Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Connecticut U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, has picked up the politically correct mantra that racism is a “public health crisis” in the United States. She has joined U.S. Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-California, in introducing a resolution that would have the House of Representatives declare that the country’s public health system is full of “systemic practices and policies that perpetuate racism” and would pledge the federal government to get rid of them.

Of course the resolution will accomplish nothing. It is mere leftist posturing to keep the country on the defensive politically in the face of any racial or ethnic grievance. Indeed, while the resolution enumerates many of the racist wrongs of history, it fails to identify any current racist public health policies and practices in government.

While the resolution makes complaints of underfunding, of course nearly everyone getting money from the government claims to be underfunded, including Ukraine, which lately has received from the United States billions of dollars that, quite without objection from Hayes and Cardenas, are not being used to drive racism out of this country’s public health system.

No one denies that the United States has many racial disparities. But public health is only one of them, and as the enumerations in the Hayes-Cardenas resolution suggest, these disparities are rooted not in current policies and practices but past ones. These past policies and practices are partly but not entirely responsible for the racial disproportions in poverty, and today it is poverty rather than racism that most needs to be overcome.

While government has many programs supposedly meant to reduce poverty, poverty seems to be worsening. Today in Connecticut there is more clamor than ever that one group or another can’t make it financially and needs more money from government, even as Ukraine seems to be first in line. This month’s “community well-being” reports from the Regional Data Cooperative for Greater New Haven, better known as Data Haven, indicate that Connecticut is increasingly divided between people doing well or well enough financially and people who are just scraping by or not getting by at all — that is, the reports show serious income inequality along with the usual racial disparities. They also show that many whites are impoverished too.

If racism was really the underlying problem with poverty, most members of racial minorities, instead of many, would be impoverished, and few instead of many whites would be impoverished.

Similarly, if racism was really the underlying problem, government, business, higher education, and society generally would not be permeated with hiring, advancement, and other policies favoring minorities.

The failure of poverty policy should induce elected officials to knock off the demagogic posturing and get real, to stop railing against something that nearly everyone has been against for decades and to examine critically what hasn’t been working for decades.

Hayes especially — formerly a single teen-age mother, a resident of run-down government housing, a teacher in Waterbury, and national teacher of the year — should ask how minority kids are helped by a welfare system that deprives most of them of fathers and then advances them through school and gives them diplomas without ever requiring them to learn anything, whereupon so many of them enter adulthood uneducated, unskilled, and qualified only for menial work.

Those policies are far more racist and destructive than anything in Hayes’ empty resolution.

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MORE ON EARLY VOTING: Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas, whose recommendations for early-voting legislation were reviewed in this column recently, has clarified and elaborated on the early-voting statement she gave to the General Assembly’s Government Administration and Elections Committee on Feb. 22.

Thomas recommends 10 days of early voting before an election, starting with the second Friday before the election and ending on the Sunday before the election. She does not recommend starting on the second Saturday before the election and continuing through the Monday before the election, as her statement implied.

Thomas also recommends that the voter check-off sheets maintained by poll workers should be made public at the end of each day of early voting.

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

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By Chris Powell

Before voting on the huge increase in appropriations being sought by the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, state legislators should watch the video taken of the dozens of students and their friends who on March 2 invaded the Student Center at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain to prevent the showing of a film most probably had not seen.

The film, “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of Black Lives Matter,” was to be shown by the Central chapter of Turning Point USA, a conservative group. But the protesters commandeered the stage and chanted slogans, took seats and shouted interruptions, and even after being persuaded to leave by a university official, made so much noise outside the hall that the film had to be canceled.

The protesters called Turning Point USA a hate group even as their own misconduct dripped with hate for freedom of expression. They chanted “This is what democracy looks like” as they committed fascism.

A protesting student interviewed by the Hartford Courant called the film “triggering,” yet, by attending the event, she had sought to be “triggered.” Indeed, the protesters outnumbered the people who came to see the film, and the protest brought far more attention to the film than the event’s organizers achieved by themselves.

This fascism from the political left is now typical of higher education throughout the country and it increasingly infects public higher education in Connecticut. It suggests that higher education is more interested in political indoctrination than scholarship — indoctrination financed with tax money.

A university committed to freedom of expression and academic freedom would punish the students who prevented the showing of the film. If this is “what democracy looks like” at Central, legislators should stop sending public money there.

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SLEAZE IS LIBERATED: Political blogger and newspaper columnist Kevin Rennie, a former Republican state legislator from South Windsor, revealed the other day that Democratic state senators are soliciting lobbyists at the state Capitol for thousand-dollar donations to the Hartford mayoral campaign of state Sen. John Fonfara. While state law long has forbidden legislators from seeking contributions from lobbyists for legislative campaigns while the General Assembly is in session, the ban doesn’t apply to municipal campaigns like Fonfara’s. Still, the solicitations stink of extortion, the more so because Fonfara is Senate chairman of the legislature’s powerful finance committee. Many lobbyists need his favor.

Gross as this is, it may be more notable for showing just how politically uncompetitive Connecticut has been made by the Republican Party’s infatuation with Donald Trump. Connecticut Democrats seem to believe that as long as Trump is the face of the opposition, they can get away with anything.

Will Republican legislators make an issue of the sleaze of their Democratic colleagues, as by proposing to extend the lobbyist solicitation ban to cover municipal campaigns? Will Connecticut Republicans see that their association with Trump facilitates everything wrong Connecticut Democrats do, and thus the state’s decline as well?

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SUPERSTITION EVOLVES: A resolution to apologize for the witchcraft convictions and executions that occurred in Connecticut nearly 400 years ago is advancing in the General Assembly and getting much publicity though it is only pious posturing, as if anyone today needs to be told that witchcraft really isn’t so powerful and that innocent people were hanged.

Meanwhile the state should be much more concerned about recent wrongful convictions, some based on false confessions sweated out of young people. Recent wrongful convictions and imprisonments are estimated to have cost the state about $48 million. So legislation has been proposed to prohibit police from misleading, intimidating, or coercing criminal suspects.

What constitutes misleading, intimidating, and coercing may be difficult to define, so the legislation probably will lead to much litigation. But this issue is far more compelling than an official admission that Connecticut’s superstitions have evolved over the centuries. While state government no longer believes that witches can do much harm, it now believes that, if the right political spells are cast, men can become women and women become men just by thinking it so.

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

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By Chris Powell

Rent-control legislation advocated by the “Cap the Rent” campaign of “democratic socialists” has failed in a General Assembly committee, which is good, since a basic question about the proposal was never answered.

That is: Why was the capping campaign limited to rental housing? For the prices of many other necessities of life — like food, electricity, gasoline, and medicine — have been soaring just like the price of housing. Indeed, people can live without housing longer than they can live without food.

So why was there no proposal to cap the price of those other necessities as well? Probably because any candor from the “democratic socialists” would expose their dishonesty.

They isolated rent for capping because only housing providers are easy to expropriate.

Cap the prices of food, electricity, gas, medicine and other necessities and their providers will go elsewhere and shortages will develop quickly.

But rental property can’t relocate. It is captive.

While capping rents will discourage construction and renovation of inexpensive rental housing, thereby depriving many others of homes, the existing supply will remain and its occupants will keep their homes at the expense of the unhoused. And yet capping rents was portrayed as humane when it was actually self-serving. “Democratic socialism” turns out to be plain old theft.

* * *

What may be most remarkable about state government lately is that so little of what is shown to be wrong about it is ever questioned by Governor Lamont and state legislators. State government is almost completely without oversight.

Another example of this arose the other day at, predictably enough, the University of Connecticut, where, Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers discovered, a professor had been fired for impropriety and then, in arbitration, was ordered reinstated and paid $1.4 million in damages with no announcement from the university.

The Hearst papers discovered the huge payment during a review of the list of the highest-paid state government employees, and then asked the university about it. Only then did UConn admit the disaster.

Strangely this time the details suggest that UConn was right in firing the professor. The university contended that she had improperly concealed her financial affiliations with institutions in China, and the National Institutes of Health agreed. So maybe the issue most compelling to pursue here, if state government ever cared about efficiency and accountability, is why, like state government generally, UConn continues to subject itself to outside arbitration of employee disputes.

Must the contentment of government’s employees always trump administration in the public interest?

Since the issue that has been raised again at UConn will not be pursued by the legislature, the public interest seems to be of no concern.

At least the Republican minority in the state Senate complained last week when it was disclosed that over the last year the state Board of Pardons and Paroles has sharply increased its commutations of criminal sentences, including the sentences of violent offenders. Commutations went from just six between 2016 and 2021 to 71 in 2022 alone, 44 of last year’s sentence reductions being received by murderers.

Some sentences reduced by the board had been imposed in part to give assurance to survivors of murder victims that justice would be done. Of course the Board of Pardons and Paroles always has had the power to undo the sentencing judgment of courts, but the recent increase in commutations is extraordinary. It reflects the broader policy of recent Democratic state administrations to go easier on crime.

The ranking Senate Republican on the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, John A. Kissel of Enfield, notes that the explosion in commutations will undermine confidence in Connecticut’s criminal-justice system. Such confidence is already low as the state is being overrun with crimes committed by repeat offenders while Democrats boast about closing prisons.

But Governor Lamont and Democratic legislators have expressed no concern about what the Board of Pardons and Paroles is doing. The legislature plans no hearings on it but may find the time to declare pizza the official state food.

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

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By Chris Powell

With a state constitutional amendment last November, Connecticut voters approved early voting in principle, but practice will be complicated and the details have been left to the General Assembly. Fortunately the new secretary of the state, Stephanie Thomas, has proposed sensible answers to the major questions.

— How long should the period of early voting be?

The secretary proposes 10 days of early voting, covering the two weekends before the election, the intervening five days, and the Monday before Election Day. Hours would be from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. except for the Wednesday and Thursday before the election, when they would be 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Election Day hours would remain 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. All voters should find convenience in that.

— What polling places will be used for early voting?

Municipalities would propose the locations with the secretary empowered to approve or disapprove them. Site criteria would include accessibility for the handicapped, parking, and public transportation. Most municipalities might have only one location but cities might need several.

— What provisions would be made for the security of the ballots cast ahead of Election Day?

The secretary wants the early ballots stored just as absentee ballots are stored: in their original sealed envelopes in vaults at the municipal clerk’s office. Getting the early votes safely to the vault every night implies a security challenge for municipalities whose early-voting sites are not adjacent to the clerk’s office — the transportation of the ballots when witnesses aren’t around. This should be addressed.

— Which elections would be covered by early voting?

The secretary proposes to cover general and primary elections but not municipal referendums and special elections, which aren’t as important and draw much less participation even as covering them with early voting would incur equal expense.

— Will the voter check-off sheets maintained by poll workers be available to the public, candidates, and campaign workers at the end of every day of early voting, to facilitate efforts to get out the vote?

This shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange, and, after all, early voting’s objective is to maximize participation. But the issue hasn’t been addressed.

— Who will pay for the extra expense: state taxpayers, municipal taxpayers, or a combination of the two?

The secretary wants state government to reimburse municipal costs, which will be substantial. Of course municipalities also want state reimbursement, which is not always provided with state mandates. While state government, overlooking its huge bonded debt and unfunded pension obligations, claims to be carrying a financial surplus in the billions of dollars, innumerable interest groups are already competing for a share of it.

— What would be the first elections with early voting?

The secretary hopes that the enabling legislation will be passed in time to begin with this November’s municipal elections. Indeed, it would be far better to start with municipal elections than a state or federal election, when participation is much greater.

— With so many votes cast in advance of Election Day, will vote tabulation be faster on Election Night?

Not necessarily. Early-voting ballots won’t be counted until the polls are closed for good, and presumably early voting will produce more votes than single-day elections. The greater participation and the need to open so many more ballot envelopes may delay tabulation rather than hasten it. Already some municipalities, especially Hartford and Bridgeport, seem unable to report complete vote totals for a day or two after the election. But then of course there are many other things wrong with the cities, and the competence of their governments is stretched.

While simple in principle, in practice early voting will be a huge challenge for voter registrars, town clerks, election workers, and the people in the secretary of the state’s office — the unsung heroes of democracy.

Especially as early voting gets started, state government should be generous with reimbursement to municipalities, and everyone should be patient with the people who will be striving to make elections more convenient.

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

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By Chris Powell

Exclusive zoning may not be the only reason that little inexpensive rental housing is being built or renovated in Connecticut. Anyone interested in the housing issue would do well to read the fascinating report about a day in housing court published March 5 in The Day of New London. It was written by journalism students from the University of Connecticut.

The court was full of people whose landlords were trying to evict them for chronic failure to pay rent. Some of the delinquent tenants were hard-luck cases. Others were victims of their own irresponsibility in life. An indulgent judge, court mediators, and lawyers provided to the tenants by state government tried to arrange payment solutions and forestall evictions.

But most of these efforts were probably impractical from the start. In the end even patient and understanding landlords ended up seriously cheated. Evictions were dragged out for months but not prevented since the tenants simply couldn’t or wouldn’t pay.

“If you need something,” one landlord said, “you can’t just take it, like a coat if you’re cold. Yet if you take my product — time, space — and don’t pay, it’s not illegal. … If someone steals from you, you can be made whole. But my product is gone, used, consumed.”

The Day’s report indicated just how mistaken the clamor at the state Capitol for rent control is, for the troubled people in housing court often can’t pay [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] rent. They hold on by using the court to expropriate their landlord, sometimes for most of a year.

Rent control would be expropriation. But in housing court expropriation is already policy.

With rent control possibly coming on top of the expropriation any delinquent tenant can arrange in housing court, why should anyone want to get into the less-expensive rental business in Connecticut, even if exclusive zoning is overthrown as it should be?

And yet the only solution to the housing problem is to increase supply.

Submarine maker Electric Boat in Groton, just across the river from New London, plans to hire thousands more workers over the next few years. But no one has announced plans to build thousands of housing units for the new workers to occupy nearby. EB’s growth will push housing costs way up.

The problem bigger than the housing shortage is Connecticut’s growing population of people not equipped to support themselves and their families — people who are uneducated, unskilled, and often demoralized. Meanwhile industry in the state is unable to find qualified applicants for tens of thousands of jobs with good salaries and benefits. (Contrary to the premise of public education in Connecticut, giving high school diplomas to people who never mastered their schoolwork doesn’t make them educated.)

Many people whose evictions are prolonged in housing court are in effect long-term welfare cases. To reduce evictions during the virus epidemic, state government has reimbursed landlords for some unpaid rents. The program continues but many tenants have exhausted the benefit. Maybe it should be enlarged to become like the Section 8 housing voucher program.

But housing the incapable is government’s responsibility, not the responsibility of any landlord. That’s why delinquent tenants aren’t really the ones expropriating the people who provide rental housing. The expropriating is being done by government.

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IS ACCOUNTABILITY ILLEGAL?: The dumbest non-sequitur of government in Connecticut is thriving at the top of the state’s system of what styles itself higher education.

The Board of Regents for the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, which runs the community colleges, still refuses to explain what happened with the firing and reinstatement of Manchester Community College CEO Nicole Esposito two years ago. Esposito sued, charging sex discrimination and retaliation for her questioning financial improprieties, and quickly got her job back and $775,000 in damages.

A spokesman for the board says it won’t comment on personnel matters that have been resolved or allegations that have been withdrawn.

But why not? Is accountability illegal in Connecticut now?

No, the law doesn’t forbid explaining when so much money has been squandered. Governor Lamont and state legislators should press the point.

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

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By Chris Powell

Many sad stories were told a few weeks ago at a hearing of the General Assembly’s Human Services Committee on legislation to provide free state government medical insurance to illegal immigrants under 26 years old. There was testimony about young people and children going without normal treatment for painful illnesses and broken bones and thus risking lifelong suffering or even death.

No one would [ITALICS] want [END ITALICS] to deny treatment to anyone in such distress. But with more than a hundred thousand illegal immigrants in Connecticut, with most of those who are working doing so in low-wage jobs without medical insurance, the cost to state government of the proposed free insurance would quickly rise to tens of millions of dollars per year. Such a program would lead to a program for free insurance for [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] illegal immigrants at much more cost.

This might greatly increase illegal immigration to the state.

Illegal immigration has worsened Connecticut’s desperate shortage of housing, but ironically many of those who complain about the housing shortage advocate facilitating illegal immigration into the state’s self-proclaimed “sanctuary cities.”

Meanwhile some immigrants in Connecticut, legal and illegal alike, are clamoring for an education measure misleadingly called the “parents’ bill of rights” though it would provide only foreign language services to parents who don’t speak English and aren’t bothering to learn it.

Maybe the current wave of illegal immigration being allowed by the Biden administration is only cosmic reparations for this country’s abuse of the privilege of issuing the world’s reserve currency, which long has enabled the United States to run huge trade deficits, paying for imports not with equivalent production but with colored paper and electrons and, of course, munitions, the latter doing little to improve standards of living outside this country.

But cosmic reparations or not, the economics of it all is not widely understood, and with the president defending Ukraine’s borders better than those of his own country, Connecticut residents at least should try to be more hard-headed than their ever-posturing state legislators. They should recognize a few things:

— The free medical insurance legislation is mainly about facilitating illegal immigration.

— Its cost in the long run will be enormous.

— Governor Lamont’s budget proposal does not provide for it.

— Providing for it will mean reducing government services to legal residents, raising taxes, or more cheating with the state pension funds.

— Most of all, state residents should recognize that if the country’s [ITALICS] legal [END ITALICS] immigration policy, close to the most liberal in the world, is still not good enough and is to be disregarded in favor of open borders, Connecticut can have half the populations of Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala in just a few months — just for starters.

This surge in illegal immigration arises less because this is the land of the free as much as it is the land of seemingly free [ITALICS] stuff. [END ITALICS]

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WAR TAX IS INFLATION: Visiting Ukraine the other day, President Biden promised tens of billions of dollars more in military assistance. There was no debate in Congress about appropriating the money. It must already have been lying around somewhere. While Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal insists that there are no “blank checks” for Ukraine, there [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] an unlimited number of [ITALICS] huge [END ITALICS] checks, all being dispatched with the senator’s approval if not actually with his vote.

Nor has there been any serious articulation of U.S. war aims. Do the president and Congress mean to commit this country to Ukraine’s recovery of every inch of territory occupied by Russia, including the Crimean peninsula, which, like all of Ukraine itself, for centuries was part of Russia and was annexed again by Russia nine years ago?

Infinite money for Ukraine and U.S. domestic goodies now is regularly being distributed without any reference to how it is to be financed. It’s not done with taxes. No, the money is being obtained from debt that is quickly monetized.

That is, it is being financed by inflation, a tax Congress doesn’t have to vote on but still has to be paid by the unwitting public.

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

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By Chris Powell

Despite its devotion to political correctness and everything “woke,” could government in Connecticut actually be approaching relevance when it comes to gun crime and crime generally?

That was the implication the other day as Governor Lamont, the mayors of Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, and Waterbury, and police chiefs gathered at the state Capitol and seemed to admit that the gun violence problem isn’t so much a problem of guns themselves as a problem of chronic offenders who shouldn’t be loose.

The mayors gave compelling examples. In Waterbury 70% of the people charged in shootings last year were awaiting trial on other charges or on probation, and 63% already had convictions for violent felonies or gun crimes. Of those charged in shootings in Hartford last year, 39% were awaiting trial on other charges, 14% were on probation, and 5% on parole.

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim concurred that a few chronic offenders commit a disproportionate number of gun crimes in their cities.

Chief State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin added that someone who has been convicted of criminal possession of a gun is 8,000 times more likely to be charged in a shooting than someone with no convictions.

That is, the big problem in the state’s violent crime is chronic offenders.

So, in a pleasant surprise, the governor and mayors broke from state government’s tedious habit of calling for more laws to hamper gun ownership by licensed and law-abiding people and instead proposed what should have been obvious decades ago: tougher enforcement against gun criminals.

“There have to be serious consequences for serious firearms offenses,” Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said. But gun charges are often dropped to secure plea bargains on other charges.

So the mayors want the Judicial Department to increase the number of courts with dockets dedicated to gun crimes. The mayors want “serious firearm offenses” to be more broadly defined, and criminal possession of a firearm to carry a longer sentence.

The mayors proposed new procedures for revoking bail, probation, and parole for offenders charged with new crimes, and requiring higher bonds for defendants with felony records.

The proposals were wonderful — and, sadly, so elementary. It was as if the mayors had just begun reading their local newspapers. wherein the phrase “long criminal record” appears almost every day in arrest reports about serious crimes. If the mayors had been reading the papers they might have noticed many years ago that police often arrest offenders who have incurred 10, 20, or even more convictions but who remain free and may not ever have spent much time locked up.

Meanwhile state officials and bleeding hearts boast about closing prisons.

But the mayors’ proposals omitted two crucial things.

First, they omitted an incorrigibility law, known elsewhere as a “three-strikes” law — a law requiring life sentences for chronic repeat offenders. In Connecticut even a “10-strikes law” might markedly reduce crime.

And second, the mayors omitted anything about ensuring that offenders are truly rehabilitated before their release.

Two days after the governor and the mayors acknowledged the problem of chronic offenders, the Capitol was visited by a social-justice group, the Career Resources Data Team, which reported on the horrifying condition of Connecticut’s prisoners and parolees.

According to the report, half of parolees have a serious drug problem and 60% are mentally ill to some extent. Almost half of parolees lack a high school diploma, 85% have less than five years of work experience, and 32% have less than two years. Eighteen percent have no housing — they are essentially destitute.

Without education, work skills, rudimentary housing, and mental health, parolees hardly can be expected to resist the temptation to return to crime. So maybe [ITALICS] every [END ITALICS] offender with a serious conviction should get an indeterminate sentence for which parole can be obtained only through a year-long, government-sponsored job apprenticeship that provides medical insurance and a private room to live in.

Dumping uneducated, unskilled, unhoused, and disturbed people on the street, as Connecticut long has been doing, is only asking for more crime and is a crime in itself.

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

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By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone agrees that Connecticut badly needs more inexpensive apartments. Many basic two-bedroom units in the state carry monthly rents that are as high as a home mortgage payment, and rents are still rising. As was demonstrated the other day at a state legislative committee hearing, many renters are desperate, especially with unprecedented electricity price increases coming on top of rent increases.

But no one has explained how a law restricting rents — government price control that would be exclusive to housing even as the prices of all other necessities are rising sharply as well — is going to encourage construction and renovation of rental housing. Indeed, with a rent control law Connecticut may send a powerful signal to rental housing developers to avoid the state and a powerful signal to landlords to convert their apartments to condominiums and sell them.

Rent control may help people who already have apartments but it won’t increase supply or slake demand.

Fortunately the major rent-control legislation under consideration in the General Assembly is a fraud. It would restrict annual rent increases to 4% [ITALICS] plus inflation. [END ITALICS] With the official inflation rate around 7% and real inflation closer to twice that, the legislation would hardly cap rents at all. Its main value to its advocates may be to establish the [ITALICS] principle [END ITALICS] of expropriating property without fair compensation.

Then, after a few years, other legislation might cap rent increases at 4% [ITALICS] without [END ITALICS] an inflation adjustment, and then freeze rents entirely. After all, many advocates of rent control think that [ITALICS] everything [END ITALICS] necessary should be free. Of course nothing is really free, and decisions about who should pay can be messy, since cost shifting is such a big objective of government.

Many people oppressed by their rents aren’t familiar with economics and how the real world works. But many advocates of rent control [ITALICS] are, [END ITALICS] and they know exactly what they are doing and what they are [ITALICS] not [ITALICS] doing.

They are [ITALICS] not [ITALICS] encouraging the crowd to understand inflation and where it comes from — government itself. They are not encouraging the crowd to notice that since most important prices have risen sharply, landlords aren’t to blame.

Nor are the rent-control advocates concentrating on the only solution to rising rents: increasing housing supply. No, expropriating is their objective.

There [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] solutions to supply, but they aren’t quick and easy.

Liberalizing municipal zoning is the one most discussed. But any zoning solution will be slow and disjointed.

State government could build housing directly, exempting itself from municipal zoning, using eminent domain to obtain land, hiring contractors, and assigning construction plans, but that would risk much corruption.

Or maybe state government could exempt itself from local zoning, use eminent domain to obtain property near water and sewer lines and transit infrastructure, put the properties out to bid to apartment developers, and then exempt them from taxes as long as the properties were well maintained.

Such a policy would be sounder environmentally and possibly less controversial than putting apartments in rural towns that lack infrastructure.

But there can be no substantial construction of housing [ITALICS] anywhere [END ITALICS] without controversy. In the end the issue is a choice between the haves and have-nots. Government may try to mollify the have-nots with free bus rides, diapers, and contraceptives, but what they need most is less expensive housing.

* * *

In the meantime state government will continue to take care of itself better than anything else.

Central Connecticut State University in New Britain has just announced its hiring of former Hartford Democratic state Rep. Edwin Vargas as the new occupant of the Gov. William A. O’Neill Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Practical Politics. The job pays $69,000, pretty sweet for someone who is 74 with pension income. That’s “practical politics” for you.

Vargas won re-election last year but, betraying his constituents, declined to take office in January so he could accept the university job. His predecessor was another state legislator, former state Sen. Donald J. DeFronzo, a Democrat from New Britain.

If Republicans ever want to occupy an endowed chair in public higher education in Connecticut, they’ll have to start winning a lot more elections.

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut state legislators who have introduced legislation to prevent disclosure of discussions teachers have with students about “sensitive subjects” are upset that schools are facing many more freedom-of-information requests.

Responding to these requests, the legislators say, can incur great expense in school staff time.

One of those legislators, Rep. Jennifer Leeper, D-Fairfield, complains, “There is a national movement that has led a lot of people to believe that our teachers are influencing kids in dangerous and insidious ways, which has had real-world impact even here in Connecticut.”

Does Leeper really think that suspicion about what schools are doing is without foundation? For Connecticut itself is full of cause for suspicion.

Schools treating students for gender dysphoria conceal this from their parents if the students don’t want their parents to know, even as state law forbids minors from getting tattooed without parental permission.

Some school systems refuse even the most legitimate freedom-of-information requests, as in Enfield, whose school superintendent refuses to disclose how the internationally infamous “pizza sex” assignment got into a middle school class a year ago and where it came from.

Connecticut schools long have refused to disclose teacher evaluations, and under the pernicious influence of the teacher unions, the General Assembly has enacted and maintains a law exempting such evaluations from disclosure, alone of all government personnel evaluations in the state.

School systems in Connecticut sometimes have been almost as corrupt as the Catholic Church in handling teachers caught molesting students, allowing them to resign quietly and take their teaching licenses with them to positions with other school systems.

Last year Project Veritas video-recorded an assistant principal in Greenwich admitting he refused to hire Catholics and political conservatives as teachers, the better to propagandize students with liberal politics — a secret school policy on personnel.

Also last year parents exposed a teacher at Southington High School who had distributed to students a packet titled “Vocabulary for Conversations about Race, Gender, Equality, and Inclusivity” that emphasized transgenderism and racism, topics that had no relation to material being taught in the teacher’s English classes. Asserting that students might be contributing to oppression of minorities without even knowing it, the packet was political propaganda and indoctrination. When it was exposed, Southington’s school superintendent begrudgingly admitted that distributing the packet had been improper.

Of course whenever anyone questions the age-appropriateness of a book in a school library, there are shrieks of “censorship,” as if a librarian’s judgment is always right even as the library itself already has “censored” millions of books by not including them.

Representative Leeper also complains that Fairfield’s school system has gotten FOI requests about teachers and schools unrelated to the requester’s own children.

But this complaint is doubly dishonest, first because everyone in Connecticut pays taxes that support all public schools in the state, and second because everyone has an interest in exposing mistakes or misconduct in education anywhere.

Leeper notes that there may be “bad faith” FOI requests. Some may even be meant as harassment. But these can be declined, and the state Freedom of Information Commission isn’t likely to advance them.

No, the real problem behind the explosion in FOI requests to schools in Connecticut is public education’s own lack of transparency and accountability and its political bias.

The propaganda and indoctrination that increasingly pop up in public education are always of the leftist kind, which is not surprising, since the national teacher unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, are aggressively left-wing political organizations. Who believes that all these union members leave their politics at the classroom door?

The assistant principal in Greenwich explained it well to Project Veritas last year. He was asked: “So it’s like you present everything in a way that’s subconsciously influencing the kids to vote liberal but not doing it in such an explicit way where the parents can actually get mad at you for it?”

He replied: “Right.”

Six months have passed since then. The investigations of the assistant principal that supposedly were undertaken by the Greenwich school system and state Attorney General William Tong still haven’t reported. Presumably the scandal is expected to fade away.

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

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By Chris Powell

How can you tell that something is part of public education? That’s easy: It strives to keep the most important things secret.

That’s the lesson of the Journal Inquirer’s attempt to discover why, two years ago, the Board of Regents of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system set about to fire the chief executive of Manchester Community College, Nicole Esposito, only to restore her after she brought a federal sex discrimination lawsuit. The college system paid Esposito $775,000 in damages and legal fees.

Last August the JI asked the college system to provide access to the personnel files of the three system officials Esposito had cited in her lawsuit as perpetrators of illegal discrimination: Community College Regional President Robert Steinmetz, Chief Operating Officer Alice Pritchard, and Vice President of Human Resources Andrew Kripp. The newspaper wanted to know if they had been disciplined for the Esposito disaster.

While state law makes such personnel files public, the college system stalled, refusing to grant access, since the officials whose files were sought objected, claiming an invasion of privacy. But this month, as the dispute was about to be scheduled for a hearing before the state Freedom of Information Commission, the college system relented, knowing that the commission almost certainly would order disclosure because the conduct of public officials on the job is public business.

The files were made available and showed that none of the sued officials had been disciplined for anything involving Esposito.

The college system might have resolved the issue quickly long ago simply by answering whether the sued officials had been disciplined, but it refused. Indeed, the college system has never explained why it tried to fire Esposito in the first place.

So $775,000 has been paid to Esposito, and probably much more has been spent in state government personnel time, for — what? No one outside the college system is to know.

Meanwhile the three defendants in Esposito’s lawsuit remain employed by the college system at spectacular annual salaries: Steinmetz at $276,754, Kripp at $242,217, and Pritchard at $228,354. The president of the college system, Terrence Chung, is paid even more extravagantly: $360,000.

In January Chung pleaded poverty for the college system. He asked the governor and General Assembly to nearly double the system’s annual spending over the next three years, from $318 million to $597 million.

When that request gets a hearing before the legislature, Governor Lamont and state legislators should ask Chung to explain the Esposito case and its huge expense as well as the necessity of the system’s spectacular salaries. Students in the college system should ask as well. After all, the college executives claim to be doing everything for the benefit of their students, many of whom say they lack food, secure housing, and transportation and need more support from their colleges.

With a few candid answers, maybe the college system would take a step toward becoming [ITALICS] public [END ITALICS] education.

* * *

START WITH SIKORSKY: No place in Connecticut has as much untapped potential as its largest and most impoverished city, Bridgeport — located on Long Island Sound with a great harbor, superhighways leading to the east, west, and north, a major stop on the Northeast Corridor railroad line, and a city-owned airport just over the municipal line in Stratford.

But state government long has overlooked Bridgeport’s potential because no one in authority has dared to deal with the poverty of the city’s residents.

Refurbishing the airport and restoring scheduled commercial flights there could contribute greatly to Bridgeport’s revival and economic development. But predictably enough Stratford doesn’t want to cooperate. Two of its state legislators, Republican Sen. Kevin Kelly and Democratic Rep. Joe Gresko, have introduced legislation to thwart Bridgeport’s sale of Sikorsky to the Connecticut Airport Authority, essentially giving Stratford control of the airport, which would mean no improvement.

Bridgeport is too poor and ill-managed to restore Sikorsky itself. But it could be done by the airport authority, which has greatly improved Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks. If Bridgeport is ever to be improved in [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] respect, state government will have to do it. Let it start with Sikorsky.

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

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