressmembers should have known this would happen. Indeed, triggering Trump may have been their objective. It’s easily done.

It would have been harder for Trump to misconstrue and rage if, instead, the congressmembers challenged the president to cite any legal authority for his directing the military to kill drug-smuggling suspects in boats on the high seas as he has done lately around Venezuela and Colombia. 

The United States is not at war with those nations and there is no evidence that the people in the boats destroyed by U.S. military aircraft were military personnel. The U.S. military itself seemed to recognize as much when it repatriated two survivors of an attack instead of detaining them as prisoners of war.

It also would have been harder for Trump to misconstrue and rage if, instead, the congressmembers had asked whether his recent dispatch of an armada toward Venezuela was meant to contrive an excuse for war without a declaration of war by Congress — as President Lyndon B. Johnson contrived the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 to justify more U.S. military intervention in Vietnam.

Of course the Venezuelan regime is reprehensible, but does Trump intend to overthrow it without a declaration of war by Congress? The congressmembers should have asked that question as well, instead of letting the president get away with changing the subject.

But continuing his campaign to become the darling of the apoplectic wing of the Democratic Party, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy jumped into the fray with his own vulgar hysteria.

Citing Trump’s denunciation of the congressmembers who raised the “illegal orders” issue, Murphy said: “If you’re a person of influence in this country and you haven’t picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a #!@$%+# side.”

Since he comes from a state that long has seemed inclined to elect Democrats to statewide office no matter how questionable their positions, qualifications, and records, Murphy has never been compelled to reflect on how difficult it has been lately for many Americans to “pick a #!@$%+# side.” 

The essential question facing the Democratic Party since Trump’s election as president last year remains unanswered by Murphy and most other leading Democrats: Why would most voters decide to return to the presidency someone as megalomaniacal, reckless, unstable, corrupt, and cruel as Trump? 

Surely Murphy might have noticed that while Connecticut didn’t come close to giving Trump its electoral votes last year, he substantially increased his support in the state and throughout the country. So how come?

Having replaced Trump’s first administration with a Democratic administration in 2020 only to get roaring inflation, worsening poverty, open borders, incompetence, senility, and claims that civil rights require putting men into women’s sports, bathrooms, and prisons, might some people voting for president last year have concluded that they had to pick a different side even if by doing so they might doom themselves to picking a different side again in 2028?

Senator Murphy is sore to the point of vulgarity that so many people still have not yet picked his side, though, on top of the nonsense of last year’s campaign, his side now is also advocating nullification and insurrection. In Scottish dialect from a few centuries ago the poet Robert Burns might explain the senator’s problem to him:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

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

New Haven school board is frank with public: Get lost!

By CHRIS POWELL

New Haven’s Board of Education, of which Mayor Justin Elicker is a member, says city residents should not be told how well School Superintendent Madeline Negron is doing her job.

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The New Haven Independent reported this month that the board conducted Negron’s evaluation orally and in secret in August, putting nothing in writing because a written evaluation would have become a public record while an oral evaluation could be conducted without leaving any traces.

The mayor told the Independent: “If you have a written document that’s going to be in the newspaper, it doesn’t facilitate a very honest and frank conversation and it certainly doesn’t facilitate a back-and-forth.”

So how is the public to know how the superintendent is performing? How is she to be held accountable to the public? How is the board to be held accountable?

Of course the mayor’s rationale for secrecy for the superintendent’s evaluation — to make it easier for evaluators to be frank — can be used to conceal the performance of all government employees. Indeed, teacher unions long have been so politically influential in Connecticut that 41 years ago they persuaded the General Assembly and Gov. William A. O’Neill to exempt their performance evaluations from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law. No other government employees have been given such exemption, only teachers, even though teachers think their work is more important than the work of other government employees.

Mayor Elicker and New Haven school board President OrLando Yarborough agree that Superintendent Negron is doing a great job, though the mayor admits that New Haven’s schools have serious problems. But if the superintendent is doing so well, why can’t the public know how she has been evaluated? And if she’s not doing so well, isn’t that just as important for the public to know, so improvement can be demanded and measured?

State Education Commissioner Charlene M. Russell-Tucker and Governor Lamont seem not to have been asked about New Haven’s brazen repudiation of open government. But then the governor and the commissioner long have presided over the erosion of student academic performance and the general decline of standards in Connecticut’s schools.

The arrogance demonstrated by New Haven’s school board and mayor is another reminder that the biggest problem with public education in Connecticut is that it’s really not public at all.

TOO MUCH INDIFFERENCE: Can any inferences be drawn from the Connecticut voter registration data published the other day by the Connecticut Mirror?

The changes over the last five years have been small. Unaffiliated voters have remained the largest group, at 41.2% of the electorate, up from 41% in 2020. The Democratic share of the electorate has fallen by almost 2%, from 37% to 35.1%. The Republican share is up slightly from 20.4 to 21.1%. While Democrats outnumber Republicans by five to three, the larger number of unaffiliated voters sustains the possibility that, with compelling issues, a Republican might win a statewide election.

While Republicans in Connecticut don’t always seem to want to raise compelling issues, the state is full of them, like high electricity and housing prices, high taxes, the high cost of living generally, faltering public education, and low economic growth.

But more than the possibility of political competition, the voter registration data implies alienation among a large number of voters. 

Connecticut has “closed” party primaries for nominating candidates. That is, only party members can vote in a primary. But enrolling in a party requires only a voter’s desire to have the right to help choose the party’s candidates.

In municipalities whose voters lean heavily to one party or the other, primaries — not elections — are often where the real choosing of elected officials is done. But 41% of Connecticut voters want nothing to do with choosing nominees, and about a quarter of the state’s eligible adults haven’t even bothered to register to vote. The state’s sad situation is evidence of far too much political indifference.

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

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