Why Connecticut won’t get a ‘public’ electric system

By Chris Powell

With Connecticut facing another big increase in electricity rates, this one caused entirely by state government policy, a reader asks: 

Why can’t Connecticut replace its current power companies with a consumer-run co-operative organization like those that seem to work well in other parts of our country?

Government or “public” ownership of electric utilities isn’t a wild idea. Government-owned electric utilities serve about 15% of U.S. residents, and six municipalities in Connecticut operate their own electric utilities, though they generate little power themselves and get most of their power from producers elsewhere.

Any jurisdiction starting from scratch might want to consider government ownership.

But Connecticut didn’t start its electrical system that way. The state started with a privately owned and then government-regulated system. Indeed, a century ago the state’s main electrical utility often seemed to be regulating state government, and not the other way around. Back then the Republican political boss of Connecticut, J. Henry Roraback, also ran the biggest electric utility, Connecticut Light & Power Co., as well as another regulated utility, the New Haven Railroad.

Such domination of government by corporations is no longer accepted in Connecticut. Instead Connecticut today lets its government be dominated by the government employee unions.

Whether government-owned utilities can provide electricity less expensively over the long term is the critical question. Connecticut’s municipally owned utilities claim to provide power cheaper but they don’t have the expensive regional system maintenance responsibilities of the state’s two major electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, the latter a subsidiary of energy giant Avangrid. The municipally owned utilities are also exempt from most of the “public benefits” charges state government requires Eversource and UI to hide in their bills to customers. 

Quite apart from that, there are reasons to doubt that a government takeover of the electricity business in Connecticut would save much money for customers.

First state government would have to come up with a huge amount of money, probably more than $15 billion, to purchase the Connecticut-based assets of Eversource and UI. 

Then there would be the costs of separating Eversource’s Connecticut assets from its out-of-state assets and UI’s assets from the rest of the Avangrid network. State government would have to assume those costs too.

Then there would be the staffing issues. Presumably most Eversource and UI employees in Connecticut would become unionized state government employees gaining coverage by state government labor contracts, with their wages, pensions, insurance, and seniority rights from the utility companies being preserved or improved. Employed by state government, the former Eversource and UI workers might be more expensive. For starters, they’d probably get more discretionary paid holidays, some of which they would be expected to use by working in Democratic political campaigns.

With private stockholders out of the way, a government-owned electric utility would not have to pay dividends. But that savings likely would be wiped out by the interest due on the billions borrowed by state government to purchase the Eversource and UI systems. 

Also with private stockholders out of the way, there would be little resistance to state government’s use of the electric company for political patronage and to camouflage even more government costs than state government already hides in Eversource and UI bills.

Up to this point politicians might love the idea of state ownership of Connecticut’s biggest electric utility.

But then the governor and state legislators would have to take direct responsibility for running the electric system on a day-to-day basis. Every service outage and natural disaster would be seen not as a failure of the big, bad privately owned electric company but as a failure of state government, with no scapegoat available to elected officials.

Nobody in Connecticut cares much about the longstanding failures of public education, criminal justice, child protection, poverty and urban policy, and such. But everybody cares when the power goes out. Are the governor and state legislators running the government so well that they’re ready to take on responsibility for the electricity system too?

Not a chance, no matter how much money might be saved.

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

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Ban investment takeover of Connecticut’s charitable hospitals

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont and state legislative leaders have not yet completed their health-care proposals for the new session of the General Assembly but they should include legislation forbidding the sale of nonprofit hospitals to profit-making entities. 

Many nonprofit hospitals in Connecticut have been acquired in recent years by large nonprofit chains like Hartford HealthCare and Yale New Haven Health and so may not be vulnerable to acquisition by profit-making entities. But many other nonprofit hospitals in the state may be — the ones owned by smaller chains of nonprofits and the few nonprofit hospitals that remain independent.

Good luck to anyone who can start a private hospital and make money from it. But state government must protect the nonprofit hospitals insofar as they have been built over many years by community charity and voluntarism and their capital properly belongs to the community. An investment company’s 2016 acquisition of three Connecticut nonprofit hospitals — Waterbury, Manchester Memorial, and Rockville General in Vernon — has resulted in the liquidation of that community capital for private profit. 

The investment company sold the real estate of the three hospitals, paid the money to its investors, and then leased the property back so hospitals could continue operating but with the added expense of rent. This was essentially what in high finance is called a leveraged buyout. More simply it is looting.

Now the three hospitals are insolvent, operating under financial duress, and being offered for sale but there appears to be only one potential buyer, Yale New Haven Health, and it wants a subsidy from state government to make the deal. It’s starting to seem as if the hospitals may fail before a deal is made.

The same situation has unfolded recently in Massachusetts, where an investment company bought the six nonprofit hospitals of Caritas Christi Health Care and eventually liquidated their real estate for profit for investors. Now those hospitals are insolvent and in severe trouble as well.

In a statement this month the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation wrote that the investment company “stripped out and sold the property from underneath these hospitals, creating hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for private equity executives while leaving the facilities with long-term liabilities that are magnifying — if not creating — the current crisis.” 

The acquisition of nonprofit hospitals by private investors is a racket. Connecticut should outlaw it. If nonprofit hospitals can’t survive financially, their assets should default to state government, which should reorganize them in the public interest, not the private interest, so the charity that built them endures.

*

Can armed civilian patrols reduce the violent crime in Hartford’s Garden Street neighborhood, where two people were shot to death Feb. 10? A city pastor, Dexter Burke of The Light Church of God, thinks so and is organizing the patrols as well as a block watch and trash-collection efforts.

Hartford police will welcome the extra eyes and ears if not necessarily the extra pistols to be carried, though the people in the patrols will be licensed.

Burke is tired of the prayer vigils led by another city clergyman that always pop up following shootings in the city. While television news often publicizes them, the vigils do no more than display the righteousness and ineffectiveness of their participants.

Burke’s accusation that Hartford’s police are “unwilling or unable” to protect the neighborhood is less justified, since Hartford is full of poverty and crime, not just around Garden Street. Of course Connecticut’s other cities are full of poverty and crime too, and nobody ever does anything about that either — or at least nothing effective. 

Citizen patrols and block watches may help but may not reduce crime as much as push it into other areas. Still, that might not be so bad, for with more crime in middle-class suburbs, maybe state government could be prompted to examine why nothing it does to reduce poverty and crime has much effect.

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

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High school boys weren’t culture war’s aggressors

By Chris Powell

According to a report in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, the recent destruction of a feminine hygiene products dispenser that had been installed in a boys bathroom at Brookfield High School “ignited a culture war.”

But the “culture war” wasn’t ignited by the vandalism at all. It was ignited by the dispenser’s incongruous installation, which had been prompted by a requirement in a state law that is to take effect soon — a requirement that feminine hygiene dispensers must be installed in at least one boys bathroom in every public school, even as the products at issue also are to be made available in girls bathrooms and school offices. 

If this was “culture war,” the device’s installation was the aggression and its destruction was the defense.

The Hearst report got worse, portraying the device’s destruction as benighted opposition to making feminine hygiene products available to students without charge. But no one objected to the free distribution of those products. The objection was to the new law’s presumption that men can be women and women can be men if only they pretend hard enough, and that in the face of this pretense people should cheerfully surrender their longstanding right to gender privacy in bathrooms.

Of course vandalism should be punished, not celebrated, especially in this case, since the new law could have been protested far more effectively and legally. 

That is, the insulted male students could have played along with the law’s silly premise by taking one of the feminine hygiene products with them whenever they used the bathroom. Soon the dispenser would be empty and no school official could reprimand anyone about it without contradicting the law’s premise: that gender is just a state of mind and that one can be any gender one wants to be. No one could disprove that any boy pocketing a feminine hygiene product wasn’t feeling transgender that day.

The law here seems to have crept through the General Assembly without notice or debate. It should be debated, and could be if any legislator proposes amending it to remove the provision about boys bathrooms. Contrary to the Hearst report, feminine hygiene products would still be easily available to students without charge.

*

TRUMP BAD, GANIM GOOD: Former President Donald Trump, being prosecuted for absconding with classified documents when he left the White House, is claiming to have been above the law when he was president, just as Richard Nixon claimed to be. In an interview with David Frost in 1977, the former burglar-in-chief ridiculously contended: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

But the prosecutions of Trump have become disproportionate to his offenses and thus have become persecutions, and his adversaries are blind to the ironies that are piling up.

After all, Trump only claims to be above the law. But his opponent in this year’s presidential election, President Biden, actually is above the law. For while Biden also absconded with classified documents after his vice presidency, a special prosecutor from the president’s own Justice Department has declined to bring charges against him because he is senile.

Biden has gotten away with exactly what Trump is being prosecuted for.

Democrats in Connecticut are especially blind to the ironies. Even as they have condemned Trump, last week on the eve of Bridgeport’s do-over election for mayor the state’s leading Democrats — Governor Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy — went out of their way to endorse the re-election of Joe Ganim, who was convicted of 16 federal corruption charges and served seven years in prison for crimes committed during his first stint as mayor. 

How did the Democratic leaders rationalize their endorsement in light of that disgrace? Apparently they think Ganim is doing a good job, despite the absentee ballot box-stuffing his campaign undertook in the Democratic primary last year, the offense that brought about a second primary and election.

But rationalizing their support for Ganim may have been easier since no one in the press seems to have asked them about his crimes.

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

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Connecticut’s tenants may block housing; and U.S. meddling in Ukraine exposed

By Chris Powell

With its desperate shortage of housing, Connecticut presents what should be a great opportunity to make a lot of money in housing construction. But a hearing held last week by the General Assembly’s Housing Committee suggested that state government instead will be making the shortage worse.

Under discussion were bills to prohibit evictions of tenants when their leases end or at least to require landlords to provide a “just cause” reason for eviction. Residential evictions are already difficult in Connecticut and a bad tenant resisting eviction easily can wipe out the annual profits of a landlord with smaller properties.

But Connecticut’s “tenant union” movement isn’t interested in increasing the supply of housing. It wants evictions prohibited and rents frozen or reduced, as if landlords don’t face inflation just as tenants do.

The Connecticut Mirror captured the critical dialogue between Wolcott Sen. Rob Sampson, the ranking Republican on the committee and a landlord himself, and Connecticut Tenants Union President Hannah Srajer.

Sampson asked: “Is there something wrong with the landlord making a profit?” 

Srajer and her supporters in the audience answered in unison: “Yes!”

In such a political environment Connecticut will be lucky to get construction of any rental housing, and then only the most expensive kind. Forget “affordable” rental housing. No one will invest in it when rent increases and evictions are prohibited. 

If the proposed restrictions on landlords are enacted, people who already have apartments may keep them longer but the stock of rental housing will decline and deteriorate as profits are drained, and tenants will have been more selfish than landlords.

*

This column’s recent assertion that years of meddling by the United States in Ukraine prompted Russia’s invasion of that country was met with incredulity and outrage by many readers. Yet just days after the column was published, the New York Times reported that soon after the U.S.-assisted overthrow of Ukraine’s government in 2014, the United States began installing a dozen spy bases in Ukraine and through them collected much sensitive intelligence about Russia’s military and strategic installations.

This was seven years before Russia invaded.

The Times reported: “Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the Central Intelligence Agency, together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.”

Along with the U.S.-supported expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into eastern Europe right up to the Russian border, the Times’ report is more evidence that the current war is largely a matter of the refusal of the United States to grant Russia a smaller version of the buffer zone the U.S. has enforced for itself in the Western Hemisphere ever since the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed two centuries ago.      

Last week Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal returned from Ukraine and attended a rally in support of continuing to underwrite the war. Ukrainians, Blumenthal said, are tying the Russians down so Americans don’t have to fight them in the countries on the Russian border that have recently joined NATO, as the NATO treaty obliges Americans to do.

But prior to the U.S. meddling in Ukraine, Russia was not menacing eastern Europe. Those recent NATO members — Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, and Poland — add little to the security of the United States. They are military liabilities, not assets.

And what exactly are the U.S. war aims in Ukraine? Are they for Ukraine to recover Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, or the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine recently annexed? Blumenthal didn’t say. Nobody does. No, we should just send more weapons and money and keep the war going even as our own military is unprepared to fight and we couldn’t defend eastern Europe against invasion without resorting to nuclear weapons.

The war is one small miscalculation away from exploding on the world. Making peace is urgent.

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

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Overpaid higher educators say they can’t save a cent

By Chris Powell

Public higher education in Connecticut is doomed — doomed! — if the University of Connecticut and the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system don’t get at least $110 million more than Governor Lamont has proposed in his budget. That’s what college administrators and students told a hearing of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee last week.

The governor proposes to increase higher education funding by millions of dollars but not enough to compensate fully for the emergency federal money to which the colleges and universities got accustomed during the recent virus epidemic, assistance that is expiring just as the colleges and universities knew it would. But they were confident that they’d get plenty more from state government, as they usually have done. 

The governor isn’t cooperating. He seems to think higher education should economize for once.

Students testifying at the hearing demonstrated only that they have not been taught skepticism and critical thinking. They listened quietly without snickering as spectacularly paid administrators pleaded poverty: University of Connecticut President Radenka Maric, who draws an annual salary of $666,000 with fringe benefits worth another $47,000, and Terrence Cheng, chancellor of the CSCU system, who draws a salary of $441,000 with fringe benefits also worth another $47,000.

The students seemed unaware of the state auditor reports about UConn, like the one about excessive sabbatical time and payments for professors, and unaware of UConn’s improper firing of basketball coach Kevin Ollie, which cost the university $15 million.

Nor did the students seem to have heard about the disastrous mismanagement at Manchester Community College, whose president was fired and then reinstated under pressure of a sex-discrimination lawsuit and paid $750,000 in damages without any explanation to the public. The three administrators responsible were making between $228,000 and $256,000 per year — for community college work.

While the higher education executives agitated for more money at the Capitol, other higher ed employees agitated in the press. A letter from 49 “endowed chairs and distinguished professors” at UConn, published in the Hartford Courant, warned that the university faces a “dystopian future” if it doesn’t get more money. The letter’s lead signer, Manisha Sinha, a history professor, gets an annual salary and fringe benefits worth more than $241,000.

Not even the continuing national catastrophe of college student loan debt can shake the swelled heads.

A few days after the appropriations hearing President Biden announced he is canceling another $1.2 billion in student loan debt, essentially transferring it to taxpayers generally. One needn’t be an “endowed chair” or “distinguished professor” to figure out what is going on here.

The cost of college education has been driven up by government policy even as its benefit to students has collapsed, with millions discovering that higher education led them to poverty instead of good careers and loan repayment. 

Where did the billions in defaulted college loan debt go? To the higher educators, who aren’t the least apologetic about their racket. Indeed, they continue to insist that everything they do is for their students when they are really running a vast transfer of wealth from the poor to the prosperous.

If the value of higher education was aligned with its cost, the compensation of higher educators would be cut. They would teach more, research and publish less. But work more useful to society would be beneath their enormous dignity, and besides, government employee compensation is untouchable in Connecticut. 

Instead, when money needs to be saved in higher education, services to students will be reduced.

Legislators at the appropriations hearing did not press the salary issue, though it deserves an extensive investigation, as do the particular failures of higher education management.

But the General Assembly disbanded its Program Review and Investigations Committee years ago, and now, with state government so big and with so many employees of public higher education living in nearly every legislator’s district, even the most obvious critical questions can’t be asked at the Capitol.

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

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Connecticut uses electricity to hide cost of government

By Chris Powell

Feeling unusually put-upon by state government, Connecticut’s two major electric utility companies, Eversource and United Illuminating, are pushing back, which is good, since, whatever their faults, they are too easily demagogued against, as nearly everybody hates electric companies, electricity being too expensive.

Connecticut has the second highest electricity costs in the country. But now the utilities, which formerly only grumbled privately about the biggest reason, are talking openly about it: government policy. 

The forthcoming rate increases, expected to be around 19%, are reported to be entirely the result of two state government mandates. 

The first mandate requires the utilities to purchase the production of the Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford, electricity that sometimes is cheaper than other sources and sometimes isn’t. State government has concluded that keeping Millstone operating is vital to Connecticut’s energy security.

The second mandate requires the utilities to keep providing electricity to customers who consider themselves too poor to pay for it. Whereupon that cost is transferred to customers who don’t consider themselves too poor to pay and whose rates go up.

Quite apart from those mandates, Eversource long has estimated that 15-20% of its charges to customers arise from state mandates having little or nothing to do with the cost of the production or delivery of electricity. 

Then there is the failure of Connecticut to import more natural gas, largely the result of New York’s obstruction of new pipelines from the west.

The co-chairman of the General Assembly’s Energy and Technology Committee, Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, accuses Eversource of trying to make customers pay for a cash-flow problem the company suffered as a result of its recent “wind-power investment gamble.” But even there state government has to share responsibility. After all, why would electric companies “gamble” on wind power if government wasn’t encouraging “green” energy and setting targets for accomplishing it?

The state government policies affecting electric rates are not necessarily wrong. But recovering their costs by hiding them in electricity bills, as Connecticut does, is dishonest. It deliberately misleads the public into thinking that the utilities are responsible for high rates when they are the work of government.

There is no social justice in requiring electricity users who pay their bills to pay as well for users who don’t pay. The cost of people who don’t pay their electric bills easily could be drawn against everyone from general taxation. Even the much bigger cost of subsidizing Millstone could be paid directly from general tax revenue. 

Of course other taxes might have to be raised, but then people would see that it wasn’t the big, bad utilities that took their money but that their own state legislators and governor did. Then people would be prompted to make a judgment on the policies behind the extra costs.

But hiding the cost of government in the cost of living is practically a principle of government in Connecticut. State taxes and the cost of state government policies are concealed not just in electricity rates but also in wholesale fuel taxes and medical and insurance bills so that energy companies, hospitals, doctors, and insurers take the blame, just as electric companies do.

Indeed, hiding the cost of government in the cost of living is now a primary principle of the federal government as well, with trillions of dollars in government expense being covered not by taxes but by borrowing, debt, the resulting money creation, and thus by inflation, which most people imagine is a force of nature, like the weather, something beyond human control. 

Inflationary finance prevents people from asking their members of Congress inconvenient questions, like: How much more war in Ukraine, other stupid imperial wars, illegal immigration, Social Security, Medicare, and new subsidy programs can we afford?

With their new candor about the origin of high electricity prices the utility companies are taking a big risk. Through the Public Utilities Control Authority, the governor and legislators can punish the companies expensively for telling the truth. But state government’s deception of the public is already expensive.     

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

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Education lobby is outraged that it has to compete for money

By Chris Powell

For decades and maybe even centuries the sages have noted that to govern is to choose. Charles de Gaulle elaborated that governing is “to choose among disadvantages.” 

Leaders of Connecticut’s education lobby and the state legislators they control will have none of this wisdom.

They’re sore at Governor Lamont for proposing to move $43 million to “early-childhood education” from state grants to municipal school systems. Though he doesn’t put it this way, the governor could figure that the shortage of day care for children from poor households is a bigger problem than the desire of school systems for more money, most of which is spent on staff compensation, which rises every year even as student enrollment and performance decline, and that more day care will do more for neglected children than raises for teachers and administrators.

This implication may be what has outraged the education lobby and its tools in the General Assembly. Last week they shrieked that the various components of education should not have to compete against each other for appropriations — that schools and “early-childhood education” both should get whatever they want, no questions asked.

But of course the components of education already compete against each other for money. They compete whenever a school board compiles its budget, and the education lobby never complains that, because of state binding arbitration law and teacher union contracts, school employee compensation takes heavy precedence over everything else.

The governor and legislators do such choosing on a far larger scale whenever they assemble state government’s budget. Then education expenses compete against everything — transportation, medical insurance, housing, environmental protection, criminal justice, and so on.

The president of the Connecticut Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, Kate Dias, says that in appropriating for education, “We cannot have a dollar-store mentality.” But dollar stores are noted for economy, so what’s wrong with that, except that teacher unions are glad when their members are paid more than necessary?

Except for their great political influence, why should people drawing their income from government in the name of education be exempt from competing for appropriations?

Besides, Connecticut has no “dollar-store mentality” with education. Ever since the state Supreme Court decision in the school financing case of Horton v. Meskill in 1977 and passage of the Education Enhancement Act in 1986, the premise of education policy in Connecticut has been that if government just spends enough money, especially on teacher compensation, student performance will soar. Acting on that premise for almost 50 years Connecticut has spent many extra billions of dollars in the name of education, only for student proficiency to decline.

That decline can’t be blamed entirely on schools. As the governor’s emphasis on “early-childhood education” suggests, the far bigger problem is the collapse of the family and parenting amid the deepening of poverty. When, as has been the case lately, a third or more of Connecticut’s children are chronically absent from school — a situation proclaiming poverty and demoralization — no Ph.D is required to figure out that the problem is not a lack of school spending.

Indeed, the lack of correlation between student performance and school spending has been plain for many years, just as plain as the strong correlation between student performance, steady parenting, and family income. But the political economy of Connecticut and most other states — that is, the huge number of people employed in the name of education — precludes any such acknowledgment. 

Even the governor surely knows that the legislature will reject his proposal to shift money from schools to “early-childhood education” and will make sure that the education lobby gets the money it wants, perpetuating irrelevance. The legislature will choose — but against less-influential interests.

The historian Edward Gibbon attributed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to its steady loss of civic virtue. That the education racket in Connecticut continues without any substantial questioning of its dreary results suggests that government has grown far larger than the civic virtue available to set it right.  

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

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Murphy’s pork is inflation; and U.S. wrecks Ukraine

By Chris Powell

Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, whose idea of national security is to have border control agents wave across 5,000 illegal entrants per day, quite apart from the hundreds more who sneak into the country out of sight, has another great idea. 

He calls it the Connecticut Fund Finder — an interactive map on his office’s internet site that allows constituents to track the $4.2 billion worth of projects in the state that have been financed by federal government money Murphy has helped to arrange in the last four years.

“I’m really proud that we have been able to bring billions of federal dollars back to Connecticut since 2020,” the senator says.

But “bring back” isn’t right.

For most of the patronage pork for which Murphy claims credit — items not part of the federal government’s ordinary operations — has been financed not by taxes drawn from the senator’s constituents but from deficit spending, borrowed money. This money is not free or a sort of refund as the senator suggests. Instead it is debt that his constituents have just begun to repay and will be repaying for decades, and not necessarily repaying through direct taxes but through the indirect tax of inflation, which is already rampant in Connecticut and the country.

That’s why Murphy’s Connecticut Fund Finder would be more honest if it was accompanied by an interactive map that might be called the Connecticut Inflation Finder. It would try to calculate how much each project touted on the Connecticut Fund Finder map contributed to the rising prices of groceries, gasoline, housing, insurance, medical care, and such. 

Then the senator’s constituents could make more informed judgments as to the worth of each project and would be reminded that nothing is really free.

*

Independent journalist and provocateur Tucker Carlson may be criticized for not putting enough hard questions to Russian President Vladimir Putin in their interview in Moscow the other day. Of course Putin may be criticized for being a murderous tyrant. But the interview was valuable for illuminating Putin’s main rationale for Russia’s war with Ukraine.

That rationale is the longstanding meddling of the United States on Russia’s border. The U.S. was much involved in the 2014 coup that toppled an elected Ukrainian government friendly to Russia. Then the U.S. began encouraging Ukraine and other eastern European countries — former satellites of Russia (also known as the Soviet Union) — to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 

NATO membership would have put U.S. and the military forces of its Western European allies close to the Russian border, even though U.S. diplomats and diplomats from other NATO countries had informally assured Russia, upon the Soviet Union’s breakup and Germany’s reunification, that NATO would not expand eastward and that the former satellites would provide Russia a buffer against the Western powers.

Putin repeatedly warned the U.S. and NATO to stop intervening in Ukraine. His warnings were treated with contempt. In effect he was dared to do something about the intervention. So Russia invaded. The war has devastated Ukraine.

In 1962 the United States responded similarly to provocation, imposing a naval blockade on Cuba after the Soviet Union’s placement of nuclear missiles there, 90 miles from Florida. Indeed, via the Monroe Doctrine, since 1823 the U.S. has insisted on buffering the whole Western Hemisphere against intervention by other powers.

Despite the clamor for ever more billions of dollars for Ukraine to fight Russia with, the United States has never clearly articulated its war aims. Is the U.S. insisting on Ukraine’s recovery of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, and the Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine, more recently occupied and annexed? Those objectives seem wildly impractical and risk nuclear war.

Indeed, while Americans have hardly noticed it, through NATO’s expansion they recently have become obligated to defend five more countries abutting Russia, countries Russia had not been menacing before the U.S. intervention in Ukraine.

This is madness. Having provoked the war in Ukraine, the U.S. urgently should repent by helping to make the most practical peace possible.   

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

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Press lets Lamont forget he runs a ‘sanctuary state’

By Chris Powell

Not since President Richard Nixon went to China to cozy up to the communists there in 1972 has an American politician gotten away with reversing his position as easily as Governor Lamont did this month.

In two national television interviews Feb. 2 the governor, a Democrat, said his party had been slow to confront illegal immigration, immigration policy should be much stricter, the southern border should be closed, and he had offered President Biden the use of the Connecticut National Guard for border security but the president had declined.

No one in journalism or politics (if there is much difference these days), nationally or in Connecticut, seems to have noticed that ever since taking office in 2019 Lamont has been presiding without objection over a “sanctuary state” — that is, a state whose law and policy are to prevent enforcement of federal immigration law. Connecticut law and policy are that anyone who breaks into the country illegally and reaches the state should be above the law.

Connecticut forbids its law enforcement officers from cooperating with federal immigration officers. The state issues driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking. Connecticut has four self-proclaimed “sanctuary cities” that similarly protect illegal immigrants against enforcement of federal immigration law, New Haven being most aggressive in nullification. 

Indeed, the governor seems to have forgotten — and no one on his staff seems to have reminded him — that if the president had accepted his offer of the Connecticut National Guard to secure the border, guard members might have been breaking their own state’s law, though maybe they would be permitted to do in Texas and thereabouts what they are forbidden to do back home.

How silly and insincere for the governor: To advocate closing the southern border while his own state’s borders are, by state law, left wide open to any illegal entrant. Worse, how confident the governor must be that no news organization will ever challenge him on his  grotesque contradiction and test the sincerity of his new pose.   

Connecticut will know that the governor’s new pose is sincere when he proposes legislation requiring all law-enforcement officers and public officials in the state to cooperate with federal immigration authorities and prohibiting issuance of government identification documents to illegal immigrants, thereby ending the state’s nullification policy and terminating its “sanctuary” status.

And Connecticut will know that its minority party in the General Assembly, the Republicans, have regained consciousness when they propose such legislation as well.

Unfortunately hypocrisy about illegal immigration isn’t confined to Connecticut.

Just next door New York City is screeching over the cost and inconvenience of housing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Biden administration’s open-borders policy. 

Mayor Eric Adams says the migrants are costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars, exhausting its emergency facilities, overwhelming its schools, and causing crime. The city is suing bus companies that have taken the migrants north at the instigation of Texas officials who inform them that free shelter and food, and even cash stipends await them.

Yet New York still proclaims itself a “sanctuary city.” So does Chicago, even while being similarly overwhelmed.

The cost of this political correctness is huge and increasing by the hour.

Why does the United States suffer so much illegal immigration?

Yes, some migrants are fleeing political persecution, but not many. Most are fleeing miserable conditions in poor countries in Central and South America, like Venezuela, which used to be rich but has been impoverished leftist totalitarianism. 

But the main reason the United States suffers so much illegal immigration is simply because the country allows it. Migrants are rightly confident that they can bypass proper procedures for entry and still get in, stay in, and quickly achieve food, shelter, and medical care at government expense, as they do in Connecticut.

This isn’t the immigration of Statue of Liberty days, when unfettered entry for migrants obliged them to support themselves. It’s the immigration of the modern, politically correct welfare state.

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

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Was Lamont too cheery? And another racial mess

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont’s welcoming address to the new session of the General Assembly last week celebrated a state he sees improving in all respects. But even those who acknowledge that the governor is a decent guy may have begun noticing how much his remarks contrasted with recent news reports and the clamor at the state Capitol by dozens of groups for more money for human needs they say are worsening.

Indeed, recent news and that clamor suggest that Connecticut is being overwhelmed by, for example, neglected and mentally disturbed children, homeless people, drug addiction, poverty, underperforming students, failing and underfunded schools, badly stressed social-service organizations, racial and economic segregation, housing prices, urban deterioration, and crime.

How can this be, especially when the federal government’s economic data shows a strong national economy? 

Maybe it’s because to a great extent the official data is bogus. Many economists think so, noting how the official data is often contradicted by unofficial data and is revised downward when people have stopped looking. Bogus official data would explain why most voters give the Biden administration poor marks on the economy and think things were better under his awful predecessor.

Telling people to believe the government and not the evidence of their own lives is risky politically.  

If, as people sense, the economy is really not so good, then the governor’s budget proposal is even more courageous for maintaining some restraint on spending in accordance with state government’s increasingly controversial “fiscal guardrails,” which bring the state’s pension funds closer to solvency. 

Of course the people who clamor for more spending don’t think pension fund solvency should be a priority. But then those people have never recognized that state government long ago became primarily a pension-and-benefit society for its own employees and municipal teachers, who constitute the army of the majority party at election time. Nor do the people who clamor for more spending ever notice that most additional spending fails to improve anything beyond the salaries of government employees, especially when it comes to education.

The people clamoring for more spending have never complained about government’s results, about government’s failure to get value for spending.

At least there’s value in spending on Connecticut’s government employees in one crucial respect. That is, as in ancient Rome, not paying the army well risks regime change.

*

Maybe after a year of insubordination and chaos the state Public Defender Services Commission is moving toward normality.

Last week the commission suspended the chief public defender, TaShun Bowden-Lewis, putting her on paid leave and commencing another inquiry into the turmoil she has caused at the agency ever since her appointment two years ago, when she was hailed as its first Black chief.

Whereupon she began accusing of racism nearly everyone who disagreed with her, disregarding the commission’s instructions, changing policies without the commission’s approval, and antagonizing many subordinates. This should have been corrected quickly, but the commission lacked the nerve to remove its first Black chief. So instead of firing Bowden-Lewis, four of the five commissioners, including two Superior Court judges, resigned, allowing her to keep running amok. 

Last week she was accused of breaking into the e-mail accounts of two senior lawyers who displeased her.

If the replacement commissioners, appointed by Governor Lamont, the chief justice, and legislative leaders, have figured out that Bowden-Lewis is no more fit for authority than Donald Trump is, they will fire her despite the fear that doing their duty will prompt a few years of litigation full of racial invective, ending in a settlement payment to Bowden-Lewis of a couple hundred thousand dollars. 

That’s how the governor’s 2020 dismissal of his health commissioner — also a Black woman — ended last year. 

The imbroglio with Bowden-Lewis validates the observation by the late, great political columnist Charles Krauthammer: Racism will be vanquished not when people can be hired despite their race but when they can be fired despite their race. Government in Connecticut isn’t there yet.

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

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