Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Hardly had the General Assembly’s Regulation Review Committee, the energy and environmental protection commissioner and Governor Lamont withdrawn a regulation that would have banned the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in Connecticut after 2035 when the idea’s political correctness crashed into more reality.

While Lamont insisted that a ban by 2035 would remain the state’s objective and noted that it has the support of many states besides ever-nuttier, dysfunctional, and expensive California, where the idea originated, the idea was losing support in New Jersey, a state just as Democratic and politically correct as Connecticut.

The New Jersey Senate’s deputy majority leader, Paul Sarlo, who is also chairman of the Senate’s appropriations committee, told the New Jersey Business and Industry Association not to worry about Gov. Phil Murphy’s plan to ban sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

“I know everybody in this room fully understands the need to invest in green energy and move in that direction,” Sarlo said. “However, to be practical about it, 2035 is not happening.”

Sarlo’s reasons were the same as those offered by the Republican state legislators who had mobilized opinion against the ban in Connecticut: that the necessary expansion of the state’s electric grid and electric car-charging infrastructure could not be ready in time, that the costs, while unknown, would be huge, that there was no plan to pay for them, and that, whatever the plan, a big new burden would fall on the people.

Meanwhile Consumer Reports magazine found that electric cars are much less reliable and require much more repair than conventional gas-powered cars and dual-power cars, or “hybrids.”

The magazine noted that electric-car technology is new and expected to improve, and maybe it will bring the costs of electric cars down, making them practical for people of modest means. But then government isn’t going to promise such improvement and cost reduction by any particular time. 

So for state government to mandate conversion to an electric-car system when the costs are unclear and the technology uncertain would be crazy, since political correctness doesn’t pay any bills.

Some people say that mass conversion to electric cars is inevitable. But if it’s inevitable, it will happen by itself, quite without government’s requiring it before it’s practical.

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Why does government in Connecticut only become more expensive despite the improvements it is always claiming to implement?

A hint was provided last month by the state Office of Fiscal Analysis in its new fiscal accountability report on state government, which, according to Connecticut Inside Investigator, found that the share of the state budget that pays for what are called “fixed costs” remains at 53%.

“Fixed costs” are costs that by law have been placed outside the ordinary process of discretionary budgeting — costs like Medicaid, interest on debt, state government employee and teacher pension and retiree health benefits, legal settlements, and certain payments to hospitals.

As a practical matter, “fixed costs” are actually a much bigger share of the budget, since while the basic compensation of state employees is not considered a “fixed cost,” its expense is determined by union contract and never declines even when the number of government employees is reduced. The cost of the remaining employees goes up to consume any savings.

The “fixed cost” percentage of the state budget was only 37% in 2006. Its rise to 53% is to some extent a measure of the decline in democracy in Connecticut. Indeed, to become a “fixed cost” — a cost outside the ordinary democratic process — often seems to be the highest aspiration of those involved with state government.

With “fixed costs” and government employee compensation now constituting the great majority of state government expense, and with the discretionary portion of the budget constituting only a minority, the only way of controlling expense is to reduce the “fixed costs” and the costs qualifying as “fixed.”

But Connecticut’s elected officials love “fixed costs,” because “fixed costs” let officials shrug at rising expense and claim that there’s nothing they can do about it.

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

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By Chris Powell

Never has the cart been put farther before the horse than with the environmental regulation the Lamont administration would have adopted this week except for the clamor raised by Republican state legislators, talk radio, and ordinary people paying attention. The regulation would have prohibited the sale in Connecticut of new gasoline-powered cars after 2035.

The regulation’s premises were beyond presumptuous. Among them: that the exhaust of internal-combustion engines is a primary cause of climate change, that future climate change is certain and knowable, and that it is bad.

Critics of the regulation didn’t need to dispute that. Instead they posed basic questions, noting that a complete transition to electric cars would require an enormous increase in the capacity of Connecticut’s electrical system and the installation of thousands of car-charging stations at a cost likely to reach many billions of dollars, and that the cost is yet to be reliably calculated and appropriated for. 

The critics also noted that the regulation failed to take into account the environmental damage from the manufacture and disposal of electric vehicle batteries, the damage done by mining the minerals needed for such batteries, the insecurity of the supply of those minerals, and the weaknesses and high expense of electric cars.

Changes this momentous, the critics said, require full review, understanding, and assent through the ordinary democratic process. But Governor Lamont, his commissioner of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, Katie Dikes, and many Democratic legislators wanted to command the changes short of democracy and confirmation of their practicality and cost. The governor had the regulation withdrawn just a day before the General Assembly’s Regulation Review Committee was to vote on it, when he learned that some Democrats on the committee didn’t want to support it.

Offering some sense from the Democratic side, House Speaker Matt Ritter argued that while setting a timely objective for conversion to electric cars is necessary, “we have to do more.” That is, Ritter said, “We have to demonstrate to Connecticut residents that this switch not only will save the environment, lives, and our planet, but not leave you in a position where you can no longer afford a vehicle.”

Even more assurance than that is needed: assurance about the cost and source of the electricity that hundreds of thousands more electric cars will require.

The cost of electricity in Connecticut is already nearly the highest in the country. More pipelines bringing natural gas into the state could increase generating capacity. So would more nuclear power plants, hydro-electric dams, and solar-panel farms. But these sources of generating capacity would be opposed by many, especially by people insisting on conversion to electric cars.

Indeed, the more that the answers necessary to a democratic decision prohibiting gasoline-powered cars are sought, the more expense will be discovered, even as poverty in the state is rising as real incomes fall.

Yes, as advocates of the ban on new gasoline-powered cars say, advances in technology may reduce the expense and increase the functionality of electric cars. But there is no guarantee that such advances will be firmly in place by 2035. Huge changes shouldn’t be required by a particular time before there is complete confidence that they will be practical and before their cost is fully understood and accepted.

The regulation that was put aside this week was just politically correct authoritarianism, and the people behind it remain in power.

At least the state may celebrate the conscientious opposition to the regulation mounted by leaders of the Republican minority in the General Assembly. The Republicans mastered the details, calmly posed the big unanswered questions, and engaged the public. If the Republicans ever made a habit of this, they might restore competitive politics to the state. For state government remains full of mistaken premises and arrogant claims that deserve to be punctured.

But if Democratic legislators continue to think that grand commands enshrined in mere regulation, unsupported, can transform society, how about a regulation requiring Connecticut’s students to master high school work before being given diplomas?

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

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By Chris Powell

Have the country’s two major political parties ever been as disgraceful as they are today?

Most Republicans remain devoted to Donald Trump despite his dishonesty, recklessness, hatefulness, cruelty, and authoritarianism. Or maybe Republicans are devoted to Trump because of those characteristics. For as he runs for president again, Trump continues to embody the contempt fairly felt by millions about their government, even if contempt is no way to run a country.

But that contempt is so high because of President Biden, a Democrat, and his candidacy for re-election. Republicans won’t turn away from Trump while polls show him ahead of Biden. What is most remarkable and appalling is that while polls show that Democrats overwhelmingly want their party to nominate someone other than Biden, no Democratic leaders of national standing dare to represent them, even as polls say a “generic” Democrat might easily defeat Trump.

There also wasn’t much courage in the Democratic Party in a similarly disastrous time, in 1967 and 1968, when the country was deeply troubled by the unnecessary and mismanaged war in Vietnam. But there was some courage, though there were fewer mechanisms for challenging party leaders than there are today.

Back then party primary elections to choose delegates to national presidential nominating conventions were not common. But one Democrat, U.S. Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota, answered the call for a challenger to President Lyndon B. Johnson, mobilized anti-war Democrats, showed that most Democrats wanted change, and caused the president to retire.

While presidential primaries now are held in most states and Biden is a disaster politically, he is not being seriously challenged within his party, though supporting Biden empowers Trump.

In this regard Connecticut’s congressional delegation, all five members of the House and both members of the Senate, is especially disappointing. Six of the seven are and long have been safe politically. The seventh, 5th District U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, has a competitive district but her greatest vulnerability as she seeks re-election next year will be running with Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

That is, all seven Connecticut Democrats in Congress could survive politically if they challenged the president’s renomination. But they have had little to say about the disaster Biden’s renomination would portend. Only Sen. Richard Blumenthal seems to have even acknowledged the danger, saying the other day that he is “concerned” by Biden’s awful standing in the polls.

Governor Lamont, the state’s leading Democrat, seems happy with the prospect of Biden’s renomination and might prefer to preserve his high approval rating by staying out of national politics. But the governor usually has a good sense of how the political winds are blowing and surely has seen that they are filling Trump’s sails. The governor might afford to spend some political capital by articulating what even most Democrats know about Biden — that he should retire.  

Confidentially Connecticut’s members of Congress might explain that if they admit that the president would serve the party and the country best by retiring, they might be cut off from the federal patronage that flows to the state. But how much patronage will Connecticut get under a Trump administration, which likely would come with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress?

As long as the Democrats seem likely to renominate Biden, thereby increasing the chances that the Republicans will renominate Trump, there probably will be stronger than usual minor-party candidates. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., shunned by the Democrats and now running independently, is getting unusually strong support in polls. The fusion ticket contemplated by the No Labels organization might do even better.

Then the national vote might be divided substantially four ways, putting almost every state in play in the Electoral College, risking strange results and leaving the country even angrier and more divided.

Even if Democratic leaders really believe that Biden is doing a good job, the people strongly disagree. Or maybe Democratic leaders secretly think that Trump’s return wouldn’t be much worse than four more years of Biden. 

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

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By Chris Powell

According to President Biden, Governor Lamont, and liberal commentators like Paul Krugman of The New York Times, the economy is strong. But opinion polls find that most people disagree, and practically every week produces price increases far above what the federal government claims to be the inflation rate, 3.4%.

Last week there were two announcements that poverty, not prosperity, is increasing in Connecticut.

The governor said that since state government has raised the incomes qualifying for benefits in state government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits will be extended to another 9,000 individuals and 5,000 households. This is expected to provide about $20 million more in cash benefits over the next year. 

The new food aid recipients also will become eligible for other federally funded services provided to the poor through state government.

It was also reported last week that applications for state government’s energy assistance program are running 23% higher than last winter, even as funding for the program is falling behind the rising demand. Last year the number of households receiving energy assistance exceeded 100,000 for the first time.

The beneficiaries of these programs are not necessarily unemployed or unemployable. Many are working people holding lower-paying jobs who can’t keep up with the sharply rising cost of living. Even if many of the beneficiaries have overextended themselves, carelessly undertaking responsibilities they can’t afford, and even if the inflation rate is falling, prices are still going up and staying up. 

Inflation is weakening the economy, not strengthening it, and remains an offense by the government against the people.

Still, people have no excuse to fall for government’s claims of a strong economy when those claims contradict their own experience. Food and energy assistance from the government is no great favor when it merely refunds some of what government already has taken away through inflation.

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News reports last week celebrated the $9 million that has been paid to municipalities in Connecticut from the wholesale tax imposed in 2021 on the tiny bottles of liquor that are sold at the checkout counters of liquor stores and usually consumed quickly and discarded anywhere but in a trash can.

The “nip” bottles are irresponsible products because they facilitate drinking while driving and cause litter everywhere. Their sale should be prohibited. People who want to keep breaking the law by drinking while driving could always invest in flasks and fill them at home.

But the General Assembly can’t stand up to the liquor lobby and so resorted to the wholesale tax on nips as what was purported to be a compromise. Yet the wholesale tax, 5 cents per bottle, doesn’t really address the problems of the nips. It discourages neither consumption nor littering.

Imposing a regular bottle deposit on nips might reduce their littering a little but not much until the deposit approached 50 cents, about half the price of a nip bottle. In any case, with millions of nips being sold in the state each year, few retailers have the room or the staff to deal with nip bottle returns. Indeed, a regular bottle deposit on nips might induce most retailers to stop selling them, which, while in the public interest, would cost the retailers money.

A regular bottle deposit on nips wouldn’t reduce drinking while driving at all. People who drink from nips while driving might just save a few empties to trade for their next nip purchase.

The wholesale tax on nips is paid to state government by liquor distributors and then forwarded to municipalities in proportion to the number of nips sold in each one, with the money required to be spent on protecting the environment. This can include removing litter like nip bottles but it doesn’t have to, and in most municipalities the money is not being used that way.

So nip bottles keep trashing the state even as government collects a lot of new money in the name of problems it won’t solve. Success!

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s state Senate president pro tem, New Haven Democrat Martin M. Looney, recently acknowledged the state’s worst social problem. Better late than never.

Interviewed by the Connecticut Examiner about the next session of the General Assembly, Looney said he hoped there would be more funding for preschool and day-care programs. “I think the challenge from birth to age 5 is in a real crisis in this state,” Looney said. “We have too many kids coming into kindergarten unprepared to be there and never really catching up.”

Of course given his long service to the government class, the senator may see this as just another opportunity to hire more people to remediate a problem rather than examine its causes and eliminate it. But maybe Looney’s acknowledgment will prompt other legislators to look more critically.

For if educational failure is determined before children turn 5 and arrive in kindergarten, the cause of the failure isn’t in school but in the home, where many if not most of the kids who are unprepared for kindergarten and never catch up are without fathers and, as a result, their homes tend to be poor, their mothers stressed, and the children are lacking the intellectual stimulation and loving care they need.

Day care and preschool can compensate a little for this neglect, but even when these are available to children their households remain poor, as fatherlessness continues to correlate with poverty, bad outcomes in life, and huge public expense.

So eliminating the problem Looney has acknowledged, rather than merely remediating it and rationalizing it by building more government on top of it would require more than the appropriations so reflexive with Looney.

It would require asking what changed Connecticut and the country from having most children born within marriage to having a third or more born outside marriage, often more than 80% in the cities, where, not coincidentally, almost half of children are chronically absent from school and always falling more behind.

Of course the unpreparedness here is not just that of schoolchildren. Much more so it is the unpreparedness of the people having children, the women bearing them and the men exploiting the women, with the welfare system facilitating the exploitation.

Decades of free or heavily subsidized contraception and abortion have not solved the problem of fatherless and neglected children, for childbearing outside marriage is no longer an accident but a choice. Hiring a lot of people to remediate the problem rather than diminish or eliminate it is a choice too — a convenient one politically, increasing dependence on government and growing its army of unionized and politically active employees.

After all, even with Looney’s recognition of the problem and more spending in its name next year, will Connecticut have fewer neglected kids or just more government employees and contractors ministering to them?

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Connecticut residents of Palestinian descent who have relatives in Gaza met last week with Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy in Hartford and then held a press conference to lament their losses and call for a ceasefire in Gaza’s war with Israel. If journalists posed any critical questions, it didn’t show up in reporting.

“Almost every family has lost somebody or something in these senseless attacks on civilians,” said a leader of the Palestinian group, Khamis Abu-Hasaballah of Farmington. “We need to bring a stop to this insane, inhumane catastrophe.”

But ceasefires may not be peace, just brief pauses in war. Do the Connecticut residents with relatives in Gaza want Gaza’s government, run by the terrorist movement Hamas, to make peace? They don’t seem to have said so, nor even to have been asked. 

They don’t seem to have said, nor even to have been asked, if they or their family members approved of Gaza’s barbaric attack on Israel Oct. 7, nor if they concur with Hamas’ commitment to destroy Israel.

Maybe they are afraid to call for peace because Hamas is so barbaric and might harm them or their relatives. But then they show why the war must continue until Hamas and its supporters are wiped out.   

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

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By Chris Powell

To understand the feeling that lingers for John F. Kennedy on the 60th anniversary of his assassination, it may be best to go back to the poem Robert Frost wrote for the young president’s inauguration in January 1961.

Some poor fool has been saying in his heart

Glory is out of date in life and art.

Our venture in revolution and outlawry

Has justified itself in freedom’s story

Right down to now in glory upon glory.

Come fresh from an election like the last,

The greatest vote a people ever cast,

So close yet sure to be abided by,

It is no miracle our mood is high.

Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs

Better than all the stalemate an’s and ifs.

There was the book of profile tales declaring

For the emboldened politicians daring

To break with followers when in the wrong,

A healthy independence of the throng,

A democratic form of right divine

To rule first answerable to high design.

There is a call to life a little sterner

And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.

Less criticism of the field and court

And more preoccupation with the sport.

It makes the prophet in us all presage

The glory of a next Augustan age,

Of a power leading from its strength and pride,

Of young ambition eager to be tried,

Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,

In any game the nations want to play.

A golden age of poetry and power

Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

Frost’s prophecy was not fulfilled. Kennedy’s assassination left America thinking of what might have been and bred a restorationism that still moves people.

Kennedy’s appeal today is generally that of the handsome martyr. But to those of his generation and to those whose political awareness began about the time of his election, his appeal is much more than that; it is a strange and powerful nostalgia.

That nostalgia must overlook much of Kennedy’s political record.

He was born to wealth and aristocracy, and as a member of Congress was cautious and undistinguished. While he and his brother Robert were to become liberal heroes, they first were friendly with Sen. Joseph McCarthy amid the second great Communist scare. Kennedy defeated the greatest liberals of his time, Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey, for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960 and contrived the “missile gap” in that campaign. He presided over the invasion of Cuba, an imperialist scheme utterly stupid in execution. He got the United States into what became the Vietnam War. He misled the country about his health and cavorted with women in the White House.

Kennedy is better remembered for being the youngest and the first Catholic president, for getting the Soviet Union’s missiles out of Cuba without war (even while inadvertently legitimizing the Soviet military presence there), for the treaty prohibiting testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere (the first really successful disarmament treaty), for preparing the United States to overtake the Soviet Union in the exploration of space, for establishing the Peace Corps, and for putting the federal government emphatically on the side of civil rights, thus increasing the presidency’s moral authority and deepening Americans’ love of their country.

Part of the nostalgia is for Kennedy’s style, humor, wit, glamour, and occasional candor, unusual not only for his time but even today. But Kennedy reminds more importantly of something else, something suggested in his inaugural address.

Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. …

To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. …

Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation” — a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, north and south, east and west, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?

In the long history of the world only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice we ask of you.

With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on Earth God’s work must truly be our own.

No American political leader had articulated such a grand vision and spoken like that since Franklin D. Roosevelt; no one has spoken that way in the six decades since. And America has gone from Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” to Ronald Reagan’s “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

For many people liberalism is little more than a device for getting or staying on the government payroll. Cowardice, weariness of the “long twilight struggle,” and narcissism masquerade as high-mindedness, and bluster, recklessness, and intimidation as courage.

Americans are seldom challenged and inspired by their leaders to be better or to try to understand difficult things; their leaders seldom tell them more than what it is thought they want to hear.

The Kennedys were far from the saints their martyrdom has made them to many, but, as Norman Mailer observed, they mixed some idealism with their “willingness to traffic with demons, ogres, and overloads of corruption.” The Kennedys “seemed magical,” Mailer wrote, “because they were a little better than they should have been, and so gave promise of making America a little better than it ought to be.”

That is, at the crucial moments of his short presidency John F. Kennedy appealed to the best in Americans. Only his words are left, but that has been more than enough. Auden explained why.

Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honors at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views

And will pardon Paul Claudel

Pardons him for writing well.

John F. Kennedy is not missed so because he was better than what has come after him, though he was, nor because his times were better, though in some ways they were. He is missed so because when he was president we were better, and because some brave and unselfish ambitions are remembered or, thank God, still live deep down inside us, waiting to be touched again.

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

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By Chris Powell

East Hartford’s new mayor, Connor Martin, has a vision and a prescription for his town of 51,000.

“We’re no longer going to be this blue-collar town, this poor community that we get labeled as,” Martin says. “We have to start raising the household median income, bring in revenue through economic development, and bring in retail, entertainment, and shopping.”

Great — but how? 

Raising incomes should be the objective of government throughout the country, especially since incomes have been declining for years under the pressure of soaring inflation — currency devaluation caused by the federal government’s policy of financing huge increases in spending not through taxes but money creation. 

These days whenever presidents and members of Congress announce millions or billions to be spent on various goodies, there is no mention of how they are to be financed. Money creation is assumed to be able to do it, which means inflation. State officials are just as culpable for inflationary finance insofar as the goodies they announce are financed by federal grants.

Meanwhile prices of necessities rise, real incomes fall, and most people can’t understand why their living standards are sinking even as they are invited to credit the elected officials announcing goodies financed by inflation.

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So how is Mayor Martin going to raise the incomes of ordinary people in East Hartford?

He’s not going to do it by reducing inflation, since municipal officials have no power to do so. Since the mayor is a Democrat, he won’t even be asking Connecticut’s members of Congress to reduce inflation, since, while they are heavily responsible for it, they are all Democrats too. They will leave the inflation problem to the Federal Reserve, which has been raising interest rates to induce a recession, destroy economic demand, create unemployment, and lower living standards some more.

East Hartford could raise the incomes of its residents as some other towns in Connecticut do it: by impeding inexpensive housing and keeping the poor out. While East Hartford has some good middle-class neighborhoods, it also has many dilapidated apartments and tenements that could be acquired by the town and razed, with the lots sold to developers for construction of condominiums and luxury apartments that current town residents could not afford. Such redevelopment is called “gentrification.” 

Driving poor people out this way has the advantage of reducing the number of neglected and poorly performing schoolchildren, cutting education expenses.

Such policy wouldn’t be very fair, but poverty is a burden, not a virtue, and Mayor Martin has acknowledged that East Hartford doesn’t need more poor people. He’s not alone in this. The mayors of Hartford and New Haven have said they would like to relocate many of their poor to the suburbs.

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But how can incomes in East Hartford and other poor cities and towns be raised without making life even harder for the poor people there? 

No one in authority in Connecticut seems to have the policy for that. Indeed, policy in Connecticut works strongly against raising the incomes of the poor by failing to qualify so many of them to earn more. Welfare policy weakens the family while education policy — social promotion — sends young people into adulthood without the skills needed to earn good incomes.

Mayor Martin mistakenly equates “blue collar” with poverty. But “blue-collar” work can pay well and is often the work society most needs — machinists, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and such, people who do real things. Teaching and nursing may not be considered “blue-collar” jobs but they also pay well and are within reach of the working class. 

Manufacturers in Connecticut have thousands of well-paying jobs they can’t fill because of a lack of qualified applicants.   

Can East Hartford increase the job skills of its many poorly performing young students, thereby increasing their earning power, while building the sound and affordable housing that would be needed to keep them in the state as their incomes rise? Can Connecticut?

Any mayor who could achieve that might deserve to be governor, even president.

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

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By Chris Powell

Drawing on data from the secretary of the state’s office, Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported last weekend that while voter participation in the state’s municipal elections long has been poor, participation in this month’s municipal elections improved slightly, from 32 to 33%. But in fact participation is far worse than that and is always far worse than is officially reported.

For the percentages from the secretary’s office are based on the number of people who are registered to vote in the state — 2,130,142 as of Election Day — not on the total population of adults eligible to vote. According to the U.S. census, Connecticut’s population of legal residents of voting age eligible is much greater than 2,130,142. It is 2,803,538, not counting the estimated 113,000 people living in the state illegally.

So Connecticut has about 673,000 people who are eligible to vote but who are not registered.

That is, about 24% of Connecticut’s eligible adult population couldn’t care less about elections. So the voter participation data from the secretary’s office must be discounted by 24% to produce the real participation rate, and the real participation rate in the recent municipal elections was not 33% but more like 25%. 

Similarly, though Connecticut’s voter participation rate in the 2020 national election was officially reported as 80%, the real participation rate was more like 61%, and though the participation rate in the 2022 state election was officially reported as 58%, the real rate was more like 44%.

The implication here is that nearly 40% of Connecticut’s legal adult residents don’t care much about their country and more than half don’t care much about their state.

The lack of civic engagement is usually worst in Connecticut’s poorest cities, where the winners in municipal and state legislative elections often receive fewer votes than the winners in suburbs that have only half as many people. Hartford’s official voter participation rate in this month’s election was only about 13%. Despite Bridgeport’s heated campaign for mayor and its absentee ballot fraud controversy, the city’s official participation rate was only about 20%. The real participation rates were surely substantially lower.

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What explains the lack of participation in municipal elections?

Of course municipal government may be considered less important than state government, which in turn may be considered less important than national government. But then voters may have more contact with and influence on municipal government than the others.

What explains the lack of participation in elections generally? That is, what explains the lack of caring by so many people even about their country and state?

One might like to think it is because people are disgusted by political leaders and alienated from politics. If that is the case, then people at least would know something about their government. 

But it is more likely that participation in elections is low because civic engagement and patriotism are declining. Many people can’t identify major elected officials in the state and their towns. Young people long have graduated from high school without knowing what the three branches of government are, nor when the Civil War and the world wars were fought and what happened during them, nor anything about the heroism and sacrifices of the country’s armed forces in defense of the nation’s freedom and the heroism and sacrifices of the civilians who worked to expand that freedom.

* 

Indeed, many Connecticut residents and Americans generally take their freedom and standard of living for granted. 

It all seems like the old corruption of prosperity. A country ascends with the basic virtues of work, learning, thrift, faith, and hope, only for later generations to consider their prosperity to be the natural order of things, not something that has to be constantly earned again.

Yes, freedom isn’t free. Nearly everyone has to do some work to maintain a community, a state, and a country. 

Woody Allen said 80% of success is just showing up. What will become of Connecticut and the country now that half the people are not showing up?

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

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By Chris Powell

What’s going to happen to Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital?

The three hospitals, then nonprofits, were in financial trouble when they were acquired in 2016 by a California company, Prospect Medical Holdings, which said it would invest in them but instead appears to have taken tens of millions of dollars out of them, leaving them even worse off. 

CBS News has reported that in 2018 Prospect borrowed more than a billion dollars and used $457 million of it to pay dividends to its executives and shareholders. The Prospect repaid the loan by selling hospital buildings and land to a real estate investment trust from which Prospect leased the buildings and land back, thereby incurring annual rental costs and leaving the hospitals with far less equity. Indeed, the transaction was essentially looting.   

Waterbury Hospital is said to owe its vendors $40 million. Manchester and Rockville hospitals also are said to be failing to pay their bills. On top of that, a recent devastating attack on the computer systems of the three Prospect hospitals likely cost them a lot of money but they can’t afford to modernize their systems.

Last year Connecticut hospital chain Yale New Haven Health, a nonprofit operation, proposed to purchase the three hospitals from Prospect for $435 million and return them to nonprofit status. But faced with the worsening condition of the Prospect hospitals, Yale now wants Prospect to reduce the price sharply and state government to contribute as much as $80 million to the acquisition. 

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Governor Lamont has fairly criticized Prospect’s management and doesn’t want state government to have to help pay for their purchase by Yale. He thinks Prospect should secure the deal by reducing the price. Meanwhile the hospitals are at risk of abrupt closure or deep cuts in services.

Since Prospect has turned out to be more of an opportunistic financial operator than a health-care company, the governor is right to want to avoid assisting it. The fairest resolution with the three hospitals might be a bankruptcy that eliminated whatever equity Prospect still has in them and sent them to an auction in which Yale or another party might win them with a lower bid. 

But suspension of the hospitals’ services during a bankruptcy would inflict great damage on their communities. State government should ensure that this doesn’t happen, especially since it shares responsibility at least for the decline of Manchester Memorial and Rockville, which began before Prospect acquired them.

While the two hospitals were nonprofits back then, having combined as Eastern Connecticut Health Network, their executives were highly paid even as the hospitals’ finances were declining. ECHN’s Board of Trustees was compromised by self-dealing and conflicts of interest, with some of its members receiving large payments from the company. 

The company’s ultimate authority, its 232 corporators, residents of the communities served by the hospitals, were indifferent to this self-dealing and to the long failure of the Board of Trustees to get expenses under control. Indeed, when the corporators approved the sale of the company to Prospect, 27% of them didn’t even vote.

Meanwhile state government was also indifferent to all this, though the malfeasance at the two ECHN hospitals was reported extensively in the Journal Inquirer. Nonprofit community hospitals were being run more in the private interest rather than the public interest. But state government had let two venerable charitable institutions that had been built up by decades of civic virtue be acquired by what turned out to be a predator.

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Whether they are nonprofit or for-profit, hospitals today are largely creatures of government because of government’s heavy direct regulation of them and its heavy indirect regulation through Medicare and Medicaid insurance.

So let the governor play chicken with Prospect. But his administration should be ready with a plan to assist Yale New Haven Health or another buyer in quickly acquiring the Prospect hospitals out of any bankruptcy so there is no interruption of service and Prospect doesn’t extract more from the hospitals than it already has.

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

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By Chris Powell

A Bridgeport Hospital nurse, Emily Callahan, last week told a gripping story to the Connecticut Hearst newspapers upon her return from Gaza, where she had been volunteering with Doctors Without Borders when the Hamas-ruled territory invaded Israel and reveled in the slaughter and abduction of civilians, prompting devastating retaliation.

Callahan and her colleagues are courageous and meant to do right in Gaza. But did they?

It’s not as if they were remediating some natural disaster. They were providing their services in a theocratic fascist country that long had sworn to destroy its neighbor and indeed had been waging such war off and on. Would there have been any difference if Callahan’s group had gone to Russia to care for people injured in its invasion of Ukraine? Many places deserve relief from suffering more than Gaza, whose suffering results entirely from its genocidal insistence on killing Jews.

In an essay reprinted last week in the Hartford Courant, Bloomberg News columnist Bobby Ghosh argued that Gazans are not responsible for the crimes of their Hamas government, cannot overthrow it, and should not suffer the “collective punishment” of war.

But in their first and only election in 2006 Gazans put Hamas into power, whereupon Hamas ended elections. Gazans cheered last month as their soldiers returned from Israel with hostages. While of course Hamas’ totalitarianism makes overthrowing it difficult, history is full of successful revolutionary wars. Ghosh seems not to have noticed the American one.

Yes, overthrowing a totalitarian regime requires people to risk their lives. But people governed by a totalitarian regime must take that risk if they seriously object to it. Gazans have not objected.

Indeed, all people are responsible for their government to some extent, Americans included, though they often fail to notice grave offenses committed in their name. Their country’s nuclear arsenal protects them against accountability. 

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Nobody today says that the German people were not responsible for the Nazi regime whose genocidal war killed millions in Europe, nor that the Japanese people were not responsible for their imperial regime’s genocidal war that killed millions more in Asia. When their wars were going well Hitler and Hirohito enjoyed fanatical loyalty from their people. 

During those wars no one in the West — not even people who thought themselves enlightened — proposed establishing “humanitarian corridors” for the evacuation of enemy civilians and sending them “humanitarian supplies.” Back then even enlightened people understood that such “humanitarianism” would sustain the totalitarian regimes and their warmaking power, if only by relieving the regimes of the expense of caring for their own people and reducing the incentive of the people to overthrow their genocidal governments.

Since the totalitarian powers were genocidal, their adversaries were willing to level cities where war materiel was manufactured and materiel and troops were marshaled. Civilian casualties were accepted as unavoidable. So eventually Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and dozens of other cities went up in firestorms to hasten the end of the war. 

This tactic soon found vindication. The German armaments minister, Albert Speer, said under interrogation that if the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 had been quickly followed by similar attacks on six other cities, Germany would have been knocked out of the war. Announcing Japan’s surrender, Hirohito attributed it to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Pledging to “make Georgia howl” in 1864, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman led an army that cut a swath of ruin from Atlanta to Savannah, thereby breaking the back of the Confederacy, enabling Lincoln’s re-election, and demolishing slavery. “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman said. “The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”

News reports from Gaza last week hinted that Sherman was right. Outraged by the destruction of their homes and shortages of food, water, and medicine, angry Gazans were said to have started engaging in “rare acts of defiance” against Hamas. With enough destruction maybe someday they will install a government demanding peace. 

Until then Gaza will remain a genocidal regime’s weapons factory and marshaling yard, and so far, by history’s standards, it has gotten off easy. 

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

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