Politically correct electricity will raise rates while failing climate

By Chris Powell

How much do Connecticut and Governor Lamont want to commit to buying a lot of politically correct electricity to reduce “global warming” before ascertaining and understanding its price? 

Not as much as they used to. Reality is catching up with political correctness in energy costs.

For Connecticut residents are angry at their sharp recent increases in electricity prices, especially since the increases were political choices by the governor and General Assembly. 

For many years the governor and legislators have chosen to hide in electric bills the costs of various social programs having nothing directly to do with the generation and distribution of electricity, including a program that requires electricity users who pay their bills to pay as well for electricity users who don’t pay for years at a time. As this is a public welfare expense it should have been covered by the state budget, where elected officials could be held accountable for it, and not hidden in electricity bills, where blame is misdirected to the electric utilities. 

Now that the soaring price of electricity has gotten people’s attention, they have discovered and resent the government’s dishonesty.

The bigger cause of the recent electricity rate increases is the commitment state government made by law in 2017 to purchase half the electrical output of the Millstone nuclear power plant to keep the plant in business. Since Millstone produces nearly half the electricity used in Connecticut, its closure would jeopardize the state’s energy security. In addition, the power Millstone produces can be portrayed as politically correct. 

That is, Millstone generates no “greenhouse gases,” just deadly radioactive waste with a half life of thousands of gubernatorial and legislative terms, waste for which the federal government has not yet gotten around to creating a depository, and whose politically incorrectness has been temporarily suspended. 

For a while the Millstone guarantee saved Connecticut electricity users a lot of money, but now other sources of electricity, especially natural gas, have fallen in price and are less expensive than nuclear. Energy prices change and state government did not prepare the public for the possibility. The Millstone guarantee may save money again before it expires in 2029, but at the moment it’s a loser.

So now Governor Lamont is backing away from Connecticut’s agreement to join Massachusetts and Rhode Island in buying a lot of electricity from offshore wind projects that aren’t operating yet and whose electricity almost certainly will be much more expensive than electricity produced any other way. Indeed, it’s questionable whether offshore wind will even work or survive the first hurricane or nor’easter that comes along.

The governor is musing about recommitting to offshore wind if Massachusetts and Rhode Island will join Connecticut’s commitment to buy power from Millstone, thereby spreading the risk of volatile energy costs. Maybe Massachusetts and Rhode Island would pay for some extra security from Millstone.

But the more electricity prices rise under the pressure of political correctness, as they will rise, the more Connecticut should question political correctness in energy. Even if one really believes that big changes in climate are manmade and not produced by the same natural factors that caused big changes many times over millions of years before the industrial age, one is obliged to believe something else before committing the state to still more expensive electricity.

That is, one is obliged to believe that anything little Connecticut does with its energy sources will make any difference to the world’s climate.

Last week the nonprofit environmentalist organization Global Energy Monitor reported that China is developing enough new coal mines to produce another 1.28 billion metric tons of that dirty fuel every year. A spokeswoman for the group noted that China’s government maintains long-term contracts guaranteeing the profitability of coal mines. Meanwhile Connecticut subsidizes what is considers “green” power.

Chinese coal is sure to erase in just a few minutes whatever savings Connecticut could achieve in “greenhouse gases” in a year, even if the state stopped using conventional energy altogether. So how much more does Connecticut want to pay just to feel politically correct about electricity?

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

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Zoning comes for a mouse; and don’t blame Facebook

By Chris Powell

A tiny cluster of low-lying rocks in Long Island Sound just off the coast of Connecticut at Groton is aptly named: Mouse Island. Robinson Crusoe was more removed from civilization, but the residents of Mouse Island’s three houses, occupying lots of barely a quarter acre each, might have considered the island a good enough getaway. For they have had to generate their own electricity, bring their own fresh water, and, to return to civilization, swim, row, or motor 500 feet to the mainland.

But The Day of New London reported last week that government has just discovered the getaway and has determined that it can’t be left alone — that it needs more rules.

In a way it’s the fault of one of the islanders themselves. He decided to renovate his windows and applied to the town for a permit. If he had done the renovation without a permit, no one would have known or had reason to care. But his request prompted Groton officials to start thinking about Mouse Island.

They first thought that the island was within the zoning jurisdiction of the town’s Noank Fire District. But a review determined that the island isn’t part of the district and that the town had long left the island without zoning, the houses having been built years before adoption of the zoning code in the 1950s.

The Noank fire district’s zoning officer said that until the recent review the district had had no cause to think about zoning on Mouse Island because nobody could remember anything ever happening there.

So now Groton will undertake to write zoning regulations for the island that will leave the homeowners some flexibility while guarding against … overdevelopment.

How silly. For nothing has happened on Mouse Island for a long time because nothing else very useful or secure can be built there. Old newspaper reports say five houses on the island were destroyed by the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, and of course big coastal storms are always possible.

But Groton now may spend thousands of dollars to write regulations to guarantee that no one will do on Mouse Island anything that no one ever was going to do or would be able to do anyway. Indeed, if the regulations are ordinary, they’ll prohibit foundries, shopping malls, stadiums, amusement parks, and airports even as island residents will still be obliged to get a permit to fix a window. That’ll teach them.

*

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and the attorneys general of 41 other states last week imagined themselves coming to the rescue even more grandly than Groton’s zoning officials. Tong and his colleagues urged Congress to require social-media companies, like Facebook and Instagram, to post a surgeon general’s warning that social media can harm the mental health of young people.

As some of those other attorneys general do, Tong represents a state government that is actually so unconcerned about young people’s mental health that, in greedy pursuit of more tax revenue, it has legalized sports betting on the internet and, contrary to federal law, legalized marijuana as well — as long as it is bought from a licensed dealer and state tax is paid.

In recent years school officials increasingly have complained that children are coming to school “stoned” or consuming marijuana candies in school.

Last month the Hartford Courant quoted the executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, Diana Goode, as saying there has been a “huge demographic shift” in problem gamblers in the state. “We used to think that the problem gambler was the little old lady at the slot machine,” Goode said. “Now it’s the 20-something male betting on sports.”

Yes, social media can exploit the natural neurosis of youth. But social media are manifestations of freedom of speech, a constitutional right. If social media are so harmful to children, the attorneys general should ask Congress to outlaw the possession of internet-capable mobile phones by minors. 

Kids get mobile phones only because their parents arrange them. Parents are where responsibility lies, but no one in politics dares to acknowledge it. 

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

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Abortion extremists are pushing Connecticut far ‘beyond Roe’

By Chris Powell

Now that the issue has been returned to the states and democracy, abortion extremism has revived throughout the country. In some states this extremism aims to make abortion virtually impossible, limiting it to the earliest weeks of pregnancy, sometimes before women may realize they are pregnant. But in Connecticut the extremism goes the other way.

A few days ago Connecticut abortion extremism manifested itself at the state Department of Public Health, which held a hearing on its proposal to repeal three state regulations that pose only slight impediments to abortion, regulations that did not bother advocates of “reproductive rights” back when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade was in force. Indeed, for decades Connecticut has modeled its abortion law on the principle proclaimed by Roe — that abortion should be an individual right prior to fetal viability but subject to state regulation after, because society has an interest in the unborn when they are able to live outside the womb.

As constitutional law Roe was questionable, as even some advocates of abortion rights acknowledged, but it amounted to a political compromise that commanded majority support nationally, though not in all states.

The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe has changed nothing in Connecticut. There is no movement here to outlaw or seriously restrict abortion, though the public probably would support legislation to require parental consent for abortions for minors, since such abortions conceal rape.

To the contrary, as shown by the health department’s proposal to repeal those three regulations, the political movement about abortion in Connecticut is, in its own words, to “go beyond Roe” — to legitimize late-term abortion, abortion of viable fetuses, in all circumstances. 

The department would repeal the regulation arising from the Roe principle that authorizes abortion in the last trimester of pregnancy only to protect the mother’s life or health. 

This regulation is actually only the pretense of concern for unborn life, since no government authority is checking on late-term abortions and since protecting a pregnant woman’s health is construed to include her mental health. In advance of childbirth it’s impossible to disprove a woman’s claim that delivering her child will drive her insane, absurd as such a claim may seem. 

But even the regulation’s pretense of concern for viable fetuses is too much for Connecticut’s abortion extremists.

Another regulation proposed for repeal requires abortion providers to try to save of life of a fetus — that is, a child — who survives an abortion. Connecticut’s abortion extremists want to erase any hint of an abortion survivor’s humanity. An infant bleeding and gasping for breath is to be coldly left to die in the presence of doctors, nurses, the law, and its own mother — barbarity.

Also proposed for repeal is the regulation that authorizes medical personnel to refuse to participate in abortions for religious reasons. As Connecticut essentially declares abortion the highest public good, all conscience is to be trampled.

The foremost advocate of repealing the regulations, state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, leader of the abortion extremists in the General Assembly — they style themselves the Reproductive Rights Caucus — maintains that the regulation protecting the consciences of medical personnel is unnecessary because federal law already protects them. But Gilchrest would not advocate repealing the regulation if she wasn’t hoping that someday abortion extremists will gain control of the federal government, repeal the law, and let Connecticut drive anti-abortion doctors and nurses out of their profession.  

Governor Lamont told the Hartford Courant he wasn’t fully informed about the move to repeal the abortion regulations and would be looking into it. But he added perceptively, “I hope it’s not a solution looking for a problem.”  

That’s just what it is. For the only problem here is that some people think that while Connecticut is more liberal on abortion than all states except Vermont and Oregon, which have no gestational limits, the state still doesn’t exalt abortion enough. 

Does the governor agree with the barbarians? Since the health department answers to him, it will be answering for him if it decides to “go beyond Roe.”

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

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Welcome to Connecticut, home of wasted payroll

By Chris Powell

Since Connecticut state government is a big place, it will make mistakes even in the best of circumstances. But Governor Lamont and state legislators should pay much more attention to state government’s most expensive undertaking — payroll administration — and less attention to what engaged them last week — new highway signs on the state’s borders touting the state as the home of great pizza, gourmet food, college basketball, and submarines.

In July Connecticut Inside Investigator, a product of the Yankee Institute, disclosed that Central Connecticut State University had paid nearly $763,000 in back pay to a former executive, who, the state Supreme Court ruled, had been wrongly fired in 2018. The firing was prompted by the man’s arrest in an incident unrelated to his job. But he denied the charges and eventually they were dismissed.  

In August the state auditors reported a similar situation, wherein the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection overpaid a conservation officer $109,000 during 19 months of paid administrative leave after he was charged criminally, though state regulations restrict paid administrative leaves to 30 days. The charge here was dropped too and the officer returned to work after what was effectively a year and a half of paid vacation.

Audits covering 2018 through 2020 already had faulted the department for violating paid leave rules.

Two weeks ago the auditors reported pervasive financial mismanagement at the Correction Department. The most expensive incident involved an employee who was entitled to a $3,032 payment for working holidays. Instead he got 54 bi-weekly payments of $3,032, or $161,000 more than he was owed.

The Correction Department audit also found improprieties with payments for compensatory time, overtime, workers’ compensation, and union leave, as well as raises awarded without evaluations.

Last year the auditors found that the University of Connecticut had overpaid two professors on sabbatical leave by more than $450,000 altogether. And who can forget the UConn Health Center’s having kept a professor on the payroll for five months after he had stopped showing up for work in 2018. He had been murdered by his wife but it took five months for anyone in authority to notice that he wasn’t doing his job anymore.

Two members of the state Senate’s Republican minority issued a statement about the Correction Department audit, asking if the department would try to recover the $161,000 from the improper year-and-a-half paid vacation. But even the most embarrassing audits seldom prompt any acknowledgment from legislators, and especially not from Democratic legislators, since the state administration is controlled — or, rather, often left uncontrolled — by a Democratic governor.

Connecticut Inside Investigator reported the other day that government employees in Connecticut are the most unionized government employees in the country. This is in large part because state law virtually requires their unionization and, through binding arbitration of their contracts, gives them great control over their compensation and work rules. Since their members are often the beneficiaries of the mismanagement identified by the state auditors, the unions don’t complain about it. Indeed, the great effort the unions make at election time to sustain the regime that is indifferent to such mismanagement may be why so few candidates for state office dare to question it.

But if voters ever tire of Connecticut’s rapidly increasing cost of living, this expensive mismanagement may be worth remembering at the election for the General Assembly two months hence.

* * *

IS ANYBODY HOME?: Connecticut might be safer if anyone in the chief court administrator’s office and the chief state’s attorney’s office read the newspapers or maybe just cared a little more.   

Last week the Hartford Courant reported that a Windsor man has been arrested and charged with drunken driving in four incidents in the state since last December. Other charges against him include driving under suspension and driving without insurance.

He has yet to be brought to trial and after his most recent arrest he was released on bail again. It’s not hard to imagine a deadly end to this crime spree if no one in authority thinks it’s urgent. 

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

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Baseball stadium isn’t crucial for turning Hartford around; housing is

By Chris Powell

While downtown Hartford’s Dunkin’ Park, which opened in 2017, may be the most beautiful minor-league baseball stadium in the country, it will be a long time before it can be considered a success. 

For the Hartford Courant reported the other day that city government is losing more than $3.7 million per year on the stadium, the difference between the income the stadium brings to the city — a little more than $900,000 annually — and the $4.6 million the city pays annually in interest and principal on the nearly $69 million it borrowed to build the stadium. Almost $56 million remains to be paid.

When the stadium idea was conceived a decade ago it was presented as a way of revitalizing Hartford even as city government was essentially bankrupt. Predictably enough, the project’s execution was quickly botched with a 25% cost overrun, then with the firing of the original contractor, and then with a $10 million payment to the fired contractor to settle its lawsuit against the city for damages. It was a caricature of urban public administration in Connecticut. 

So without any substantial debate or even awareness of what it was doing, the General Assembly approved Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s legislation to have state government assume Hartford’s bonded debt of $500 million, essentially reimbursing the city for its incompetence with the stadium project and for a lot more previous incompetence. Producing big Democratic pluralities in state elections is really all the competence city governments in Connecticut need to get by.

No one now in charge of state or city government bears any responsibility for the stadium project. While the administration of Hartford’s new mayor, Arunan Arulampalam, is stuck with the payments, he and nearly everyone else in authority likes to pretend that the stadium is a big part of Hartford’s chances for revitalization. 

The present is something else. At least Hartford City Councilman Joshua Michtom acknowledged to the Courant that the stadium has yet to produce the promised economic development and property tax revenue growth. “It has not in any way that we can measure helped the city’s coffers,” Michtom says, noting that the stadium will cost the city money for another two or three decades, “a generational black eye in terms of funding necessary services.”

The big problem with Hartford and Connecticut’s other cities is that they are too full of people who need government services — that is, too full of poverty, which state government profitably manufactures in the cities with its education and welfare policies. Without those policies and the many people who haven’t learned to support themselves the government class might collapse. 

Like hospitals, museums, and concert halls, a stadium may be an attraction for a city, but probably not so much for a small one. After all, the Yard Goats, Dunkin’ Park’s tenant, play only about 70 home games per year, leaving 295 dates to fill if the park’s value is to be maximized.

The attraction most needed by Hartford and Connecticut’s other cities is market-rate, middle-class housing for people who don’t need extra government services, people who can pay their own way. Fortunately Hartford city government has started to recognize this and is acting accordingly with development plans. 

Connecticut’s housing supply is so tight that almost any sound, new middle-class housing probably can be filled by owners or renters. These days even middle-class people with children might consider city living because regional “magnet” schools allow escape from neighborhood schools overwhelmed with neglected children. 

If a middle-class influx into housing in the city reached critical mass, supermarkets and the other necessities and accoutrements of middle-class life might follow. The decline of the city might be halted or even reversed. City living used to make sense and could again. 

Of course such good things might happen in the city if welfare and education policy ever elevated the poor instead of keeping them poor and dependent on government and scaring the middle class away. But there aren’t yet many advocates for that. 

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

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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.  

*

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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