Connecticut’s working class is put on the path to oblivion

By Chris Powell

Over the Labor Day weekend leading Democrats — starting with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz — claimed loudly that theirs is the party of organized labor and working people.

Insofar as organized labor — unions — consists these days mostly of government employees, the Democrats were telling the truth. Unionized government employees are the party’s army and are well rewarded financially for working to keep Democratic regimes in power. During the holiday weekend Connecticut Inside Investigator reported that government employees in the state are the country’s most unionized government employees. 

This is largely because Connecticut law virtually requires state and municipal employees to be unionized and, through binding arbitration of their contracts, gives them great control over their compensation and working conditions. Connecticut’s system of labor relations is a surreptitious program of public financing of Democratic political campaigns, a system far more effective than the state’s formal program of campaign finance, the Citizens’ Election Program, for which all candidates are eligible.

Unionized government employees are a privileged class. The working class is something else, a matter of the private sector, and private-sector workers are not doing so well under Democratic regimes. Indeed, as the holiday weekend began, employees of major hotel companies throughout the country launched a strike for higher pay in the belief that, as their picket-line signs said, “One job should be enough.”

But the days when one job could support a family are long gone from the United States. They are gone in part because much of the world has industrialized and made labor more productive. But they are also long gone from the United States because the country has sunk under the political and moral corruption of inflationary finance of government and has repealed standards in public education. Inflation has nullified wage gains while the U.S. workforce is losing its advantage in skills over the workforces of other countries. Because of social promotion many if not most U.S. high school graduates today are qualified only for menial work.

Real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — have been falling for the U.S. working class to enable elected officials to claim credit for distributing goodies financed by mere money creation and borrowing and to wage imperial wars without the political limits that war taxes would impose. Meanwhile inflation has transferred huge wealth away from labor to capital, the owners of property, as with the spectacular increase in housing prices.

Despite national Democratic campaign propaganda that the country has never had it so good economically, many Democratic elected officials at the state level sense that real life is quite different. Hence the clamor, especially strong in supposedly wealthy Connecticut, for more government subsidies for the basics of life — food, housing, fuel, electricity, medical care, child care, and such.

Often today even two jobs aren’t enough. 

Inflation and inadequate work skills are why so many people can’t support themselves anymore, along with welfare policies that encourage harmful behavior and embed people in poverty. 

Inflation, the collapse of public education, and welfare dependence are not acts of God but government policies. So who is responsible for them? 

Both major political parties are, though the Democratic Party’s adherence to them is more ironic, given the party’s claim to represent the working class. On the national level inflationary government finance is equally a Republican policy, and while it has been a long time since Connecticut had a Republican administration, Republican state legislators and municipal officials go along with some destructive Democratic policies, like continually increasing teacher compensation even as student proficiency keeps falling. 

The only compelling reason now for raising the compensation of Connecticut’s teachers is just to keep them coming to work amid the worsening epidemic of student misbehavior and mental illness, about which no one will do anything.

Those students misbehaving themselves out of an education are the working class of the future, and they will be even less able than the current working class to understand how they have been cheated and abused.

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

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What do Connecticut college students mean by ‘free Palestine’?

By Chris Powell

College is back in session and students are returning not just to their studies but also to protests on campus about the war in Gaza. At the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Yale University in New Haven, and other institutions, students are chanting and carrying signs reading “Free Palestine!”

Journalism not being what it used to be, since literacy and civic engagement aren’t what they used to be either, no one seems to be asking the students exactly what they mean by “Free Palestine!” and how that objective should be achieved. 

So how do the student protesters define Palestine? Do they define it as most Palestinians themselves do, as encompassing the land “from the river to the sea” — the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean — thus liquidating Israel, as Palestinians often have tried to do in war since the area was partitioned into Jewish and Arab sections by resolution of the United Nations in 1948, and as they are doing again now? 

Do the student protesters define Palestine as something that leaves room for Israel — a Palestine consisting of Gaza, which Israel evacuated in 2005, and the “occupied West Bank,” the land between Jordan and Israel proper, most of which Israel agreed to evacuate during negotiations sponsored by President Bill Clinton in 2000?

If the student protesters define Palestine as the Clinton plan did, they might want to ask the people on whose behalf they’re protesting why they can’t accept such a compromise even now that the war Gaza launched against Israel last October has brought catastrophic bloodshed and ruin to the territory. The students should explain why Palestinian irredentism is worth so much.

And what do the student protesters mean by “free”? Do they mean civil liberties — speech, press, assembly, religion, due process of law, women’s rights, and sexual orientation — liberties enjoyed in the United States, Western Europe, and Israel, but not in Gaza and West Bank areas under Palestinian control, nor, indeed, anywhere in the Arab world? If that’s what the student protesters mean, they should go to Gaza or the West Bank and try to exercise such freedoms there, after making provision for the transport home of their corpses.

Or do the student protesters understand “free Palestine” as most Palestinians appear to understand it — a land free of Jews, a land free to attack a neighboring state and people, bombarding, murdering, raping, and kidnapping whenever the necessary strength has been regained during another “ceasefire”?

Yes, the war in Gaza is horrifying. But then wars against totalitarians seldom can be won politely. The war against the totalitarian aggressors of World War II, Germany and Japan, were won only by leveling both countries, killing millions of civilians, and then remaking the totalitarian societies through long military occupations.

If the student protesters think there is another way, they should spell it out and offer it to the warring parties. They may find, as Clinton did, that making peace requires more than pious hand-wringing on a peaceful campus oceans away from cutthroats whose hatred and brutality far surpass anything the students can imagine.  

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TREATMENT ISN’T ENOUGH: School officials and social workers report that Connecticut is facing an epidemic of mental illness among young people — not just teens in high school but also children in elementary and middle school. There is clamor for state government to spend more for treatment and school mental health clinics, as if that will solve the problem.

Little attention is being paid to the cause of the youth mental illness epidemic. The recent virus epidemic and its disruption of school and home life is an easy explanation, but that epidemic is long over. Something else must be wrong. Child neglect was already bad when the virus struck. Because inflation has soared since then, real incomes have fallen. That may have worsened neglect.

Treatment isn’t enough. The General Assembly and Governor Lamont should strive to discern and eradicate the causes of youth mental illness.

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

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Senator Murphy keeps excusing crimes from open borders

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s junior U.S. senator, Democrat Chris Murphy, seems to be running for re-election on the premise that open borders are good policy.

First the “compromise” border security legislation he negotiated this year with a Republican senator and a nominally independent senator formally excused thousands more illegal entries indefinitely into the future. The legislation seemed to presume that border security simply isn’t possible.

Now Murphy is telling the country not to worry about illegal immigration at all because, contrary to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, there is no illegal immigrant crime wave.

“You don’t have to feed into the irrational fear Trump is trying to make people feel,” Murphy said on MSNBC the other day. “It is important to push back on this idea of a migrant crime wave. … Immigrants to this country commit crimes at a rate lower than natural-born Americans.”

Trump has been exploiting the issue of illegal immigration, sometimes disgracefully, as when he remarked that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. For this country has no “blood,” no single race. From its Declaration of Independence the United States has aspired to be the universal country, and after 2½ tumultuous centuries it indeed has become the most racially and ethnically diverse one. 

But exploiting issues is the highest purpose of political campaigns. That’s what gives people a choice about government policy, and a country without borders is no country at all. Last week Murphy again was making excuses for the inexcusable — the many murders, rapes, and other crimes committed against U.S. residents by illegal immigrants during the open-borders policy of the Biden-Harris administration. Trump’s gathering survivors of these crime victims to call attention to catastrophically mistaken policy is legitimate and compelling.

For so what if illegal immigrants on the whole are more law-abiding than, say, residents of the anarchic, Democrat-ruled cities from which the party draws its big pluralities? This is no consolation for the crimes of illegal immigrants. A decent and competent government is obliged to examine every immigrant and visitor for fitness to be here, not to shrug off still more illegal entrants as Murphy’s “compromise” border-security legislation would have done.

Trump was right to warn Republican senators against it.

Quite apart from the crimes that would not have been committed except for Democratic open-borders policy, there is also the matter of national security. 

The country is full of soft targets — power and chemical plants, refineries, dams, hospitals, schools, reservoirs, theaters, and such — just as it now may be full of foreign agents awaiting orders to commence terrorism. Does Murphy not remember the attack committed by foreign agents on September 11, 2001? 

Thanks to his party’s open-borders policy, the country now hosts millions of foreigners about whom the government knows little or nothing. 

Murphy’s response is: Don’t worry, most of them won’t hurt anyone.

Then there is the trouble caused even by the illegal immigrants who mean no harm and who, like immigrants to the country throughout history, seek only opportunity for better lives. The country should continue to welcome such people — but only insofar as it can accommodate and assimilate them into its secular democracy.

The country’s schools, hospitals, social services, and police were not equipped to handle the flood of immigration prompted by open-borders policy and now are under great strain. The country’s housing supply was already inadequate and now housing costs and homelessness are soaring as illegal immigrants crowd out the poorest Americans. The great increase in unskilled labor from illegal immigrants has put downward pressure on wages for the poor. And a notable minority of recent immigrants, legal and illegal alike, opposes secular democracy, seeks theocracy instead, and is gaining political influence.

Of course even the most conscientious border security wouldn’t catch every threat, but it would catch many. 

Senator Murphy’s contention that most illegal immigrants aren’t criminals is contemptibly irrelevant to the problems he keeps excusing. Yet news organizations, showing their bias, keep failing to question him critically about it.

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

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Business executives warn Connecticut about too much higher education

By Chris Powell

What a wonderfully subversive and politically incorrect idea has exploded from the committee set up by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities to study the problem of the state’s estimated 119,000 “disconnected” and alienated young people.

Meeting this week at New London City Hall, the group heard a vice president of Yale New Haven Health, Paul Mounds Jr., criticize the widespread misimpression that hospitals and other medical companies hire only applicants with college degrees.

Mounds said Connecticut’s hospitals have hundreds of openings for people with high school diplomas or the equivalent. He added that employers should reach out to overlooked potential workers, including former convicts. (A decent job is a strong incentive not to return to crime.) 

The president of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, Chris DiPentima, elaborated. He said many of Connecticut’s reported 93,000 job openings don’t require college degrees and he urged employers to shift from degree-based hiring to skill-based hiring. DePentima scorned what he called efforts to “over-educate the population.”

That is, Mounds and DiPentima were lamenting the cost of the credentialism that has been inflicted on society by higher educators, who profit greatly from it, and by society’s own vanity. (See “Doctor” Jill Biden.) Credentialism is why millions of Americans are hobbled with billions of dollars of college loan debt incurred in pursuit of degrees that conferred little in the way of education or job skills.

Of course credentialism is a big business in itself, as shown by a review of salaries in higher education, especially administrator salaries. Reducing credentialism might cause a fair amount of unemployment, since much of higher education is just unnecessary overhead expense for society.

Higher education isn’t useless. But outside highly technical fields, it is grossly overpriced and distracts catastrophically from the country’s big education problem, lower education.

A recent survey by the Connecticut Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, illustrated a big part of the lower-education problem.

It wasn’t the survey’s finding that teachers in Connecticut say they are underpaid. As they are members of unions it’s practically their obligation to feel underpaid, just as they felt underpaid in 1986 when the state’s Education Enhancement Act became law, leading to decades of steady pay increases for teachers in the belief that student performance was mainly a function of teacher salaries. (There turned out to be no connection, and student performance has declined as teacher pay has risen.)

No, the CEA survey was valuable for showing that teachers are increasingly demoralized by student misbehavior, which is prompting teachers to leave their profession earlier than planned and making it harder for schools to hire good applicants. 

This problem is worst where poverty, child neglect, and mental illness among children are worst — cities and inner suburbs. While Hartford’s school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, showed her usual enthusiasm in welcoming children back to school this week, she also acknowledged that the city’s schools are still trying to fill 200 vacant positions. As the CEA survey indicated, teachers want to teach, not break up brawls or restrain children who freak out in class and don’t know how to behave because they have so little parenting — and because school administrations prohibit disciplining them.

This social disintegration is part of government’s general impoverishment of society but Connecticut’s political class remains oblivious to it and busies itself instead with politically correct irrelevance, as New Haven’s city council did the other day even as the city’s schools are just as dismal as Hartford’s.

The council is promoting a resolution that would apologize for New Haven’s having blocked the establishment of a college for Black people back in 1831, nearly two centuries ago.

Maybe in another two centuries New Haven will apologize for the failure of most of its schoolchildren to perform even close to grade level, for the racial achievement gap in its schools, and for the city’s constant crime, most of whose victims are members of minority groups. Maybe in two centuries state government will consider apologizing too.

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

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Don’t make businesses pay for the addiction of their employees

By Chris Powell

Two Democratic state senators, Saud Anwar of South Windsor and Jan Hochadel of Meriden, plan to propose legislation making Connecticut businesses pay, through their workers’ compensation insurance, for remediating the drug addiction of their employees. 

The senators contend that much drug addiction is caused by overwork, abuse, and repetitive-stress injuries on the job, which cause people either to medicate themselves with alcohol or illegal drugs or to seek addictive painkillers from doctors.

Blaming drug addiction on employers is a stretch. For work itself is both stress and a choice. No one should take or remain in a job whose stress drives him to drink or worse. (As social scientist Clint Eastwood said, a man’s got to know his limitations.) Resorting to drug abuse to handle stress or general unhappiness is also a choice, doubly so when addiction comes from treatment by a doctor who is too free with dangerous prescriptions.

Some repetitive-stress injuries may be easy to trace to certain manufacturing, construction, and agricultural jobs, but almost [ITALICS] everyone [END ITALICS] may be able to claim plausibly that his drug addiction was caused by stress at work. (Ironically, as much drug addiction may result from the emotional depression caused by unemployment or underemployment as from work.) There is so much drug addiction today that opportunistic claims for workers’ compensation for addiction might require vastly increasing the staff of the Workers’ Compensation Commission with dozens more hearing officers and administrative judges.

The proposal by Senators Anwar and Hochadel to make businesses responsible for the addiction of their employees may be, like the explosion in addiction itself, a sign that times are much harder than the national and state administrations would have people believe. That times are hard also may be why government is full of clamor for more subsidies for people who can’t support themselves — not just clamor for subsidies for medical insurance but also for child care, electricity and heating oil, housing, addiction treatment, and so forth.

Lincoln said the purpose of government is to do for the people what they can’t do for themselves. But at some point people must take responsibility for themselves, and that point encompasses drug addiction.

UKRAINE ISN’T TEXAS: Some readers responded with astonishment and ridicule to this column’s assertion last week that restoring Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern provinces to Russia isn’t a bad idea. The readers said this would be the same as restoring Texas to Mexico.

No, it wouldn’t be. Not even close.

Like all of Ukraine, its eastern provinces were part of Russia — that is, the former Soviet Union — for hundreds of years and as recently as 1991, just 33 years ago, and those provinces remain Russian linguistically and culturally. There long has been and remains much division between the Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking provinces of Ukraine. 

Few people in Ukraine’s eastern provinces object to Russia’s annexation of them amid the current war between the two countries. The feeling is similar in Crimea, reclaimed by Russia in 2014 after Ukraine’s pro-Russian government was overthrown by a revolution assisted by the United States.

By contrast, Texas became part of the United States, 179 years ago, in 1845, and long has been fully integrated into the country. While many Texans speak Spanish, they have little interest in rejoining Mexico, especially since such a move would impoverish many of them. That’s why migration is almost entirely into Texas from Mexico, just as it is from other states into Texas.

A few ornery Texans are clamoring for secession, but not to join Mexico. They would restore the old Republic of Texas, which lasted less than 10 years, from independence in 1836 to annexation by the United States in 1845.

Of course none of this makes great humanitarians of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Mexican president of old who lost Texas to the United States, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, but it corresponds to the facts on the ground today.

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

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Connecticut’s schools are unlikely to improve until unions are ‘tackled’

By Chris Powell

Acknowledging reality sometimes seems like the worst offense in politics and government. Fifty years ago opposing the war in Vietnam got one called a Communist. Today opposing NATO’s proxy war with Ukraine against Russia gets one called a tool or at least an apologist for Vladimir Putin. 

Something similar happened the other day in Norwalk, where the school system’s new human resources director, Denise Altro-Dixon, committed candor. She pronounced herself ready to improve local education, help school employees develop their careers, and “tackle those unions.”

Leaders of unions representing Norwalk teachers, administrators, and other school employees denounced Altro-Dixon for being “antagonistic” and taking “a union-busting approach and attitude.”

The school system’s chief financial officer, Lunda Asmani, tried to smooth things over. He said Altro-Dixon’s comment was “a poor choice of words” and he was confident she will achieve a “productive working relationship” and “genuine partnership” with the unions.

Ah, yes — a genuine partnership. So let’s pretend that the public’s interest in Norwalk’s school system is exactly the same as the interest of the school employee unions: Accountability for staff, disclosure of teacher evaluations, performance-based pay, and efficiency, as well as accountability for students and parents so that promotion from grade to grade and graduation from high school are based on learning rather than aging out.

Of course the public interest and the union interest in schools are almost exact opposites.

As a practical matter in Norwalk’s school system and most others, there is already a “genuine partnership” between the school board and the unions. The unions tell the administration what they want and rather than fight over it the administration tells municipal government how much money it must have for labor peace; municipal government raises property taxes accordingly; and school costs per pupil continue their long rise while student performance continues its long decline. Neither union members nor parents may be disturbed lest political trouble ensue.

Most municipal expense and thus most property taxes go for personnel compensation, and most municipal personnel compensation goes for school employees. If the public interest and the interest of school employee unions are the same, municipalities don’t need their current mechanisms of government. They can just let the unions run everything. Indeed, Connecticut is almost there already.

On the other hand, if municipal government ever is thought to be taking too much and delivering too little, the public will need someone to “tackle those unions” and insist that for a government official to tell the truth is not “a poor choice of words” but rather an obligation.

PANDERING ON TIPS: The major-party presidential candidates, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris, agree on something: that tips received by restaurant workers should be exempt from the federal income tax. Remarkably, Trump, supposedly the embodiment of plutocracy, got to the idea before Harris did. Despite their agreement, it’s a bad idea, just a lot of pandering.

For income is income, whether from tips or interest payments from a bond portfolio. If the objective is to shield the working class against income taxation, income taxes are already largely progressive, and because their incomes tend to be low, most wait staffers pay little federal income tax already.

An income tax exemption for tips would increase possibilities for income tax evasion, since extraneous payments could be disguised as tips. 

Besides, even being subject to income taxes, tips already are rife with tax evasion, since there are often no records or no good records of them, and tip recipients can underreport their tip income with impunity. Since there are millions of restaurant wait staffers, most are part-time, and most aren’t making a lot of money, the Internal Revenue Service doesn’t have the staff to investigate so much small stuff.

If Trump and Harris really want to be working-class heroes, let them make the hard choices in the federal government that would be necessary to eliminate the inflation that is grinding the poor down.     

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

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Connecticut Republicans have lots of opportunities: issues

By Chris Powell

Low participation in the recent primary for the Republican nomination for U.S. senator has renewed observations that there doesn’t seem to be much left of the party in Connecticut. Such observations are often accompanied by pro-forma expressions of support for competitive politics, if usually from people who would be appalled if the state ever put a Republican in a position of power. 

But then hypocrisy remains the tribute vice pays to virtue, and Connecticut could benefit from more competitive politics. Stupidity, waste, and surrender to special interests would be more difficult.

The Republican decline in Connecticut has accelerated the move of the state’s majority party, the Democrats, to the far left, which is not where most state residents want to go. Members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly are usually the only ones in politics to point out the nuttiness of state policy, and lately they have had two big successes.

This month Republican legislators ignited the public’s opposition to big increases in electricity rates that were caused in part by the stuffing of utility bills with the costs of Democratic social welfare policy. Last year Republican legislators mobilized public opinion to defeat a Democratic scheme to forbid sale of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035. The scheme was especially nutty since there was no plan for the necessary and expensive increase in the capacity of the state’s electric grid to handle full conversion to electric cars, and since electric cars are not yet affordable and durable.

So the public can be mobilized — even by Republicans.

State government remains full of nutty policies that the public might oppose if politicians had the courage to dispute them. 

Connecticut political columnist Red Jahncke has shown how the recent and touted bolstering of state government’s state employee pension funds has been mostly nullified by the Lamont administration’s award of huge raises to state employees, which correspondingly increase pension entitlements. Republicans have let this deception pass unremarked, being afraid of alienating the state employee unions.

It’s the same with the collapse of public education under the weight of social promotion, and with state government’s long acceptance of the racial achievement gap in schools. Of course there can be no pressing these issues without risking the outrage of the teacher unions and the race mongers, but as two heroic politicians of a century ago, New York City’s Fiorello LaGuardia and Britain’s Winston Churchill, liked to say, and went on to prove: Kites rise against the wind.

Connecticut Republicans seem afraid to press even some obvious issues where the public would be overwhelmingly on their side, like the state’s allowing biological males to compete in female sports events and its requiring schools to stock feminine hygiene products in male restrooms. Pressing these issues also might get a politician called a name or two, but while transgenderism may seem like a small thing, it’s not. It’s about reality itself. 

If government policy can hold that there are no physical differences between the sexes, or not enough differences to justify separate sports, restrooms, and prisons for males and females, the rest of reality may be defenseless.  

Journalism could help challenge these policies but won’t now that most news organizations have rejected impartiality and fairness in news reporting and have joined the partisan left. 

Just as discouraging is the adage of election campaign strategy: If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

But how are voters to understand issues if no one in politics tries to explain them?

His aide and biographer, Ernest Cuneo, wrote: “LaGuardia’s main concern was policy. He took definite positions and was at great pains to state his reasons for them. These reasoned arguments he forcibly brought to the attention of his district’s voters, paying them the compliment of assuming they had brains in their heads and cared about the issues of the day. This paid dividends; his constituents appreciated him and were proud of him.”

Could it happen again? Connecticut Republicans have little to lose by trying.

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

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With misleading address, Harris poses as change

By Chris Powell

As a matter of oratory, Kamala Harris’ address to the Democratic National Convention accepting the presidential nomination Thursday night was excellent — clear, articulate, enthusiastic, empty of cackling — and it excited the crowd. 

Content was something else. 

The address was largely about fooling the country into thinking that she represents change, that she shares no responsibility for the disaster of the administration in which she has been President Biden’s vice president.

“We’re not going back,” Harris said, describing her candidacy as “a new way forward,” thereby implying that the way pursued by the Biden-Harris administration has not been the right way. Indeed, no delegates chanted “four more years,” as is traditional when a political party seeks another term in control of the executive branch. 

For despite assurances from Harris and other speakers that under the Biden-Harris administration the country never had it so good, the country emphatically believes otherwise, and did so even before the president collapsed in senility during his debate in June with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. 

Harris made some perfectly valid criticisms of Trump — like the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by the supporters he had summoned there, and his lack of seriousness about government. But she also spouted much nonsense, asserting that if they return to power in Washington the Republicans will outlaw abortion nationally and destroy Social Security and Medicare.   

If the Democrats gain full control of the federal government they are far more likely to legalize late-stage and live-birth abortion nationally than the Republicans are to outlaw abortion. Indeed, most Democrats in Congress already support the proposed Women’s Health Protection Act, which would eliminate all restrictions on abortion.

If they really believed that the Republicans would outlaw abortion and destroy Social Security and Medicare, the Democrats would not be so eager to repeal the Senate’s filibuster rule, under which a minority can block legislation. If Republicans gain control of the Senate, the Democrats will use the filibuster rule as they have done many times over the years, just as the Republicans have.

Harris promised to secure the southern border, apparently assuming that people will forget her administration’s disastrous open-borders policy, under which as many as 10 million people have entered the country illegally. She said Trump’s influence with Republican congressmen had killed bipartisan border security legislation, but the legislation wouldn’t have secured the border at all; it actually authorized much more illegal immigration.

Harris said “fundamental freedoms” are at stake in this election: “the freedom to live safe from gun violence” and “the freedom to love who you love, openly and with pride.”

For a moment it seemed as if the Democrats had forgotten that they were in Chicago, where there are dozens of gun-related shootings every week, with the city and its state long having been under ruinous Democratic administration. Reflection on Chicago might lead to suspicion that gun violence is much less a problem of gun laws, the focus of the Democrats, than of the long failure to do much about poverty, especially among racial minorities, even as the Democrats claim that they should be kept in power because of their concern about poverty. 

Their real concern often seems to be to keep people poor and thinking of themselves as victims forever dependent on government.

As for “the freedom to love,” if homosexuals were still oppressed, Democrats wouldn’t constantly be calling attention to homosexuals being elected to public office. These days minority status is usually a positive in politics, but here too Democrats seem to want to perpetuate a sense of victimhood even as hardly anyone cares anymore about the sexual orientation of candidates.  

Harris played both sides of the war between Israel and Gaza, but the essence of her administration’s position is that it would keep the Hamas terrorist movement in power in Gaza, a mortal threat to Israel, even as it still holds U.S. citizens hostage.

Can Trump illuminate Harris’ many contradictions and far-left positions? And would it matter much as long as he remains his truculent, blustering, insulting self?

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

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Stop Connecticut’s utility regulator from usurping tax power

By Chris Powell

Even a few members of the General Assembly’s Democratic majority last week expressed alarm at the latest arrogance at the Public Utilities Control Authority, its raising electricity rates again. 

This time the increase is to repay Connecticut’s two largest electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, for the millions of dollars the agency ordered them to spend reimbursing individuals and businesses for installing electric car chargers. The program was meant to reduce climate change. 

The program was silly, since even if Connecticut stopped using every kind of energy and reverted to a prehistoric way of life, it would have no bearing on climate change, nor on the introduction to the atmosphere of the “greenhouse gases” that climate hysterics believe will destroy the planet before Greta Thunberg grows up. China and the rest of the developing world will see that oil and coal remain the world’s primary fuels for decades to come, until wind and solar power become much less expensive and more reliable. 

Connecticut is far too small to measure in those calculations.

Stuffing the expense of somebody else’s electric car charger into ordinary electric bills, joining other expenses of government policies that have nothing to do with the generation and delivery of electricity, as Connecticut long has done, has always been beyond silly. It’s offensive, because electricity, like food and medicine, is a necessity of life and commerce. 

Leaders of the Republican minority in the General Assembly and even some ordinary citizens noted last week that the rate increases to pay for electric car chargers are doubly offensive because they take more from the poor than the rich. Rate increases for electric car chargers are essentially regressive taxes. Since electric cars are so expensive and less durable, only wealthy people can afford them. But while Democrats claim to be the party of the working class, they don’t mind regressive taxes hidden in the fine print of electric bills.

But now soaring electric bills in Connecticut at last have prompted ordinary people to start questioning what have been euphemized as the “public benefits” hidden in those bills — “benefits” like charging people extra to make up for the people who don’t pay.

Reporting on the controversy last week, the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio noted another reason why hiding EV charger costs in electric bills is offensive. That is, quite on its own three years ago the Public Utilities Control Authority required the electric companies to reimburse people and businesses for installing EV chargers and related equipment, making the costs payable to the electric companies through general rate increases.

This appropriation was made and its method of financing was levied without legislation enacted by the General Assembly and Governor Lamont. Portfolio writes: “PURA’s ability to impose sweeping mandates without legislative oversight has left ratepayers footing the bill for policies that disproportionately benefit a select few.” 

That is, Governor Lamont and the legislature have essentially delegated taxing power to an unelected agency. That’s irresponsible and anti-democratic.       

Republicans have asked the governor to call a special session of the legislature to undo some of the recent electric rate increases. The governor says he is open to the idea — that is, he’ll call a special session if more people clamor for an end to the “public benefits” racket. People should take the hint. 

MORE CASINOS COMING? Does Connecticut want more gambling casinos, and more casinos that operate from the authority of licenses awarded as ethnic privilege?

That question soon may become compelling. Last week Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs may reverse its position and invite the three state-recognized tribes in the western part of the state to reapply for the federal recognition that long ago was denied to them. Such recognition almost certainly will come with the same casino privileges enjoyed by the two federally recognized tribes in the southeastern part of the state.

If that happens, it will be time for the state to democratize casino licenses and let people get into the casino business regardless of their ancestry.

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

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Blumenthal escapes questions as he promotes needless war

By Chris Powell

Last week Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal returned from a quick trip to Ukraine even more enthusiastic about the U.S. proxy war against Russia there. He said he plans to propose many more billions of dollars for the war.

Journalists dutifully conveyed what the senator said but their reports gave no hint of critical questions. 

Where is the money for more proxy war to come from? Still more debt and inflation rather than taxes and difficult choices in spending? 

Should Russia not have felt provoked by U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian government in 2014, our maneuvering to bring Ukraine into NATO, and our use of Ukraine for gathering military intelligence at Russia’s border?

Eastern Europe has been partitioned dozens of times over the centuries and all of Ukraine used to be part of Russia, so what is wrong with reincorporating into Russia Ukraine’s Russian-speaking provinces? 

Having already extended NATO right up to Russia’s border in four Baltic countries, are the United States and its allies really prepared to fight a war there when they can’t even properly staff their militaries?

What exactly do those nations add to the defense of the United States? Do their contributions match the liabilities they impose?

What is wrong with having neutral buffer zones between great powers?

More than 70 years ago there was good foreign policy advice in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical play “The King and I,” wherein the king sings similar questions: 

Shall I join with other nations in alliance?
If allies are weak, am I not best alone?
If allies are strong with power to protect me,
Might they not protect me out of all I own?

Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a bad guy — maybe, in the estimation of Blumenthal and other Democrats, almost as bad as Donald Trump. But before it attacked Ukraine, Russia seemed to want only a tiny buffer against the United States and NATO, nothing like the buffer the United States has extended over the whole Western Hemisphere since James Monroe was president. 

This war is not necessary to U.S. security or that of its allies. It is a dangerous provocation and a bloody mess. Having provoked it, the United States should move urgently to end it, not prolong it.

‘EQUITY’ IS PENSION JACKPOT: Another former state legislator is on his way to a state pension jackpot.

He’s Brandon McGee Jr., a Democrat who served nine years as state representative from Hartford and a year as deputy housing commissioner. He has just been named executive director of the Connecticut Social Equity Council. 

As a state legislator McGee never earned more than a part-time salary, but as deputy housing commissioner he was paid $152,000 per year and he’ll likely be paid more as the Social Equity Council’s executive director. His nine low-paid years in the legislature provided most of his qualification for a state pension, and that pension will be based on the average of his five highest-paid years with state government, with three more high-paid years being virtually assured to him.

Life is good — in state government anyway.

But the Social Equity Council is based on a faulty premise. 

The council will distribute as political patronage millions of dollars in state marijuana tax revenue, which will be awarded in communities believed to have been disproportionately harmed by the “war on drugs” — poor communities, which are disproportionately minority. 

The harm done by the “war on drugs” is construed to mean mainly the criminal prosecutions of dealers and users of contraband. During the “war on drugs,” the poorer, less parented, and less educated were more tempted to try to make money in contraband, just as they are now.

Mistaken as much drug policy may have been and still may be, the communities in which the contraband trade disproportionately occurred also disproportionately benefited from it, disproportionately reaping its profits, since not everyone dealing drugs was caught.     

And what will state government give people who have always obeyed the drug laws? Higher electricity bills.   

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

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