Much delusion in Connecticut about a ‘two-state solution’

By Chris Powell

This week as Connecticut marked the anniversary of Gaza’s invasion of Israel and the slaughter, rape, and abduction of hundreds of Israelis, there were more calls for a ceasefire not only between Gaza and Israel but also between Israel and Lebanon, whose de-facto government, Hezbollah, has joined Gaza’s war, launching hundreds of rockets into Israel’s north.

Some ceasefire calls in Connecticut came from Jews, including members of Jewish Voice for Peace, who accused Israel of genocide for defending itself and urged that U.S. military supplies to Israel be stopped.

In calling for a ceasefire members of Jewish Voice for Peace joined other protesters in Connecticut and around the country in blaming Israel for the latest carnage. Few of them protested last October after Gaza’s attack on Israel. Apparently that slaughter of innocents didn’t strike them as genocide. Indeed, those calling for a ceasefire are not really calling for peace at all. The history of Israel and its neighbors since Israel’s re-establishment by the United Nations in 1948 has been a history of ceasefire after ceasefire — that is, constant war. 

Ceasefires in the war against Israel are just pauses allowing the aggressors to restock and regroup for their next attack. Tired of the ceasefire racket, Israel now may strive to settle the conflict forever by destroying all those committed to its destruction, though about half of Israelis seem to be as deluded as Connecticut’s Jewish Voice for Peace.

For the conflict’s only issue has been Israel’s simple existence. No peace is possible until Israel’s right to exist is guaranteed by those who have sworn to destroy the country, and it seems that no one among Israel’s proclaimed enemies — Gaza and Hamas, Lebanon and Hezbollah, and their patron, the theocratic fascist regime in Iran — will ever make peace rather than a mere ceasefire.

That’s because any leader of Israel’s enemies who sincerely offers peace — that is, recognition, legitimacy, and security — will soon be assassinated by the irreconcilables in his own ranks, just as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Egyptian irreconcilables, religious crazies, for making peace. 

Of course Israel has its irreconcilables and religious crazies too, one of whom assassinated Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995 for trying to make peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its leader, Yasser Arafat. But irreconcilables aren’t yet a majority in Israel, even if Palestinian irreconcilables soon may make them a majority. 

President Bill Clinton crafted a peace plan that gave Arafat and the PLO almost everything they demanded. Israel’s government accepted it but Arafat still rejected it, knowing that if he signed it he would be signing his own death warrant.

So the war and ceasefires continue — in large part because the United Nations, Iran, and even the United States subsidize the people ruled by the irreconcilables in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Those people have no incentive to demand peace from their rulers as long as their rulers don’t have to provide basic services to them and instead can devote their resources to war.

Just as thoughtless as the calls for another ceasefire are the calls — echoed by all members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation — for a “two-state solution.” These calls are misdirected at Israel, which long accepted a “two-state solution” in principle while Hamas and Hezbollah always rejected it and still do.

Those calling for a “two-state solution” seem not to have noticed that prior to last October two states were already in effect, since Israel had evacuated Gaza in 2005. Indeed, since Hezbollah long has been the de-facto ruler of southern Lebanon, prior to last October a three-state solution was in effect. But in 2006 Gazans elected Hamas, which quickly resumed its war against Israel. Even now Gazans prefer their own destruction by Israel to letting Israel have peace within any borders.

Israel’s enemies are unlikely to accept any peace of co-existence until their own states are leveled and the world stops subsidizing their incorrigibility.

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

-END-

Getting electric rates down requires more natural gas

By Chris Powell

Connecticut has nearly the highest electricity prices in the country in large part because it lacks a good mix of sources of energy for electrical generation. The Millstone nuclear power station in Waterford is the biggest source of the state’s electricity, with natural gas second. This year electricity from natural gas has been cheaper than electricity from nuclear power, and Connecticut might have used more gas if gas lines into the state could carry more. 

Operators of two major natural gas pipelines serving Connecticut propose to expand them, but last month environmental extremists, led by the Sierra Club, went to Governor Lamont’s office to deliver a letter opposing more pipeline service to the state — and, implicitly, opposing any use of natural gas. More natural gas, they argue, means more “fracking” to obtain it and more “greenhouse gases.” Expanding the pipelines, they wrote, “will lock us into unreliable, unaffordable, unhealthy, and unjust energy.”

This is nonsense.

Maybe someday solar, wind, and water will be able to power Connecticut inexpensively, but people have to live in the present, so what is “just” about the state’s high electric rates? Since electricity is a necessity of life, high rates fall most heavily on the poor. What is “just” about that? 

Natural gas has a long and successful record as an energy source and will be as reliable as government wants it to be, as by encouraging production and facilitating delivery. 

By contrast, the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow, and rivers don’t always flow enough to provide hydroelectric power. While solar, wind, and hydro don’t produce air pollution, they damage the environment in other ways. Connecticut already has controversy about solar farms devouring farmland and destroying forests.

No energy source is perfect, but in respect to air pollution and “greenhouse gases,” natural gas is a great improvement over its predecessors, coal and oil, and may be preferable to nuclear power as well, at least while nuclear power creates deadly radioactive waste for which the federal government has failed to establish a safe repository. Indeed, it is strange that Connecticut’s environmental extremists are so alarmed about natural gas but silent about the risks of nuclear power, the state’s leading source of electricity.

Getting more natural gas into Connecticut and building more gas-fired electricity-generating plants are the most practical means of reducing the state’s electricity rates and increasing the state’s energy options.

Most state legislators and legislative candidates, along with the governor, are bemoaning high electricity prices, and the Republican minority in the General Assembly has asked the governor to call a special session to address the issue. The governor, a Democrat, and the leaders of the legislature’s Democratic majority have opposed a special session, arguing that nothing can be done about electricity prices quickly, before the legislature convenes for its regular session in January.

That’s not quite right, since a special session could reallocate state government money, particularly from surplus funds, which are nominally high now, to the electric utilities for crediting to customer bills. 

But the state budget surplus is mainly a matter of how much state government wants to keep cheating on its pension funds by maintaining or even increasing their unfunded liabilities, thereby charging future taxpayers for services they never received. Columnist Red Jahncke has noted that the big pay raises for state employees in recent years have driven up their pension entitlements and nullified most of the supposed gains made by extra deposits to the pension funds.

Besides, as the governor says, using the state surplus would not be a long-term solution for electricity rates, just a political gesture.

The long-term solution is to facilitate more use of natural gas for electricity in Connecticut until the Nirvana expected by the environmental extremists arrives: perfectly clean and free energy. So obtaining more natural gas should be an issue in the current campaign for the General Assembly, and the governor and legislative leaders should pledge to put it high on their agenda.

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

-END-

Overgenerous pension system is politically impossible to fix

By Chris Powell

An angry reader notes that after 24 years as a judge, the Connecticut Supreme Court’s chief justice, Richard A. Robinson, has just “retired” while joining a big national law firm, Day Pitney, which has five offices in Connecticut. “So now,” the reader writes, “he will be getting a full pension from state taxpayers plus another full-time paycheck. Why should the state pay him a pension if he is still working? This is why the state is virtually bankrupt. It’s crazy. How come the press doesn’t report this part of it?”

Maybe what’s left of journalism in Connecticut doesn’t report the pension angle because it’s an old story, not that it ever has been told very well.

Robinson’s immediate predecessor as chief justice, Chase T. Rogers, retired six years ago after 20 years as a judge and then went to work at Day Pitney too. She now draws an annual state pension of more than $160,000, quite apart from her salary at the law firm. Since Robinson had four more years as a judge than Rogers, his state pension may be a bit larger. Since both retired judges are in their mid-60s, with continued good health they probably will have quite a few years earning at the law firm at least as much as their pensions.

But such opportunities are not peculiar to retired Connecticut judges. Virtually all retired state employees are eligible to do the same kind of thing — that is, to collect an excellent retirement pension from state government even as they launch second careers. 

The practice is especially popular among state troopers and municipal police officers, who typically can retire with great pensions at a young age — in their late 40s or early 50s — and then qualify for other good jobs to take them into their actual retirement.

Sometimes it’s a bit of a racket, as was shown in 2020 by the internationally notorious case of State Trooper Matthew Spina. The trooper was video-recorded by a motorist he stopped in New Haven and the video was posted on the internet. It showed the trooper hysterical with rage, screaming at the motorist, ordering him out of his car and handcuffing him, bullying and threatening him, searching his backpack, and stomping on his possessions before uncuffing him and letting him go without even ticketing him, since he had done nothing wrong, or at least nothing actionable.

While inflicting this abuse Spina declared that he hated his job and the public and was eager to retire in 14 months.  

Spina appeared to be middle-aged and a little journalism revealed that for five years he had been working so many extra hours that his overtime pay exceeded or nearly equaled his base annual salary of almost $100,000. That is, like many other troopers he was risking burning himself out and driving himself crazy to attain the magical threshold of the state pension system — three extremely high-earning years from which his pension would be calculated.

State police management readily obliged his mad pursuit of a pension bonanza.

Spina indeed retired the next year and now draws an annual state pension of more than $116,000. If he has another job now, his pretend retirement may be almost as comfortable as that of the retired judges.

Of course Connecticut’s state employee pension system isn’t a racket for everyone, but it is often excessively generous. It is a fair question as to why state government should pay large pensions, or any pensions, to people earning substantial amounts in second careers.

But there is a simple explanation. It’s that Connecticut has many more politically active state and municipal government employees and retired employees than it has politically attentive and engaged citizens.

Anyone who sees extravagance here should try putting the pension question to his state legislators. Few legislators are likely to express any criticism, lest they alienate a powerful special interest. If Connecticut is ever to have a better public life, it will need a better public.

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

-END-

Throwing money at schools is a policy needing an audit

By Chris Powell

Like public education in most American cities, public education in Connecticut’s cities has been chaotic and ineffective for decades. Ever since the enactment of the Education Enhancement Act in 1986 the state’s response to this failure has been to throw money at schools and particularly at teacher salaries, on the premise that teacher salaries and student performance are correlated. 

But student performance has not improved. Indeed, as measured by standardized tests, student performance has steadily worsened, to the point where many educators now want to eliminate standardized testing, claiming that it is somehow racist, though then there would be no measurement of results and no chance of accountability for both students and schools.

So educators and the elected officials who defer to them keep clamoring for more money, as New Haven’s did this week at “September Surge” rallies held at three schools in the city. Though New Haven’s schools received $127 million in emergency funding from the federal government during the recent virus epidemic, city educators and Mayor Justin Elicker said the schools need many millions more. They demanded that schools be “fully funded.”

What exactly does “fully funded” mean? No clear numerical answer has ever been offered. As a practical matter it means only a lot more, every year forever.

Mayor Elicker said New Haven has been doing its part, having increased its school appropriation by 42% over the last five years. He contended that the city should get more education aid from the state and federal governments because it spends slightly less per pupil than the state average even as the city’s students have greater needs, 75% coming from poor households and many not speaking English well or at all.

Many New Haven students have been traumatized by unstable upbringing, and many are immigrants, legal and illegal. To hear educators tell it, nearly every student in New Haven needs his own social worker, “paraprofessional” (that is, assistant teacher), psychologist, and English tutor — and maybe a nanny and chauffeur as well, since the chronic absenteeism rate of students in New Haven’s schools is 37.5%, highest in the state. (How extra services will improve education for children whose parents can’t or won’t get them to school is also yet to be explained.)

Besides, to some extent the greater need of the city’s students is New Haven’s own fault, since the city long has declared itself a “sanctuary city,” a brazen nullifier of federal immigration law.

In any case Connecticut has a right to resent the theater some New Haven teachers attempted during this week’s rallies as they marched through one of the targeted schools. According to the New Haven Independent, the teachers crouched, held up their hands, rubbed their thumbs and forefingers together as if holding dollar bills, and shouted: “Show me the money!”

A skeptical reader of the Independent responded incisively: “Show me the education.” He might have added: “Show me what is causing all this expensive and everlasting poverty, and how, amid this poverty, decades of throwing money at schools have improved student achievement.”

If only a similar demand came from anyone in authority — the governor, state legislators, mayors and municipal school board and council members, and state Education Department officials. If only state residents generally wanted to know why student performance falls as spending rises. Throwing money may salve the public’s conscience about chronic educational failure, but since that policy doesn’t work, uneducated kids will still be destined for lives of menial labor, financial hardship, unhappiness, poor health, drug abuse, crime — and more poverty. 

New Haven’s schools may be the most badly administered in the state, but similar problems plague schools in Hartford, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Meriden, and other poor cities and towns.

So Connecticut’s policy of throwing money at education and hoping for the best needs to be audited. Is auditing never attempted because most children not being educated are members of racial or ethnic minorities? Is it because an audit might threaten the careers of thousands of government employees? Is it both?

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

-END-

Murphy commercial hints at the issues against him

By Chris Powell

Connecticut got its nickname as “the land of steady habits” in part because of its resistance to political change and its inclination to keep the same people in elective office for a long time. Comments made by Thomas Jefferson about Connecticut politics in 1801 have been aphorized as “few die and none resign.”

Now that Connecticut has lost most political competition, with Democrats long having held all major state and federal offices in the state, change seems more unlikely than ever. A television commercial for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s campaign for a third term acknowledges this resistance to change even while suggesting it’s needed. 

The commercial shows the senator on another campaign walk around the state. He says: “What I find on this walk is that the things people care about here in Connecticut really don’t change: the cost of living, how much money are they making, how much are they paying in taxes, are their neighborhoods safe?”

Would people keep expressing such concerns if they were satisfied? Or has the cost of living been outpacing wages for many? Have taxes decreased or has inflation made them more burdensome? And when social disintegration makes news in the state every day, how can anyone believe government’s claim that crime is down?

Of course if people’s major concerns never change, eventually they might figure out that re-electing officials who never change anything won’t help. 

But then where are the alternatives in Connecticut? Ken Dixon of the Connecticut Hearst newspapers reports that six of the 36 state Senate elections and 43 of the 151 elections in the state House of Representatives next month are essentially uncontested.

Only one of the six Republican candidates for Congress is well known and will raise enough money for a plausible campaign. It’s not enough for candidates to have a message. They also need the means to publicize it.

Meanwhile the Republican candidate for president is terribly unpopular in the state and will be of little help to the party’s other candidates here.

But any campaign at least starts with a message, and Republican campaigns in Connecticut might do well to take Senator Murphy’s inadvertent hint. That is, the cost of living is too high, as is the cost of government, and the social order is coming apart without any acknowledgement by those in charge. Something must be done. But what exactly?

The administration the senator supports has worsened the awful trends. Will Connecticut Republicans offer voters more than the opportunity to cast protest votes?

*

IS SEGREGATION GOOD NOW?: U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the former Connecticut education commissioner and Meriden school superintendent, will be remembered mainly for botching the redesign of the federal college financial aid application, causing a national scandal. Even Democratic members of Congress doubt that Cardona could be considered for reappointment if the party keeps the presidency.

Cardona also spends much time using social media to pander to the teacher unions, the Democratic Party’s biggest constituency.

But the other day Cardona said something on social media that might actually be good for Connecticut residents to ponder. He wrote: “The Biden-Harris administration has invested over $17 billion in historically Black colleges and universities, more than any other administration in history. Now that is investing in Black excellence.”

Many state residents may remember what they were told by Cardona’s colleagues in the state education bureaucracy during the years of litigation in the school integration case of Sheff v. O’Neill: that Black students learn best in a racially integrated environment and that Connecticut’s de-facto segregation of Black students should be considered unconstitutional. Now the same big thinkers claim that Black students need other Black students and Black teachers.

So how does racial segregation become “excellence” when, with the federal government’s encouragement and financing,  Black students enter “historically Black” colleges and universities? After the billions of dollars of expense resulting from the Sheff case and the regional schools it spawned, Connecticut residents might want to know.

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

-END-

Lamont’s posturing won’t put Connecticut ahead of Florida

By Chris Powell

One of these days Governor Lamont may show Florida a thing or two. But probably not soon.

Without explanation, Florida’s tourism internet site recently removed a section touting destinations in the state said to be particularly attractive to members of sexual minorities. This renewed complaints that the state is hostile to those minorities because of its “Don’t Say Gay” law, its refusal to let people change the sex on their driver’s licenses, its prohibition of sex-change therapy for minors, and its requiring people to use restrooms corresponding to their biological sex.

As oppression goes, this isn’t much. The “Don’t Say Gay” law only forbids school class discussions of homosexuality in third grade and below, in the reasonable belief that any sex-related discussions aren’t appropriate for younger children. 

The prohibition on changing sex designations on driver’s licenses guards against deception. 

The prohibition on sex-change therapy for minors protects them against irreversible, life-changing treatment until they are fully able to make their own decisions. (All states prohibit certain things for minors, including Connecticut.)    

Members of sexual minorities who live in Florida may disagree with these policies but apparently not enough to leave the state. Florida long has been and remains attractive to them, and their share of the population in Florida seems to equal or exceed their share of the country’s population. An independent internet site on Florida tourism lists dozens of localities considered “gay-friendly,” many with “gayborhoods,” along with dozens of attractions that might appeal particularly to them.

And supposedly backward Florida has been gaining population while supposedly progressive Connecticut has been losing it.

So having already appealed to Florida businesses to relocate to Connecticut because of Florida’s restrictive abortion law — a law that probably will be liberalized by voters in a referendum in November — Governor Lamont this month had Connecticut’s tourism office undertake an internet advertising campaign aimed at sexual minorities, emphasizing the state as “a welcoming alternative.”

Of course this campaign won’t be any more effective than was the governor’s appeal to Florida businesses to relocate to Connecticut because of abortion law. Both undertakings are just politically correct posturing by the governor, a Democrat who has been finding it harder to maintain the support of his party’s extreme left. His posturing won’t do much to keep the lefties in line either.

If only the governor could plausibly issue an appeal to Floridians, including the many who used to live in Connecticut (among them former Gov. Jodi Rell), that they should return here because of, say, the stunning new efficiency of state and municipal government, much-improved public education, reduction in taxes, and a rising standard of living.

After all, Florida’s weather isn’t that state’s only attraction; it’s not even all that good. Florida’s winter can be lovely while Connecticut shivers, shovels, slips, and crashes. But Florida’s summer can be oppressively hot, rain there can go on for days and is often torrential, hurricanes are frequent and can be catastrophic, and the state is full of mosquitoes, alligators, Burmese pythons, and cranky old people driving haphazardly to and from their doctor’s office.

Florida’s lack of a state income tax may be a bigger draw than its weather. While tax revenue from the state’s tourism industry takes much financial pressure off state government, so does Florida’s refusal to be taken over by the government class, a big difference from Connecticut. Florida’s strengthening Republican Party may help in that respect, even as Connecticut’s Republican Party and political competition in the state have nearly disappeared.

Connecticut’s natural advantages remain what they always have been. Beautiful hills, valleys, meadows, forests, rivers, streams, lakes, a long seashore, changeable but generally moderate weather, and nearness to but comfortable distance from two metropolitan areas. It is a great but gentle beauty, crowned with convenience.

That is, Connecticut is a state to be lived in, not visited. Indeed, contrary to the governor’s latest pose, the fewer tourists here, the better. Connecticut would be more wonderful still if government didn’t keep making it more expensive and thus making Florida seem better.      

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

-END-

New Haven apologizes as cops defend themselves

By Chris Powell

Here is what Connecticut has come to. 

Last week a career criminal from New Haven wanted on a federal warrant for robbery and gun crime was cornered by police at a car wash just over the city line in West Haven. He pulled out a stolen gun and shot at the many officers trying to arrest him. Three shot back and killed him.

Whereupon New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobsen publicly and repeatedly expressed condolences to the career criminal’s family “on behalf of the city.” The mayor even met the family at a hospital to express the condolences before doing it again at a press conference this week when the state inspector general issued a preliminary report and released body camera video vindicating the officers.

Even so, the career criminal’s daughter and about 50 others protested outside New Haven police headquarters.

No city residents protested the career criminal’s life of crime or his attempt to kill the police.

Mayor Elicker and Chief Jacobsen aren’t stupid. In repeatedly expressing condolences they were recognizing New Haven’s political and social environment — full of poverty, despair, ignorance, disrespect for law, and resentment of authority, an environment in which crime is more easily excused as a way of life, the more so now that the political party that poses as the friend of the oppressed keeps making their lives harder with high inflation and illegal immigration. (The oppressed haven’t figured it out yet.)

But how smart is Connecticut when city officials feel obliged to make excuses for basic law and order? Will the awful political and social environment of the cities ever induce state government to try to change it? Or are the cities already fulfilling state government’s real objective for them — to maintain them as concentration camps for the poor and dysfunctional and income streams for the government class ministering to them?

That’s the implication of the recent trouble with state government’s Social Equity Council, the agency established to license marijuana cultivators and retailers and distribute to distressed areas — mainly cities — the revenue raised from license sales. 

In response to complaints that the council has been arbitrary and disorganized, Governor Lamont froze the council’s money pending a review by state Comptroller Sean Scanlan. This week the comptroller’s review concluded that the council needs clearer criteria for awarding licenses and disbursing funds to help distressed areas. The General Assembly may act on the comptroller’s review next year.

Since the Social Equity Council is all just petty political patronage, it won’t do anything for distressed areas. Giving money to a few politically connected churches and social-service organizations won’t address the big problems of the cities, problems that are major responsibilities of state government. State government knows very well what those problems are and how it is failing to alleviate them.

They are all results of generational poverty caused by government policy. 

Most city children have only one parent, if that. Few have fathers in their lives. The incentives of the welfare system have made fathers seem unnecessary, at least financially, though a healthy and stable home life that avoids child neglect is exceedingly difficult without them.

Most city children don’t learn much in school. Little discipline is permitted. Many kids learn mainly that they will be promoted from grade to grade and given a high school diploma without having to learn anything. Indeed, they are promoted and graduated even if they are chronically absent. Chronic absenteeism in Connecticut is worst in New Haven’s schools, affecting 37.5% of students. Their parents, such as they are, can’t or won’t see that they get to school and take education seriously, but many get welfare benefits anyway.

As a result many kids reach adulthood uneducated, demoralized, and qualified only for menial work, drug dealing or other crime, or more welfare.

After decades of this it must be assumed that state government actually intends the result of its policies, horrible as the result is: the manufacture of generational poverty. Yet now state government claims to be pursuing “social equity.”

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

-END-

The ‘banned books’ racket; and busway’s costs hidden

By Chris Powell

This week is what librarians and leftists in Connecticut and throughout the country call Banned Books Week. A more accurate name for it would be Submit to Authority Week.

The week is misnamed because in the United States there are no banned books at all — no books whose publication and possession are forbidden by government. Banned Books Week has been contrived by librarians and leftists to intimidate people out of criticizing certain books that librarians and school administrators have chosen for inclusion in school libraries, curriculums, and public libraries. The objective is to prevent libraries and schools from ever having to answer to anyone for their choices.

The selection of every book for a library or curriculum is always a matter of judgment. But the promoters of Banned Books Week would have the public believe that the choices made by librarians and school administrators are always right, and that anyone who questions these choices is a follower of Hitler or, worse, Donald Trump.

Some criticism of library and curriculum choices is nutty. Two great works of American literature that have helped to defeat racism — Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” — are sometimes targeted by people who can’t get past the occasional racist language in them. 

But these days most books whose inclusion in schools and libraries are challenged involve homosexuality and transgenderism, and these are fairly challenged at least in regard to their appropriateness for children, especially amid the mental illness that is worsening among them.

This doesn’t mean that such books should be excluded automatically but that their appropriateness should be settled by thoughtful review and discussion. Calling a book’s critics “book banners” and a book’s advocates “groomers,” as is common in these controversies, is not thoughtful.

The great irony of Banned Books Week is that as a practical matter its promoters are themselves the biggest book banners. That is, with a virtually infinite number of books in the world, librarians and school administrators reject thousands of books for every one they include. 

Of course not all books can be included in any library or curriculum. Do the choices that are made give a politically balanced view of the world and academic subjects or a politically skewed and propagandist one? 

If Banned Books Week succeeds, no one will ever know — which is the idea.

*

The once-controversial bus highway between Hartford and New Britain, CTfastrak, has been operating for 10 years, and this week Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers sought to determine if, after a construction cost of more than half a billion dollars, the busway can be considered a success.

The state Transportation Department says the highway had 2.8 million riders in 2016, its first full year of operation, reached a peak of 3.3 million riders in 2019, and then, amid the Covid-19 epidemic, fell to about 2 million riders in 2021 and has been slowly increasing since.

But the chief of the department’s Bureau of Public Transit, Ben Limmer, was unable to provide information crucial to a judgment on the project. While it stands to reason that the bus highway has reduced automobile commuting between Hartford and New Britain, the department says it has no data on that. More concerning is that the department can’t or won’t say how much each CTfastrak rider is being subsidized by state government. 

“We do what we can to make sure fares are affordable,” Limmer said. “I assume fares have not kept up with inflation, so we’re probably flat or slightly up on subsidies.”

All modes of transportation — sidewalks, streets and highways, trains, and airplanes — are subsidized by government in some way. But now that the epidemic-induced trend of working from home has greatly reduced commuting, CTfastrak is even more questionable than it was when it began.

Does the Transportation Department want to know what CTfastrak’s operating costs are and how much riders are being subsidized? It doesn’t seem to want the public to know.

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

-END-

Ethnic pandering in politics is out of date in Connecticut

By Chris Powell

Stamford state Rep. Anabel Figueroa, a member of the city’s Board of Representatives, may be a bit of a demagogue. But is she really a hater of Jews? That’s the charge leveled against her by the Democratic City Committee, which is moving to expel her this week.

Figueroa is in trouble for a comment she made as she campaigned for renomination for state representative by the Democrats in a primary last month. She said her district, heavily Hispanic, couldn’t possibly consider electing her challenger, Jonathan Jacobson, because he’s Jewish. The context of this comment and others Figueroa made during the primary campaign seems not to have been prejudice or malice but rather ethnic entitlement and pandering — the premise that, being so Hispanic, her district just had to be represented by a fellow Hispanic, especially since its people are disproportionately poor and need the special understanding only an ethnic compatriot can provide.

Figueroa’s comments became controversial during the campaign and her district — or at least the Democrats who voted in the primary — repudiated her premise, nominating Jacobson with 63% of the vote. Religion and ethnicity may not have mattered much if at all to anyone who voted, aside from Figueroa herself.

Only Figueroa can be sure of what’s in her heart. But she didn’t say Jews should be persecuted. Instead her remarks probably were motivated by the chance to engage in old-fashioned ethnic politics. She may have thought that stuff mattered, or she may have wanted it to. 

Quite unconsciously, Connecticut long has been acquitting itself of its past in that regard. 

From the 1850s to the early 1960s the state’s politics sometimes pitted Yankee Protestants and immigrant Catholics against each other, and then Irish, Italians, and Poles against each other. Eventually the political parties tried to smooth over these conflicts by balancing their tickets ethnically and religiously. As time went on, Jews were fit in. 

This ticket balancing was a primitive but well-intended and integrating practice, if sometimes silly, as during the many years when both major parties reserved their nominations for U.S. representative at large for candidates of Polish descent. 

Blacks were invisible in state politics until the 1960s but as the civil rights movement gained during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, their new allegiance to the Democratic Party won them a place in ticket balancing. Indeed, for the last 60 years the party has reserved its nomination for state treasurer for a Black candidate, as if no white Democrat has any mathematical ability.

With the exception of the Democratic nomination for treasurer, the ethnic obsession in state politics has faded away. But in recent years something very much like it has been making a comeback with the Democrats — their celebrating themselves for nominating the occasional gay candidate. This practice presumes dubiously that any gay person who has made it to adulthood in Connecticut must have overcome terrible challenges. It also seems to presume dubiously that minority sexual orientation may be more of a qualification for public office than experience with government and familiarity with issues. 

But of course Democrats wouldn’t celebrate candidates for their minority sexual orientation if the party didn’t think that these days almost any minority status is politically advantageous, since nearly all state residents favor equal opportunity. Connecticut is overwhelmingly libertarian on sexual orientation, having decriminalized homosexuality 53 years ago and having declined to enforce the law for decades before that.

So should Figueroa be banished from Stamford’s Democratic committee for her clumsy political opportunism? Or would that just embitter some Hispanics against the Jewish candidate who bested her? Is Figueroa’s defeat for renomination as state representative not enough of a lesson? Does she need to be denied renomination to the city’s Board of Representatives as well?

Or should Figueroa be forgiven on account of the service done to Connecticut by her humiliation — for her showing the state that contriving ethnic, racial, and religious rivalries is finished as a formula for political success?   

——

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

-END-

There’s a better innovation; and prohibit the looting of hospitals

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s state auditors are on a roll with their critical report about state government’s “venture capital firm,” Connecticut Innovations, which was published the other day soon after the critical audits about expensive management failures at Central Connecticut State University, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, and the Correction Department.

The problem with Connecticut Innovations, the auditors say, is that the agency, which spends tens of millions of dollars investing in new companies in the state, can’t be sure that the companies have produced all the jobs they promised to produce with state government’s investment. According to the auditors, Connecticut Innovations says verifying the job numbers would require auditing the companies and the companies can’t afford it. Connecticut Innovations adds that while the state Labor Department has data about employment at the companies, it’s always out of date.

This explanation is weak. Surely without much cost the subsidized companies can quantify their employment at regular intervals and identify their employees by names, address, and hours worked. Connecticut Innovations then could do spot checks about the claimed employees. This wouldn’t be foolproof but it would be better than simply accepting the data provided by the subsidized companies as Connecticut Innovations does now.

Connecticut Innovations says it will try to figure something out, though the issue may be forgotten unless the General Assembly presses it.

The auditors’ report on Connecticut Innovations should be taken by the legislature as an invitation to reconsider the agency in its entirety. For even if the job-creation data reported to Connecticut Innovations could be verified comprehensively, it would not mean the agency’s subsidies were essential.

For the world is full of banks and investment firms that finance new businesses. Who can be sure that the jobs at companies subsidized by Connecticut Innovations couldn’t have been created anyway with private financing? Why does state government need to get into the venture capital business any more than it needs to get into any other business?

Of course a venture capital firm operated by state government can provide one thing more readily than a private venture capital firm can — political patronage for those who run the government.

In any case if Connecticut had an economic and political climate more favorable to business and wealth creation than to employment by and dependence on government, state government might not feel as compelled to play favorites and subsidize certain businesses. A better economic and political climate would be the best innovation of all.

*   

Better late than never — and in the middle of his campaign for re-election — Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy has noticed the looting of Waterbury, Manchester Memorial, and Rockville General hospitals by the California-based investment company, Prospect Medical Holdings, which purchased them from their nonprofit operators in 2016 and began mortgaging their property and stripping their assets to pay big dividends to its investors.

This kind of thing has become a nationwide racket, and Murphy cited the Connecticut angle last week during a Senate hearing about the bankruptcy of Steward Health Care, a for-profit company that recently ran three hospitals in Massachusetts into bankruptcy.

Murphy asked: “How have we let American capitalism get so far off the rails, so unmoored from the common good, that anybody thinks it’s OK to make a billion dollars off of degrading health care for poor people in Waterbury, Connecticut?”

The answer is simple. It is less a matter of capitalist greed than government’s negligence. That is, in Connecticut and elsewhere government has allowed profit-making companies to acquire nonprofit hospitals and extract for profit the decades of public charity that built them.

Federal and state law could prohibit such transactions. So how about it, Senator, Governor Lamont, and state legislators? And Senator, how about returning the $2,500 campaign contribution you received from Prospect’s political action committee in 2017, a year after it acquired the Connecticut hospitals, a contribution reported this week by political blogger Kevin Rennie?

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

-END-