Governor, treasurer celebrate a disaster with ‘baby bonds’

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont and state Treasurer Erick Russell this week invited Connecticut to celebrate a disaster. They announced with rejoicing that almost 8,000 children born in Connecticut since last July 1 have qualified automatically for state government’s “baby bonds” program by virtue of the coverage extended to their parents by Medicaid, government medical insurance for the poor.

Another 15,000 children are expected to be born into Medicaid — that is, born into poverty — in Connecticut this year, and 15,000 or more every year after that in perpetuity. Wonderful!

Most parents whose households get Medicaid were unprepared to support children in the first place. Such households are usually headed by unmarried women whose children have little if any commitment from fathers. With its “baby bonds” program at least state government acknowledges that such households are where poverty begins.

So now Connecticut is investing $3,200 on behalf of each new Medicaid baby in the expectation that the bond’s value will increase to $11,000 or more by the time the child reaches age 18, whereupon the beneficiary will be able to liquidate the bond for cash for higher education, purchase of a home, or investment in a business or retirement plan.

“In just six months the first-in-the-nation Connecticut baby bonds program has put more than 7,000 working families on a pathway to the middle class and is transforming the future of our state,” the governor said. “This gives our young people startup capital for their lives and ultimately will help break the cycle of intergenerational poverty for thousands of families.”

The governor’s forecast makes some happy assumptions: that escaping poverty is mainly about access to cash and that the beneficiaries of baby bonds will reach 18 well-parented, well-educated, skilled and employable enough to make their own way in the world, and not demoralized from neglect at home and in trouble with the law.

The Department of Children and Families, the courts, and the Correction Department know better than such assumptions about kids born into Medicaid.

The baby bonds program also assumes that its beneficiaries will reach 18 knowing how to manage money. Since even the program’s advocates recognized the shakiness of that assumption, baby bond recipients are to be required to pass a test of financial literacy, at least if the people running the program 18 years hence remember to devise one.

But recipients of baby bond cash will not be required to have mastered basic courses in high school, nor even to have graduated from high school. Indeed, linking baby bond cash with educational success would have made the case for the program much stronger. But such a link would have impugned all public primary education in Connecticut, whose main policy is just social promotion.

Treasurer Russell acknowledged that baby bonds are not a “silver bullet” and that breaking the cycle of poverty will require far more action. “How we support those kids along the way will go a long way in determining how prepared they are to seize this opportunity,” Russell said. So he has organized a study committee about that.

Such an inquiry should have long preceded baby bonds. 

For starters it should have asked how children are diverted from poverty by a welfare system that rewards childbearing outside marriage, depriving them of fathers, and by schools that advance them without requiring them to learn anything.

What most improves a child’s chances is well documented: a stable family with two devoted parents who know the necessity of education and work and who set the right examples. The children of such families long have avoided poverty without baby bonds. 

As the governor notes, young people going out into the world need some capital to get started with. But the better part of that capital is not the money thrown at problems by elected officials too lazy or scared to examine them. The better part of that capital is intangible: what is put into the minds and character of children as they grow up.

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

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Prisons aren’t the only agency that could use an ‘ombudsman’

By Chris Powell

With their residents locked in and the public locked out, Connecticut’s prisons are inevitably far more secretive than other agencies of government. Combine this secrecy with the disdain for prisoners and the decline of journalism and prisons become especially susceptible to malfeasance, misconduct, and abuse of power. 

Criminal justice in Connecticut is lenient and goes out of its way with probation and suspended sentences to keep offenders out of prison. With most elected officials, reducing prison population and expense is far more important than putting chronic offenders away. As a result when criminals are sent to prison most are already pretty messed up and have been repeatedly destructive for a long time, making them still more dangerous and the prison environment still worse. Even the most decent prison guards are always at high risk of being assaulted by disturbed inmates.

But in recent years neglect of medical care for inmates in Connecticut’s prisons has been well documented, and the high rate of prisoner recidivism — the return of released prisoners to crime and imprisonment — suggests that while prison protects society, it still doesn’t do much to turn prisoners into productive members of society upon release. Indeed, with recidivism so high it’s crazy that so few repeat offenders are given life sentences.

So along with criminal justice generally, prisons in Connecticut need scrutiny, and thanks to recent legislation they will have to be much more accepting of it than they were when, 40 years ago, the Journal Inquirer recruited a literate inmate of Somers State Prison to write a regular column for the newspaper. Eventually the warden and correction commissioner grew so resentful of occasional criticism from inside their domain that they transferred the prisoner-columnist to the federal prison system, purportedly for his own safety but actually to silence him and end the publicity about Connecticut prison life.

For while writing for the newspaper the prisoner was never attacked or threatened by other prisoners. He was threatened only by the prison administration, as the administration threatened the newspaper itself with criminal prosecution for facilitating the prisoner’s writing. A prosecutor quickly determined that the threat against the newspaper had no basis in law and was just intimidation.

The new legislation establishes the office of an independent prison ombudsman, authorizing him to investigate prison conditions and complaints from prisoners and thus go where the press and public usually can’t. If the ombudsman is conscientious, he will report regularly to the commissioner, the governor, the General Assembly, the press, and the public, and maybe someone will hold the Correction Department to account. 

A committee appointed to review candidates for prison ombudsman has recommended that Governor Lamont appoint Kenneth J. Krayeske, a civil rights lawyer based in New Haven who has dabbled on the far left of state politics and successfully litigated on behalf of prisoners. Krayeske promises to be reasonable — that is, he knows that only being reasonable is likely to make progress for prisoners. He will have to build trust, and given his clientele this may not be easy.

But if the ombudsman does his job right, he may do a service for the public as well as for prisoners. He might prompt people to wonder: Why shouldn’t Connecticut establish ombudsmen for all major state government agencies?

Of course Connecticut already has its two state auditors, who do excellent work even if some agencies don’t always take their findings as seriously as they should. But the auditors come around to the agencies only once in a while and concentrate on financial issues.

What if there were ombudsmen authorized to butt into all agency business every day — meetings, personnel decisions, records — and make regular public reports about whatever struck them as objectionable or questionable?

This might awaken the conscience in state government — that conscience being, as H.L. Mencken wrote, “the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking.”

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

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Soccer won’t rescue Bridgeport but middle-class housing might

By Chris Powell

Hartford’s decline into poverty over the last 60 years hasn’t been reversed or even halted by the expensive development projects that have shuffled the city’s downtown this way and that — first Constitution Plaza, an office building complex; then the Hartford Civic Center; then the Connecticut Convention Center; and most recently a minor-league baseball stadium.

Nor was New Haven’s decline into poverty over the same period reversed or halted by the New Haven Coliseum, completed downtown in 1972 and demolished in 2007.

Bridgeport also kept getting poorer after building a minor-league baseball stadium downtown in 1998. Minor-league baseball was not very successful there and after only 19 years the stadium was replaced with an outdoor concert amphitheater, though it is adjacent to an indoor arena built in 2001.

Last week a developer announced that he has been awarded a minor-league soccer team franchise and wants to put it in Bridgeport if city government and state government will build a stadium for him. Mayor Joe Ganim and Bridgeport’s state legislative delegation support the idea, though minor-league soccer has never been one of the struggling city’s urgent needs. The mayor and the legislators may see patronage opportunities in stadium construction and operation.

Fortunately Governor Lamont, while wishing the Bridgeport soccer idea well, did not endorse putting state government money into it. He should plainly oppose giving it any government money, state or municipal.

For Bridgeport, like Hartford and New Haven, is a ward of the state, with half of city budgets covered by state aid, and state government has both the moral and practical right to veto big city projects, as it should have vetoed the Hartford stadium project when the City Council approved it in 2014 even as the city was insolvent. 

Instead state government eventually paid the entire bill for the Hartford stadium, as well as for many other things in Hartford, by assuming responsibility for nearly all the city’s bonded debt, around $500 million, thereby relieving the city of accountability for many years of mismanagement.

Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city, may resent state government’s grotesque favoritism to Hartford, especially since Bridgeport produces in state elections the same huge pluralities for the state’s Democratic regime that Hartford does. But state government should acknowledge the failure of the “bright shiny object” theory of urban management. State government also should acknowledge that the big problem of Connecticut’s cities is not the lack of some entertainment or tourist venue but the poverty of the people who live there. 

For even when a city entertainment or tourist venue draws enough traffic to cover expenses, it seldom induces middle- and upper-class people to move to the city, pay property taxes and support businesses there, and send their well-parented children to school there. To the contrary, patrons of those venues just return to the suburbs when they are done with their entertainment, leaving the cities just about as poor as before, except maybe for a few restaurants.

Hartford imagines its baseball stadium as the engine of economic renewal and growth downtown, but this is wishful thinking. Many entertainment events have continued at the Civic Center and the Convention Center without doing much for growth. 

What likely will bring economic growth and improve Hartford’s demographics is city government’s recent emphasis on building market-rate housing downtown. Connecticut’s housing shortage is so desperate that middle-class people may be more willing to consider living in a city, despite its bad demographics and neighborhood schools, if the market-rate housing is new, neighborhoods are walkable, and regional schools are accessible.

The governor knows that housing is best built, and with the least opposition, where transportation, energy, water, and sewer infrastructure is already in place, as it is in the cities. So he should tell Bridgeport that state government will help build market-rate housing there but not a soccer stadium. For once cities recover their middle class — people with some money to spend — entertainment, supermarkets, other retailing, and professional services will show up and take care of themselves.      

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

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Poor need much more housing, not protection from eviction

By Chris Powell

Many elected officials make a living by causing problems and then purporting to solve them. So it is with the Eviction Protection Act recently re-introduced in Congress by Connecticut U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District. 

The legislation would have the federal government offer financial grants to state governments that provide lawyers to represent low-income people facing eviction from their apartments, as Connecticut and several other states do.

The proposal implies that the country’s housing problem is largely a matter of unscrupulous landlords gouging innocent tenants. But the housing disaster results mostly from the dislocations to the economy caused by government’s excessive restrictions during the recent virus epidemic; and then the money created and distributed by government to compensate for lost income; and then the money created and distributed by government to pay for the explosion of all kinds of spending under the Trump and Biden administrations — money created far out of proportion to the economy’s actual production.

These policies have devastated the poor — cutting their incomes through restrictions on commerce and again through inflation, which is far higher than the heavily manipulated official figures. Meanwhile inflation also has sharply increased the expenses of landlords. They pay more for nearly everything required to maintain their property, and their extra costs are passed along to tenants via rents.

The legislation for federal grants for state eviction-protection agencies identifies no source of funding for them. For financing for the whole federal government now is based largely on money creation — that is, on inflation. 

For Congress has fallen in love with a school of economic thought called Modern Monetary Theory, which is built on the truism that government can create money without levying taxes and that any government that can create money can never go broke. But Congress has ignored the remainder of Modern Monetary Theory — that the danger of money creation is not bankruptcy but currency devaluation. This devaluation — inflation — has already become oppressive.

Then there is the problem of insufficient housing construction, especially construction of less expensive, multi-family housing. More than lawyers to delay their eviction, the poor need greater housing supply. But nearly everyone who already has housing doesn’t want more housing in his neighborhood, and nearly everyone who owns his housing has a selfish financial interest in perpetuating housing scarcity.

That’s why Representative DeLauro has not proposed legislation requiring or facilitating construction of multi-family housing in the comfortable suburbs of her district, like Woodbridge, Orange, Bethany, Guilford, and Durham.. It’s so much safer politically for her to pretend that the housing problem is unscrupulous landlords. 

Like most members of Congress, DeLauro is confident that few voters will ever learn that inflation is not like the weather, not an act of God, but an act of those who go to Congress and pose as protectors of the working class.

COMMUNISM IN CONNECTICUT: The Yankee Institute reports that some Democratic state legislators played footsie again the other day with Connecticut’s Communist Party, attending or sending greetings to the party’s Amistad Awards ceremony, which honored state Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, state employee union leader Stacie Harris-Byrdsong, and immigrant rights advocate Luis Luna. The award winners also received congratulatory citations from the General Assembly.

Connecticut’s Communist Party is no threat to national security. It has few members and little presence outside New Haven’s nutty politics, and Communist parties abroad now are mainly ordinary totalitarians and crony capitalists, not revolutionaries. But communism’s record remains one of mass oppression and murder. Why should anyone help celebrate that?

Yet while they are paling around with Communists, Connecticut Democrats are calling Connecticut Republicans extremist for supporting or tolerating Donald Trump.

The program book for the Amistad Awards ceremony was full of advertisements from government employee unions, including the American Federation of Teachers, the New Haven Federation of Teachers, and the University of Connecticut chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Apparently with the unions there can be no enemies on the left, no matter how bloody their hands throughout history.     

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

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Publicize more police video; and can Hartford change?

By Chris Powell

Video from police cruiser dashboard cameras and body cameras worn by officers in Connecticut isn’t just protecting civilians against police misconduct, as was the main objective of camera advocates years ago. These videos, like the ones made quickly available by the state’s inspector general after recent shootings of criminals, are also protecting officers against suspicion.

When broadcast by television stations and posted on news organization internet sites, the videos are publicizing some of the contemptible conduct to which police respond every day, conduct often committed by repeat offenders. 

Even so, police departments resent requests for access to dashboard- and body-camera video, which are sometimes made by news organizations and parties aggrieved by an arrest. Fulfilling the requests means extra work. 

But the public interest would be served if police departments made a point of quickly posting on their internet sites all video of violent, angry, or disgraceful conduct encountered by police.

Of course criminal defense lawyers might complain that publicizing such videos could prejudice the trials of their clients. But such complaints would be empty, since Connecticut has few trials and most criminal cases are plea-bargained down to a fraction of the offenses committed, and the videos would be just part of the arrest reports the law already requires police to release.

To dispose of any question of police bias against criminal defendants, state law should require police departments to post all such videos promptly along with arrest reports.

If such videos also disclose what looks like police misconduct, so be it. For the sake of accountability the public is entitled to as complete an account of crime as can be provided, and dashboard- and body-camera video is less likely to lie than people are.

* * *

After taking his oath of office, Hartford’s new mayor, Arunan Arulampalam, may have channeled John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address from 63 years ago, wherein the new president declared: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

Arulampalam asked his constituents to take their own oath with him: “Will you pledge that for the next four years as a community, we will put aside our divisions, our vitriol, our cynicism, our old way of doing things, and that we will work together for the sake of the city?

“Will you promise to fight for hope, for light — to fight for each other, not just to support each other but to uphold each other? Will you promise to sustain, support, to uphold with passion and purpose everything we need to do to bring this city forward for the next four years?”

Arulampalam’s audience at the Old State House heartily agreed, but this was easy, since the new mayor did not specify “everything we need to do” in Hartford — or anything, for that matter — and any such list might require many more years than the four for which he has been elected.  

After all, Hartford’s population is overwhelmingly poor and dependent on government benefits and subsidies, and civic participation is low. As usual few people voted in the city election that chose the mayor in November. So how much do the city’s residents have to give? Or, really, how much can they afford to stop taking?  

The fate of Hartford and all Connecticut’s cities lies less with them than with the rest of the state, which, through state government, long has been sending them huge amounts of money without reducing their poverty or improving the education of their children, failures that pass without notice except when they can be construed as evidence that still more of what doesn’t work should be done. 

This policy has only appeased city employee unions, the engines of the giant Democratic pluralities the cities produce in state and national elections, which seems to be the policy’s real objective.

Will Mayor Arulampalam continue this policy or will he recognize it as part of “our old way of doing things,” needing to be changed?

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

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Weather hysteria of TV news doesn’t keep Connecticut safe

By Chris Powell

Even on a warm, sunny summer day local television newscasts in Connecticut are usually trivial. But when winter comes and there is any chance of a few inches of snow, TV newscasts are liberated from all pretension to meaning, and they crown their triviality with redundancy.

As they did last week, for several days ahead of a potential storm they strive to scare their audience about the dangers ahead. On the eve of the storm they devote most of each half hour to “informing” their viewers that the state Transportation Department and municipal public works departments are preparing to plow, salt, and sand the roads, as if this isn’t what they always do and have done for decades. Reporters are often reduced to doing live dispatches from sand and salt barns. 

The obvious is repeated half hour after half hour, as if all meaningful activity in Connecticut has come to a halt and as if the state has never seen snow before.

During the storm itself the TV newscasts delight in broadcasting from their four-wheel-drive vehicles to inform their viewers that it’s snowing, as if their viewers lack earlier technology — windows.

Deepening the suggestion of doom, some TV stations give names to the winter storms they glory in, as the National Weather Service gives names to hurricanes. Since a hurricane must have winds of at least 74 miles per hour, it can do enough damage to prove memorable in some places and thus to merit a name. But to earn a name from a TV newscast, the only threat a winter storm needs to pose is to the relevance of the newscast itself, and indeed most such storms will not be memorable at all.

Meanwhile the newscasts will warn people with heart conditions against shoveling too much snow, and warn all viewers against putting their hands in a snowblower while it’s running. Such is the estimation of the intelligence of the local TV news audience.

This charade of local TV newscasts is called “keeping you safe.” But when the charade is operating, Connecticut has even less journalistic protection from wrongdoers and malfeasance. Indeed, that seems to be the point of the weather hysteria of local TV news — to fill time with the trivial and redundant because it is so much less expensive than reporting about anything that matters, which usually requires investigation.

This principle of killing time is observed by local TV newscasts even when there is no weather to frighten people with. For the typical newscast is full of reports that consume 90 seconds to convey just 10 seconds of information.      

Of course newspapers, competitors to television, are full of triviality and redundancy too. But at least readers can turn the page and dispose of the product at their own pace. Viewers of live TV newscasts can’t fast-forward past what they don’t need to watch.

Presumably the triviality and redundancy of local TV newscasts continue because market research tells TV stations that triviality and redundancy are what their audience wants — especially since most local TV news is broadcast in the morning when people are rising, dressing, making breakfast, getting ready for work, and seeing children off to school, and in the evening when people are reconnecting with family, making dinner, reviewing mail, and getting kids to do their homework.

The breakfast and dinner hours are not suited to profundity from TV, so during those hours local TV news usually provides what is only incidental information, less compelling than the immediate information of home life.

Even so, at least national television occasionally has done serious journalism.

So could local TV newscasts not find 10 minutes every other weekday for news that means something, news relevant to society’s or government’s performance, news that wouldn’t be forgotten as fast as last week’s Storm Jack the Ripper or yesterday’s murders, robberies, fires, and car crashes?

Those things really aren’t all Connecticut needs to know.

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

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‘Dollar’ stores don’t cause poverty but just reflect it

By Chris Powell

Like the rest of the country, Connecticut is seeing an explosion of “dollar” stores — Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Dollar Tree, discount retailers that are causing alarm in some quarters because, while they sell food and consumer goods, they don’t offer fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables and they are feared to be driving  traditional food markets out of business. As a result some municipalities around the country are legislating to restrict or even prohibit “dollar” stores.

Now, the Hartford Courant reports, a University of Connecticut professor of agricultural and resource economics, Rigoberto A. Lopez, has published a study supporting this resentment, linking the growth of “dollar” stores to unhealthy diets in “food deserts” and the failure of regular grocery stores.

But “dollar” stores aren’t doing anything illegal or immoral. They wouldn’t be successful if they weren’t providing goods people want and at low prices. Nobody seems to be accusing the “dollar” stores of using unfair trade practices or violating anti-trust law. If “dollar” stores are doing better than traditional groceries, competition is what a free-market economy is about. People can choose where to shop.

Critics of “dollar” stores don’t like that. They seem to think they should be allowed to decide not just where people shop but also what they eat. 

Of course there is a problem. “Food deserts” are real but retailers aren’t to blame for them. Poverty is, and the expansion of “dollar” stores is largely a measure of worsening poverty in the country as well as Connecticut.

Too many people don’t eat enough fresh food quite apart from their ability to pay for it, and combine bad eating habits with poverty and the problem is worse. 

But poor households qualify not just for government housing, energy, and income subsidies but also federal food subsidies — food stamps are now the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — and if they live responsibly can afford fresh food if they want it, and if they can travel outside their “food desert.”

That’s the other part of the problem. Like other retailers, full-service supermarkets won’t make as much money by locating in poor neighborhoods as they will make in middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods. Avoiding poor neighborhoods, any retailer will suffer less theft as well.

So Hartford’s city government is considering opening its own supermarket. Whether city government has the competence to run [ITALICS] anything [END ITALICS] is always a fair question, since the poverty of so many city residents is inevitably reflected in city government itself. But there probably will be “food deserts” in cities as long as their demographics are so poor. A city government supermarket in Hartford won’t solve the problem.

Indeed, a good measure of the long decline of Hartford from what was considered the country’s most prosperous city a little more than a century ago to a struggling one is the decline in the number of chain-owned supermarkets in the city — from 13 in 1968 to only one or two today.

Because of this poverty there isn’t much retailing left in Hartford generally. For years city residents have done much if not most of their shopping in West Hartford and Manchester. West Hartford’s downtown long has been far more vibrant than Hartford’s, because that is where the middle and upper classes — the people who have money to spend, people who many years ago might have lived in Hartford — have moved.

Blaming “dollar” stores for poor nutrition among the poor is just an excuse to ignore the causes of poverty. More than a study of the impact of those stores, Connecticut could use a study of what pushed Hartford and its other cities from prosperity to privation — like fathers who don’t father, mothers who don’t parent well on their own, schools that don’t educate, policies that produce dependence instead of self-sufficiency, and government that takes better care of itself than its constituents. 

The decline was underway long before Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, or either of the Bushes became president. But even as the “dollar” stores spread across Connecticut, no one in authority seems to have any curiosity about what happened.         

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

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Secrecy in discipline weakens public confidence in courts

By Chris Powell

Can respect for Connecticut’s judiciary be maintained only by imposing nearly complete secrecy on complaints of misconduct by judges? 

That is the presumption of state law, as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reminded readers this week with investigative reporter Bill Cummings’ comprehensive review of the Judicial Review Council, the agency in charge of disciplining judges.

While the council provides data about its work, it seldom identifies the judges, workers compensation commissioners, and family magistrates complained against. The Hearst report found that 98.5% of the nearly 2,000 complaints made in the last 17 years had been dismissed without any public acknowledgment or explanation. 

Only 12 complaints were disclosed, occurring when the council decided there was probable cause to hold a hearing. Only nine of those complaints went to a hearing, whereupon six judges were punished with suspension and three were censured. Eight were reprimanded secretly.

The seemingly low rate of judicial discipline does not necessarily indicate the council’s lack of conscientiousness. Most complaints are said to be and almost certainly are frivolous, filed by litigants enraged simply because a judge didn’t see a case their way. That’s not prejudice or corruption.

Judges and many lawyers fear that disclosing all complaints against judges and everything about their handling, making the information available to news organizations, will harm judicial reputations unfairly.  

But secrecy already breeds suspicion. It prevents anyone outside the Judicial Review Council from knowing that a complaint was properly handled. Secrecy also presumes that news organizations and citizens — people the courts trust to serve on juries — are too stupid to distinguish frivolous complaints from serious ones. Thus secrecy exempts courts, judges, and lawyers from ever having to account for the law and legal proceedings.

Besides, the very structure of the council raises suspicion. As with most of professional discipline in Connecticut, the law establishing the council puts those being regulated in charge of their own regulation.

That is, three of the council’s 12 members are judges and another three are lawyers, who make their living seeking favorable rulings from judges. The council’s remaining six members are “public” members. Neither those “public” members nor the public itself are ever likely to perceive any favor trading or back-scratching among their judge and lawyer colleagues on the council, though letting judges and lawyers dominate the council facilitates conflict of interest.

Defenders of the council’s composition may argue that the council needs guidance by legal professionals and that the council’s lay members can’t understand the law and the judicial code of ethics on their own. But if a council dominated by “public” members needed legal advice, the council could hire it or get it from the state attorney general’s office as other state agencies do.

Conflict of interest with judicial regulation is not peculiar to the Judicial Review Council. The General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee is itself full of lawyers who inevitably gain influence in their private practice by virtue of their membership on the committee. Such lawyers have power over judges. 

The House chairman of the committee, state Rep. Steve Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, supports secrecy for the Judicial Review Council, defending it partly because, he says, while the council’s reprimands and admonishments of judges are not public, the committee is told about them and they may be cited in committee hearings on judicial reappointments.

“So,” Stafstrom says, “the information does get out there when it counts the most.”

Not really. For when the Judiciary Committee starts discussing judicial renominations, hearings on the nominees are over and it is too late for the public’s participation. The public should have full and timely access to all information the committee may use to make its decisions.

Most judges in Connecticut do a difficult job well. Compelled by the evidence and due process to make decisions likely to be unpopular, judges are sometimes heroic. But since they are paid more than $200,000 per year they can afford a little more accountability, just as the public can use the education that would result. 

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

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Put liquor lobby in its place: Ban ‘nips,’ boost competition

By CHRIS POWELL

Now that Connecticut’s 5-cent tax on tiny “nip” liquor bottles has done little to remove their litter from streets and roadsides, state Rep. Joseph Gresko, D-Stratford, plans to propose legislation to allow municipalities to ban the sale of the troublesome product. 

The “nip” bottle tax, paid by liquor distributors to municipal governments in proportion to the number of “nips” sold in each city or town, has financed local environmental-protection initiatives, but none aimed directly at the “nip” litter problem. This month’s increase in the bottle deposit fee from 5 cents to 10 cents won’t help either, since “nip” bottles can’t be recycled, being too small for the machinery in use.

So empty “nip” bottles never can be anything but trash, and full “nip” bottles are good mainly for consuming liquor while driving.

That’s why the legislation to be proposed by Gresko, House chairman of the General Assembly’s Environment Committee, won’t go far enough. Larger municipalities that have many liquor stores and “nip” sales, and thus substantial revenue from the “nip” tax, will let “nips” continue to be sold, while only small towns with few if any stores and few “nip” sales will ban them. The reduction in “nip” litter and drunken driving would be small.

So why not outlaw “nip” sales altogether on a statewide basis?

The executive director of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of Connecticut, former state Rep. Larry Cafero, offers two reasons — one implausible, the other venal.

Banning “nips,” Cafero says, could lead to banning sale of alcoholic beverages in larger containers or alcoholic beverages favored by underage drinkers. 

But the complaints about “nips” are not about alcohol generally but about litter and drunken driving, and Connecticut may be the least Puritanical state in the country, with “mom and pop” liquor stores on every other corner and marijuana shops striving to catch up.

The venal reason Cafero offers is the liquor industry’s far bigger concern: that banning “nips” would contravene the “expectation” liquor store operators had when they got into the business — the expectation that they would be able to sell “nips” forever and that state government never would interfere with their privileges, like the state law against liquor price competition.

That is, in the opinion of the liquor industry, eliminating a terrible litter problem and reducing drunken driving aren’t worth the risk to the industry’s profits, and nothing wrong in the law should ever be fixed if someone is making money from it.

State government long has been subservient to the liquor industry, since the law against liquor price competition insures that there are many stores in each legislator’s district, sustaining an influential special interest. Awful as “nip” bottle litter and drunken driving are, few people will complain to their legislators about it, but most liquor store operators in the state will mobilize immediately against any attempt to put the public interest ahead of their interest.

A ban on the sale of “nip” bottles in Connecticut would be unusual but not unique. Sale of “nips” has been outlawed in New Mexico, in part because that state has the country’s worst alcoholism problem as well as spectacular vistas that are often disgraced by heaps of beer and liquor bottles discarded carelessly by drunks even as they marvel at God’s work.

Connecticut should follow New Mexico’s lead — in the name of environmental protection and highway safety as well as to show the liquor industry that the public interest must come first.

And if the General Assembly can muster that much courage, it also should pass legislation allowing supermarkets to sell wine in addition to the beer they already sell. To reciprocate, the legislation also could authorize liquor stores to sell groceries.

Many states not subservient to the liquor industry allow supermarkets to compete by selling wine as well as beer, and the public interest in the convenience of it is overwhelming. Even with the liquor industry put in its place, there still will be many special interests for legislators to pander to and seek campaign donations from.

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

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‘Clean slate’ won’t increase education and work skills

By Chris Powell

Connecticut law is full of mistaken premises, and more will be added in January when the criminal records of an estimated 80,000 people will be privatized — not exactly erased but removed from public access under what is being called the “clean slate” law. The records involve convictions for misdemeanors more than seven years old and “low-level” felonies more than 10 years old committed by people not convicted of anything since.

The rationale for the new law is, first, that it’s not fair that old convictions should be known, and, second, that public knowledge of convictions is a huge impediment to people seeking housing and employment.

But why shouldn’t convictions be impediments to getting housing and jobs? 

Since most criminal charges are substantially discounted in plea bargaining to avoid trials, most people who have been convicted have already received extra consideration from the government. So what is fair about eliminating all trace of their discounted offenses? 

What is fair about depriving landlords and employers of basic information about people for whom they may become responsible? 

What is fair about keeping people ignorant of what their government has done?

Of course society also has an interest in having everyone honestly employed. But people have to compete for jobs and housing, so why shouldn’t people who have not committed crimes have an advantage over former offenders? Why shouldn’t former offenders have to try harder to show they are worthy of trust?

Criminal convictions are not the biggest impediment to finding housing these days. The biggest impediment is the sharply rising price of housing that results from inflation and the general scarcity worsened by municipal zoning. Connecticut is said to need at least 90,000 more housing units for its current population. If the state suddenly had another 390,000 units, rents would be much lower and landlords wouldn’t be so picky about tenants. Eliminating public access to conviction records will not build more housing.

Criminal convictions are probably not the biggest impediment to obtaining jobs either. 

Governor Lamont himself hinted as much this month when he announced that the “clean slate” law would take effect in January. The governor noted that Connecticut has a labor shortage and “desperately” needs former offenders in the workforce. The worse the shortage of labor, the more that employers will be willing to overlook old convictions, if former offenders can demonstrate their ability to do the job — and ability to do the job is almost certainly the biggest impediment to employment for former offenders.

Lack of a good upbringing, education, and job skills push people toward crime, and Connecticut, with a welfare system based on destroying families and a school system based on social promotion, is full of people who lack what they need to support themselves. Indeed, if one’s education and job skills are strong enough, even the worst offenses may be readily forgiven.

Such is the lesson of the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the first hero of the United States space exploration program. 

Von Braun’s first career was during World War II with the Nazi government of Germany. He designed the infamous V-2 rocket bomb, became a major in the criminal SS military force, and was awarded the Iron Cross by Adolf Hitler himself. (Years later a biography of von Braun was titled “I Aim at the Stars,” prompting the American comedian Mort Sahl to say it should have been subtitled “But I Sometimes Hit London.”)  

Nevertheless the U.S. government hired von Braun as soon as the war ended. His rocketry skills overcame any concern about his record as a Nazi criminal mastermind. 

Instead of presuming that erasing criminal records will somehow qualify people for housing and jobs, state government should provide a year or so of paid employment, basic medical insurance, and rudimentary housing for former offenders who are not yet able to support themselves, allowing them to build the creditable record everyone needs to gain employment and housing.

Better still, state government should fix the failures of its welfare and education systems. 

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

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