Without an auditor for prisons, legislature should do the job

By Chris Powell

People may never care much about the health of criminals serving prison time, nor about their treatment generally, even if most of them will be released eventually and many may have a barely suppressed desire to take revenge on the world. But Connecticut should start caring more than it has cared lately.

For years miserable medical care for the state’s prisoners has been a scandal. Lawsuits and other formal complaints have disclosed many cases where prisoners with serious ailments were misdiagnosed or denied proper care until it was too late to save them. These cases were in large part what two years ago prompted the General Assembly and Governor Lamont to create an ombudsman for the Correction Department, an outside officer empowered to investigate prisoner complaints, examine records, and question prison employees.

But the position is yet to be filled amid wrangling between the governor and urban legislators from minority groups. 

The minority legislators represent the families of prisoners, most of whom are from minority groups and thus may be easier to abuse or neglect. The minority legislators want the new ombudsman to be strong and aggressive, and they have favored a candidate who several times sued the Correction Department on behalf of prisoners. 

The governor seems to want an ombudsman who won’t be eager to embarrass his administration. So the appointment and even the mechanism for developing candidates remain tied up in slow and fitful negotiations.

The governor has the upper hand insofar as he can stall the appointment forever if he wants to. In retaliation, the minority legislators seem to think that they can only threaten to make trouble for legislation sought by the governor. But the legislators could do more than that. They could insist that the legislature undertake its own regular investigation and oversight of the Correction Department, something the legislature should do in regard to failing policy and administration in other respects but never does, contenting itself with less important matters.

Both sides should compromise to get the ombudsman position filled urgently, if only with an interim appointee. For the Correction Department is the most insulated and secretive part of state government. The public and news organizations have little access to prisons and no way of reliably evaluating contradictory claims by prisoners, prison administrators, and prison employees.

Forty years ago when the Journal Inquirer had a columnist who was a prisoner at the high-security prison in Somers, the prison administration was enraged by the public’s peek inside and by the threat of accountability. Eventually the administration transferred the prison writer out of state, purportedly for his own safety but actually to silence him and thereby kick the public out. 

Meanwhile in a letter the warden threatened the newspaper’s managing editor with criminal prosecution for communicating with prisoners by mail. When the editor conveyed the warden’s threatening letter to the state’s attorney and asked for a ruling, the threat was quickly dismissed as a baseless attempt to intimidate.

Such are the totalitarian impulses nurtured by secrecy in government. Connecticut’s prison administrators today may not be as heavy-handed but they surely won’t be if the minority legislators maintain their nerve and insist on transparency and accountability. 

All state agencies would benefit from a full-time auditor-journalist with access to everything. The legislature long has empowered the office of the child advocate to investigate and bring transparency and accountability to the occasional serious failures of the state Department of Children and Families, and the same principle should apply to prisons, though prisoners are seldom sympathetic characters like children. 

If the governor won’t compromise to the legislature’s satisfaction on a prison ombudsman, the legislature should claim subpoena power and start doing the job itself. Maybe then the legislature will understand better why it should stop enacting exemptions to the state’s freedom-of-information law to protect special interests. For state government is the biggest special interest of all.

Prison administration is thankless work but keeping the public ignorant deserves no thanks. As a practical matter the prison ombudsman will be working for the public as much as for prisoners.

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

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Will Connecticut ever notice its many chronic offenders?

By Chris Powell

According to government officials and politically correct journalism, crime in Connecticut is down. But a dedicated band of chronic criminals is trying to keep up the appearances of a crime wave, even if elected officials refuse to notice.

According to police in New Haven, two weekends ago a 49-year-old man hijacked a city police cruiser with an officer sitting in it. Rather than be hijacked, the officer pulled on the steering wheel, causing the cruiser to crash into a church. Nobody was badly hurt and when the police caught up with the perpetrator, charging him with kidnapping, assault, and a few other things, they discovered that they knew him well, as he already had been arrested 80 times.

It was a big story for a day but few news organizations bothered to quote the police about the perpetrator’s long criminal record.

Journalistic follow-up here is unlikely, since it would be too politically incorrect. “Long criminal record” is hardly news in Connecticut anymore; it’s more like a journalistic cliche.

But campaigns for the November election for the General Assembly have begun. Might some legislators and some challengers see a public service in asking how someone with 80 arrests has managed to stay out of prison and why there has been no recognition of his incorrigibility despite the constant harm he has done to public safety and order?

Every few years the Correction Department issues a report on recidivism — the return to crime and prison of offenders even after they have been imprisoned and released — and typically the rate is around 50%. This rate may be fairly construed as the rate of failure of the criminal-justice system. It would be much higher if it included crimes for which there was never an arrest.

The recidivism rate is so high because most people in Connecticut have to work hard at crime before being sent to prison, having repeatedly received lesser sentences and probations that persuaded them that criminal justice is not serious, and because most offenders are already seriously if not permanently damaged psychologically before a court gets around to locking them up. 

Prison often tries to help offenders gain some education and work skills, but this seldom succeeds. Most prisoners are released into poverty, many of them still disturbed psychologically and without housing, a job, transportation, medical insurance, and any idea of what to do with themselves besides more of what got them into trouble.

There may be alternatives to this cycle — like giving parolees an efficiency apartment, a job, medical insurance, transportation, and counseling for a year or so of adjustment. New Haven, home to thousands of former and likely future offenders, is experimenting with something like this. But with severely chronic repeat offenders, nothing is likely to work. 

Whether it’s a three-strikes, 10-strikes, or even an 80-strikes law requiring life imprisonment for chronic repeat offenders, reality requires starting there. But does Connecticut have any legislators or legislative candidates willing to face reality?

*

TRY SUING FOR PEACE: Horrible carnage continues in Gaza, as does clamor in the United States and around the world for a cease-fire between Gaza’s terrorist Hamas regime and Israel. 

The Associated Press quotes a widowed Gazan mother of three saying, “We don’t know where to go,” and a Gazan father of five saying, “The situation is unbearable.”

But a cease-fire is not peace. There have been dozens of cease-fires in the long Palestinian war against Israel. What is most unbearable in Gaza is not war but peace. No one in Gaza is calling for peace and few outside Gaza are. A cease-fire is just the euphemism for preparing more war against Jews. 

Peace might be had tomorrow if Gaza wanted it. There was a sort of peace until last October 7, when Gaza invaded Israel, killing, raping, and kidnapping mostly civilians. But anyone in Gaza who called for peace would be murdered by those dedicated to exterminating Jews.  

Exterminating Jews remains the objective of those in charge of Gaza, and now, not surprisingly, the Israeli government is losing fear of exterminating Gazans in return.

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

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Connecticut isn’t ready to prosper; and stop taxing electricity

By Chris Powell

When federal census data showed Connecticut’s population increasing by about 57,000 in 2021 and 2022, Governor Lamont construed it as great news, evidence of the state’s prosperity under his administration, a remarkable contrast with the population losses of nearby states.

But the other day the U.S. Census Bureau acknowledged that the population increase report was a mistake and that Connecticut probably experienced a population loss of 13,500 during that period. 

In a way this may be construed as great too.

For the state has a severe shortage of housing, home prices and rents have been soaring, and homelessness is rising. Experts say the state needs at least 100,000 more housing units just for its current population to be able to live decently. If the state really had gained 57,000 people, it would be under much greater strain. 

Connecticut isn’t prepared for greater prosperity, and more strain is promised by the increased military contracting coming into the state for which thousands of new workers are needed.

Even if the national economy is entering a recession, as it seems to be, Connecticut still will have thousands of inadequately housed people.

Equating construction of inexpensive housing with poverty because of the mess the state has made of its cities, Connecticut has been slow to recognize that its housing policy — unfriendly if not hostile to new housing — has been a disaster too.

But the Lamont administration has taken the hint and is proceeding with state government incentives for housing construction. Hartford and New Haven are encouraging apartments and condominiums and are showing that city living can attractive, and a few suburbs are viewing housing proposals more favorably than usual.

It’s far from enough but it’s a start. If housing initiatives continue for a few more years and state government discourages exclusive zoning and controls spending and taxes, maybe even accurate census data will start showing that more people want to move to Connecticut than leave it for lower-taxed states with milder winters.

*

Connecticut has nearly the highest electric rates in the country, and the big increases imposed last month are painful reminders that the state will have to reduce rates if it would increase its prosperity and population — or even just maintain its population.

The latest rate increases have two major causes: the decision by the governor and General Assembly to guarantee purchase of the electricity generated by the Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford as a matter of Connecticut’s energy security; and second, the “public benefits” charges that long have been largely hidden in customer electric bills, essentially sales taxes to finance state government programs having little if anything to do with generation and delivery of electricity.

Among the “public benefits” charges is one by which people who pay their electric bills are required to pay as well for people who don’t pay but who under state law can’t be disconnected during much of the year. Since this charge is a welfare expense, it should be borne by taxpayers generally, not by electricity users particularly.

Indeed, there is no good reason to charge electricity users particularly for any of the “public benefits” hidden in their bills. Insofar as electricity is a necessity of life, taxing it is no more justified than taxing food and medicine would be. 

The real justification for financing the “public benefits” from a de-facto sales tax on electricity is that state legislators and governors have liked obscuring the costs of those “benefits” and deceiving the public into thinking that the big, bad electric companies are overcharging. By some estimates 20% of the cost of electricity for a typical Connecticut resident results from non-electrical “public benefits” charges.

Members of the General Assembly’s Republican minority have been making an issue of this and fortunately have begun pressing it harder. “Public benefits” charges on electricity bills should be eliminated, along with the “public benefits” themselves, or else their costs should be recovered through general taxation or spending cuts elsewhere. 

Now who wants to specify the tax increases or spending cuts necessary to get rid of the “public benefits” charges?

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

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‘Smart phones’ aren’t why Connecticut’s students are dumb

By Chris Powell

Schools increasingly are prohibiting students from operating or even carrying “smart phones” — internet-equipped telephones — in class. Some schools are investing in special pouches in which students must lock their phones in school, being able to unlock them only with a special device made available when they are leaving. 

At $25 or so each, the pouches are a significant expense, but educators find them effective at restoring students’ concentration. The pouches even induce students to start talking to each other face to face.

Governor Lamont was an early advocate of banning “smart phones” in school, and while he was unable to get the General Assembly to legislate on the point, he has asked the state Education Department to draft and recommend such a policy to municipal school superintendents and boards. It’s a good idea and most school systems probably will go along with it if pressed by the Education Department.

But there is a bigger underlying problem here that no one in authority seems inclined to address.

For if students spend too much time on their “smart phones” in school, it’s because they know they can afford to miss the teaching being attempted. They know they are going to be promoted from grade to grade and even graduated from high school no matter what. Learning is completely optional.  

That is, even if school policy bans “smart phones,” a bigger school policy will remain: social promotion. While it would be much more expensive, repealing social promotion would do much more to restore education than locking up “smart phones.”

Repealing social promotion would require teachers and school administrators to enforce academic standards not just against students but also against their neglectful parents, who outnumber responsible parents in many school districts.

Like most states, Connecticut has resorted to social promotion to boost graduation rates and thereby make education look more successful even as it is failing, with the academic proficiency of students in basic subjects continuing to decline. Schools know that when uneducated students graduate they become someone else’s problem — the problem of employers and the welfare, medical, mental health, and criminal-justice systems.

The refusal to restore standards in public education may be behind the governor’s recent conversion to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the new euphemism for “affirmative action” — racial and ethnic preferences in hiring, college admissions, and other endeavors.

Connecticut schools long have suffered an appalling gap between the educational achievement of white students and those from racial and ethnic minorities. The gap results mainly from something over which schools have no control — the great disparity in the parenting and wealth of the homes students come from. Students who do poorly in school almost always need more attention at home, but state government declines to examine why they don’t get it. More broadly, state government declines to inquire into why poverty endures and is worsening. 

The state’s primary policy for improving education is just to increase the compensation of educators. This has done little for education and nothing for closing the racial achievement gap, but it has kept Connecticut’s biggest and most influential special interest, the teacher unions, working for the state’s majority political party.

The governor’s new plan to create an Office of Equity and Inclusion to diversify state government’s workforce racially and in a few lesser respects indicates state government’s acceptance of the racial achievement gap. 

After all, if schools eliminated the gap and most high school graduates were of largely equal education across the races and ethnic groups, state government would not have to look so hard for qualified applicants from minority groups and would not have to incorporate racial and ethnic preferences into the hiring process in pursuit of diversity. Diversity and integration would occur naturally and income inequality would fall.

But the racial and ethnic gap in education generates an impoverished underclass dependent on government for sustenance, which in turn maintains government’s power, size, and expense. In that respect the many who have made comfortable careers ministering to Connecticut’s worsening poverty may consider the gap a great political success.

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

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Repulsive as Trump may be, his remarks weren’t racist

By Chris Powell

For the sake of argument stipulate that Donald Trump is the most repulsive creature to walk the Earth since the dinosaurs. But that doesn’t mean he is always wrong or that his adversaries are always right. Contrary to what his adversaries are trying to construe from what they consider Trump’s repulsiveness, it doesn’t mean that it was right for the Biden administration to stop enforcing immigration law, instigate the war in Ukraine, or order states to let males impersonating females use female restrooms.

Nor does it mean that Trump is racist for making a point involving the race and ethnicity of his rival for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, or that he was racist for his remark 30 years ago in protest of the government’s awarding casino licenses according to race and ethnicity, a remark made in reference to Connecticut: that is, “They don’t look like Indians to me.”

Racism is the subordination of people because of their race or ethnicity and denying them rights enjoyed by everyone else.

So Trump didn’t commit racism last week when he noted that in her earlier political campaigns, in California, Harris emphasized her south Asian Indian ancestry while she now is emphasizing her Black ancestry. Why she is doing this is obviously political and involves Trump. 

When President Biden was expected to be the Democratic nominee for another term as president, his party was losing its lock on the Black vote because of the weakness of the national economy and a surprising number of Blacks were expressing support for Trump. So it is more politic now for Harris to stress her Black ancestry instead of her south Asian Indian ancestry. Harris will be making many similar adjustments to escape her extreme-left record.

Trump was explicit last week that he wasn’t disparaging Harris’ ancestry; he said both aspects of it were fine with him. Instead he was highlighting her political opportunism.

If journalism wasn’t so biased in favor of the political left it might acknowledge that Harris doesn’t deserve the political credit she is seeking for her ethnicities. For they caused her no trouble in her rise in politics in California, an extremely liberal state, nor in her rise in national politics. Indeed, she wouldn’t be stressing her ethnicities now if she didn’t think they conferred advantages.

Even so, Trump may have been mistaken tactically to make an issue of this, since he should have known that his adversaries would try to twist Harris’ opportunism into his racism and misrepresent his point. But Trump has yet to learn that some points, while perfectly fair, aren’t worth the trouble of making, especially when most news organizations are sworn to destroy you.

As for Indian casinos, the federal law that authorized them was meant to redress the general poverty of Indian tribes and the prejudice their members still suffered in many places. The law was a grant of racial and ethnic privilege — a politically correct form of racism — and in Connecticut it was exploited by two Indian tribes whose members long had fully assimilated into the state’s life, had not suffered prejudice for decades, and were not impoverished. Most were middle class. 

But political correctness and cynical politics gained a lucrative casino duopoly for them and they quickly got rich, though they deserved far less compensation for injustices to their ancestors than Blacks and Puerto Ricans in Connecticut’s cities did. 

That’s what Trump meant when, seeking a casino license in Bridgeport but lacking the necessary ancestry, he said, “They don’t look like Indians to me.” That is, Connecticut’s casino Indians didn’t look like the sort of Indians everyone imagined when the government decided to award casino licenses as racial and ethnic patronage dressed up as social justice.

They still don’t look like they were ever oppressed, but now that they are rich, politically influential, big employers, and major advertisers with news organizations, the racket is beyond criticism.

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

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Murphy’s silly tip to Democrats: Claim success on illegal immigration

By Chris Powell

Identifying the weakest feature of one’s product and then promoting the heck out of it is said to be the first principle of cynical advertising. Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, running for re-election, seemed to grab for it last week as he urged fellow Democrats to stop cowering amid illegal immigration.

Responding to Republican criticism of their newly minted presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats are denying that President Biden ever put her in charge of policy on the southern border, though in 2021 dozens of newspaper headlines and television news stories indeed publicized her appointment as “border czar,” and nobody demanded a correction. Actually the president had asked Harris to ascertain the causes of migration into the United States from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and to determine what might be done about them.

The initiative did little to stem the flood of illegal immigration into the United States, which reached record levels under the Biden-Harris administration and is among the top concerns of voters.

So last week Senator Murphy urged Democrat to proclaim the Biden administration’s immigration policy, and Harris’ work on it, to be a great success, because illegal entries have fallen substantially in recent months. 

It’s silly. For how can a few months of decline in illegal immigration excuse three years of negligence on the border during which millions of migrants entered illegally and the Biden administration claimed to be unable to do anything about it without new legislation, which the president and Democrats in Congress didn’t enact and didn’t really want? 

Murphy’s idea is doubly silly because the recent decline in illegal immigration may result mainly from the Biden administration’s reinstating policies of the Trump administration that Biden quickly canceled upon taking office. The supposed success of the new policies indicates that quite on its own the Biden administration could have greatly reduced the flood long ago.

“Immigration policy can be a strength, not a liability, for Democrats,” Murphy told the Washington Examiner last week. Yes, but only insofar as those millions of illegals, most of them having been sent to overwhelmingly Democratic cities, will be counted in the next federal census, sharply increasing the number of securely Democratic districts in the House of Representatives and diminishing swing and Republican districts even if the illegals, not being citizens, don’t vote.

Can the country assimilate so much immigration so fast? Does it have the capacity to house, educate, and provide medical care to so many new people, most of whom, hardworking as many may be, are unskilled and unable to speak English? 

Murphy and other Democrats don’t address such questions, though they already have been answered by the country’s desperate shortage of housing, rising homelessness, public education’s collapse, and strain on hospitals. When it comes to illegal immigration what seems to matter to Murphy and most Democratic leaders is only the prospective bonus to their party in congressional districting six years from now.

SKIP THE CENSORSHIP: Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, is getting much credit for the Senate’s overwhelming passage last week of the Kids Online Safety Act. It will require internet service providers and particularly providers of social media to do a lot of censorship to protect children from the many nasty things in cyberspace, things that can make teenagers even more neurotic, including bullying, sexual exploitation, and general cruelty. Because of such experience on the internet and with social media, some teens have killed themselves.

But everyone should know that the internet and social media can be as dangerous as the world itself, and that government-instigated censorship can be even more dangerous. 

Senator Blumenthal complains that social media companies try to make their products “addictive,” but then all forms of media — like all members of Congress — seek to entice and hold an audience.  

The real problem here is neglectful parents. Parents can and should control their children’s access to the internet and social media via the computers and mobile phones they pay for. Instead of imposing censorship on the country, the law should hold parents more responsible.  

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

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Murphy’s money for nothing only makes poverty worse

By Chris Powell

Running for re-election, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy proposes that the federal government spend $4 billion over four years to provide free summer camp to poor children. Connecticut might get $40 million of that. 

“Outside experiences, adventure experiences, summer experiences where you get to improve your socialization skills, where you have your mind opened to new possibilities, new hobbies, new interests — it’s necessary,” Murphy says. “It’s a tough time to be a kid. It’s a tough time to be a parent. So we have to make sure that when our kids leave school for the summer they don’t lose access to learning and socialization.”

The senator seems to figure that it’s not a tough time to be a taxpayer, since he did not propose any revenue source for free summer camp. But then no member of Congress or presidential candidate bothers with revenue sources anymore for the goodies they propose. It is just assumed that the federal government — and increasingly state governments, recipients of ever-more federal largesse — can have infinite free stuff, financed by borrowing, the issuance of bonds whose interest increasingly will be paid by more borrowing, and that the foreign governments and investors who purchase many of these bonds will never worry about the insolvency. 

But they are already worrying about it and reducing their purchases.

Murphy’s proposal hints at two big problems.

First is that too much spending without taxing — that is, creation of too much money and debt, far out of proportion to the country’s economic production — causes inflation. That’s where the ruinous inflation of the last several years has come from. It didn’t begin with the recent virus epidemic, but it was turbocharged by the government’s response, which stopped people from working and gave them free money instead. 

Now elected officials are addicted to spending without taxing. This week Murphy and Connecticut’s senior senator, Richard Blumenthal, announced that they aim to include in the next federal appropriations bill almost $77 million in grants to dozens of municipal government and community organization projects. There are no particular standards for these grants. They are the personal political patronage of the senators. 

So the senators will get the thanks while most people keep wondering where inflation comes from and why the rising cost of necessities keeps outpacing their incomes and making their lives harder.

The second problem with the money-for-nothing approach of Murphy’s free summer camp idea is that it distracts from the big failures of life in the United States while purporting to address them.

Democrats particularly are claiming spectacular success for the administration of their president, Joe Biden, whom they frantically just pushed into retirement because of his equally spectacular unpopularity. The Democrats say Biden has been the best president in decades. So why is this, as Senator Murphy says, such a tough time to be a kid or a parent? 

Judging from Murphy’s proposal and others, poverty in the United States is increasing, not being reduced. More people can’t support themselves and their families and so they clamor for government to provide more free or subsidized stuff — child care, food, rent, electricity, heating fuel, treatment for the increased levels of mental illness and drug addiction, college loan forgiveness, and so forth, along with many new or expanded social programs. 

Then there are the subsidies for illegal immigrants, whose housing needs drive up rents and whose labor drives down wages.

Why are real incomes falling for many people, though government data strives to conceal this by sharply understating inflation? Apart from inflation arising from money for nothing, falling real incomes also may have something to do with the destruction of the family under the perverse incentives of the welfare system and with public education’s descent into social promotion, whereby many young people reach adulthood horribly undereducated and prepared only for menial work.   

So is government’s objective now a self-sufficient and prosperous population or an impoverished one permanently dependent on government? Money for nothing well may have that result, letting elected officials pose as heroes even as the country sinks.

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

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Bears become less cute; and Central blows $763,000

By Chris Powell

As their appearances in Connecticut become more frequent and damaging, bears become less cute and amusing.

According to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, in the last two weeks:

— A woman sitting in her back yard in Cheshire was attacked by a bear that snuck up on her from behind. She suffered two puncture wounds before managing to scare it away.

— A man driving a small car on the Route 8 expressway in Torrington struck a bear that ran in front of him, causing the car to crash into a guard rail. The driver was uninjured but the bear was killed and turned out to weigh more than 500 pounds, almost as much as the car.

— A bear and its cub broke into a car in Winsted, destroying the interior.

— And residents of a home in Winchester interrupted a bear’s attempt to break in.

An official of the environmental agency says Connecticut is “good habitat” for bears and “they are here to stay.” 

Why is that? 

It’s because while state law now permits killing bears in self-defense or in defense of pets, in other encounters people are just supposed to shoo bears onto a neighbor’s property. Bears have no natural predator except man, and state government long has prohibited hunting them. Indeed, Connecticut is the only New England state without a bear-hunting season.

If bears really are “here to stay,” they won’t be stopped by securing trash cans and barbecue grills and taking down birdfeeders, as the environmental agency and bear lovers urge. There were no trash cans, barbecue grills, and birdfeeders in the forests through which the bears migrated back into Connecticut. Without predators, their population increased naturally and the northern forests couldn’t support all of them. 

So now bears will be reproducing in Connecticut until every town has many of them, and the more the state is “good habitat” for bears, the less it will be “good habitat” for people. Only a long hunting season will stop bears, and that won’t happen until state legislators are more scared of bears and the harm they increasingly do than they are scared of the bear lovers and apologists.

*

Connecticut Inside Investigator, a product of the Yankee Institute,reported the other day that state government has bigger management deficiencies than the supposed lack of diversity that has become Governor Lamont’s new focus.

The news organization said Central Connecticut State University has paid nearly $763,000 to its former director of student conduct, who, the state Supreme Court recently ruled, was wrongly fired in 2018 after police responded to a complaint that he had assaulted his wife at their home. Police arrested him there after a standoff.  

The university seems to have decided that since the director of student conduct handles complaints of abuse and harassment, it wouldn’t be right to have a director who was in that kind of trouble himself. But the man denied the charges, they were dropped eventually, and the incident involved conduct off the job, not on the job.

His dismissal went to arbitration, which ordered him rehired. The university appealed to Superior Court, where the arbitration award was vacated and the dismissal upheld. But then the man appealed to the state Supreme Court, which overturned the Superior Court and reinstated the arbitration award with its huge liability in back pay.

Was the university right or wrong to persist with the dismissal though its cause did not involve the employee’s job performance and the criminal charges were dropped? There is an argument on both sides, but a risk to due process should have been clear to the university. It might have been better just to transfer him to a position not involving complaints of abuse and harassment. 

In any case state government looks ridiculous here, and if the General Assembly ever comes to think that $763,000 is a lot of money to waste, it should investigate what happened, ascertain what legal advice the university got, and set clear policy so this kind of thing can’t happen again. 

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

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Lamont subverts competence in state government’s hiring

By Chris Powell

Racial preferences in hiring used to be considered unfair because they treated people as members of groups rather than as individuals. This unfairness was euphemized as “affirmative action” and for a few decades the U.S. Supreme Court maintained an ambiguous stance on it. But recently the court took the forthright position that racial preferences are unjust and unconstitutional. 

So now advocates of racial preferences are seeking to give them a new euphemism: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Two weeks ago Governor Lamont joined this bandwagon, establishing the Office of Equity and Opportunity within his office “to ensure that state government is a leader in equity and inclusion with the goals of eliminating institutional and systemic barriers and creating opportunity and access for all those it serves and employs.”

The Office of Equity and Opportunity will aim to ensure that  “state government offices are representative of the people they serve, and that people from different racial, ethnic, gender, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds have a voice in the decision-making processes.”

That is, if the Office of Equity and Opportunity is taken seriously by state agencies, simple competence and experience will no longer be enough in their staffing. The race, ethnicity, gender, and geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds of job applicants will have to be considered, and agencies will be subject to “statewide diversity, equity, and inclusion benchmarks and measures of progress.” 

What’s more, the new office will “identify diversity, equity, and inclusion training opportunities for all state employees.” Of course no state employees are likely to avail themselves of such “opportunities,” thereby implicitly acknowledging their need for political re-education, unless they are paid to take time off from their regular jobs. So they’ll probably be paid for sitting through lectures in political correctness instead of working.

The implication of the governor’s plan is that state government is a bastion of discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, women, the poor, and residents of certain municipalities — a complaint that, despite state government’s various faults, has seldom been made. Who knew state government was such a nasty place, besides, apparently, the governor?

As public education in Connecticut long has been declining, state agency hiring officers already may have enough trouble finding competent people. If the Office of Equity and Inclusion is taken seriously, hiring officers soon will have to meet quotas having nothing to do with competence.

The governor created the Office of Equity and Inclusion by executive order, apparently because as ordinary legislation the idea could not stand questions in the General Assembly and from the public. With luck the damage to be done and the expense to be incurred here will be limited to one or two more patronage hires in the governor’s office and no one will be more annoyed by the extra political correctness than the governor himself.

PENSION JACKPOT: The governor has nominated former state Rep. David Arconti, D-Danbury, to the Public Utilities Control Authority, and it’s probably an excellent choice. Arconti was House chairman of the General Assembly’s Energy and Technology Committee, where he was regarded as pro-consumer and pro-regulatory reform, and lately has been handling government affairs for the Avangrid conglomerate, owner of United Illuminating, Connecticut Natural Gas, and Southern Connecticut Gas, a position from which he presumably will resign. He has seen all aspects of utility issues.

But Arconti’s nomination is also interesting for illuminating the value of political patronage. As a state legislator Arconti earned only about $40,000 or less each year, but by serving 10 years he qualified himself for a state pension. As a PURA member he’ll be paid $175,000 annually, and his pension will be calculated from the average of his five highest-paid years in state service — and $175,000 is more than four times $40,000.

Even a couple of years with the utility agency will bump Arconti’s pension way up, so like many others who have moved from the legislature to the executive branch, he may have just hit the jackpot.

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

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Ousting Biden, Democrats show Trump isn’t the only liar

By Chris Powell

Forgive Democratic leaders for what seems like their hypocrisy, their overthrowing their presumptive nominee for president, the incumbent, Joe Biden, who won the party’s primaries, and replacing him instantly with Vice President Kamala Harris, who didn’t have to earn support for the nomination from the party’s ordinary members. 

It’s no big deal because polls show that Democrats throughout the country overwhelmingly wanted Biden to withdraw once his mental and physical decline no longer could be concealed by party leaders and news organizations. The vice president was the obvious substitute. Despite the mockery coming from Republicans, democracy is not so offended by this. 

Democracy is offended by the Democratic leadership’s having blocked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s challenge to Biden’s renomination, forcing Kennedy to run for president as an independent. If Kennedy’s challenge had been allowed within the party, Biden’s incapacity might have been exposed at a safer distance from the election.

The ridiculousness of Democratic leaders and so many journalists is not forgivable either — their claim that Biden withdrew his candidacy for the good of the country. Biden didn’t withdraw as much as he was dragged away kicking and screaming after insisting that he would never withdraw unless God told him to. This week the New York Post claimed that Biden withdrew only when party leaders threatened to instigate his removal as president via a formal 25th Amendment finding of incapacity. 

That report seems more than plausible in light of Biden’s abrupt reversal on withdrawing after swearing that he would heed only God, and in light of his failure in his address to the nation this week to explain why he changed his mind. 

The Democrats are worse than ridiculous, having been shown to be as dishonest as Biden is senile. They long denied his worsening infirmity and even claimed that video evidence of it was forged. The president’s mental collapse on national television June 27 during his debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump made it impossible for Democrats and journalists to continue lying about the president’s competence. 

So party leaders resolved that Biden had to go, even as many did not publicly call for his departure. When their coup succeeded, nearly all party leaders involved with it and nearly all who did not object to it began hailing Biden as the greatest president in decades, even as his public approval rating long had been the worst of any president in decades.

Vice President Harris insisted on Biden’s competence and scolded doubters right up to the moment he withdrew. Did she really not know about his condition, or was she among the many who lied about Biden’s condition and who have returned to denouncing Trump as a liar?

While Biden is off the Democratic ticket, his party has contaminated itself by covering up for him only to retire him forcibly. So rather than let him get away, the Republicans may tie him around Harris’ neck along with the rest of the record of the Biden-Harris administration, which produced the president’s disastrous approval rating.

BUDGET RESERVE IS ILLUSION: Government employee unions and social-service groups are distressed that Connecticut state government has a budget reserve of more than $4 billion. The unions want the money for their members, the social-service groups for their clients, and they are sore at Governor Lamont and the General Assembly for not repealing or reducing the “fiscal guardrails” requiring state government to put so much money aside.

Of course state government always fails to meet some compelling human needs, but the impression that it is rolling in money is mistaken. While the “guardrails” have improved its financial position, state government still has an estimated $37 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, incurred during decades of overspending elsewhere. Even if the $4 billion reserve was used entirely to reduce those liabilities, Connecticut would remain hugely in debt.

The best way to find more money for compelling needs is to economize elsewhere. A good place to start would be state government’s extravagant payroll, which is increasing pension liabilities almost as fast as they are being paid down.

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

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