Hartford’s new archbishop eyes the poverty factory

By Chris Powell

When he was installed two weeks ago, Hartford’s new Catholic archbishop, Christopher J. Coyne, said he has several big objectives, though he conceded that with two of them he may be dreaming.

Coyne’s most practical objective is simply restoring the local church and regaining parishioners. “In recent years,” Coyne said, “we have given folks no shortage of causes to walk away from the faith — parish closings, the abuse scandal and associated betrayals by leaders who should have known and done better, and pastoral approaches that at times have done more to judge people than serve them.”

The archbishop can’t undo those scandals but he can be candid about them and make sure that the wrath of God quickly falls — publicly — on any agents of the archdiocese who betray their trust. 

As for unhappy judgments on people, archbishops are stuck with church doctrines that many think contradict modernity, like the refusal to ordain women or sanction same-sex relationships. Given the conservative bent of the places where the church is growing, those doctrines are unlikely to be changed soon.

Not that modernity is always right. Indeed, the basic Catholic morality of old is less primitive than today’s morality of anything goes. It wasn’t entirely because of religious doctrine, but Connecticut was better before state government started pushing gambling and marijuana on the public and pretending men can be women and vice-versa.

Sad as Catholic parish closings are, ripping roots out of the community and leaving empty buildings as stark monuments to a vanished era, the decline in church membership requires closings and it has not been caused primarily by the scandals. While spirituality is not dead in the developed world, religious dogma is losing adherents fast. Perceptions of the divine today are much broader. 

Fortunately the church has much to offer beyond dogma, starting with the Sermon on the Mount, and evangelical and non-denominational churches are growing. Catholic leaders might study their appeal.

In his inaugural remarks the new archbishop noted that parish and school closings have left the church with many buildings that might be converted to inexpensive housing, of which Connecticut is desperately short. Of course this is easier said than done. While nearly everyone purports to want the state to have more housing, nearly everyone wants it built somewhere else. The fear of the underclass is real and often justified, as indicated by violent crime and terrible school performance in the cities.

The new archbishop has an idea about his new city, Hartford, a poverty factory where two high school students were shot to death the other day. His dreamiest objective is to restore Catholic schools in the city — there are none left — and make them tuition-free. 

The excellence of Catholic schools is generally acknowledged. The schools have behavioral discipline and academic standards, which now are virtually prohibited in public schools. Unlike public schools, church schools can choose their students, but they use this freedom not to exclude but to pursue the most motivated students and parents. 

Thus church schools can offer students an escape from the demoralization of city life, and with their better environment they can retain good staff while paying less than public schools. 

Regional public “magnet” schools offer some escape as well but are still somewhat impaired in discipline and academic standards. They also impose more transportation burdens on students and parents than neighborhood schools.

In any case, as indicated by the litigation of the past quarter century over school segregation in Hartford, the city and other cities in Connecticut can use much more school choice. The return of Catholic schools could help provide it, but avoiding tuition would require money from somewhere. 

A scholarship program from state government might provide it and educate students better and less expensively than government’s own system, but the teacher unions would never consent, and they run government in Connecticut. They have no interest in improving student performance, reducing poverty, and saving money. Only dreamers care about such stuff. Good for the new archbishop for being one.

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

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Don’t leave hospitals’ fate to a big game of chicken

By Chris Powell

A big game of chicken may determine what becomes of Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital in Vernon. 

Yale New Haven Health, which two years ago agreed to purchase the three struggling hospitals from Prospect Medical Holdings for $435 million, now is suing Prospect to nullify the agreement. Yale New Haven Health contends that Prospect has substantially impaired the hospitals by mismanagement since the agreement was made. 

Prospect’s Connecticut hospitals were already in terrible financial condition, most of their equity having been stripped from them and liquidated by their parent company, a private equity investment firm based in California. The Prospect hospitals no longer own their own real estate but must pay rent to a real-estate company. 

Connecticut law never should have allowed nonprofit hospitals, which Waterbury, Manchester, and Rockville were, to be acquired by investment companies like Prospect. The state now has a big interest in keeping the hospitals operating, restoring their solvency, and returning them to nonprofit status.

But Yale New Haven Health has a big interest in not overpaying for an operation that may be on the verge of collapse and bankruptcy. After all, Yale New Haven Health runs four hospitals in Connecticut, all nonprofits, and they could be critically weakened if their parent company pays too much for the Prospect hospitals. 

As the condition of the Prospect hospitals deteriorated after Yale New Haven Health agreed to acquire them, Yale New Haven Health asked state government to subsidize its purchase by $80 million. Governor Lamont didn’t want to do that and urged the two sides to keep negotiating. But with the acquisition unfulfilled after two years and the lawsuit charging bad faith, negotiations have failed and seem unlikely to resume soon. The Prospect hospitals are far behind in paying bills and state and municipal taxes. They may not have any net worth left at all.

But the Prospect hospitals serve large communities and their closure would be a disaster for Connecticut. Other hospitals are not prepared to take up the displaced patient load, and even if they could handle it, many patients of the failing hospitals and the doctors who treat them would have far to travel. The disruption to medical care in the state would be immense. Despite Prospect’s awful ownership and top management, its hospitals employ hundreds of dedicated professionals striving to provide excellent care under worsening financial stress.

State government’s financial intervention in support of an acquisition by Yale New Haven Health strikes many as the obvious solution.

But a state subsidy for the purchase will ratify Prospect’s looting of its three hospitals and the real-estate company’s purchase of the hospitals’ property. The real-estate company now may think it has decisive leverage over whoever acquires the hospitals and intends to keep them operating. But if the hospitals fail and go out of business, their buildings probably would lose much of their value, since they have practical use only as hospitals.

The best mechanism for saving the hospitals may be to let them fail and go into bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is exclusively a federal court process but with the court’s approval state government could become a party to the case and assist the financial reorganization of the hospitals from the moment of their bankruptcy filing. Bankruptcy could relieve the hospitals of their burdensome property rental obligations.

In any case state government should do more than what it long has been doing about this problem — just hoping that Yale New Haven Health and Prospect will work things out eventually before the Prospect hospitals collapse and close. Hope is not a strategy or plan. 

So the governor should assemble a team ready to assist a bankruptcy proceeding, the General Assembly should make millions of dollars in an emergency loan available to a new owner of the hospitals, and the legislature and governor should give Connecticut a law to prevent nonprofit hospitals from falling into the hands of predators ever again, and thus to prevent the theft of decades of community charity that state government’s negligence allowed here.

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

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Slush fund paves the way for subsidizing strikes

By Chris Powell

Connecticut state government’s mad dash to the far left produced another ridiculous moment last week when, as the Connecticut Mirror reported, “with no explanation and scant debate” the state House of Representatives approved a bill to establish what essentially would be a slush fund at the disposal of state Comptroller Sean Scanlon. The bill would put $3 million in an account to be used by the comptroller for “assisting low-income workers.” 

Which workers exactly? How would “low-income” be defined? What would prevent the money from being used for political patronage? How could such a vague undertaking be considered superior to all the specified unmet financial needs lately competing at the state Capitol? 

Discussion about the legislation in the House provided no explanation. 

But later the Mirror got House Speaker Matt Ritter to admit that the $3 million appropriation was meant as a compromise between the Connecticut AFL-CIO and Governor Lamont over the labor federation’s desire for state government to start providing unemployment compensation for workers who strike. The money is meant to start subsidizing strikes.

Lamont has gone along with Big Labor on other issues, like generous raises for state government employees and requiring nearly all businesses to provide paid sick leave to employees, but he seems to realize that Connecticut is already perceived as unfriendly to business and that awarding unemployment compensation to strikers would make the state openly hostile.

Given its reliance on military contracting done by large manufacturers with unionized workforces, Connecticut should be especially wary of awarding unemployment compensation to strikers. Subsidizing strikes against military contractors could impair national security and discourage the Defense Department from relying on Connecticut manufacturers.

Awarding unemployment compensation to strikers also could cause more expense for state government itself, insofar as nursing homes are major state government contractors for the care of the infirm and nursing home employees are generally low paid and increasingly unionized and inclined to strike. 

Unemployment compensation for strikers deserves a full debate in the General Assembly and accountability from legislators. The House bill is meant precisely to prevent that. Creating a slush fund on the assumption that the comptroller will use it responsibly when the bill provides no rules signifies still more contempt for the legislative process. Presumably the comptroller will be able to use the slush fund as political patronage, to benefit only those strikers whose unions are close to the state’s majority political party, the Democrats, or to bestow the money on other organizations that purport to serve low-income workers and have Democratic connections.

Surprisingly the Republican minority in the House, which, while small, has some power in a legislative session’s last days — the ability to talk a bill to death — did not object to the slush-fund legislation.

Maybe the Republicans figured that letting the $3 million be spent as Democratic patronage is a small price to pay to help divert the comprehensive legislation Big Labor sought for unemployment compensation for strikers. But even such a strategic calculation would have been complicit with the attempt to keep the public ignorant of what was really going on with the bill. 

If the legislation passes the Senate the governor should veto it and recommend that legislators try addressing the momentous issue forthrightly and with integrity, not with deception, slush funding, patronage, and contempt for the public. 

*

OPEN JUVENILE RECORDS: Accountability also was overlooked by the House two weeks ago when it passed legislation granting officials of other states access to Connecticut’s criminal records of juveniles who seek to buy guns in other states. 

There is nothing wrong with the legislation — a new federal law compels it — but it raises the question of why the criminal records of juveniles ordinarily remain concealed in Connecticut in the first place. 

Connecticut lately has seen that its juvenile offenders increasingly have contempt for the criminal-justice system, since it refuses to punish them despite repeat offenses. Concealing criminal records of juveniles also exempts the system and parents from accountability for their many costly failures. The records should be opened to the public to increase deterrence and accountability. 

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

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Can state legislators resist clamor to bust ‘guardrails’?

By Chris Powell

Last week’s projections of more than a billion dollars in unexpected state government tax revenue over the next two years have strengthened demands for more spending in the last days of the General Assembly’s current session. Legislators already had been grabbing furiously at the remnants of federal pandemic emergency aid, and the projections of much more tax revenue have increased pressure for lowering the state’s “fiscal guardrails.”

The situation is similar to that of state government in the late 1980s, where the state government’s budget surplus was greatly enlarged by an inflationary boom and Gov. William A. O’Neill and Democratic legislators rushed to spend it all. Whereupon a devastating national recession struck, bursting the real estate bubble, collapsing banks, and causing bankruptcies, layoffs, and a monstrous state budget deficit. It led to imposition of the state income tax.

Could another economic collapse happen? Indeed, is it already happening? 

The stock market, whose capital gains provide much income to the wealthy, the people who pay most of Connecticut’s income tax, seems to be stalling out. Large layoffs are increasing in the state’s private sector. Housing prices have soared with inflation and already are crushing the working poor. Commercial real estate has crashed under the trend toward working and shopping from home. Homelessness and hunger are rising. The economy is not as strong as elected officials contend, and its next big move is probably down.

That would quickly devour the state’s budget surpluses.

Additionally, state government’s indebtedness may not have been reduced as much as thought lately. Business consultant and commentator Red Jahncke notes that the extra money placed into state government’s pension funds in recent years has been mostly offset by an increase in their obligations. For the big raises bestowed on state employees by the Lamont administration have been “pensionable.” That is, the raises have greatly increased the pensions state employees will be owed. 

Also arguing for continued restraint in state government’s finances are the categories in which there is the most clamor for raising spending: higher and lower education.

Higher education in Connecticut is full of spectacular salaries and frivolity, while higher education generally has been heavily discredited by the college student debt scandal and the debt forgiveness scandal. Higher education is highly overvalued and overpriced.

Lower education long has been Connecticut’s much more compelling challenge, since student performance has declined even as per-pupil costs have increased. The situation screams for auditing. But since members of teacher unions receive most education spending and are the state’s most influential special interest — the largest element in the political army of the state’s majority party — no such auditing is politically possible.

For it simply doesn’t matter that increasing education spending does not improve educational results. The main purpose of education spending has become the purchase of political support. Accountability in education is out of the question — not that it figures much elsewhere in state government, where results are seldom gauged against costs.

While some aspects of government in Connecticut might improve with more spending, the more compelling the need, the less influential the advocacy. Self-interestedness rules, as indicated by a recent report by the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio. 

Portfolio detailed the support given by state Sen. Jan Hochadel, D-Meriden, to raises for state employees and more education spending even as she also serves as president of the Connecticut chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, a government employee union. This struck Portfolio as a conflict of interest.

Of course Senator Hochadel perceives no conflict among the public interest, the union interest, and her personal interest, and many of her constituents were aware of her associations and knew what they were voting for and would probably get. Maybe more should have known but didn’t. Maybe they should learn before she seeks re-election this year.

But even if, as H.L. Mencken wrote, “every election is a sort of advanced auction of stolen goods,” the thieves don’t elect themselves. 

——

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

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Must Connecticut subsidize more illegal immigration?

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s state government seems to think that illegal immigration isn’t a problem here, just — maybe — in other states. The other day state officials gathered with advocates of illegal immigration at the state Capitol to congratulate themselves on what a Connecticut Mirror report called the “explosive” demand for state insurance coverage for illegal immigrant children.

When this insurance, which is much like federal Medicaid insurance, was extended to illegal immigrant children age 12 and younger in January 2023, the state Department of Social Services estimated that about 4,000 children would be enrolled. But enrollees now exceed 11,000.

Now pregnant illegal immigrants qualify for this insurance as well and can continue it for a year after childbirth. 

While it has not been publicized, children born to illegal immigrants in Connecticut also qualify for state government’s touted “baby bonds” program, in which the children are to receive as much as $24,000 in state money upon turning 18 — money to be used for higher education, starting a business, buying a home, or saving for retirement. The office of state Treasurer Erick Russell, which manages the program, lied to this writer to conceal the eligibility of the children of illegal immigrants but told the truth to a state legislator.

The deputy commissioner of the Social Services Department, Peter Hadler, gave the Mirror an absurd comment about the state’s medical insurance for illegal immigrant kids and pregnant illegal immigrants.

“Sometimes,” Hadler said, “there is trepidation on the part, especially of non-citizens, to participate in government programs. The good news is that that has not proven to be a barrier, and people are enrolling at strong rates and they’re seeking this out.”

Reluctance to claim government benefits? Maybe there was some back when the United States enforced its immigration law and immigrants were expected to cover their own expenses, but there is no reluctance today. Under the Biden administration and Democratic state administrations, illegal immigrants are qualifying not just for free medical insurance but also housing and monthly stipends.

There continues to be much agitation at the state Capitol to extend state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants in the state, though there are concerns about cost. It probably won’t happen during the current session of the General Assembly, since Governor Lamont is reluctant to give up the “fiscal guardrails” keeping order in state government’s finances.

At the rally at the Capitol a spokesman for the coalition seeking to extend state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants in Connecticut said: “Health care is a fundamental human right, and no one should be denied access based on immigration status.”

But anyone can be treated without charge in a public hospital emergency room in the state, and is entering the United States illegally and living in Connecticut a fundamental human right too?

The advocates of extending state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants seem to think so. They seem to think there should be no controls to ensure that immigration can be assimilated without overwhelming public resources — housing, medical care and insurance, and education — and without sparking ethnic conflict and jeopardizing national security and the democratic and secular culture.

With its disastrous shortage of housing and long decline of its public education, Connecticut especially should have awakened to the danger by now.

While the campaign to subsidize illegal immigration dresses itself in righteousness and goodness, it devalues citizenship. It would increase dependence on government, enlarge the constituencies of the Democratic Party, increase the number of Democratic-dominated legislative districts, and drain the private sector. It would make the country ungovernable.

If the Biden administration’s open-borders policy continues and Connecticut continues its own subsidies for illegal immigration and continues its own nullification of federal immigration law, in a year or two the state easily could double its population of illegal immigrants, now estimated at 113,000. Millions of people in troubled and impoverished places like Guatemala, Venezuela, and most of Africa perceive the grand invitation. How many more does Connecticut want? How many more can it afford? 

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

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Palestine would murder protesting U.S. students

By Chris Powell

At Yale University in New Haven, the University of Connecticut in Storrs, and a score of other institutions of higher education, students are protesting the support being given by the United States to Israel in its war with the Hamas regime in Gaza. 

The students want their colleges to dissociate themselves from Israel and from military contractors whose munitions Israel uses. The students call for a ceasefire in the war and chant, “Palestine will be free.”

But there were no protests at the colleges when Gaza attacked Israel on October 7 last year, launching hundreds of rockets and murdering, raping, kidnapping, and mutilating civilians. The protests began only when Israel naturally retaliated and undertook to destroy Hamas. As Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir remarked a half century ago, the world loves Jews as victims but hates them when they fight back.

And what exactly do the students mean by “Palestine will be free”?

Do they mean freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly? Due process of law? Sexual freedom? 

If so, the students’ sympathies are laughably misplaced, for there have been no such freedoms in Gaza under Hamas rule, and few such freedoms elsewhere in the Arab world. Gaza’s sympathizers on U.S. college campuses would be murdered within a week if they lived among the people are defending.

So maybe the calls of the students for a ceasefire in Gaza and freedom for Palestine really mean they want the area to be free of Jews. That always has been the objective of the people who have been running Gaza since Israel ended its occupation there in 2005. Back then Palestinians at last had their own state.

But two years later they elected Hamas, a movement sworn to Israel’s destruction. Soon missiles were flying from Gaza into Israel. For years Israel tried to handle the problem merely defensively. Then came last October’s barbaric attack.

Many people are appalled by the destruction and famine in Gaza. By some estimates more than half the structures in the territory have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair, and people are starving. Yet that is common in war. 

Gaza today still looks better than Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and dozens of other cities in Germany and Japan did in 1945. Those cities and many others had to be leveled by Allied bombing to compel the enemy’s surrender. 

Gaza’s sympathizers complain that Israel’s blockading Gaza has made starvation a weapon of war. But starvation always has been a weapon of war. With its submarines Germany tried to starve Britain out of both world wars, just as Britain and the United States, with naval blockades, tried to do the same to Germany. In 1945 the United States mined most Japanese harbors in what was frankly called Operation Starvation. It was highly effective and if undertaken earlier might have prevented the atomic bombings.

For starvation is a far more merciful weapon than bullets and bombs, as it gives an adversary more of a choice for survival.

Some of Israel’s tactics are fairly criticized. But Israel is fighting for survival against an enemy that, at least until recent days, has refused even to contemplate the “two-state solution” the world presses on Israel. Indeed, the integrity of the Palestinian hate for Jews is amazingly pure, since most Palestinians still prefer their own destruction to co-existence. Their longstanding fanaticism now is generating similar fanaticism among Israelis, who years ago moved far closer to peace than the Palestinian factions ever went.

The protesting students don’t help with their calls for a ceasefire. Since Israel was re-established by the United Nations in 1948 there have been dozens of ceasefires with the irreconcilables who surround the country. What is needed is not another ceasefire but peace — that is, a permanent settlement. 

Israel doesn’t want to rule Gaza. But Gaza wants war, having broken a ceasefire last October. So Gaza will have to be the one to ask for peace, and Gaza, not Israel, is where pressure for peace first must be applied. 

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

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Environmental Rights Amendment could justify almost anything

By Chris Powell

Belief that the world, or at least Connecticut, can be changed by grand but empty proclamations isn’t confined to the Lamont administration and its environmental protection commissioner, Katie Dykes, who recently tried to proclaim the prohibition of gasoline-powered cars. The belief infects much other environmental advocacy in the state, as indicated by the state constitutional amendment being promoted by leading Democratic state legislators and environmental activists.

It’s called the Environmental Rights Amendment.

“Each person,” the proposed amendment says, “shall have an individual right to clean and healthy air, water, soil, ecosystems, and environment and a safe and stable climate for the benefit of public health, safety, and the general welfare. The state shall not infringe upon these rights and shall protect these rights equitably for all people regardless of race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, gender, socioeconomic status, or geography.

“The state shall serve as trustee of all of the natural resources of this state, including its waters, air, flora, fauna, soils, and climate, and shall conserve, protect, and maintain these resources for the benefit of all people, including present and future generations. Any funds supporting the state in its obligations as trustee as stated in this section shall not be diverted for nontrust purposes. The rights stated in this section are equivalent to all other inalienable rights and may be directly invoked and enforced by the residents of this state.”

What the heck does all this mean? 

Is it another mechanism for requiring Connecticut residents to trade their reliable gasoline-powered cars for unreliable electric ones? Does it mean converting more electric power generation to politically correct mechanisms?

Will it affect the siting of power-generation facilities? Will it impede farming, hunting and fishing, housing and road construction, and industrial production? 

How about human reproduction, population density, and the state’s total population? After all, environmentalism tends to oppose population growth.  

And exactly how may these new rights “be directly invoked and enforced by the residents of this state”?

No constitutional provision enforces itself, nor is any constitutional provision “enforced by the residents of this state,” at least under the state’s current form of government. Implementing all constitutional provisions requires action by the various branches of government — legislative, executive, and judicial.

Nobody can know what the Environmental Rights Amendment means, and that seems to be its point: to let people construe the amendment however they want, to bring lawsuits citing the amendment as authority for their policy desires that are not yet enacted, and to try to get courts to agree, thereby transferring legislative power away from the elected branches of government, the General Assembly and the governor, to the unelected branch, the judiciary.

The amendment easily could be construed to upend all life in Connecticut without ever submitting any specifics to the people or their elected representatives. So much for the right of the people to understand what government is doing or setting out to do. By approving the amendment, the people would be surrendering all their rights.

But if grand and vague constitutional amendments are the way of the future, how about proclaiming other rights for the courts to construe?

Why not the right to efficient government, a government that pursues the public interest instead of the special interest? Why not the right to schools that educate rather than propagandize and socially promote, and the right to be free of crime?

Environmental issues aren’t the only ones Connecticut has yet to resolve perfectly.

Indeed, to improve its environment Connecticut hardly needs something as grand but empty as the Environmental Rights Amendment. The state could do all sorts of ordinary things. 

It could appropriate more to improve sewer and storm water drainage systems. It could invest more in converting trash to energy. It could legislate to reduce unrecyclable consumer product packaging. It could outlaw sales of “nip” liquor bottles, millions of which mar the landscape to pad the profits of the liquor lobby.

Issues like these are already pending. They just lack the grandeur of a constitutional amendment and the opportunity for pious posturing.

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

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Wild ‘Kia boyz’ represent Connecticut’s grim future

By Chris Powell

What may prove to be Connecticut’s best journalism for many years was a 44-minute video documentary of sorts posted last week on YouTube by freelancer Andrew Callaghan and brought to the state’s attention by CTCapitolReport.com.

Callaghan gained the confidence of three teenage gangsters from Bridgeport and video-recorded them on their daily rampages — breaking into and stealing cars day and night throughout the state, speeding away wildly along highways and residential streets, risking death and the death of others, defeating police pursuit, and boasting that no one can catch them.

Of course the young gangsters might be caught, insofar as Callaghan repeatedly located them and even joined them at a government housing project in Bridgeport, where, he found, stolen cars are regularly being “sold” to other young gangsters for a mere hundred dollars or so, the contents of the cars having more value than the cars themselves, which are soon abandoned since they can’t be acquired legally.

Apparently the Bridgeport police were not yet aware of or interested in the use of the housing project as a stolen car market. Nor, apparently, was Mayor Joe Ganim, though his recent re-election campaign was noted for soliciting absentee ballots from public housing residents who may have feared that keeping their apartments required such cooperation with the regime.

Despite the harm they were doing, the kids seemed more lost and nihilistic than evil, glad that someone from another world was paying attention to them. As they sat on the roof of a small abandoned house, taking a break from their mayhem, Callaghan even got them to reflect briefly on their lack of parenting and particularly their lack of fathers.

The young gangsters call themselves the Connecticut Kia Boyz, since most of their target vehicles are Kias, which became notorious for the ease of bypassing their ignition systems with a screwdriver and USB cable.

It is hard not to see the Kia Boyz as the country’s future — the vanguard of the ever-growing urban underclass, products of the family-destroying welfare system; of schools that pay their employees well but fail to educate because they can’t educate when their primary policy is social promotion and parents are no help; and of a criminal-justice system that pretends that social work actually works and is preferable to imprisoning young repeat offenders, giving them what feckless state legislators call “the help they need” without ever defining or delivering it.

What the Kia Boyz and the hundreds of thousands like them around the country need most is parents. But no one in authority in Connecticut dares to inquire into what has happened to parents and particularly to fathers, and why. That’s because such an inquiry might distress the many government employees and others who make their livings doing what doesn’t work or even makes things worse.

Anyone daring to inquire into the collapse of the family would also risk accusations of racism, since fatherlessness and poverty are racially disproportionate,.

So the country’s nearly comprehensive abandonment of behavioral standards continues, worsened by the crushing pressure imposed recently on schools, hospitals, welfare agencies, and government budgets by the Biden administration’s admission of millions of illegal immigrants.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the social scientist who became a great U.S. senator, saw it all coming in the famous 1965 report that bears his name.

Moynihan wrote: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder — most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure — that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.”

Six decades later Moynihan’s prophecy is still ignored even as new horrors fulfill it almost every day.

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

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Turn ‘nips’ into ‘caferos’; and Southbury defies FOI

By Chris Powell

Connecticut won’t be getting any relief this year from the plague of tiny liquor bottles littering the state. Legislation proposed by state Rep. Joe Gresko, D-Stratford, to allow municipalities to prohibit sale of the “nips” failed to get out of a committee in the General Assembly this month. 

Of course the liquor lobby, led by former state Rep. Larry Cafero, R-Norwalk, executive director of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of Connecticut, opposes the legislation. Cafero claims to see danger in having different standards of liquor regulation across towns, as if the public welfare would be diminished if “nips” could be purchased in certain towns but not others — just as Connecticut allows local option on marijuana retailing and as if most state residents don’t already do some out-of-town shopping each week.

But since nearly every legislative district has a bunch of liquor stores and most legislators are eagerly susceptible to special interests, the liquor industry’s opposition is always decisive on liquor law. Gresko acknowledges that even most municipal officials probably would oppose his bill as well, since they are glad to have the nickel-a-bottle tax money municipalities get on the sale of “nips” within their borders. 

While the “nip” tax law says cities and towns should use the money for environmental purposes, it needn’t be used to collect the “nip” litter, so few municipalities do anything to collect it, spending the money elsewhere.

“Nip” litter might be reduced if a substantial redeemable deposit was put on each bottle — say, 25 cents or more. But the liquor lobby opposes any deposit because liquor stores don’t want to handle the clutter they spew. The little bottles aren’t recyclable and liquor stores prefer the clutter to go on roadsides.

So people keep buying “nips,” hop in their cars, drink and drive, and toss the empties out the window, leaving any clean-up to civic-minded pedestrians, hikers, and scout troops — and sometimes to emergency personnel responding to drunken-driving crashes.

“Nip” litter gives the lie to all the prattle from Connecticut’s politicians about their devotion to the environment and public safety. They are devoted mainly to tax revenue. Against that revenue and the support of the liquor lobby, the environment and a few lives lost are of no consequence.

Gresko says he may introduce his local option legislation again next year. He should make it stronger, outlawing the sale of “nips” entirely, as New Mexico does. The next campaign against “nips” should go beyond the civic virtue of the pedestrians who collect the litter. It should have some bite illuminating the special-interest venality of the problem, as by calling the discarded bottles not “nips” but “caferos.”

*

For almost 50 years Connecticut has had a pretty good freedom-of-information law and a state commission to enforce it subject to judicial review. Many FOI precedents have been firmly established. But some municipal elected officials defy the law anyway and get away with it until a complaint is adjudicated, since that can take years, fines for violations are small, and fines are seldom imposed no matter how great the contempt shown by the violator.

One of those officials is Southbury First Selectman Jeffrey A. Manville.

A political adversary, former Selectman John Diehl, has asked Manville for access to the personnel files of town employees and particularly to letters of resignation so he can evaluate Manville’s management ability and confirm high turnover among town staffers. Manville is refusing to comply though the law makes public nearly all material in municipal employee files.

Manville says, “I don’t know what can and can’t be released, but there are a lot of employees who are expressing concern” that Diehl’s request could make their personnel files public.

But those files are already public, and if, as he says, Manville really doesn’t know, he needs only to ask someone who does, like the town attorney or the FOI Commission. Instead Manville will break the law to delay what might be bad publicity for himself.  

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

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Praise late chief justice but not for Sheff case

By Chris Powell

As the first woman to get tenure as a professor at Yale Law School, the first woman appointed to Connecticut’s Supreme Court, and the state’s first woman chief justice, Ellen Ash Peters must have had something going for her.

But the tributes offered for her last week after her death at age 94 credited her most for the Supreme Court decision she wrote in the school integration case of Sheff v. O’Neill in 1996 — a decision that has been heavily discredited by its consequences.

The decision, which divided the court 4-3, arose from the concentration of minority students in Hartford’s schools. The court held that Connecticut’s Constitution establishes the right of every public school student to a racially integrated education and that the state’s school districting by municipal boundaries is unconstitutional.

Desirable as racial integration is, nobody took the Sheff decision seriously — not the plaintiffs who brought the underlying lawsuit nor even the court itself. The decision was an empty gesture. Its logic was that all students had to be assigned to school by their race, that municipal school districts had to be dissolved and redrawn to balance their populations racially, and that many students had to be bused long distances to integrate the white student bodies in rural towns.

Of course all that would have been impossible politically and educationally, and none of it ever happened. Indeed, despite its proclamation of a constitutional right and a new era of social justice and better education, the Sheff decision produced little integration at all.

Instead the decision produced 25 more years of subsidiary litigation about enforcement, during which the lawyers for the plaintiffs — nominally some students in Hartford — quickly acknowledged that they really didn’t care about the right of every student in the state to a racially integrated education and wanted only more opportunity for Hartford students to escape the city’s poorly performing schools. The supposed constitutional right of every student in the state to a racially integrated education was a ruse.

Prompted by the Sheff decision, state government gradually appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate regional “magnet” schools to mix minority students from Hartford and white students from the suburbs. But the regional schools still left Hartford’s schools with overwhelmingly minority and disadvantaged populations. Worse, the regional schools began to deprive the city’s neighborhood schools of their better and most-parented students, damaging city school performance even more.

Today Hartford’s schools are barely more integrated than they were when the Sheff decision was rendered. While the rest of Connecticut’s schools are slightly more integrated, mainly in the inner suburbs, it is not because of Sheff. That integration has resulted from the general increase in prosperity of members of racial minorities, enabling them to relocate to towns with better schools — or, really, better students.

The latest judicial “settlement” of the Sheff case has state government promising to make more room for Hartford students in regional schools. But this still will leave Hartford’s schools and most others in Connecticut heavily segregated, and the additional integration will remain pathetically small compared to the expense.

The results have been similarly dismal for Connecticut’s other big state Supreme Court decision on civil rights in education, Horton v. Meskill, issued in 1979.

The Horton decision found the state’s system of school financing to be unconstitutional because it relied too much on municipal taxing ability, which varied sharply with property wealth among towns. The resulting disparity in school spending was deemed to be the cause of the awful educational performance in poor municipalities.

State government responded to the Horton decision with much larger financial grants to poor municipalities, leading to a huge increase in the state’s total educational spending. But student performance in poor municipalities remains as bad as it was at the time of the Horton decision. Indeed, for years student performance has been falling almost everywhere in the state.

So it seems that educational performance has little to do with racial integration and spending. Now if only having children outside marriage and parental neglect were unconstitutional.

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

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