Connecticut’s prosperity depends on more housing

By Chris Powell

Will Governor Lamont and the new session of the General Assembly do much about the state’s severe shortage of housing? The governor and legislators say they want to bring down the state’s high cost of living and make the state more affordable, and housing expense may be the biggest part of the problem.

Connecticut’s social promotion makes public education a costly fraud

Hartford schools obstruct investigation of graduate’s illiteracy

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For years the housing issue in Connecticut has been mainly a controversy over exclusive zoning in the suburbs and a state law that allows developers of less-expensive housing to go to court to get around such zoning. Opponents of the law insist on preserving local control to maintain the “character” of suburban and rural towns. By “character” they mean in large part the exclusion of the poor.

Unjust as such opposition seems in general, it arises from fair concerns. For the poor can impose much expense on a municipality and diminish its quality of life. They usually consume more in government services than they pay in taxes, and their children are often neglected, commit crime, and weaken schools. 

Poverty is no fun, and having turned most of Connecticut’s cities into poverty factories, government’s failure has cautioned suburbs not to let more poor people in. 

But to exclude the poor, towns end up zoning out their own middle-class children starting out in life, as well as their own parents needing to downsize in retirement. 

While so much more housing is needed, there is a big risk in pushing too much of it into the suburbs: land-gobbling sprawl and the need to build expensive infrastructure like roads, schools, sewers, and sewage-treatment facilities. Such expenses worsen the zoning controversy.

The political left may keep advocating zoning overrides in pursuit of social justice, but moderate Democratic legislators have been reluctant to risk offending their constituents with more poor people, and most Republican legislators proclaim devotion to local control. 

As he considers a third term, the governor also seems to want to avoid the zoning issue. He notes his administration has been financing or otherwise facilitating much housing construction, if not enough.

But if more zoning overrides are a dead end politically, there is still plenty of opportunity for more housing in Connecticut, exactly where less expensive housing —  that is, multi-family housing — would be best placed: in the cities and older inner suburbs. For these places have many abandoned industrial and commercial sites as well as utility lines and public transportation already in place. These locations could also accommodate the businesses that would be needed by new or revived neighborhoods — shops, supermarkets, restaurants, professional offices, and such.

City government in New Haven is making good progress in facilitating new housing in the downtown area. Hartford and Bridgeport are striving to catch up. Bridgeport, which once styled itself the industrial capital of Connecticut, has much abandoned factory property and run-down housing that could use redevelopment.

Getting state and city governments to work together with developers isn’t always easy. While city residents aren’t as snobbish as suburbanites, they too can resent change in their neighborhoods, and, living among so much poverty already, they are right not to want more nearby. 

That’s why new housing shouldn’t be too affordable. Most should be aimed at people who can support themselves and who could become homeowners with government-subsidized mortgages, just as government-subsidized mortgages helped build the middle class in the suburbs decades ago, helping millions of people become middle-class with equity in their homes.

Catholic philosophers of old argued that the best way to extend prosperity and protect property is to ensure that everyone owns some. Indeed, it has been done. 

If only the United States could develop a housing policy more like Singapore’s, where the government directly builds housing and finances homeownership for all who want it and where, as a result of this policy and high educational standards — not the social promotion destroying education in the United States — society is integrated and productive, enjoys a high standard of living, and suffers little poverty and crime.

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

Connecticut’s social promotion makes public education a costly fraud

By Chris Powell

Social promotion in Connecticut’s schools isn’t just informal policy and practice, implemented by winks and nods. This week Marc E. Fitch of the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator reported that many school systems, including those in Hartford, New Haven, Waterbury, and Middletown, follow written policies virtually prohibiting giving students failing grades. 

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The policy is called “Minimum 50” and it requires teachers to give passing grades to all students, including those who have learned little if anything and even those who never showed up. Such practices and policies have destroyed educational standards.

“Minimum 50” ensures that uneducated students are advanced from grade to grade and then given high school diplomas even if they are illiterate or essentially so, like the recent Hartford Public High School graduate who last September sensationally confessed to the Connecticut Mirror that she still couldn’t read or write. Now she is suing the city for $3 million in damages.

Educational standards have been destroyed this way to increase high school graduation rates and conceal the massive fraud that public education has become, especially in impoverished cities.

Fitch reports that the Hartford school system last year claimed a graduation rate of more than 78%, its highest in a decade, even as 27% of its students were chronically absent, with Hartford Public and Bulkeley high schools having chronic absenteeism rates above 50%. Rising chronic absenteeism rates can correlate with rising graduation rates only where educators are corrupt.

But the massive fraud in public education also helps conceal Connecticut’s worsening social disintegration.

After all, a student doesn’t remain illiterate through 12 or 13 years of schooling, like the Hartford girl, without having indifferent or incompetent parents or no parents at all. There are many such households. This is an angle that journalism about the Hartford girl’s case has studiously overlooked.

Educators enable parental irresponsibility by accepting and rationalizing it.

Hartford’s school system has put its social promotion policy in writing for seven years but only recently have a few teachers begun complaining about it in public. In other school systems in Connecticut there seem to be even fewer complaints from teachers about social promotion. Instead teacher unions lately have been demanding hefty raises — like those recently awarded in Hartford — because student misconduct and terrible performance have become insufferable and are driving teachers out of the worst school systems and even out of the profession. 

This is another sign of social disintegration, but social disintegration has yet to make the agenda of Governor Lamont and state legislators, perhaps because any serious inquiry would implicate a similar destruction of standards by state law and policy — standards of personal behavior.

Educators and elected officials treat chronic absenteeism of students as a bit of a mystery but it isn’t. When students and their negligent parents realize that promotion and graduation are assured without learning and without even attending school, and that there are no “truant officers” anymore, no consequences, why bother attending? 

Indeed, why should Connecticut maintain its mandatory attendance law when it isn’t enforced and attendance and learning aren’t needed for graduation? Indeed, why not offer public education only to those students who want to attend and save the billions of dollars social promotion wastes on the pretense of education? Why not just distribute high school diplomas with birth certificates?

Apart from the disaster of an ignorant population, the social promotion scandal risks financial disaster. For what if the illiterate Hartford girl wins her lawsuit against the city and collects millions in damages? Thousands of other illiterate graduates could follow with their own lawsuits and get rich at tax expense.

But at least the scandal has given Connecticut a searing look at the cruel, costly, and cynical operation of the poverty factories its cities have become. 

Meanwhile Connecticut Democrats are upset that wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon will be President-elect Trump’s education secretary, not upset that students can get diplomas without learning anything or even attending school. For the poverty factories are the Democrats’ cash cows.

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

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Hartford schools obstruct investigation of graduate’s illiteracy

By Chris Powell

Fifty years ago, during the bad old days of the state Department of Children and Families, when it was called the Department of Children and Youth Services, a clumsy mechanism of unaccountability was used by the political hacks who ran the agency. (For years the only qualification of the department’s commissioner was his service as Democratic chairman in Westport and participation in Democratic campaigns.) 

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Child neglect and abuse were exploding in Connecticut and the department’s negligence and incompetence kept being suggested by appalling news reports drawn from police investigations of the abuse of children in households supposedly being monitored by the department’s social workers. The department frequently refused to provide explanation, claiming that accountability would violate the privacy of the abusive households. 

Of course the department sought only to protect itself against bad publicity.

This began to change in 1991 with the settlement of a federal class-action lawsuit against the department charging incompetence. In 1993 the department’s name was changed to the current one, and the department itself began to change with John G. Rowland’s election as governor. Since some news organizations were starting to pay attention to the department, Rowland knew that more child welfare agency scandals would reflect badly on him. 

Chastened by the department’s awful reputation, Rowland and the General Assembly created the office of child advocate to investigate and report publicly about child welfare scandals, and Rowland chose new commissioners with relevant qualifications who repudiated their predecessors’ unaccountability. 

Of course Connecticut still has child welfare disasters, but few involve blatant unaccountability, and there is more understanding of the difficulty of the department’s work as social disintegration worsens in the state.

So these days the bigger problem of unaccountability in government in Connecticut involves education.

Last September the Connecticut Mirror reported about a young woman who had just graduated from Hartford Public High School unable to read and write. Many other such cases are suspected, since Connecticut’s main education policy is social promotion.

Hartford’s school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, pledged to investigate the illiterate graduate’s case but has reported nothing, apparently hoping it will fade away. 

The state education commissioner, Charlene M. Russell-Tucker, also pledged to investigate, and last week, in a letter to two Republican state senators who had prodded her about the case — Stephen Harding of Brookfield and Eric Berthel of Watertown — she reported that Hartford’s school administration is obstructing her investigation.

The Education Department wants to see the Hartford school system’s records on the student but the school system refuses to provide them on the grounds that sharing the records “could complicate the parties’ resolution” of the student’s lawsuit.

The student’s privacy rights are not at issue. As a practical matter she waived them by giving her sensational interview to the Mirror and by bringing suit. 

Nor is it an excuse that the Hartford school system thinks it would be easier to settle the suit if no one can ever find out what happened during the student’s “education.” The Education Department has supervisory authority over municipal schools, and the public interest in accountability is far more compelling than a school system’s interest in concealing a scandal through a confidential settlement of a lawsuit.

But that’s public education in Connecticut for you. It’s like the child welfare agency of old. 

So which teachers “taught” the illiterate girl? Which administrators advanced her from grade to grade and to graduation despite her illiteracy? Do Hartford’s schools have any standards for advancement?

How widespread is the problem of gross under-education of high school graduates in Connecticut? Why does the state have no proficiency tests for advancement and graduation? Why is social promotion deemed superior?

Two Republican senators seem interested in these questions. The 185 other legislators and the governor don’t seem to be. After all, the answers might be horrifying. 

For as it was 50 years ago, the scariest word in state government remains “accountability,” and there’s no “child advocate” to investigate education’s failures, just advocates for more raises for school employees.

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

   

Connecticut mustn’t worry about illegal immigrants until they kill

By Chris Powell

Charged with the horrifying immolation murder of a woman sleeping on a subway car in Brooklyn on Dec. 22 is a man from Guatemala who entered the country illegally and was deported in 2018 but who entered illegally again and found his way to New York, where subsidies for illegal immigrants are especially attractive.

Since prior to the murder the man appears not to have been charged with any serious crime, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and most other state Democratic leaders would have defended his right to violate immigration law if he had been in Connecticut prior to Dec. 22. Indeed, that’s the state Democratic position on all illegal immigrants — that people who enter the country illegally and reach Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law until they commit a serious crime.

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But under the Democratic national administration’s policy of open borders, supported by Tong and most leading Connecticut Democrats, the government can’t know much if anything about people who enter illegally until they do something terrible here and are apprehended. No matter if they were criminals in their home country; once they get here we’re not supposed to know. 

Protecting the country against those who have bad intent and are unable to support themselves honestly is the main purpose of immigration law. Or it was the main purpose prior to the Democratic Party’s realization that it could gain permanent control of the U.S. House of Representatives by packing Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas with millions of illegal immigrants who, even if barred from voting, still would be counted in the federal census and cause creation of many more solidly Democratic congressional districts at the expense of competitive and Republican districts.

The Democratic response to the objection to admitting millions of people without individual evaluation is that most illegal immigrants won’t commit crimes and that illegal immigrants generally are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born. 

That is, Democrats maintain that since 51% of illegal immigrants probably won’t commit crimes, there’s no need to worry about the other 49% — no need to fear that some who have entered the country illegally may be awaiting instructions from hostile powers and scouting the country’s thousands of soft targets, like a street crowded with revelers in New Orleans and the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, last week’s scenes of mayhem.

The Democratic rationalization for open borders is ridiculous but it may keep working politically until news organizations end their complicity and challenge those who make it.

The Brooklyn murder case highlights another major problem caused by open borders policy that Connecticut Democrats overlook. Both the woman murdered on the subway car in Brooklyn, who was a U.S. citizen, and the illegal immigrant charged with burning her to death appear to have been living in homeless shelters. 

The cost of housing has soared in the last few years, a subsidiary cost of open borders, since government made no provision for the millions who entered the country illegally and were exempted from deportation. Over the last year homelessness is estimated to be up 18% nationally and 13% in Connecticut. 

It’s not just the increase in homelessness. Rising housing costs have reduced living standards for millions of working-class people.

Many Democrats in Connecticut prattle about the housing shortage while overlooking their party’s responsibility for it with open borders and obstructing deportations except for serious criminals. The state is estimated to have well more than 100,000 illegal immigrants, many receiving state government medical insurance and driving down the wage base by working illegally at substandard wages.

Ironically the country easily could afford liberal immigration policy if it required immigrants to show familiarity with American history, fluency in English, and commitment to a democratic and secular culture, and to forswear welfare benefits for 10 years. 

In that case the United States might have a better class of immigrants than the native-born, who increasingly are uneducated and unskilled and take their country for granted. But that’s a different government policy failure.

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

This suggests an epidemic of incorrigibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-END-

Holiday congestion at Tweed indicates airport’s potential

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconsidering fluoridation; and are we having fun yet?

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

-END-

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-END-

Lamont, legislators minimize college arrogance, hypocrisy

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a wonderful life — and a political one

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

POTTER: A friend of yours.

BAILEY: Yes, Sir.

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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