Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

The ritual observances of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 suggest that some people want the United States to apologize for ending a war that Japan still cannot bring itself to apologize for starting.

Two wrongs indeed would not make a right. But the piety here has lost all proportion, for even if the horror inflicted on those cities is acknowledged and regretted, the atomic bombings were not quite so special as acts of war.

If the complaint is the immorality of total war, the killing of civilians, it is not uniquely made with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For Japan had been waging total war in Asia for a decade, even before going to war against the United States at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese army’s Rape of Nanking in China in December 1937 slaughtered as many as 250,000 civilians, more deaths than were caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And the issue of total war was settled in principle many times elsewhere just prior to and during World War II — by the Nazi bombing raids on cities in Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Britain, and Russia; by the Nazi murder camps; by the British and U.S. firebombing raids on Hamburg and Dresden; and the U.S. firebombing raids throughout Japan in the last year of the war.

Indeed, the most deadly bombing attack in history is believed to have been not either of the atomic bombings but the conventional U.S. firebombing raid on Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945, in which more than 100,000 people died.

As industrial and military centers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reasonable targets, and long before the atomic bombings it was already U.S. war policy to level every major Japanese city to diminish the country’s capacity and will to make war. That policy was nearing completion when the atomic bombs were dropped. Gen. Curtis LeMay, in charge of the U.S. air war against Japan, estimated that when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, the Army Air Force was only weeks away from running out of targets.

Still Japan fought on and continued its brutal occupation of much of Asia.

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There is a better argument if the complaint is that the atomic bombings were not necessary to induce Japan’s surrender — that Japan was already effectively beaten and would have surrendered soon enough anyway.

But Japan was effectively beaten in large part precisely because of the bombing of its cities, the policy of which the atomic bombs were just a more dramatic part.

Yes, Japan was soliciting peace terms through the Soviet Union and received in reply the Potsdam Declaration, which repeated the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender even as a public promise to let Emperor Hirohito remain on his throne might have encouraged Japan to give up.

And yes, strongly influenced by Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, President Truman seems to have been glad of the chance to use the atomic bomb to demonstrate to the Soviet Union the new invincibility of American power, to intimidate the Soviets generally and to keep them from invading Japan and exploiting a victory in the Asian war they so far had done nothing to win.

But the Japanese government was sharply split between war and peace factions and, beaten or not, did not just surrender as it might have done to avert the destruction the United States had been warning it about. No, the war faction was still in control of Japan and thereby still in control of much of Asia.

Even as Japan was quietly soliciting peace terms, it noisily was preparing for what its war propaganda called “the honorable death of a hundred million,” the mobilization of every man, woman, and child in the empire against an invasion of the home islands. Japanese culture long had venerated ritual suicide, and Japanese fanaticism — the suicidal, kamikaze insistence on death over surrender on any terms — recently had made a profound impression on the Americans in the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Suicidal Japanese resistance there argued that the Japanese regime was sincere in declaring that only extermination would get Japan to stop fighting.

As it turned out the bombing of Hiroshima alone didn’t induce surrender right away; even the bombing of Nagasaki failed to accomplish that. Rather than simply end the war, the Japanese government dithered for a few more days over the status of the emperor. The peace faction of the Japanese government actually welcomed the use of the atomic bomb in the hope that it would make the war faction see reason.

And when, after the two atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, the emperor finally agreed to surrender with the assurance that he would be left on the throne while subordinate to the U.S. military occupation, a military coup tried to avert his radio broadcast to his subjects and nearly sent kamikaze airplanes into the USS Missouri during the surrender proceedings in Tokyo Bay.

Critics suggest that Truman’s eagerness to use the atomic bomb to scare the Soviet Union was illegitimate. But the president’s concern about the Soviets was well-founded; they already were imposing a new tyranny in eastern Europe and were to become as cruel and dangerous as the powers the United States had just struggled to defeat. At first Japan itself sought to condition its surrender on the Soviet Union’s staying out of the Pacific war, and Japan today may know best of all how bad the Soviets were — for while the American military occupation of Japan ended in just a few years, Russia still holds the islands the Soviet Union seized from Japan in the last few hours of the war.

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Clearly Truman didn’t do as much as he might have done to avoid the atomic bombings, and clearly he had little sympathy for Japanese civilians. By today’s precious standards, presumably Truman might have begged the Japanese for terms, in the name of their own children about to die otherwise. (Who today, free of the hatred of that war, would not get down on his knees before Japan’s former rulers to plead for their surrender to save the civilians of the doomed cities?)

Yes, Truman might have offered earlier to let Japan keep the emperor. Yet it is doubtful whether such an offer made prior to the atomic bombings would have been accepted. Instead it might have been seen as evidence of American war weariness, a change in policy that would have encouraged Japan to hold out for better terms.

In any case in the context of the time Truman would have been thought quite mad to make any concession to Japan and particularly to Hirohito, who was considered as much a war criminal as Hitler. And in the context of the time it is easy to see how Japan’s exceptional brutality at war invited such disregard even from a nation ordinarily as benign at war as the United States.

For in the emperor’s name and with his consent Japan had not only waged aggressive war but had done so outside the Geneva Convention, which it pointedly had refused to sign. Further, the very nature of Japanese society was totalitarian and barbarous, as represented by the emperor’s absolute rule, his people’s worship of him as a god, and the fanaticism not just of Japanese soldiers but also of Japanese civilians, some of whom admitted afterward that, upon the emperor’s command, they would have killed themselves.

Japan’s criminal abuse of prisoners of war, while almost forgotten today, invited many more atomic bombings than the country got.

The Pacific War did become a race war, but racism was a symptom rather than a cause of American war policy and attitudes toward Japan. To realize this it is necessary only to compare the gentle and infinitely uplifting American occupation of Japan with Japan’s own military occupations from 1931 until 1945.

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Defenders of the use of the atomic bombs may make too much of one alternative to the bombings, an American invasion of Japan and its likely massive casualties. For since March 1945 the United States had undertaken what it frankly called Operation Starvation, the blockade of Japan, and as of August 1945 Japan was probably less than a year from being starved into submission.

But blockade without use of the atomic bombs would have cost many more Japanese lives than the 200,000 or so taken by the bombs; the Japanese government’s own estimates predicted 7 million deaths from starvation by the spring of 1946. That is not to mention the tens of thousands of Allied war and civilian prisoners who were already marked for execution immediately upon the commencement of any invasion and who surely would have been starved first, nor to mention the tens of millions of people throughout Asia who remained under Japanese rule and who also might have been starved to feed their conquerors while Japan took its time making peace. Even today there is little sympathy for Japan throughout much of Asia.

The U.S. government’s motives for using the atomic bomb surely went far beyond avoiding an invasion, but Japan still wasn’t ready to surrender even after the bombing of Hiroshima, even if the emperor’s position was to be guaranteed. Japan was not ready until both bombs had been dropped and the Soviets had joined the war by attacking in Manchuria — and even then Japan’s offer of surrender was conditional, still dependent on maintaining the emperor.

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Japan’s decision to surrender was a matter of Hirohito’s making it and his warmonger generals’ allowing it to stand, if resentfully, out of their loyalty to him. Thus what ended the war precisely when it ended was largely a matter of the psychology of those few people, and if the use of the atomic bombs then seemed as terrible as its critics maintain today, the bombs must be considered decisive in ending the war.

For the bomb suddenly raised for Hirohito and his generals the prospect of the annihilation of the whole Japanese people in a way that made impossible the “honorable” mass death they had been pursuing.

That is, once the atomic bombs were in use, Japanese deaths would not, after all, serve to defend the homeland and emperor against invasion; the Japanese would not be able to shout a fanatical “banzai” one last time and take an enemy soldier with them and maybe inflict enough casualties on the horrified Americans to obtain better surrender terms. Because of the atomic bomb the Japanese now would just be caught helpless wherever they were and be vaporized in flash after flash from the sky.

It may not have been the mere slaughter inflicted by the atomic bomb and the prospect of more slaughter that turned Hirohito and his generals around; they already had shown themselves indifferent to slaughter, including the slaughter of their own people. No, the slaughter inflicted by the atomic bomb may have been so different because it promised to deprive Japan of its sick conception of honor and glory.

Hirohito and his generals had just been led to believe that the Americans had a hundred more atomic bombs and that Tokyo itself well might be the next target. The bomb suddenly had made mass death not honorable and courageous but meaningless.

Hirohito said as much in his address announcing Japan’s surrender. Continuing to fight in the face of the “new and the most cruel bomb,” the emperor said, “would not only result in the ultimate collapse and the obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also the total extinction of human civilization.”

Thus with their shock and horror the atomic bombs broke the political deadlock on both sides — relieving Japan of what it had considered its duty to fight to the last, and relieving the United States of what it had considered its duty to bring down the leader of the criminal Japanese regime, to hang Hirohito along with the rest.

If it is much easier for people today to pity the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it may be less because of any defect in the American character or leadership of 1945 than because of the comfortable distance in time from the monstrous evil the atomic bombs helped to destroy.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. This column was first published in August 2015.

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By Chris Powell

Recent days in Connecticut have provided more than the usual causes for alarm.

— In Hartford a 2-year-old boy fell out the window of a third-floor apartment and soon died of his injuries. He and his four siblings, all under 12, had been left alone by their mother as she went to work as a taxi driver. There was no sign of the children’s father or fathers, but then public policy considers fathers unnecessary and journalism never notices that their absence correlates strongly with poverty’s daily disasters. Police said the family’s apartment was an unsanitary shambles, though the state child protection agency, the Department of Children and Families, said it checked on the family a month earlier and found their situation OK.  

— In Waterbury a 14-year-old girl riding in a stolen car with three other young teens at 2:20 in the morning was killed when they ran a red light and smashed into another car. The girl and the driver, 15, were reported to be well known to police.

— In New Haven a 13-year-old girl riding in a stolen car involved in a chase with another stolen car was shot several times from the other car at 2:50 in the morning. Fortunately the incident took place next to Yale New Haven Hospital, which has regular experience with gunshot wounds, and she will survive. Police believe the shots were meant for the girl’s boyfriend, who was driving the stolen car in which they were riding. He is also 13.

— The state child advocate reported that eight Connecticut children under age 3 died last year after ingesting the deadly narcotic fentanyl. The report said more than a quarter of the 97 young children who suffered untimely deaths in the state last year lived in homes that were being or recently had been monitored by DCF.

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— Indeed, with drug abuse and addiction exploding in Connecticut and throughout the country, controversy has erupted in New Haven over whether city government should open clinics where addicts can inject illegal drugs under the supervision of nurses equipped to treat overdoses. Would such clinics save lives or rationalize and facilitate addiction? Probably both. In any case many New Haven residents don’t want such clinics near them.

— Governor Lamont attended the opening ceremony in Hartford for one of four new state-funded crisis clinics for children, the others being in New Haven, Waterbury, and New London. The clinics will treat children for depression, thoughts of suicide or self-harm, drug abuse, and “out-of-control” behavior and will try to keep them out of hospital emergency rooms, which are likely to remain busy enough with gunshot victims.

The clinics are among a dozen new state programs to help disturbed children, including a psychiatric ward at the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford and an outpatient clinic in the Waterbury area.

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These initiatives are separate from the nearly $800 million state government spends annually on the Department of Children and Families, which deals with the thousands of households whose children are in danger of neglect or abuse.

The department has been hiring to reduce the case loads of its social workers so they can pay more attention to clients, but it remains difficult work, and not all child neglect may be threatening enough to come under the department’s jurisdiction, as with the 25% of Connecticut students lately classified as chronically absent from school. In the cities the figure is around 50%.

The governor, some of his commissioners, and many state legislators may be old enough to remember a time in Connecticut when so many children were not fatherless, neglected, disturbed, taking drugs, riding around in stolen cars at 2 in the morning, and causing other trouble. This social disintegration had become rampant before the recent virus epidemic, though government’s response to the epidemic, like closing schools under the pressure of the teacher unions, made the disintegration worse. 

Something has been changing for a long time — but what exactly? Perhaps more important, who is striving to discern and address the cause of social disintegration rather than just deal with its ever-increasing symptoms?

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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

Everybody seems to be investigating the traffic ticket scandal in the Connecticut state police, exposed by an audit a month ago. It contended that about 25,000 tickets state troopers wrote over several years were phony — reported only to a state police database, not to the Judicial Department, which would have triggered prosecution of drivers.

Speculation has offered two possible explanations for the fraud. 

First, more plausible, is that troopers wrote the phony tickets to make themselves seem busier and more effective so they could gain preference for pension-inflating overtime, promotions, and such. 

Second, more sinister, is that troopers were trying to mask their prejudice against minorities, using the phony tickets to report more traffic stops of white motorists than they were actually making so their disproportionate stops of minority motorists would not be noticed.

The racial census state law required with state police traffic tickets was worth doing for public confidence even if it was based on the false premise that any racial disparity in criminal justice signifies racism. For crime itself long has been racially disproportionate, less because of racism in the criminal-justice system than because poverty and its pathologies long have been racially disproportionate. 

Because crime is racially disproportionate, some racial disproportion with tickets had to be expected. But how much, and how much would trigger screams of racism? And could troopers have used the phony tickets somewhat innocently — to protect themselves against complaints of racism amid disproportionate traffic violations by minorities?

Misconduct on the job for financial gain will always be a temptation. But misconduct to conceal one’s racism on the job would be malicious and vile, the more so because it would require much work beyond what might be necessary for monetary gain.

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What is especially disturbing here is that while state police executives already had a month to look into the ticket audit, at a General Assembly hearing last week they could not or would not explain what, if anything, their own investigation had discovered, though every ticket is coded so that its issuing trooper can be identified.

Some troopers who issued fake tickets surely could have been questioned by their supervisors prior to the legislative hearing. Were they? Did they respond? If so, what did they say? If not, did they invoke a union contract right against accountability?

State police executives were not prepared to say much more than that their investigation continues, along with everyone else’s.

Governor Lamont and some legislators say troopers who forged tickets should be fired. But whether troopers or other unionized state employees can be fired for anything is always a question. Union contracts — negotiated by the governor, ratified by the legislature, and adjudicated by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration — are designed to prevent any state employee from being fired and to ensure that any serious discipline is reduced to a slap on the wrist with loads of back pay once the public has mostly forgotten about the misconduct at issue.

Such protection of unionized government employees against accountability is the liberal Democratic way, since those employees are the core of the party’s political army. But the liberal Democratic way is also to clamor constantly about racism to keep members of racial minorities thinking that they are eternally victims and in need of special protection from liberal Democratic administrations.

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This incongruity may be enough to justify hoping that racism will be the explanation for the fake tickets. For to overcome racism Connecticut needs to audit far more than those tickets. 

It needs to audit all government policies bearing on racial minorities. It needs to ask: Why is life in the cities not improving? Why is the racial performance gap in public education never closed? Why does poverty remain so racially disproportionate? Why are so many more minority kids growing up without fathers? Why are so many more minority kids chronically absent from school?

Racism in traffic tickets is the least of the problem.

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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

Strengthening the Social Security system has been Connecticut U.S. Rep. John B. Larson’s main objective in his last several terms. 

Larson, D-1st District, keeps introducing legislation that would bring more revenue into the system, covering the costs of the worsening ratio between retirees and workers; increasing benefits, especially for the working poor and homemakers; and keeping the system financially sound for the long term, averting the insolvency projected for about 2034, when benefits paid are likely to exceed the system’s revenue.

Larson’s bill would achieve solvency mainly by imposing Social Security taxes on incomes above $400,000. At present Social Security taxes stop when an income reaches $160,200. That is, the Social Security tax is surprisingly regressive.

There are other ways of achieving solvency, as by raising the retirement age and cutting benefits, but that would make life harder for the working poor. Indeed, as Larson notes, Social Security is the country’s main and most successful anti-poverty program and has lower administrative costs than other programs. So strengthening it makes sense.

Nearly all Democrats in Congress favor Larson’s legislation, and if it was enacted, it might be the greatest accomplishment ever by a member of Congress from Connecticut. But strangely the Democratic congressional leadership failed to advance the bill in recent years when the party held majorities in both houses. 

Now Republicans hold the House and are almost tied with Democrats in the Senate, and no Republican support can be found for the bill, though most Americans strongly support Social Security and almost certainly would favor strengthening it.

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The problem Republican congressmen seem to have with Larson’s legislation is the old one — that it raises taxes on the rich, people with incomes above $400,000. But most Republicans in Congress, like most Democrats (including Larson himself) have no problem with raising taxes on everybody by the back door, by increasing the national debt and the federal government’s interest costs. Those costs are increasing sharply, since the federal debt limit has just been suspended and interest rates are rising.

Of course making Social Security solvent by raising the retirement age and cutting benefits probably would be even less popular than raising payroll taxes on people earning more than $400,000 per year.

But why should the law require Social Security to pay for itself when the federal government is indifferent to solvency in most other respects? 

Taxes were not raised to pay for the hundreds of billions spent on this country’s stupid imperial wars of recent years, nor are they being raised to sustain the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Taxes weren’t raised for the recent big federal appropriations for “infrastructure” projects around the country. 

Most aspects of the federal government now are operating in large part on borrowed money that can never be repaid except with a devalued dollar and inflation – the back-door tax, which has been soaring.

Maybe Social Security is considered easier to defend politically when it has its own revenue source in payroll taxes. But as the dollar devalues from excessive deficit spending, inflation is devaluing Social Security benefits as well.

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Lately Democrats in Congress have expressed support or sympathy for “modern monetary theory,” which holds that deficit spending and money creation don’t matter as long as there is spare productive capacity in the economy and inflation is low.

Inflation never was as low as officially reported and is hugely visible now, but deficit spending has exploded anyway and neither party cares. So maybe Democrats in Congress should test the Republicans by offering Larson’s Social Security bill minus the payroll tax increases — just benefit increases and more deficit spending and borrowing. If deficit spending and borrowing can work for sending cluster bombs to Ukraine, why not for Grandma’s monthly check as well? 

As long as it is pretended that deficits don’t matter, why not show the country that old-age pensions are as important as discretionary wars, and postpone setting better priorities until the dollar blows up? When that day comes, Social Security will be more popular than war.

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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

Prevailing opinion is that a third-party “fusion” presidential ticket like that being contemplated by former Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman’s “No Labels” group will draw more votes away from next year’s presumptive Democratic nominee, doddering Joe Biden, than from the presumptive Republican nominee, loony Donald Trump.

That’s why leading Democrats are nearly hysterical about No Labels while leading Republicans seem indifferent. Those Democrats include former Connecticut U.S. Rep. Toby Moffett, who appeared July 22 on WTNH-TV8’s “Capitol Report” program to disparage No Labels while claiming that he doesn’t understand why Biden is so unpopular. Moffett called Biden “the most active, accomplished president in modern history,” extravagant praise that may be explained only by the former congressman’s own senescence or his employment as a Washington lobbyist.  

A national poll taken two weeks ago by Quinnipiac University challenges the prevailing opinion about No Labels. Not only did 47% of respondents, most of them unaffiliated voters, say they would consider voting for a third-party ticket, equal to the percentage who said they would not, but more Republicans than Democrats said they would consider voting third party — by 38% to 35%.

Of course all this is hugely speculative before No Labels settles on a ticket. But when have the two most likely major-party presidential candidates generated so much disgust and contempt?

A minor party has never won a presidential election. But a minor party would not have to win the election to save the country next year. A minor party would need only to attract enough support to be seen as a great danger to one or both of the major parties prior to their nominating conventions, causing them to discard their awful candidates. In that case, Lieberman has said, No Labels would not put candidates on the ballot.

As Moffett did the other day, leading Democrats are acting as if only Trump disgusts many people. But millions don’t want to vote for Biden any more than they want to vote for Trump. The Democratic leaders terrified by No Labels can solve their problem by inducing the president and Vice President Kamala Harris not to seek renomination and by recruiting an alternative presidential candidate more credible than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose surprisingly large support among Democrats in opinion polls is another indication of Biden’s grave weakness.

Indeed, the biggest threat of Trump’s re-election isn’t posed by No Labels but by Biden himself. So Democrats should take responsibility instead of trying to shift it to No Labels.

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If the country is going to uphold the Constitution’s principle of racial equality as it was recently articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision prohibiting “affirmative action” -– racial preferences and discrimination — the decision will have to be applied beyond college admissions.

For “affirmative action” has been incorporated in many other places. 

Municipal governments, including some in Connecticut, like Hartford’s, have enacted racial and gender quotas in construction projects. 

Higher education is full of racial preferences quite apart from admissions. For example, Central Connecticut State University awards financial grants exclusively to teachers from racial minorities as a way of encouraging their recruitment for and retention on the university staff.

While the Supreme Court’s decision makes perfect sense as a matter of law and justice, it doesn’t diminish the urgency of integration. But racial preferences have been a “top-down” and arbitrary mechanism of integration when the country needs a mechanism that works from the bottom up, so that children have a better chance of equal opportunity as young adults because they are more equally qualified by upbringing and education.

A bottom-up mechanism of integration would address poverty, which remains closely correlated with race, the pernicious effects of welfare policy, the lack of parenting, and all sorts of bad outcomes in life. 

This correlation provides an opening for policy that isn’t frankly racial discrimination. But integrating by reducing the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, is a lot harder than deciding college admissions by race.

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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

With Governor Lamont’s signature on legislation last week, Connecticut will be doing more pretending about education. The new law will require high schools to offer and students to take a course on personal financial management. The course will be a prerequisite for graduation. 

Of course young people should have some familiarity with personal financial management as they go out into the world on their own, and many of them, having negligent parents, don’t get it at home. Because of parental neglect, students in Connecticut increasingly are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of their school days.  

But then young people graduating from high school also should master a lot more than personal financial management, starting with basic math and English, even as test scores show that half or more of Connecticut’s students graduate from high school without mastering the basics. Actual learning, demonstrated by passing a proficiency test, is not required for students to advance. Students will be required to take the personal financial management class, but no one will be required to pass it in order to graduate.

Indeed, can students who have not mastered basic math and English master personal financial management? Will making students sit through a course on personal financial management make them competent in math and English and personal financial management, when they are never required to show they have learned anything?

The General Assembly and the governor seem to think so.

Indeed, the legislature, the governor, and the state Education Department seem to think that merely prescribing various courses is equivalent to learning. Despite all those courses, Connecticut’s only real policy in education is social promotion. While “mastery tests” are occasionally administered in various grades, they mean nothing to students. The tests are just the illusion of academic standards. 

Students know this and many wallow in indifference. Performance on mastery tests might be better if the tests counted for something. In the absence of academic standards, student performance is only a matter of parenting, whose collapse has correlated with student performance.

But restoring standards by conditioning student advancement on academic performance might hurt some feelings and expose parental negligence. So Connecticut’s schools figure it’s better to award diplomas to everyone and let students discover that ignorance has consequences only once they’re on their own, qualified only for menial work and risking lifetime poverty.

Despite the new course in personal financial management, students who graduate without mastering basic math and English may not ever have much personal finance to manage. But the course will let state officials feel better about themselves, as unchallenged students do.

FREE SPEECH WINS: Why the hysteria about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision holding that an internet site creator in Colorado can disregard the state’s anti-discrimination law and refuse to create an internet site for a same-sex wedding?

The office of Connecticut Attorney General William Tong advises that the decision applies to narrow circumstances and will have little impact here and that the state’s own anti-discrimination laws remain in force.

But the principle of the Colorado decision will apply in Connecticut too, and contrary to the hysteria about the case, that principle is just, liberal, and in keeping with legal precedent.

That is, when an act of commerce is to a great extent a matter of freedom of expression, anti-discrimination laws cannot compel people to say what they don’t want to say. Instead the First Amendment applies. Government cannot compel speech, and creation of an internet site is a form of speech.

This principle can be traced to the Supreme Court’s decision in a case from West Virginia in 1943, where the court held that schools cannot compel students to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. 

Anti-discrimination law still applies to the sale of other services and products. The exception covers only matters of expression.

Besides, what same-sex couple would want their wedding’s internet site to be created by someone to whom same-sex marriage is morally objectionable, especially when so many other internet site creators would welcome the work?

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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

With Connecticut and the country falling apart, with the federal government spending billions of dollars to wage a proxy war in Ukraine and Russia, and with the next president likely to be a senile grifter or an insane one, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal is worried … about golf.

That is, the senator is outraged by the merger of the PGA Tour with LIV Golf, the latter being the creation of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Blumenthal is leading outcry against it, and while the merger indeed would monopolize professional golf internationally, golf has nothing to do with the decline of economic competition that most threatens the country and the world.

Banking, insurance, agribusiness, airlines, health care, pharmaceuticals, broadcasting — you name it — nearly every industry in the United States is more concentrated than it was a few decades ago. In Connecticut nearly every month produces another acquisition of a local bank by a regional one. As employers get bigger and fewer, labor is disadvantaged. Concentration of industry is not the only cause of the decline of real wages in the United States, but it is a big one.

The Biden administration has pledged more enforcement of antitrust law but hasn’t produced much, though almost any enforcement would be an improvement over the administration’s recent predecessors. Some elected officials in Connecticut, notably Attorney General William Tong,  strike poses against bank combinations but his office defers to the federal government, leaving state antitrust law on the shelf. 

Of course in recent years government itself has gotten much bigger too and for the most part it does not make the economy more competitive. Instead it increases costs for business and labor alike.

In light of the worsening but unaddressed concentration in major industries, where most prices are set, it’s silly to get upset about professional golf, which employs few people and whose customers are less numerous and charged less than those of other sports, like baseball and football, whose industries long have enjoyed exemptions from antitrust law, whose ticket prices have exploded, and whose athletes are paid far more than golfers.

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Besides, Senator Blumenthal’s opposition to LIV Golf’s combination with the PGA Tour seems less based on antitrust concerns than political ones — Saudi Arabia’s medieval and theocratic form of government, which the senator denounces. But Saudi Arabia is no more totalitarian than the government of China, which poses a far greater threat to the world and has much more business connection with the United States. In recent decades much of U.S. industry has relocated to China with little complaint and less action from Congress.

Despite Saudi Arabia’s totalitarianism, for a half century the United States has been in a de-facto military and economic alliance with the country, wherein the Saudis priced their crucial worldwide oil exports in U.S. dollars and held their surplus in U.S. Treasury bonds, sustaining the dollar as the world reserve currency when it came off the gold standard, and the United States agreed to police the oil shipping lanes. Just the other day the United States dispatched more jet fighters for that purpose.

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The billions of dollars Saudi Arabia now is ready to spend on something as trivial as golf are the product of that alliance. So should the Saudis be prevented from spending as they choose the dollars they earned by selling oil to the United States and its allies? 

A few months ago President Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia to beg for more oil production even as the president had pledged to shut down his own country’s conventional energy industry. Senator Blumenthal is a member of the president’s party and that irony escapes him.

The Saudi government lately seems to be having doubts about its U.S. alliance, and as the world oil supply has tightened, the Biden administration has been draining the country’s strategic oil reserve. If, as Senator Blumenthal suggests, Saudi Arabia is so awful that even a golf connection is objectionable, then an oil connection is objectionable too and he should become an advocate for increasing U.S. production of conventional energy.

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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

Despite the hysteria about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision prohibiting racial preferences in college admissions — a policy long euphemized as “affirmative action” — as a practical matter the country no longer needs the practice if it ever did. For government agencies and larger businesses long have been striving to hire and promote members of minority groups and women, either from the belief that such integration is a moral necessity or from a desire to be considered politically correct.

As public education eliminated its standards and declined steadily in recent decades, even smaller businesses whose managers were not especially enlightened began to discover that their prejudices could be expensive — that they were often fortunate to find a qualified applicant of any background. Thus they realized what Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher impressed on his reflexively racist players when they threatened to revolt if a Black man, Jackie Robinson, was to join the team in 1947:

“I don’t care if the guy is yellow or black or has stripes like a #@%&# zebra. I’m the manager of this team and I say he plays. What’s more, I say he can make us all a lot of money. And if any of you #@%&# don’t want it, I’ll see that you’re traded.”

The American creed was never better expressed, nor better vindicated. That is, merit will win in the end. Money doesn’t care who spends it. Show that you can do the job if given a chance.

Members of minority groups applying for white-collar jobs began figuring this out 40 years ago when they inserted into their resumes markers of their minority status — sometimes subtly, sometimes not.

Far from handicapping their applications, minority status was conveying political advantage. It still does — if the applicant is reasonably competent.

The country’s integration problem is not so much on the employer’s end anymore but on the qualifications end — and it may be worse than it was prior to enactment of civil rights legislation.

*

This is easily seen in Connecticut, where Governor Lamont often acknowledges that the state’s manufacturers are unable to fill about 100,000 well-paying jobs with excellent benefits. Meanwhile every year the state’s high schools, especially those in the cities, graduate thousands of students, nearly all of them members of minority groups, who have never mastered basic subjects and so face lives of menial work, inadequate insurance, extra physical and mental health risks, housing insecurity, and propensity to crime. These young people haven’t needed help getting into college. They have needed help getting into life but have gotten it neither at home nor in lower education.

Indeed, Connecticut long has been notorious for its racial performance gap in lower education. State government lately has decided that the solution is a little more tutoring for failing students — many of whom often are not showing up at school in the first place, being chronically absent, perhaps in the confidence they well may share with whatever parents they have that they will be promoted and given diplomas no matter what — confidence that, indifferent as Connecticut is to results in lower education, the state might as well award high school diplomas with birth certificates.

*

In any case a high school diploma no longer automatically construes any sort of education and does not impress admissions officers at serious colleges nor personnel officers at advanced manufacturing companies that need skilled employees. A high school diploma is often an empty credential, as many college diplomas are.

“Affirmative action” never did much for Connecticut or the country. It didn’t educate many young people. Mainly it advanced the less qualified and penalized those who took their studies seriously, especially students of Asian descent. It provided camouflage for the underlying problem, the welfare-induced collapse of the Black family famously noted in a research paper almost 60 years ago by the sociologist and future politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among the last of the true liberals. Action in that respect is needed more urgently than ever, but in Connecticut it can’t even be discussed.

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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

Visiting Bridgeport last week, Governor Lamont celebrated newly enacted legislation he supported to require schools to provide translation services to parents who don’t speak English and to qualify more illegal immigrant children for state medical insurance, extending their eligibility age from 12 to 15.

Bridgeport is a center of illegal immigration, and the governor sounded enthusiastic about it. “These are people who are here,” the governor said. “I’m proud they’re here. They’re welcome here in our state.”

Illegal just as much as legal? The governor made no distinction.

He added, “We’ve got a job for you here in Connecticut.”

But the jobs the governor often has cited that Connecticut has been unable to fill — estimated at 100,000 — are mostly skilled manufacturing jobs. They come with good wages and medical insurance, and with education and training people can learn how to do them. But if illegal immigrants were already qualified to do them, they wouldn’t need translation services in school and state medical insurance.

Dozens of languages are said to be spoken by the families of students in Bridgeport’s schools, and the new law requires school systems to offer translators for all parental dealings with the school system, even for anyone attending a school board meeting, in addition to translation for instruction in English for children still learning the language. No one is sure how much all these translation services will cost, which may be a reason the new law is considered so wonderful.

*

The General Assembly does have a clue that even though illegal immigration is politically correct, a cost is incurred by facilitating it. During the legislature’s recent session there was much clamor to extend state medical insurance to illegal immigrants up to age 25 and some clamor even to extend it to all the estimated 120,000 illegal immigrants in the state. For budget reasons the extension was limited to children 15 and younger, but it will be surprising if next year’s session doesn’t extend eligibility at least to age 18.

After all, Connecticut should not let any people be wracked by pain or die in the street, whatever their immigration status, and hospitals already are obliged to treat emergency cases without regard to a patient’s ability to pay. But Connecticut is long past the point at which expense and fairness to citizens and the state’s ability to assimilate foreigners over time should replace political correctness as the determinants of policy.

For if, as the governor suggests, all illegal immigrants are welcome in Connecticut, eventually to be eligible for medical insurance, income supports, education, and translation services, and to compete with ordinary citizens for housing the state doesn’t have and medical appointments sooner than six months out — thereby profoundly devaluing citizenship — by the end of the year the state might have several million more refugees from distressed places like Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, Peru, and Sudan, quite apart from the people fleeing Democratic-misgoverned New York, California, and Illinois.

*

The governor and his party in Connecticut have gotten away with their political correctness on illegal immigration because most illegal immigrants have been crowded into Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford, already impoverished cities with many government dependents who will vote for the regime no matter how awful local living conditions get.

The schools of those cities long have been graduating students who have never mastered the basics and won’t be qualified and hired for those manufacturing jobs Connecticut can’t fill. But these uneducated graduates will provide justification for ever more members of the government class to minister to them – not just translators but also medical insurance processors, social workers, and such.

That seems to be all that matters politically — not the cost of uncontrolled immigration, the destruction of the working-class wage base, the collapse of education and living conditions in the cities, and the inability to assimilate newcomers into a common culture.

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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

Schools purport to encourage the involvement of parents. But lately a big exception is being made around the country and in Connecticut.

That is, schools increasingly want to conceal from parents the gender dysphoria of students who don’t want their parents to know about it, and last week with a friend-of-the-court brief Connecticut Attorney General William Tong jumped into a Massachusetts case on the side of keeping parents ignorant.

Gender dysphoria is a profound and life-altering disorder, more serious than the injuries and accidents that students routinely suffer in school and that schools routinely report to parents. Parents unaware of their child’s gender dysphoria could be considered extremely negligent and of course are unable to participate in their child’s treatment, even though putting children through sex-change therapy — euphemized as “gender-affirming care” — carries enormous risks and is often regretted by those who undergo it.

What is the rationale for keeping parents ignorant of such a profound problem that their child manifests in school?

Attorney General Tong says the rationale is that the parents of students with gender dysphoria may not be “supportive or understanding and may actually take action to prejudice their rights or even do them harm.”

That is, in the attorney general’s view parents should not question their child’s desire to change genders and should not insist that alternatives be pursued, and that children have a right to sex-change therapy with the assistance of their school despite the opposition of their parents.

The attorney general’s concern that parents might harm their child with gender dysphoria is a mere hypothetical that could be used to justify preventing parents from acting as parents in any respect.

So the attorney general and many educators are advocating a spectacular exemption to the ordinary responsibilities of parenting, an exemption contradicting all legal precedent and experience.

*

Like other states, Connecticut holds that minors lack the judgment necessary, for example, to purchase liquor, tobacco products, and guns, to make binding contracts, and to get tattoos. So it makes no sense to contend that children on their own volition should be able to get puberty-inhibiting drugs and undergo irreversible surgery.

The attorney general and his colleagues from the 15 other states in the amicus brief in the Massachusetts case argue that requiring schools to inform parents about their child’s gender dysphoria would undermine the child’s trust in school staff. But what about the trust between parents and their children and their children’s schools? Such trust is of a far higher order.

Connecticut has no law on whether schools should inform parents of their child’s gender dysphoria, any more than the state has a law requiring schools to inform parents that their child has broken a bone in gym class. Traditionally schools have considered themselves “in loco parentis,” a Latin phrase indicating a school’s responsibility to act as parents when a child’s parents are not immediately available. Are schools now to usurp parental responsibility in a serious medical matter even when the parents are available?

While acknowledging that state law doesn’t address whether schools should deceive or mislead parents about their child’s gender dysphoria, the state Education Department seems to encourage it by cautioning that a school’s not cooperating with a student’s gender switching might raise “serious civil rights concerns.”

The Education Department sees no serious concerns about the civil rights of parents in such situations, gender dysphoria having become politically correct and parental responsibility having fallen out of favor as children increasingly are born outside marriage and grow up without fathers.

*

With no law settling the issue, some school systems in Connecticut have adopted formal policies to keep parents ignorant of the gender dysphoria of students who don’t want their parents to know.

State legislators surely would prefer to avoid the issue. But if schools are going to deceive and mislead parents about such a serious matter of children’s health, and if government really is to impair parenting so much, it should be set out clearly in law with legislators taking responsibility and everyone knowing what has been done.

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

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