Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Some Jews in Connecticut and around the country are upset with the extent of the destruction Israel is committing in Gaza to uproot the territory’s rulers, the terrorist group Hamas. Participants in a rally in West Hartford last week called for a “ceasefire” and chanted, “Not in my name!”

But Israel isn’t retaliating against Gaza in anyone’s name but its own, and no one in West Hartford has been under rocket fire from Gaza as Israelis have been for years. West Hartford’s compassion for Gazans is easier to come by. 

Yes, the United States provides military assistance to Israel, for which the participants in the West Hartford rally may feel responsible. But then the United States also long has provided “humanitarian” aid to Gaza, which, like the “humanitarian” aid long provided by the United Nations, has enabled the Hamas government to divert Gaza’s resources away from the territory’s people and toward constant war. This aid also has let Gazans think they are not responsible for their government and its longstanding pledge to destroy Israel.

Connecticut columnist Red Jahncke minimizes that pledge. The Hamas platform, he writes, “has never been tested against a reality of Palestinian civilians achieving and enjoying genuine freedom.”

Jahncke is right if he means that no Arab country has ever been free as Americans understand freedom. But he’s wrong if he means that Palestinians living adjacent to Israel have never been free of Israeli occupation. They were free of Israeli occupation prior to 1967, living under Egyptian and Jordanian government until Israel’s Arab neighbors went to war against the Jews again. And Gazans were free of all occupation in 2005 when Israel withdrew from the territory and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization took over.

A year later Gazans had an election in which they rejected the PLO’s Fatah faction and installed Hamas, despite or maybe because of its genocidal pledge. That was the last election held in Gaza. In the West Bank, where the corrupt Fatah faction still holds local authority, the first and last election was held in 2005. It is not Israel that is preventing another election there but Fatah, and if there was another election, Hamas almost certainly would win it despite the destruction it has brought on Gaza.

Indeed, a recent poll of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza found three-quarters of them opposed to accepting Israel. 

That’s why the “two-state solution” has become ridiculous. Through the years Israel repeatedly accepted it just as the Palestinians repeatedly rejected it and still do. President Clinton got Israel to accept a settlement plan that gave Arafat and the PLO nearly everything they demanded, yet they refused — probably because they knew that any Palestinian leaders who settle with Israel will be assassinated by Palestinian irreconcilables just as the peace-favoring Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a Jewish irreconcilable.

Yet prior to last October 7 most Israelis still favored a “two-state solution.” Now few do, and most may not care how heavy-handed their military gets in Gaza nor how badly Israeli settlers abuse Palestinians in the West Bank. Why bother being decent with an adversary pledged to destroy you no matter what?

The peace advocates in West Hartford and elsewhere are evasive and dishonest in calling for a “ceasefire.” Israel has had many “ceasefires” with Gaza over the years and they all ended with more rockets being fired into Israel. No one among the peace advocates in West Hartford called for a ceasefire when Israel was being attacked. A ceasefire has become desirable only now that Israel is defending itself with the overwhelming force and destruction always necessary to win a war.

Why not demand peace itself? That is, why not demand that Gaza raise up a government repudiating Hamas and committing itself to the “two-state solution” most Palestinians still reject? The response to such a call might be illuminating. 

Even now Israel might have trouble rejecting such an offer. But while Gazans are suffering, they are not yet suffering enough to make it. 

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

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By CHRIS POWELL

When government officials face a problem of administration whose solution will cause great controversy, they typically appoint a study committee or hire a consultant to provide political cover for whatever will have to be at least proposed. That’s what Governor Lamont and University of Connecticut President Radenka Maric have agreed to do in anticipation of more big deficits at the UConn Health Center in Farmington.

Though the announcement made by the governor’s office about the plan was full of jolly enthusiasm for helping the UConn Health Center “thrive,” political blogger and Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie disclosed that the university first strongly opposed it in a letter to the governor.

Maric, UConn trustees Chairman Daniel Toscano, health center board Chairman Sanford Cloud, and medical school Dean Bruce T. Liang wrote: “We fear this will cause significant damage to UConn Health, including its schools, its reputation, and most importantly, retention and recruitment of the best and brightest faculty, staff, and students.”

So the idea of getting serious about the UConn Health Center’s chronic insolvency is the governor’s alone, and while people on UConn’s payroll may resent him for that, ordinary taxpayers may approve.

For the university long has been full of excess, especially with its highest paid staffers, as a report by the state auditors reiterated in August. The auditors said UConn had overpaid two professors on sabbatical by a total of more than $450,000. The UConn Health Center still hasn’t overcome the damage to its reputation done in 2018 when it was found to have paid a professor for five months after he had stopped showing up for work, having been murdered at home, apparently by his wife.

Indeed, state legislators long have attributed the health center’s insolvency to employee compensation that is far greater than compensation paid to comparable staff at other hospitals.

Likely to compound the health center’s financial challenges is the governor’s warning to all the state’s institutions of higher education that the many millions of dollars they have been receiving in federal “emergency” money appropriated during the recent virus epidemic will be ending next year. The good old days of the epidemic — good financially, anyway — are over, state budget surpluses are diminishing, and the economy is weakening amid severe inflation.

So the wailing from higher education has begun — led by administrators who are paid salaries of $200,000, $300,000, and more.

Even if the UConn Health Center gets employee compensation under control, achieving solvency may be difficult, as it is for most hospitals that serve many patients on Medicare and Medicaid, government insurance systems that typically pay less for their patients than what other patients are charged. Additionally, there is always the danger of losing well-regarded staff members to institutions that are even less concerned about efficiency than UConn is.

But the tell is in the contradiction between the private position of the UConn administrators, as expressed in their letter to the governor, and their public position, as expressed in the governor’s upbeat press release. Hardly anyone in state government ever wants to economize, but UConn especially doesn’t, as its record suggests.

The governor does want to economize, or at least would like to, or he wouldn’t be pressing the health center issue.

How much does the governor want to economize with the health center and the rest of higher education? This involves many unionized government employees, a group that constitutes the biggest part of the army of the governor’s political party and so can bring enormous pressure on state legislators, whose votes might be needed to accomplish serious reforms with UConn.

The governor probably won’t get far with UConn, which is considered the fourth branch of government. He hasn’t remade the Board of Trustees, which would seem to be the prerequisite of reform. If he had remade the board, its chairman wouldn’t have signed the letter objecting to the review the governor wanted made of the health center’s operations.

Besides, governors come and go while tenure in public higher education and state government generally is virtually forever.

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

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By CHRIS POWELL

For decades, even before the state Supreme Court decision in the school integration case of Sheff v. O’Neill 27 years ago, educators in Connecticut have been telling the state that racial integration in education is crucial to better student performance, especially for children from minority groups. In response Connecticut built and operated dozens of regional schools at a cost of billions of dollars to induce minority students from the cities and white students from the suburbs to mix voluntarily.  

While the regional schools have moved thousands of students around, they have produced little integration, particularly in Hartford, which was the center of the Sheff case. Student performance throughout the state has continued to decline. But the political correctness of it all has produced high-paying jobs for many educators and has made them feel better about themselves.

Whereupon last week the state community college system repudiated racial integration in education without anyone noticing it.

The system announced a partnership with Morehouse College in Atlanta through which students of color who graduate from Capital Community College in Hartford in two years with an academic average of at least 2.7 will be guaranteed admission to Morehouse as juniors on their way to a four-year degree.

Morehouse is a prestigious “historically Black” institution, and according to Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, state community college officials said “studies have shown that Black students who enroll in historically Black colleges and universities are more likely to earn their degrees and have more income than those who attend non-HBCU institutions.”

Surprise! Racial integration is not such a boon in education after all.  

“HBCUs like Morehouse College inherently believe in the success of their students,” community college system President John Maduko said, implying that other schools couldn’t care less about how their students do.

So having long strived to integrate its students in primary education, Connecticut now will strive to resegregate them when they get to higher education.

The irony passed without comment from the state’s education bureaucracy and the rest of state government. Have those billions spent on regional schools been wasted? Who cares? Now let’s cost people billions more by making them all buy electric cars.    

Meanwhile the even more expensive failure of higher education is getting less notice than the failure of lower education.

Bloomberg News reported last month that changes to the federal college student loan program made since President Biden took office have facilitated forgiveness of more than $127 billion in debt, which has been transferred to taxpayers.

The problem of student loan debt is presented as a matter of the heavy burden that prevents borrowers from advancing to homeownership and family formation.

But this is only a subsidiary scandal. The bigger scandal is the grotesque overpricing of higher education. If higher education was worth what is charged for it, millions of young people wouldn’t be stuck with heavy debt for so long. They would get jobs paying them enough so that they easily could discharge their debt soon after graduating.

The loan system itself is largely responsible for inflating the cost of higher education. The more money is available, the more colleges and universities will absorb it, as by establishing courses and degrees that bestow few job skills. 

A 2014 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that many college graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college education. A study a year earlier by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity reported that there were 46% more college graduates in the U.S. workforce than jobs requiring a college degree.

College grads often earn more than other people. But is this because of greater knowledge and skills or because of the credentialism that higher education has infected society with?

Nothing has been done about this problem, since college loans are less of a benefit to students than to educators and college administrators, the ultimate recipients of the money and a pernicious influence on politics. 

——

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

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By Chris Powell

Congratulations to Danbury. A Superior Court judge has ruled that the city was within its rights and zoning law to prevent a social-service organization, Stamford-based Pacific House, from operating a vacant motel as a shelter for the homeless. 

Pacific House was operating the motel under one of Governor Lamont’s emergency orders during the recent virus epidemic. The organization’s idea was to convert the motel to contain 66 double-occupancy rooms so that the hundred or so people estimated to be homeless in Danbury in the winter would have somewhere to sleep safely and be nudged toward rehabilitation. But the order has expired, zoning law is back in force, and the people living in Pacific House’s former motel have been evicted.

The city has opened a much smaller shelter downtown but it isn’t likely to come close to bringing all local homeless people inside during the winter. 

Opponents of the motel’s conversion to a shelter argue that other towns in the Danbury area should open shelters to do their share. Suburbs do like confining social problems in the cities. But the homeless typically need more help than a roof over their heads. They usually need medical, psychiatric, and other services not readily available outside cities, and they don’t have transportation.

Besides, even if a suburb was willing to do its share, it would not likely have a vacant residential facility like the one now wasting away in Danbury. Housing in Connecticut is scarcer than ever and homelessness is rising again. 

Worse, in 2021 state government gave Pacific House $4.6 million precisely to purchase the motel for use as a shelter. Danbury now has thwarted the state’s expensively manifested interest.

Will the governor and General Assembly preside haplessly over this disaster?

Being unable to use the former motel, Pacific House might be willing to give it to state government. Indeed, state government should insist on taking ownership of the property it paid for, and if state government owned the property directly, it presumably could trump municipal zoning by leasing it back to Pacific House for use as a shelter. Or state government might seek bids for converting the former hotel to regular housing and then leasing the building to a developer. After all, the property was built to provide housing and originally was zoned for that purpose.

Of course returning the former motel to use as any kind of housing might upset some neighbors and cause controversy. But state government long has been under the administration of a party that prattles about helping the poor even as poverty in the state worsens, and after many years of Republican rule Danbury just elected its own Democratic administration. So the city now provides a test of Democratic sincerity.

It’s Christmas and this time, in Connecticut, there is plenty of room at the inn. But where is the political will to unlock the door?

AN EPIDEMIC OF SELF-PITY: Now that the virus epidemic is over, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy says the country is suffering an epidemic of loneliness. He wants the federal government to look into it, starting by establishing in the White House an office of social connection policy.

Certainly the country is coming apart in many ways. But loneliness? Other elected officials, including Murphy’s Senate colleague from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, say the country is suffering an epidemic of social media. Simple privacy is becoming a luxury.

The country’s worsening despair and alienation are more likely matters of declining living standards as real incomes fall under the pressure of the inflation Murphy and the rest of Congress long have been voting for.

In any case does the country really need the government to try to cure loneliness when civic groups and government itself are crying out for volunteers, hospitals and nursing homes are full of patients who would welcome a visitor, bars remain open until 1 and sometimes 2 in the morning, and internet chat rooms are open around the clock?

Anyone lonely in such a world may be suffering most from self-pity — and in the richest country in the world.

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

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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.

*

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.

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

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