Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Presumably Connecticut U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro agrees with the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

But ordinary people observing DeLauro’s performance in Congress a few days ago might not be so persuaded.

DeLauro was ridiculed for vigorously endorsing the U.S. Transportation Department’s plan to spend millions of dollars developing and testing “female” crash test dummies for auto safety research. Some people wondered: What’s next in the name of “diversity”?

But there is some science to the plan, since women long have been more seriously injured in car crashes than men, even discounting for the tendency of women to drive smaller cars. The disproportionate injuries involve the generally smaller and less muscular stature of women. 

It’s not clear exactly how auto design might be modified to compensate for this. While different kinds of seats, seatbelts, and air bags for men and women passengers seem impractical, research might suggest changes that would save lives.

But even as DeLauro was acknowledging the profoundly different physical characteristics of men and women, she was joining all other Democrats in the House of Representatives in voting against what was titled the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would amend federal civil rights law to forbid men who pretend to be women from participating in women’s sports.

That is, according to DeLauro, men and women are profoundly different physically when it comes to auto safety but absolutely the same in sports, and Title IX of federal civil rights law, which was enacted to guarantee equal opportunity for women in sports, should be nullified whenever a male with gender dysphoria comes along.

*

The issue of whether men who impersonate women should be allowed to compel others to pretend along with them does not seem to have been put to Fitzgerald. But if he was still around today, his readers might be entitled to ask him whether holding two opposed ideas at the same time is, instead of the test of a first-rate intelligence, the mark of ordinary political hypocrisy, in which even the least intelligent officeholders abound.

Eventually this hypocrisy is going to catch up with the Democratic Party, which lately is posturing not just as the party of women’s equality but also as the party of pretending that the gender differences that prompted enactment of Title IX in 1972 have somehow disappeared and that even the sexual privacy humanity has prized since indoor plumbing was invented should be prohibited.

The party’s posture in this respect arises from its increasing domination by the political left, which is now more illiberal than liberal in important respects. This illiberality thrives in part because women in the party are afraid not to play along with the liberal emperor’s new clothes. 

But people generally may not be so easily intimidated. Even people who have never read Fitzgerald can discern nonsense.

*

DeLauro isn’t Connecticut’s only politician to be treating dishonestly with transgenderism. Last month U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, formerly the state education commissioner, dissembled mightily in congressional testimony on his department’s plan to nullify Title IX by regulation and thereby end protection for equal opportunity in women’s sports.

U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Georgia, repeatedly asked Cardona to provide the Education Department’s definition of a woman, which would be crucial to enforcement of a new regulation. Cardona repeatedly refused to answer.

Instead, Cardona said: “I lead the Department of Education, and my job is to make sure that all students have access to public education, which includes co-curricular activities.”

But preserving gender-separate sports would not deprive anyone of opportunity. It would just require people with gender dysphoria to participate with their biological gender.

The Education Department’s press office even refused to confirm the accuracy of news reports quoting the secretary. The government can advance transgenderism only through euphemism and evasion.

—–

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

-END-

By Chris Powell

Despite the complaints on the political left, amplified by politically slanted journalism, no books are being “banned” in public schools or public libraries in Connecticut or anywhere else in the country.

Rather, books stocked in libraries, especially school libraries, increasingly are being challenged by people who find sexually graphic content inappropriate for children.

Age-appropriateness will always be a matter of judgment and community standards, and while they don’t like it, public libraries and public schools are obliged to answer to the public for their judgment and standards.

The arrogance of public schools in the face of this obligation is frequent and sometimes comic, as when people attending school board meetings are ordered to stop speaking — censored — when they read aloud graphic passages from books in school libraries.

The president of the Connecticut Library Association, Douglas Lord, is appalled by the increase in challenges to public and school library books. He says when he became a librarian 30 years ago there were no challenges.

But then 30 years ago government and public education were not doing as many sneaky things with children as they do today.

After all, why should parents trust a state government that, like Connecticut’s, strives to prevent them from learning that their minor children are getting abortions or, in school, undergoing sex-change therapy?

Why should parents trust schools that, like Enfield’s, strive to conceal aspects of their sex-education curriculum?

Why should parents trust schools that, as indicated by the scandal in Greenwich last year, seek to hire only teachers who are politically liberal, the better to politically indoctrinate their students?

Why should parents trust schools whose teachers are almost all members of far-left political groups like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers?

When most teachers are members of such organizations it can be no surprise that teachers spontaneously propagandize students about transgenderism and racism, quite without relevance to the curriculum supposedly being taught, as was exposed in Southington last year.

Of course resentment of ordinary democratic accountability does not vindicate any particular challenge to a library book. Some challenges may be nutty, like those to Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” which, in confronting and undermining racism, uses a racial epithet. But even with “Huckleberry Finn” there may be a fair question of age-appropriateness, and public library and school administrators are obliged to answer for themselves even to the crazies without resorting to demagoguery about “banned” books.

For since library space is finite even as the supply of books is virtually infinite, no book has ever gotten into a public or school library or curriculum without simultaneously excluding another one.

If not stocking a book or replacing it is “banning,” librarians themselves are the worst book banners even as they often seem to suppose, like school administrators, that their judgment is never to be questioned.

Meanwhile any supposedly banned book is always available via the internet or a bookstore, and the more criticism of a school library book, the more children may seek it out.

The “banned” books controversy is not just a fraud; it also raises a spectacular irony. For even as the political left, led by educators, clamors against the imaginary campaign to ban books, the left itself is campaigning in Connecticut and throughout the country against freedom of expression, especially in academia itself.

Practically every day brings another incident at one institution of higher education or another of censorship against non-left speakers or academics.

The public librarians and political leaders who are so agitated about mere challenges to books are largely indifferent to the censorship and “de-platforming” being committed elsewhere on the political left. To the left in Connecticut, an objection to a library book in Westport is a scandal, while the swarming and chanting that recently prevented the showing of a politically incorrect movie at Central Connecticut State University passed without the left’s criticism or even notice.

—–

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

-END-

By CHRIS POWELL

Elected officials long have been telling Connecticut that its schools are the best in the country. But they seldom produce evidence for the claim, maybe because the most that can be produced is that the grade-level proficiency of Connecticut’s students is not falling quite as fast as that of students in other states.

Meanwhile reports from the front lines of public education around the state keep contradicting the assurances from the state Capitol.

Many months of clamor in Killingly have claimed that high school students there are drowning in mental illness and urgently need a school clinic for psychological treatment.

School officials in Manchester admit that fights among students, vandalism, and vaping at the town’s high school have prompted the closing of many school bathrooms.

In January a student at Manchester High School was caught with a loaded pistol.

In February a student at Manchester’s Bennet Academy, a middle school, pushed an assistant principal from behind, causing serious injury.

Longtime Manchester residents say mayhem, bullying, and other disruptions in the town’s schools have never been worse than they are now.

School administrators say they’re doing something about it, but whatever they’re doing isn’t clear.

The other day teachers in Middletown complained to their school board that their working conditions are horrible amid constant abuse and disrespect from students. A history teacher and school coach told the board: “Never in my career have I had so many staff members come into my room, close the door, and openly cry for the way they’re being treated throughout the school day.”

This sort of stuff long has been largely confined to city schools. Now it is a problem in suburban schools as well.

*

Something big and bad is happening in schools throughout Connecticut but school officials aren’t leveling with the public about it or doing much about it — maybe because they don’t think they can, especially since Connecticut policy long has been to try to keep even the most disruptive students in school, no matter the cost to others.

The increasing desire for charter schools in Connecticut is causing more resentment among school administrators and teacher union members, who say charters are gaining popularity because the regular public schools are so underfunded. But Connecticut has been spending substantially more on public education for 40 years and charter schools are typically no better funded than the regular schools.

*

No, the popularity of charters and “magnet” schools is largely a matter of the desire for escape from the unparented and disadvantaged students in the regular schools, the very situation that for half a century has been driving the middle class out of the cities and into the suburbs — the desire to get away from the pathologies of poverty engendered by welfare policy.

Public schools are not the primary cause of social disintegration. Mainly schools play the hands they are dealt. They can’t control the demographics of their districts and seldom can choose their students. But no one except police officers gets as good a look at social disintegration as teachers and school administrators do.

Connecticut needs brutal candor from them, not more of their complicity with those elected officials who boast that the state’s schools are the best in the nation, since being best in the nation is no longer even close to being the best in the world.

If, as the reports from the front suggest, the big problem with the state’s schools is the kind of students being sent to them, the people running the schools should summon the courage to declare it.

* * *

NATO IS MADNESS: Without much notice in the United States, the other day Finland was admitted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, thus imposing on this country a fifth commitment to fight a war on Russia’s border, on top of commitments to Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.

These allies contribute little to the security of the United States even as NATO expansion to Russia’s borders has been a gross provocation and U.S. forces aren’t big enough for any conventional war with Russia in Europe. Fulfilling such commitments would quickly require the United States to use nuclear weapons. This is madness.

—–

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

-END-

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont beat up the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system pretty good the other day, but not good enough.

The college system’s president, Terrence Cheng, had called a press conference, ordered other system executives to join him, and then denounced the governor’s proposed budget for the system, contending that it is so stingy as to require hundreds of layoffs and big tuition increases. 

Through his budget director, Jeffrey Beckham, the governor replied by leveling against the college system the same charge he has leveled against the University of Connecticut — that the system had misconstrued its emergency financing during the virus epidemic as permanent and should start economizing in light of the system’s steadily declining enrollment, 36% down in the community colleges and 21% down in the universities.

Beckham should have added something about the extravagant executive salaries in the college system. After all, while Cheng was pleading poverty, he still was collecting an annual salary of more than $350,000 and not volunteering to take a pay cut to make attending college more affordable for the students he was bleating about. The three college system executives whose mismanagement recently cost it $750,000 in damages in a sex discrimination case are themselves still getting paid between $228,000 and $256,000 annually — and the system is still refusing to explain the case, in which it fired the chief executive officer of Manchester Community College only to reinstate her quickly with that lovely damage award when she sued.

The college system claims that it doesn’t need to explain a personnel matter that has been settled — as if the cost of settling it might not still be resented by taxpayers, along with the extravagant salaries of the executives responsible for the disaster.

And if economizing amid declining enrollment in the college system will require layoffs, so what? Private-sector companies are always restructuring amid financial and performance setbacks. Except for the political influence of their unions, why should the state’s higher-education employees be exempt? Why should the higher-education payroll be inviolable, starting with the salary of Cheng himself?

The governor’s budget director omitted something else important. For as good as it was for the governor to clamor for economy in government, and especially in the smug and pompous empire of higher education, and for him to criticize its administrators so sharply, the governor himself is largely responsible for the problem. For he appoints nine of the 15 members of the college system’s Board of Regents. If the board is appointing and coddling ineffective managers, it is only because the governor appointed most members of the board.

If the governor really wants to make an impression about his desire for greater efficiency in higher education, he could start replacing board members. They are not members of a politically influential union — at least not yet.

* * * 

BEARS MOCK LEGISLATORS: Connecticut’s bears seem to know that under the pressure of animal-rights fanatics, the General Assembly lacks the political courage to protect the state against the roly-poly invaders.

Soon after a legislative committee refused to report out a bill to establish a bear-hunting season, more bears went on a rampage.

In April a bear twice broke into a farmhouse in Salisbury in search of food, the second time after state environmental police set a trap for it, which the bear ignored. The officers euthanized it.

A few days later a bear attacked a woman walking her dog in Avon. That’ll teach her.

The incident in Salisbury again disproved the claim of the bear apologists that the animals cause trouble only because people discard so much food outdoors and fill bird feeders. But the bear in Salisbury would not have invited himself inside if there was so much food outside. The real problem now is that there are more bears in the state — a population estimated at 1,200 — than can survive on food available outside.

The essential question here remains: How many bears does each town want? The bears won’t be asking.

——

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

-END- 

By Chris Powell

While they quickly approved bonuses for state government employees the other day, Governor Lamont and the General Assembly may require much more time to decide whether and how to finance the “baby bonds” program that was enacted two years ago.

The program would have the state treasurer invest $3,200 of state government money in trust for each child born into poverty in the state — that is, children covered by the state’s Medicaid medical insurance program. There are about 15,000 such births annually. It is estimated that each account would be worth more than $11,000 when the children would qualify for custody of the money at age 18, whereupon they could use it for higher education, buying a home, or investing in a business.

The program authorizes the treasurer to borrow $50 million a year for 12 years to finance the bonds, but it was modified last year, at the governor’s request, so that the bonding requires the approval of the state Bond Commission, which the governor controls. While he signed the original legislation, the governor now doesn’t support raising the “baby bonds” money by bonding. After all, state government is already so heavily indebted not just by past bonding but also by unfunded pension obligations.

It’s a fair concern. Thus the governor suggests that if the “baby bonds” program is as important as its advocates believe, it should be financed by a regular appropriation in the present, not by debt to be repaid by the taxpayers of the future.

But finding money in government in the present is much harder than assigning it to be found by future governors and legislators, which is why bonding always has been so popular. In a perfect coincidence that should be embarrassing to legislators who support “baby bonds,” the $50 million they need to begin the program is the same amount they just found so easily for the state employee bonuses.

Especially for the liberals who control the legislature’s Democratic caucus, placating the politically influential state employee unions is far more important than eliminating child poverty.

In any case a “baby bonds” program is unlikely to do much about child poverty. For the poverty that most entraps children for life is about far more than a little cash. It is mainly about upbringing.

Giving a poor child $11,000 or even $24,000 when he turns 18 will not make him any more educated, skilled, and able to earn his way in the world. For most impoverished young people come out of high school socially promoted, uneducated, unskilled, unprepared for the higher education for which their “baby bond” money might be used, and ignorant of money management. Many are wounded psychologically from their dysfunctional home life. Some are already in trouble with the law.

But it is just like government to throw money at a problem, creating a bureaucracy of political flunkies in the process, when throwing money isn’t the solution, just a way for elected officials to look virtuous while strengthening their machine.

“Baby bonds” are untested, and in Connecticut alone a “baby bonds” program would spend hundreds of millions of dollars over many years before producing evidence of effectiveness.

Meanwhile nearly everyone already knows what most improves a child’s chances in life: an intact and stable family with two devoted parents who know the necessity of education and work. The children of such families long have been overcoming poverty quite without “baby bonds.”

By contrast most of Connecticut’s poorest children live in single-parent households with a mother who is herself overwhelmed, uneducated, unskilled, demoralized, and dependent on welfare, and who also may have a drug problem.

That’s why Connecticut has spent so much on its Department of Children and Families for so long without ever solving the child poverty problem. Of course, thanks to heroic social workers, there are some successes, but the supply of abused and neglected children in the state is always amply replenished and growing.

“Baby bonds” are really just an admission by the government that the most sensible responses to child poverty are politically impossible. Thus “baby bonds” will constitute still another official accommodation of child neglect, maybe the most expensive one yet.

—–

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

-END-

By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone in Connecticut knows that the first rule of employment with state government is that no one can be fired. State government itself should know this most of all.

Nearly everyone in Connecticut also knows that the state and federal constitutions confer freedom of expression to people in their personal lives. State government also should know this better than anyone else.

So what explains the case of state correctional officer Anthony Marlak, who was fired in 2021 and in February was reinstated with back pay on the order of a labor arbiter? Predictably enough, the arbiter decided that Marlak’s dismissal was excessive and replaced it with a suspension of just 25 days.

The case seems to be another one of political correctness that took offense at something posted at the social media internet site Facebook.

In 2017 Marlak posted at Facebook an image of five Middle Eastern-looking men being hanged. The image had a caption that is disputed, since the post is no longer available. It was either “Islamic wind chimes” or “ISIS wind chimes.”

Four years later the Connecticut Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations called for Marlak to be fired for the post. The Correction Department duly obliged, telling him in a termination letter that “the type of speech posted threatens the safety of staff and inmates who are Muslim.”

The department’s claim was ridiculous. While the image and caption might be construed as politically offensive, they did not threaten anyone. The image and caption just as easily might have been construed as political comment on the division in Islam between the peaceful, tolerant faction and the theocratic fascist faction.

But making distinctions and defending freedom of expression are losing propositions in politics and government these days. Taking offense trumps everything when it can be followed up with charges of “hate” and “discrimination.” So Marlak was fired and appealed.

While finding that the state did not prove its claim that Marlak had disparaged Islam, the arbiter was no particular friend of free expression. He wrote: “This right is not an absolute and must be balanced with the employer’s ability to run an efficient and effective entity.”

Despite finding that the state did not prove its case against Marlak, the arbiter punished him with a 25-day suspension anyway — typical of the racket that is state labor arbitration, making the employee give back a month of what will turn out to be a two-year paid vacation. The back pay owed to Marlak is estimated at $170,000.

There is a better way of managing this. Conduct the arbitration of employee discipline before imposition of the penalty. Or would state employees resent losing their shot at extra-long paid vacations?

* * *

PARDON TRUMP?: Writing in the Hartford Courant, Rafaele Fierro, a professor of history and government at Tunxis Community College in Farmington, offers what might seem like a great idea for restoring civility to politics.

Fierro would have President Biden issue former President Donald Trump a pardon for all violations of federal criminal law he may have committed, just as President Gerald Ford pardoned former President Richard Nixon to push the country past the bitterness arising from the Watergate scandal. A pardon might make Biden seem statesmanlike and benign.

Of course most fellow Democrats might freak out, afflicted, as they are, with Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is causing them to fantasize about many criminal prosecutions of Trump far more serious than the one just launched by the Manhattan district attorney involving hush-money payments to a pornography actress. Many Democrats seem to be as determined to put Trump behind bars as many Democrats were determined to put Nixon behind bars almost 50 years ago.

But such a pardon might cause Trump himself to freak out even more. In some respects he has been persecuted ever since taking office, but now he seems to enjoy railing against the persecution and using it to regain his leadership of the Republican Party. So he well might refuse the pardon and challenge Democrats to come get him.

It all could make politics irrelevant to the serious challenges facing the nation.

—–

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

-END-

By Chris Powell

Connecticut state legislators don’t want to know — or don’t want to be seen to know — that public education has been collapsing for many years.

They don’t want to know that poverty policy is creating as much poverty as it alleviates. They don’t want to know that awarding lucrative licenses for casinos and marijuana retailing on the basis of ethnicity just enriches special interests instead of advancing social justice.

They don’t want to know that the state’s prison population is down because repeat offenders keep being released.

But thanks to the General Assembly’s Public Health Committee and particularly to its Senate chairman, Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, and the Connecticut chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, legislators have just admitted that they don’t want to know about the rape of children.

The admission came in the committee’s refusal to advance legislation that would have required notification of a minor child’s parents when she seeks an abortion, legislation in force in most states. Abortions for minors often involve a felony — rape or statutory rape — and the perpetrator is sometimes a member of the raped child’s family.

The ACLU says parental notification might “exacerbate an already volatile or dysfunctional family situation.”

Anwar elaborated to the Connecticut Mirror: “Unfortunately, there are situations where family members are involved in harming, raping, and making somebody pregnant. That’s why it’s important to not require that” — parental notification. “It may threaten someone’s well-being.”

As if someone’s well-being has not already been far more than threatened and will not continue to be more than threatened if authorities don’t intervene.

There is spectacular irony here. Connecticut law designates certain professionals as “mandated reporters,” people who are required to report to child-protection authorities their knowledge or suspicion of child abuse and are subject to prosecution if they fail. Medical doctors are among these “mandated reporters,” and Anwar himself is a medical doctor.

And yet, on behalf of his committee, Anwar has just proclaimed that it’s better if the authorities don’t know when children have become pregnant from rape, because it might mess up life in a family where life is already as messed up as it could be.

Such abused children, Anwar and most of his committee’s members think, are best left to their abusers. Most of their colleagues in the legislature probably agree.

This raises the question of whether Anwar would obey his obligation under the mandated reporter law. But since he and so many of his colleagues don’t believe in that law, they should move to repeal it and drop the pretense about caring for children.

* * *

NO LICENSE FOR GANIM: A state Judicial Department committee on lawyer qualifications opposes by 3-2 Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim’s request for restoration of his license to practice law, which he lost after his conviction in 2003 on 16 federal charges arising from his corruption during his first stint as mayor.

The issue now will be sent to a committee of judges and may hinge on whether Ganim’s rehabilitation outweighs the disgrace he brought to the city, the state, and the legal profession.

Since he was re-elected as mayor after serving seven years in prison, Ganim’s corruption doesn’t seem to have bothered Bridgeport’s voters much, but then nothing seems to bother the city much — not the worsening crime, the educational failure, nor even the corruption of Ganim’s current administration, as indicated by the rigging of the examination for police chief so a longtime friend of the mayor would get the job.

But Connecticut is entitled to set standards higher than Bridgeport’s, and the Judicial Department should do so by rejecting Ganim’s application to practice law again.

Full forgiveness might be appropriate for an ordinary former offender who had rehabilitated himself, studied, and applied for a law license.

But since he was already a lawyer when he committed his crimes, Ganim doubly should have known better because of his obligations to both his office and the legal profession.

The shame of his misconduct during his first term in office is enough for a lifetime.

—–

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

By Chris Powell

Chicago has just thrown out an incompetent, arrogant, and far-left Democratic mayor who presided over an explosion of crime and the collapse of the city’s schools, only to elect a mayor pledged to even more extreme leftism with higher taxes and lower educational standards. The new mayor is a former lobbyist for the teachers union.

It’s as if Chicago voters thought the city’s decline has been a matter of mere personalities rather than policies too.

State government in Illinois, also under Democratic administration, is in no better shape itself, scaring business and residents away with backbreaking taxes and overwhelming government employee pension obligations — kind of like Connecticut.

Chicago and Illinois show the future of cities and states that cannot put the government employee unions back into a subordinate position and put the public interest ahead of the special interest.

It can be done, or at least it could be done 45 years ago when Ed Koch, then a U.S. representative, ran for mayor of New York City as what he called “a Democrat with sanity.” The city was falling apart amid crime, incompetence, corruption, and failing schools while being cannibalized by the city employee unions.

As the other candidates for the Democratic mayoral nomination ran to the left, Koch ran to the right, toward the center. Several of his 1977 mayoral campaign’s television commercials are archived on the internet, and today they are stunning for their candor and detail and relevance to the circumstances in which Chicago, Illinois, and Connecticut find themselves.

In one commercial Koch said: “The Board of Education spends almost $3 billion of our money but we don’t control how it’s spent. All we know is that we graduate children from high school who read at the 8th-grade level. We pay teachers $26,000 in salary and benefits to work 161 days a year, and the Board of Education wastes millions of dollars. The next mayor of New York must get control of the money spent in our school system and he must set higher standards for our students and teachers.”

In another commercial Koch challenged the city police department: “We pay the average police officer $30,000 a year in salary and benefits to protect us. But of 25,000 police in the city, only 1,500 patrol the streets on an average shift. More cops than that call in sick every day. Obviously we need more police on the streets and we can do it without spending more money — by better use of the police force we already have. That may mean taking on the police bureaucracy and the PBA [Police Benevolent Association]. But that’s what a mayor has to do.”

A third Koch commercial struck the most powerful blow: “My record in Congress is strongly pro-labor but our municipal unions consider me anti-union. They don’t like the fact that I want city employees to live in the city, that I want educators to account to the mayor for schools that don’t teach, and that I don’t want patrolmen to get two days off with pay for donating a pint of blood. There’s no point in getting angry at [teacher union leader] Al Shanker or [New York City AFSCME President] Vic Gotbaum. They’re doing the jobs they were elected to do. It’s time we had a tough bargainer on our side of the table.”

Running on this platform Koch unexpectedly won the 1977 New York Democratic mayoral primary and the election and then won re-election twice with more than 75% of the vote.

It would be nice if state government in Connecticut had a “tough bargainer” for the public interest. But under Governor Lamont state government remains mainly a pension and benefit society pretending to be proud of schools whose student proficiency has been crashing for many years and cities that are drowning in poverty, shootings, and unsolved murders.

Can any Democrat in Connecticut tell people the truth about anything that matters? If not, can any Republican?

—–

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

-END-

By Chris Powell

While former President Donald Trump long has been mainly a grifter, his indictment by the district attorney for Manhattan is not justified by the cant coming from Democrats in Connecticut and around the country: the cant that “no one is above the law.”

To the contrary, criminal prosecution is almost always largely a matter of prosecutorial discretion.

The Manhattan district attorney himself, who ran for office pledging to prosecute Trump for something, anything, and has now charged the former president with 34 felonies, has been routinely reducing felony charges to misdemeanors for offenders who are not named Trump.

Federal and other state prosecutors declined to press against Trump charges like those now being pressed in Manhattan because those other prosecutors considered the evidence too weak.

Bill and Hillary Clinton both broke criminal law while in office but received prosecutorial discretion, both being considered above the law.

Connecticut is full of prosecutorial discretion. The state long has put illegal immigrants above the law, facilitating their breaking of federal immigration law and obstructing its enforcement by federal agents. Lately Connecticut also has been putting marijuana users and sellers above the law, pretending that federal drug law — which, rightly or wrongly, continues to criminalize the drug — is nullified by the state law that actually has put state government itself into the marijuana retail licensing business.

Indeed, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has formally stated that President Biden’s Justice Department has decided that enforcing federal marijuana law in states that don’t want it enforced would not be a good use of the department’s resources — still more prosecutorial discretion that puts people above the law. So much for the Constitution’s command that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Connecticut’s law against murder does not seem to be enforced in New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford as well as it is in Woodbridge, Easton, and Avon. About 80% of the murders in the last several years in New Haven remain unsolved. There is plenty of discretion as to where the state allocates its police resources.

Sometimes prosecutorial discretion may serve a more cosmic form of justice. Sometimes prosecutorial discretion is political opportunism. But someone everywhere is [ITALICS] always [END ITALICS] above the law.

*

Just as its men’s basketball team was winning the national college championship and putting the University of Connecticut in the spotlight across the country, dozens of students rioted on the campus at Storrs, pulling down lampposts, breaking windows, and starting fires, discrediting the university at what should have been its most glorious moment in years. Fourteen people, most of them students, were arrested, and 16 others were injured badly enough by the mayhem to be hospitalized.

The university’s admissions department has a lot to answer for. How do such thugs get into something that calls itself higher education?

Of course the thugs have even more to answer for than the admissions department does. Having been arrested, some may actually be prosecuted, though most criminal charges in Connecticut these days are so heavily discounted in court that the law has lost deterrence. Most of the young rioters probably will be penalized in court with nothing more than probation.

The university promises its own vigorous internal discipline of the rioters, including possible expulsion. UConn should regularly update the public about that process — to reassure the public and deter any other thugs on campus. The basketball team, its coaching staff, its fans, and everyone else in Connecticut deserved far better, and the state needs to be shown that, at least at UConn, nobody is above the law.

*

A reader offers what might strike most people as a good idea: that each criminal court in the state should issue a weekly report of cases concluded and their outcomes, and that newspapers should publish the reports. But it won’t happen because the General Assembly, with a far-left political majority obliged by Governor Lamont, lately has been ordering the erasure of criminal records.

Most legislators and the governor think the public knows [ITALICS] too much [END ITALICS] about criminal justice.

---

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

-END-

By Chris Powell

What’s the big deal about the federal debt ceiling? The controversy in Washington suggests that the federal government won’t be able to spend as much money if it can’t keep borrowing to do so.

That’s nonsense. Quite without incurring more debt the federal government has plenty of access to money.

For the government can simply [ITALICS] create [END ITALICS] money, instructing the Federal Reserve to create it electronically, in whatever amounts the government wants, and deposit it in government bank accounts, whereby the government can spend it however it wants. The Treasury Department can be authorized to print infinite amounts of paper currency and mint infinite amounts of coinage.

The government also could get plenty of money through higher taxes or through not spending as much. In recent years federal spending has exploded without the imposition of any tax increases — so much so that during this time members of Congress and presidents have proposed all sorts of additional spending without giving a thought as to where the money is to come from, nor without a thought as to where the production of real goods and services to underwrite the money creation is to come from.

The government might create a lot of money through the infamous mechanism of minting a platinum coin with a face value of any fantastic amount — like a trillion dollars — and then depositing it with the Federal Reserve and instructing the central bank to create and distribute an equal amount of dollars.

Such a mechanism could be used to [ITALICS] eliminate [END ITALICS] the federal debt — problem solved.

In their recent endeavors to spend ever more money than is backed by the economy’s production, members of Congress and presidents have been emboldened by the failure of the public to wonder what causes inflation, the devaluation of their money. For inflation is the main danger with money creation, and the country and the world are already suffering an inflationary disaster.

This disaster is largely of this country’s making, since the United States long has enjoyed what a French finance minister called the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the world reserve currency, the dollar — the privilege of paying the country’s debts in its own currency, currency it can create for free while the rest of the world has had to do real work to produce and sell real goods and services to earn the dollars needed to participate in international trade.

On top of this, the dollar’s reserve status has long induced other countries to store their hard-earned dollar surpluses in U.S. Treasury bonds and other U.S. government debt, which additionally helps the United States live far beyond what its earns from its own economic production.

That’s really what the debt ceiling controversy is about. If the United States can’t keep borrowing more from the rest of the world — money that will never really be repaid, since the debt keeps growing and is used to repay earlier debt — the country will have to start living within its means. Or else the government will have to create so much more money that inflation will increase many times more than the current official and already much underestimated rate of 6%.

Other countries increasingly perceive how they are being exploited by the current financial practices — how the supposedly richest country is living at the expense of most other countries, including the poorest.

Many of these other countries are reducing their purchase of U.S. government debt, trading less in dollars and more in their own currencies, and, it appears from gold purchases by their central banks, preparing to switch back to gold as the reserve currency or as a large component of a new reserve currency, a reserve currency controlled by no single nation.

The concern in Washington isn’t really about the chance that the United States will default on its debt. The debt already is being defaulted upon through inflation and through its steady increase during which interest on the debt is being paid by more debt.

The concern in Washington is really about the possibility that the country might have to start paying for itself and making financial choices few in politics are prepared to make.

—–

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

-END-