Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

With the enthusiastic assistance of news organizations, same-sex marriage was euphemized as “marriage equality.” Now sex-change therapy is being euphemized as “gender-affirming care.” And at the National Safer Communities Summit last Friday at the University of Hartford, at which President Biden spoke, gun control was euphemized as “gun safety,” as if the scores of shootings in the country every day are mere accidents and not crimes.

Supporters of the right to bear arms — a right even more firmly established in Connecticut’s Constitution than the national Constitution — were disparaged as “the gun lobby,” though they have no personal financial interest in the controversy, nor any financial connection to gun manufacturers. Disparaging them as “the gun lobby” is no fairer than to disparage the American Civil Liberties Union as the pornography lobby or the Nazi lobby.

The worst demagogue at the conference, perhaps not surprisingly, was the U.S. education secretary, Meriden’s Miguel Cardona, whose tenure has been most notable for his pandering to the teacher unions. “Please don’t get me started on the politicians pushing us to arm teachers,” Cardona said. “These are the same politicians who don’t trust teachers to choose the right books for our classrooms.”

The prospect of millions of armed teacher union members is frightening, but who is advocating putting guns in the hands of any untrained personnel in schools, and why should the textbook and library book judgments of teachers and school administrators be beyond question?

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With the exception of requiring background checks for anyone purchasing or receiving a firearm, all the “gun safety” measures enacted so far or advocated around the country will have only a marginal effect on gun violence. That includes outlawing “assault weapons,” long-barreled guns whose basic mechanisms are no different than those of most pistols. Crimes with pistols vastly outnumber those with “assault weapons.”

“Gun safety” advocates know this. Their objective is to make gun possession more difficult for the law-abiding, since they understand that no gun law will much impede anyone who has resolved to use a gun to commit a crime. “Gun safety” advocates figure that when gun possession becomes difficult enough for the law-abiding, gun confiscation will become easier politically.

But when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns — among them, perhaps, Donald Trump, once again commanding the armed forces despite having already orchestrated a coup attempt at the end of his first term.

*

Circumstances in the United States sharply limit gun policies that might be practical and effective. For there is no starting from scratch. It is estimated that 40% of U.S. households are armed and that there are 120 guns in civilian possession for every 100 people. Many states are as protective of gun rights as Connecticut seems indifferent to them.

Deepening the support for gun rights is the country’s worsening social disintegration, especially in the cities, all governed, so to speak, by the political party pressing for “gun safety.” But social disintegration is everywhere. A few weeks ago Connecticut’s state police admitted that they were not sufficiently staffed to put down a riot in suburban Tolland. Apparently tear gas didn’t occur to them.

The big cause of gun violence is government’s long failure to elevate the poor, who now form an uneducated, unskilled, impoverished, and increasingly alienated underclass that grows despite numerous government programs claiming to alleviate poverty, programs seldom audited for results.

But in February Connecticut got a hint of what a little auditing of gun crime might produce. City mayors and police chiefs gathered at the state Capitol to report that most gun criminals in Connecticut are repeat offenders who somehow have not ever been put away for good.

That is, Connecticut law is not much of a deterrent to gun crime. So to achieve “gun safety” the state might do best simply to impose a sentence of life without parole for any crime committed with a gun or for any second or third felony conviction and to appropriate for the necessary investigation, prosecution, courts, and prisons.

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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 about 34,000 of its residents employed in the aerospace industry, Connecticut has good reason to be represented at the Paris Air Show this week, so Governor Lamont aims to be there with a delegation of state officials and business leaders.

“Our goal,” the governor says, “is to get more products that are made in Connecticut out into the world, and to get more of the world doing business in Connecticut.”

Some time may pass before Connecticut learns whether the excursion was a serious attempt at business development or just a junket.

Besides the concentration of aerospace businesses here, the state’s advantages to the industry are said to include its strategic location between New York and Boston, the great life in its suburbs, its skilled manufacturing workforce, and the quality of its products.

Yet business leaders from around the world who come to the air show more for business than junketing may be prepared to inquire beyond the conventional wisdom.

They might ask about the recent inability of Connecticut manufacturers to find qualified people and the growing share of the workforce emerging uneducated from the state’s schools and suited only for menial work.

They might ask about the state’s high taxes and particularly the recent extension of its 10% surcharge on the corporation income tax.

They also might ask about the state’s high housing costs and severe shortage of housing for working people. If a foreign company wanted to open a facility in Connecticut with 200 or more employees, exactly where could enough housing be found for them near the new company? Even if the new company was willing to build housing for its employees, would any municipality welcome it or just obstruct it with zoning?

If they face such serious questions in Paris, Connecticut’s delegation well might prefer to linger at the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, or any croissant shop.

* * *

Connecticut has another catastrophic and likely expensive wrongful conviction case — that of Adam Carmon, who served 28 years in prison on a charge of firing a dozen bullets into an apartment in New Haven in 1994, killing a baby and paralyzing her grandmother.

In November Superior Court Judge Jon Alander reversed Carmon’s convictions and ordered a new trial. Last week the New Haven prosecutor’s office dropped the charges, having concluded that the evidence for them won’t stand up a second time — eyewitness identification that was shaky and ballistics evidence that has been repudiated. Additionally, the judge concluded that the prosecution withheld from the defense evidence suggesting that two purported drug dealers could have done the shooting and that the police failed to pursue other suspects, including a man who confessed and then recanted.

No motive for Carmon to commit the crime was ever offered.

So last week Judge Alander dismissed the case, telling Carmon, “The criminal justice system failed you.”

For the 28 years taken from him, Carmon is entitled to file a damage claim against the state and to sue the agencies that investigated and prosecuted him. He probably has at least $5 million coming to him, though few people would exchange 28 years for any amount.

The criminal justice system also seems to have failed a disturbing number of others in recent years, especially in the New Haven area. Critics point to a dozen other overturned convictions involving complaints of police and prosecutor misconduct from the 1980s through the early 2000s. They want a federal investigation.

Investigation is very much warranted but not by the federal government, now that the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation have been so corrupted politically.

No, the investigation here should be conducted by Connecticut’s own authorities, and particularly by the General Assembly, which has broad authority over the operations of state government, including criminal justice, but seldom investigates or even audits anything, though the other day it asked state agencies to study the urgent matter of adding “non-binary” to the gender identification sections of their license and application forms.

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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 in Connecticut aren’t doing as well as they once did teaching reading, math, and the other academic basics, but they seem to be finding more time to address sexual subjects. The latest examples come from an elementary school in Granby and a middle school in Southington, where Pride Month videos were shown to students. News reports said the video shown in Granby involved transgenderism, and after it was shown, feminine hygiene products were distributed to the boys as well as the girls in the audience.

The intent of these exercises is to discourage disparagement and bullying of students who are different or are suspected of being so. But the sexual aspects of these exercises raise questions of propagandizing, age-appropriateness, and the pre-emption of parents.

That’s why the exercises may be both too explicit and too narrow. For people are different in many ways apart from sexual orientation and gender identity — different in race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and so forth. So why the emphasis lately on sexual orientation and gender, if not for propagandizing? Where are the tolerance-supporting videos about the many other differences?

Kids can be both cruel and cowardly. They are easily pressured into joining campaigns of bullying. But no lecture on sexual preferences or gender dysphoria is necessary to dissuade them. Instead kids can be instructed simply to behave decently toward their classmates — to be polite and kind in school, to recognize that people have the right to their personal lives, to keep to themselves their judgments of those personal lives, and to understand that they will be disciplined sternly when they violate these standards.

Discipline long has been lacking in public education in Connecticut, even for the most disruptive students. Parents continue to complain that their children are bullied by classmates and that school administrators do little about it. If disparagement and bullying of students now are also chronic in regard to sexual orientation and gender identity, schools need more discipline, not more videos, propaganda, or distribution of feminine hygiene products to boys as well as girls.

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Besides, Pride Month itself is a misnomer if, as Connecticut has presumed for more than 50 years, sexual orientation is largely innate, a matter of heredity and environment that, while nobody’s business but one’s own, is nothing to be proud about either, insofar as no one does anything to earn it.

Sometimes courage may be required for being candid about one’s sexual orientation or gender identity, but that’s a different issue. What should be celebrated here is not sexual or gender identity but the personal freedom the United States affords, its declaration “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

There is already a national holiday recognizing that. It is coming up in three weeks, though schools seem to be teaching less about it than about sexual orientation and gender identity.

*

Another misnomer is about to be celebrated: June 19, or Juneteenth, which is erroneously portrayed as marking the end of slavery in the United States toward the end of the Civil War in 1865. In fact the date notes only the arrival of Union troops in Galveston, Texas, whereupon, in accordance with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation 2½ years earlier, Gen. Gordon Granger declared the freedom of all slaves in the rebellious state.

But slavery continued in the country for another six months after Juneteenth — remaining legal in New Jersey, Kentucky, and Delaware — until ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865.

So if a special holiday is needed to mark the end of slavery, the proper date is December 6.

It might be called Freedom Day and used to teach about slavery and the long and heroic political, religious, and military struggles to get rid of it. Such a holiday might teach about inequalities that remain today and can be traced back to slavery.

Instead the one thing people will learn from Juneteenth is false.

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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 should laugh at the pious assertion by the U.S. Justice Department, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and others upon the indictment of former President Trump for misappropriating classified government documents — the assertion that no one is above the law.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith said, “We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone.”

No, they don’t.

Yes, if even half of the indictment is accurate, Trump is twice as crazy and dangerous as even his biggest critics have charged. But to disprove the assertion of equal justice, it isn’t necessary to note, as some Republicans will do, the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute President Biden and his son, Hunter, for their longstanding influence-peddling business. Every day of ordinary life in Connecticut disproves the assertion.

For while entering the United States without authority remains against federal immigration law, Connecticut is estimated to house 120,000 immigration lawbreakers with the full knowledge of both the federal government and state government. Despite the Constitution’s requirement that the president will “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” the Biden administration’s policy is open borders.

With various laws and policies, state government facilitates illegal immigration, and the state obstructed enforcement of federal immigration law back when the federal government tried to enforce it. Now the federal government seldom bothers to enforce immigration law in Connecticut. From the time of Andrew Jackson the federal government strove to smash what is called nullification, the claim that a state can override federal law. But now the federal government has accepted Connecticut’s nullification.

It is the same with marijuana, whose possession and sale remain felonies under federal law despite state government’s recent enthusiastic licensing and participation in the marijuana trade. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has acknowledged that the Biden administration will not enforce federal marijuana law where state governments don’t want it enforced — more nullification.

Meanwhile Connecticut often fails to enforce its nominally rigorous gun laws, with most criminal gun charges canceled by plea bargaining because there is so much more crime than prosecutorial strength and state government hates putting people in jail, even for gun crime.

To excuse him, Trump supporters may seize on the federal government’s hypocrisy. But the hypocrisy of accusers doesn’t excuse; it just indicts the accusers as well.

Trump may have a better claim for a lenient sentence: that those classified documents were more secure in his bathroom than in the vaults of a government that recently made classified documents available to a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member with a fetish for guns, plotting murder, and blabbing on the internet.

* * *

Connecticut now is said to have the distinction of paying the biggest penalty for police brutality – the $45 million settlement with Randy Cox for the paralysis he suffered a year ago in the custody of the New Haven Police Department. But the case isn’t really about police brutality at all.

For nobody meant to hurt Cox, and the devastating damage to his spinal cord was done before police handled him callously to get him into a cell at headquarters.

The incident began with Cox’s getting drunk, carrying a gun illegally, and brandishing it at a street party, prompting people to call police.

It continued with the reckless driving of the car that forced the police van carrying Cox to stop short, sending him flying head-first into the van wall, since the van lacked seat belts for passengers.

Then there were the officers conditioned by years of dealing with drunks and the mentally ill, officers who didn’t believe this drunk when he said he couldn’t move. So they dragged him out of the van.

Eventually that $45 million will come from all Connecticut’s taxpayers, for impoverished New Haven is a ward of the state.

Drunkenness, gunplay, reckless driving, antiquated equipment, jadedness — it was all just a day with Connecticut’s urban underclass. Tomorrow will be another day, costly in its own way.

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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

Congratulations to state Rep. Holly Cheeseman for exploding a spectacular hypocrisy of state government arising from its long subservience to the government employee unions.

Last week the state House of Representatives was debating legislation that would conceal from the public the home addresses of nearly every state and municipal government employee. This would have impaired accountability in government, but then that was the point. Cheeseman, a Republican from East Lyme, noted that two years ago the General Assembly and Governor Lamont enacted legislation to allow unions to obtain the same information in pursuit of enrolling and mobilizing government employees against the public interest.

Another Republican state representative, Craig Fishbein of Wallingford, noted that the address-concealing bill as it was introduced originally would have concealed addresses for employees in only two state agencies, the state attorney general’s office and the Department of Aging and Disability Services.

Other legislators complained that the expansion of the bill had never gotten a public hearing, though of course any such hearing would have been dominated by the unions. As they were about to be given another inch, the unions strove to grab another mile with the help of their tools in the legislature.

With debate making the legislation seem less sensible and starting to consume too much time in the General Assembly’s always frantic hours just prior to mandatory adjournment, the House Democratic majority leader, Jason Rojas of East Hartford, took the bill off the agenda. But it will return sooner or later, maybe with a provision to make it illegal to know anything unflattering about a government employee.

*

NEITHER BANNED NOR READ: Now that Newtown’s Board of Education has decided against removing from the local high school library two books that some townspeople considered too sexually explicit, people are celebrating the defeat of what news organizations like to call book banning.

But the placement of books in a public school library is always fairly a matter of judgment about age-appropriateness, just as the placement of any book in a public library is always a matter of judgment on several levels. Anyone has a right to challenge these judgments, and democratic government is entitled to make them. There is no book banning here. The challenged books remain available outside the libraries to anyone who wants them. Indeed, challenges to books may increase their readership.

But that does not seem to have been the case with the two sexually explicit books at Newtown High School. As the school board voted to leave them in the library, the superintendent said one of the books had been checked out only once and the other not at all. The books may not exactly be great literature, and their sexual explicitness may not compare to the pornography to which high school students easily can gain access on the internet.

The lack of student interest in the challenged books invites another challenge to school officials. If there is so little interest in the books, why do they remain in the library? After all, every book that is stocked crowds out a book that isn’t stocked. What isn’t that considered book banning too?

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WHY CAN’T WE PAY?: While three of Connecticut’s five U.S. representatives — John Larson, Rosa DeLauro, and Jahana Hayes, all Democrats — voted against the deal by President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to raise the federal debt ceiling, they almost certainly did so by arrangement with the Democratic House leadership and the White House.

That is, the legislation had enough votes so that the three from Connecticut could be spared, allowing the three House members to strike the usual poses in favor of the needy, whose assistance might be slightly reduced by the legislation.

A compelling question remains unanswered. If this assistance is so crucial, why is essentially infinite debt needed to finance it, transferring the cost to future taxpayers and countries that foolishly buy U.S. government bonds?

Why can’t the United States pay its own way in the present and the usual way — with taxes and economizing elsewhere in the government budget?

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

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By Chris Powell

With the adoption of a new state budget this week, cuts in the state’s personal income tax are on the way. “This is not a temporary tax cut,” Governor Lamont says. “It is designed to be sustainable for years to come.”

Permanent  tax cuts? The governor was silly to suggest it. Connecticut may count on the income tax cuts for a year or so, but nothing in government is permanent except taxes and the desire of the government class to raise them.

That the General Assembly’s votes on the budget were overwhelmingly bipartisan, with most members of the Republican minority concurring with the Democratic majority, indicated that the damage the budget does to the productive class is expected to be small. But enthusiasm for the budget is misplaced.

For while the income tax cuts will be highly visible, budgets are adept at raising government’s costs largely out of sight. Even as the budget cuts personal income taxes, it extends for three years the 10% surcharge on the corporate income tax, which was to expire this year. This extension is expected to raise $150 million, offsetting some of revenue losses from the personal income tax cuts.

The corporate income tax surcharge was enacted in 1989 and has been changed, eliminated, and reinstated many times since. There has been nothing permanent about it. Extending the surcharge is always available when state government wants to make a show of cutting taxes elsewhere.

Other legislation may enable state government to force businesses to raise prices, constituting a de-facto tax increase that few people will understand because it is hidden in the cost of living.

The budget raises state spending substantially, estimated at 7% over two years, and will keep the machinery of government operating happily and satisfying most of government’s dependents, except the most exploited — the employees of the nonprofit organizations that do most of government’s social work, people who long have been paid poorly and denied raises.

The budget will spend more in many area, like education, where the new spending — mostly for employee compensation — is as always euphemized as “investment” instead of acknowledged as political patronage.

*

But the budget is not likely to have much effect on Connecticut’s two biggest problems.

The first problem is the collapse of education, as signified by the sharply declining proficiency of students and even the decline in attendance. In debate the other day state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Hartford, noted that only four school districts in the state have student proficiency rates of 80% or higher. Many school districts and nearly all urban districts have proficiency rates below 50%, and proficiency was crashing long before the recent virus epidemic. But state government still affects to believe that merely throwing money at teachers ensures learning, though Connecticut has been doing that without achieving improvement since passing the Education Enhancement Act in 1986.

The second big problem is Connecticut’s worsening poverty. New programs aiming to alleviate poverty are enacted every year and yet living standards in the cities continue to fall. The murders and other violence there, increasingly involving young people, are rising, and there is so much gun crime that cities now have “shot spotter” systems so police can get to crime scenes faster.

City streets have become so anarchic that, under legislation just passed, cities soon may install surveillance systems to issue fines for traffic violations like speeding and running red lights and stop signs. Despite charges that such surveillance systems are racist, even minority-group legislators from the cities supported the legislation, acknowledging that reckless driving is both disproportionately committed by and most dangerous to their own constituents.

*

But it’s not just the cities that are falling apart.

Many areas of the state have seen the brazen street takeovers, more reckless and wrong-way driving, more mental illness, rising homelessness and drug addiction, declining attendance in school, more children with negligent parents, the sawing and theft of catalytic converters, and so forth. People who aren’t state legislators can sense the social disintegration.

Whatever is causing it, state government isn’t asking, and tax cuts won’t stop 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

Fresh out of high school this writer got a newspaper job the old-fashioned way: His parents knew somebody — Neil Ellis, a real-estate developer with an interest in public life and politics. That job wasn’t so great — smelting lead in a furnace and moulding it into bars for linotype machines — but it was just downstairs from the writing part of the business, where the heat of public life was preferable to the heat of the smelter.

As he sold the Journal Inquirer the other day, 56 years after creating it by merging two little weeklies into a daily, Ellis said, “I’m not a newspaperman.” Maybe he’s not one now, though he is still going strong in his 90s. But in one respect he long resembled Orson Welles’ caricature of press baron-to-be William Randolph Hearst — Charles Foster Kane, who declared, “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”

With the crucial help of his wife, Elizabeth, who as publisher kept volatile egos in check and became a saint to the JI’s staff, Neil pretty much did run the paper, providing its critical inspiration and investment.

Neil was why, in the JI’s early days, when a restaurant sued the paper for libel, falsely charging that a review had accused it of selling frozen pizza, the paper rejected the timid advice of its lawyers to retract. For in fact the review had said only that the restaurant’s fare was “reminiscent” of frozen pizza. Eventually the restaurant gave up on trying to intimidate the paper and dropped its lawsuit.

This was a good lesson for an apprentice journalist: Lawyers were often just bullies, and bullies could be faced down.

*

Neil was why the JI used antitrust law to defeat the efforts of the big Hartford daily papers, the Courant and the Times, to kill the upstart by preventing it from obtaining syndicated features.

Neil was why the JI outlasted both the Times and the Manchester Evening Herald, papers with long head starts.

Neil was why, when the JI exposed a South Windsor zoning commissioner in a conflict of interest and she sued for libel, the newspaper also refused to settle and instead won a unanimous decision from the state Supreme Court.

Neil was why, when zillionaire U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon threatened to sue the JI for this columnist’s assertion that her wrestling business involved pornography, the threat could be laughed off, and indeed was laughed at throughout the state.

And Neil was why, when Gov. John G. Rowland’s chief of staff, at the governor’s direction, telephoned the JI’s managing editor to threaten “consequences” for its coverage of the administration’s corruption, one could be confident that the governor indeed had become as corrupt as the paper’s reporting had suggested and that he would be forced out of office.

Yes, it can be fun to run a newspaper — if sometimes more exciting and expensive than might be desired.

*

Some might say, as Franklin Roosevelt said about Winston Churchill, that Neil had a hundred ideas a day and four of them were good. But all were necessary to keep the paper hopping and providing a growing number of towns with what was becoming a rarity — local news.

One of those good ideas was essentially a reiteration of the maxim of the great journalist Elmer Davis: “The first and great commandment is: Don’t let them scare you.”

That is, Neil was why, despite frequent controversy and volatile business conditions, when he owned it the JI was never scared, and why many of its alumni were well prepared for the positions they came to hold at news organizations of national renown.

*

Recalling his switching foreign correspondent jobs in Europe in the 1930s, the journalist turned historian William L. Shirer joked that he had gone “from bad to Hearst.” While the Hearst chain is the JI’s new owner, it has actually improved some of the other eight Connecticut dailies it has acquired and kept going.

May such improvement continue, and may it always be fun to run a newspaper.

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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

Liberal Democrats in the General Assembly are warning that a “budget crisis” will descend on Connecticut in the next year or two because state government has gotten too economical, hamstrung by the state “spending cap” and “fiscal guardrails” imposed in recent years in response to chronic budget deficits.

In the liberal Democratic perspective, all sorts of things — higher education, financial aid to municipal education, transportation, medical care, and so forth — are being neglected even as state government maintains a huge “rainy day fund” and is running a big budget surplus.

But the complaint isn’t true, because state government’s actual financial position remains tens of billions of dollars in deficit. That is, the $3.3 billion in the “rainy day fund” and the budget surplus, lately projected at $3 billion, are just small fractions of state government’s unfunded pension liabilities. With state tax revenue estimates declining as the economy goes into recession, and with the financial markets falling and worsening the unfunded pension liabilities, the prosperity imagined by the liberals may not last the year.

Those who see the “rainy day fund” and the surplus as spare cash are really proposing to run the unfunded pension liabilities back up and extend them over many more years, during which taxpayers not yet born will pay them — pay for services actually delivered to their ancestors. This is state government’s equivalent of the federal government’s ever-growing deficit spending, which repeatedly requires raising the debt ceiling and causes interest payments to consume ever more of government’s revenue.

*

This doesn’t mean that all compelling responsibilities of state government are adequately funded. Instead it means that Connecticut faces, and long has faced, not a “budget crisis” but a lack of the political courage necessary to set better priorities in spending. There is money for the compelling responsibilities, but it’s not in the “rainy day fund” or the budget surplus. It is elsewhere in the budget itself.

The Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf explained it succinctly deep down in his recent report about complaints of a “budget crisis” ahead.

The spending cap, Phaneuf wrote, “tried to keep spending growth in line with the growth in personal income or inflation. But what has happened, historically, is that a few cost drivers — employee wages and benefits, required contributions to public-sector pensions — grow faster than personal income and inflation. Everything else, like social services, health care, and aid to towns, is lucky if it stays flat.”

That is, in Connecticut the compensation of government’s own employees always comes first. State government is primarily a pension and benefit society.

Connecticut’s state government employees have been well paid but last year state government approved a new master union contract promising $700 million in raises over two years. A few weeks ago it approved $50 million in bonuses for state employees.

Meanwhile the poorly paid employees of the nonprofit organizations to which state government delegates much of the care of the frail and disabled have gone on strike because they haven’t gotten raises in 10 years, despite the recent ruinous inflation.

Higher education lately has been pleading poverty while the president of the top-heavy Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system is paid more than $350,000 a year and other administrator salaries exceed $200,000.

Last week the Connecticut Port Authority announced another cost-overrun for the redevelopment of the New London State Pier for offshore wind turbines. This overrun is $47 million, bringing the new estimated total price of the project to more than $300 million, more than three times the original estimate of $93 million.

*

A true liberal in the legislature might question these and other anomalies before complaining of a “budget crisis.” But the General Assembly fails to investigate anything of substance. Most recently it has even delegated to others a study of how to prevent the recent street takeovers, as if ordinary arrests, prosecutions, and imprisonments wouldn’t work, and a study of whether “non-binary” should be added to the gender section of state government forms.

As the maxim goes, to govern is to choose. Governing better requires choosing better.

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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

Having thought itself virtuous for exonerating the residents of the Connecticut colony who were mistaken for witches and hanged 400 years ago, and being confident that a state budget will be devised any day now, the General Assembly turned to another urgent issue: Whether state government forms that require people to identify themselves should provide a gender option apart from male or female: “non-binary.”

State agencies may be directed to study the implications of this and report back.

But at least one legislator, state Rep. Tim Ackert, R-Coventry, saw beyond the political correctness of the proposal, which aims to establish that biology is just an attitude and that mere wishing makes things so. The bigger issue, Ackert recognized, is the relevance, if any, of gender as a point of identification in the first place.

After all, when has any government official demanded to inspect people’s private parts as a condition of their application to get something?

Indeed, thousands of gender impersonators already may have fooled state government on one application form or another.

Gender may be relevant only in adjudicating participation in separate-sex sports competitions, access to single-sex washrooms, and placement in prison.

Indeed, is any study needed here at all? Why not just remove gender from government forms or make gender reporting optional? Apart from sports, toilets, and prison, the best response to the gender dysphoria and sexual neurosis sweeping the country may be good old libertarian indifference.

*

Now that the “sanctuary city” of New York has been overwhelmed with tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and nominal refugees who have crashed into the country under the Biden administration’s policy of open borders, the Democratic Party’s betrayal of the working class is becoming more obvious.

To house migrants, New York City government is reported to be renovating the former Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, steps from Grand Central Station, where rooms used to go for $300 per day. The migrants will reside there for free and soon may get work permits from the federal government.

Democrats and open-borders advocates may not see what this will do to the wage base in the city and especially in Manhattan, but the local working class will see it.

With housing in such a prime location gifted to the migrants by the government — housing worth $300 a day, $2,100 a week, and $9,000 per month — the migrants will be able to afford working for wages far below what the local working class requires as it drags itself back and forth on the bus or subway from the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, or New Jersey. With a lower wage base, the local working class will have to work even harder to pay its own rent. No free housing for them.

Even before the Biden administration opened the borders, the United States had nearly the most liberal immigration policy in the world. Immigration is great when it can be assimilated economically and culturally, but the Biden policy of uncontrolled immigration is essentially treason.

*

WORK MIGHT EDUCATE BEST: To address labor shortages, several states are moving to let children work in more dangerous jobs, to work longer hours on school nights, and even to work in bars. While at first this seems appallingly retrograde, it might not be.

For as American education has sunk under the weight of social promotion, most students — even most in Connecticut — now fail in school, performing far below grade level. They know that to advance from grade to grade and get a high school diploma, they needn’t learn anything or even come to school at all.

When formal education becomes mere pretense like this, children might learn more by going directly to the workplace. Some might end up apprenticing in jobs that can lead to decent careers. Even those who didn’t and got stuck in menial work for the long term might learn the value of the formal education they and their parents (if they had parents) didn’t take seriously, education meant to lead beyond menial work.

If they were lucky, when menial work wore them out and impoverished them, adult education would still be available.

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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

As street riots recently exploded around the state, shockingly beyond the ability or willingness of police to suppress them, the General Assembly began enacting Governor Lamont’s new gun control legislation, which is more likely to impede the law-abiding from protecting themselves than to impede rioters and other criminals.

Among its oblivious provisions, the legislation would prohibit the open carrying of guns, as if criminals don’t already conceal their weapons when they set out to do harm. The legislation also would require owners of “ghost guns” — homemade guns without identification numbers — to register them with the state police, as if the point of a “ghost gun” isn’t to avoid tracing. (The state police won’t have to add clerical staff to handle “ghost gun” registrations. It will be surprising if they get even one.)

The legislation will establish special gun crime dockets in courts in the violence-wracked cities, which sounds like a good idea but won’t necessarily mean any more actual resources for prosecuting gun crime charges, 80% of which, House Republican minority leader Vincent Candelora noted in debate, are routinely plea-bargained away, indicating state government’s lack of seriousness about gun crime. But at least the gun crime dockets may help journalists keep track of the plea bargaining.

People would be forbidden from buying more than three guns per month, as if three can’t do plenty of damage.

People convicted of domestic violence would be denied gun permits, as if lack of a permit will deter anyone determined to murder his former love. Domestic abusers can be deterred only by prompt prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment, but state government isn’t prepared to appropriate for that. Instead state government offers victims of domestic abuse only court protective orders. Many murdered women have discovered that such orders are no protection at all.

As for the street riots, the legislature seems about to create a committee to study the problem, as if the social disintegration manifesting itself everywhere doesn’t imply government’s rather comprehensive failure and society’s unwillingness to defend itself and enforce standards of behavior, and as if the offenders themselves haven’t noticed this, as elected officials boast about reducing the prison population while repeat offenders run rampant.

The unwillingness to enforce behavioral standards, especially with young people, may have something to do with Connecticut’s difficulty in recruiting and keeping police officers and teachers. Teachers and police get the closest look at social disintegration. Connecticut’s elected officials don’t dare to examine it, much less confront it.

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While state legislators were evading the sensational failure of law enforcement amid the street riots, just as they long have been evading the collapse of public education, they did produce a solution in search of a problem — a grand new voting rights law, pompously named for the late Georgia civil rights leader and U.S. representative, John R. Lewis.

The legislation would require municipalities with a record of discrimination against voters on racial or other grounds to get permission from the secretary of the state or a court before changing their election policies.

But no such discrimination in Connecticut’s elections was identified, and if any ever was, anyone aggrieved would be able, quite without the legislation, to demand and obtain redress from the secretary or a court anyway. The legislation will accomplish nothing except make its supporters feel righteous.

Connecticut does have occasional election problems, but mainly in its cities, whose populations are largely from racial minorities that are amply represented in city government, and these problems — incompetent administration — abuse everyone, regardless of race, as by making voters wait too long in line.

The practical discrimination faced by racial minorities in Connecticut has nothing to do with elections and little to do with race itself. It is indirect, mainly a matter of housing accessibility and poverty. The money of members of racial minorities is as green as anyone else’s and if they have enough they can live wherever they want, since money talks. But amid the failure of welfare policy and the success of exclusive zoning, poverty still walks.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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