Chris Powell column

By CHRIS POWELL

Maybe a couple of the state’s problems can solve each other. 

Many suburban shopping malls are fading and failing as people increasingly shop from home via the internet and have their purchases delivered. With its virus hysteria government keeps scaring them against going out, and as the economy weakens, many people can’t afford to buy as much.

Meanwhile Connecticut has a desperate shortage of housing and soaring housing prices are a major cause of the worsening poverty in the state.

So property developers here and around the country are interested in converting fading and failed malls to housing or attaching multi-family housing to them. 

Since mall property is already in commercial use and fully equipped with utilities, zoning obstacles and neighborhood objections should be much reduced, and new residents on site might substantially increase the customer base for retailers and professional services remaining in a mall. If enough housing at malls was built, housing costs would diminish for everyone.

A project successfully combining a shopping mall with a lot of new housing might create a walkable environment with much less need for cars — making something resembling city life available in the suburbs without the poverty-induced nastiness that has overtaken most cities.

Sustaining rather than eradicating poverty would remain big business for government, but any substantial increase in housing might do more to reduce poverty than any other government social program.

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OBSESSED WITH TRIVIA: New Haven sometimes seems to be striving to embody the metaphor about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The city’s Peace Commission may think it has achieved the big objective cited on its internet site — averting nuclear war — but it seems to have been surprised by Gaza’s recent attack on Israel. And though crime continues to plague New Haven while more than three-quarters of the city’s schoolchildren are not performing at grade level, many being chronically absent, the other day a committee of the city council found time for a different issue: whether the city should become the first municipality in Connecticut to prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is also moving to ban menthol cigarettes. The rationale offered is that menthol flavoring in cigarettes appeals especially to children and members of racial minorities. The unstated rationale is that children and racial minorities can’t be persuaded to avoid smoking.

A municipal ban would be only pious posturing. It would not stop city residents from crossing the city line to buy menthol cigarettes in adjacent towns. Indeed, a ban well might create another contraband market in the city. Even federal law and state law haven’t prevented deadly drugs like heroin and fentanyl from ravaging New Haven and other cities. 

Besides, a municipal ban on menthol cigarettes would be laughably hypocritical, insofar as New Haven has approved five marijuana dispensaries in the city, though marijuana presents health risks as serious as those of menthol cigarettes. But somehow marijuana has become politically correct. 

Why are New Haven’s elected officials bothering with this silliness? Probably for the same reason state legislators also spend so much time on the trivial. It distracts from their irrelevance to the big dangers of everyday life and Connecticut’s longstanding problems that are never solved as the state continues to decline.

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ANOTHER HIDDEN TAX: Electricity rates aren’t the only place where state government imposes hidden taxes. 

A recent report in the Connecticut Mirror reminded about another tax-hiding mechanism, the state’s tax on bulk sales of gasoline, which lately has been about 22 cents per gallon. Gas stations pay the tax to wholesalers and recover it from their customers at the pump, where the retail sales tax is added, another 25 cents per gallon.

Drivers have some idea of the retail sales tax, especially since state government reduced it temporarily after the gas price spike resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the international sanctions on Russian oil. But few people know about the wholesale tax.

The wholesale tax on gas is another way state government encourages people to blame industry for high prices when government itself is largely responsible.

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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

Governor Lamont and the General Assembly may deserve more appreciation than they’re going to get for steadily reducing the insolvency of the state government employee pension fund and the pension fund the state maintains for teachers. In the last five years state government has put an extra $7.6 billion into the funds, bringing their unfunded liabilities down to $39 billion.

That’s still an appalling figure, and there is no guarantee that the unfunded liabilities won’t worsen anyway, since a sharp decline in the stock and bond markets is always possible. But state government can’t control that.

The strengthening of the pension funds has been enabled in large part by the billions of dollars in “emergency” money from the federal government, but it took much political courage nevertheless. For there is constant clamor to increase spending on state and municipal payrolls, social programs, and infrastructure, and little clamor to strengthen the pension funds.

Those who clamor to increase spending would be more persuasive if they could identify areas where state government could economize, allowing money to be redirected to their preferred undertakings.

But the essential reform with the state pension funds is not to strengthen them but rather to eliminate government employee pensions gradually. For state government’s recent virtuousness with pension funding almost certainly won’t last. Eventually Connecticut’s political leadership will slip back to its old ways, underfunding the pensions so the clamor for spending elsewhere can be appeased, with pension liabilities transferred to taxpayers yet unborn.

Real pension reform would be simple enough. Salaries for government employees could be raised modestly in anticipation of the gradual elimination of their pensions, with employees advised to put the extra money into their own retirement accounts. 

Additionally, government employees could be put into the Social Security system, thereby increasing political support for the system and reducing the economic class divide between government employees and those of the private sector.

But pension equality between government employees and private-sector employees would be politically impossible. Government employees are the most powerful special interest, which is why they long have been treated better than private-sector employees, and it would be surprising if they didn’t strive mightily to keep it that way.

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Except for state and municipal government employees getting another paid day off, mail not being delivered, banks being closed, and an annual parade in Bridgeport, Columbus Day was hardly noticed in Connecticut last week.

Now that Columbus has become politically incorrect, the necessity of his holiday here seems to be only that he was an Italian who a century ago was claimed as representative of all people Italian descent (though he sailed to expand the Spanish empire) and that Connecticut has the highest percentage of people of Italian descent of any state.

Politically correct states with fewer people of Italian descent have been replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day, as if most people living in the United States weren’t born in the country and are thus “indigenous” too and as if the people Columbus encountered in the New World were all “noble savages” and never fought for territory before the Europeans arrived — indeed, as if fighting for territory isn’t the history and even the present of mankind.

Politicians are always looking for groups to patronize and pander to even as the country is dedicated to equality — “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” So why persist with an official holiday celebrating one ethnic group when there are no other such holidays (unless Juneteenth is to be construed as meaningful for Black people alone) and indeed could never be other such holidays, the country having so many ethnicities that the calendar wouldn’t have room for them all?

These days Columbus Day is meaningful mainly for people who work for the government, who already get plenty of discretionary time off. So it should be repealed and not replaced.

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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

Truth long has been said to be the first casualty in war, but news coverage of Gaza’s war against Israel suggests that the first casualty is actually critical thinking.

There has been some reporting about how most Israelis think Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resign because his government was so surprised by the attack from Gaza. But as Gazans now suffer constant bombardment from Israel, no journalists are asking them whether they support the constant war waged by their government, controlled by the terrorist movement Hamas, or if they want their government to make peace instead.

Of course Hamas, being totalitarian, probably would murder any domestic opponents just as enthusiastically as it murders Israelis. But journalism’s failure to pose the question prevents Hamas’ totalitarianism from being exposed, just as it prevents exposure of the support of the war by many Gazans. 

Much news coverage has reported that many Gazans are Arabs or descendants of Arabs who fled or were expelled from British mandate Palestine in 1948 when the territory was divided into Arab and Jewish sections, war began, and Israel declared independence. But it is hard to find any reporting that many Israelis are Jews or the descendants of Jews who were expelled from Arab countries back then or since. 

Nor is anything being made of the sharp differences between the cultures of the warring parties. Like Arab countries, Israel has many religious fanatics and haters, but the country is infinitely more egalitarian, tolerant, and committed to the rule of law than its adversaries are. Anyone who doubts this should go to an Arab country and try being a woman, a homosexual or transsexual, a Christian, a Jew, or a nonconformer of any kind. 

This is why the reflexive support for Gaza among leftists in the West is especially hypocritical and crazy. Western leftists who support Gaza would be quickly locked up or worse if they ever tried being themselves in any Arab jurisdiction. 

Almost as hypocritical is the United Nations mission in Gaza, which complains that Israel is attacking the populated areas from which the Hamas government launched its attacks. That is, while Hamas uses its civilians as shields, any casualties among them are supposed to be Israel’s fault. Further, the U.N. mission in Gaza long has been feeding, schooling, and providing medical care to Gazans so their government can devote its resources to destroying Israel. Gazans needn’t rely as much on their own government for support as long as the U.N. is there.

Gaza’s attack on Israel was so barbaric — doubly so because it aimed to derail peace negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors — that maybe the West now will smarten up. But maybe not. For as Israel’s prime minister during the war 50 years ago, Golda Meir, observed, the world loves Jews only when they are victims and hates Jews who defend themselves.

Israel’s Jews may be figuring out at last that it’s far safer to be feared than loved.

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To avoid testifying last week in the lawsuit seeking a new primary election for the Democratic nomination for mayor of Bridgeport, Wanda Geter-Pataky claimed her Fifth Amendment right. That is, Geter-Pataky, a City Hall employee, vice chair of the Democratic City Committee, and worker in the re-election campaign of Mayor Joe Ganim, refused to explain what she was doing in the sensational security camera video showing her repeatedly stuffing what presumably were absentee ballots into the collection box outside City Hall in the early-morning darkness a week before the primary.

Geter-Pataky still may be considered innocent of a criminal violation; though what she appears to have done was almost certainly illegal, she has not been charged. But when someone who is a government employee, a political party official, and a campaign worker refuses to account for her political work, she must be assumed to be politically corrupt and Bridgeport’s Democratic mayoral primary must be assumed to have been corrupted.

However the judge decides about a new primary, Bridgeport’s voters should deliver a guilty verdict on Election Day, Nov. 7. 

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

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By Chris Powell

Residents of densely populated Gaza, governed by the terrorist organization Hamas, are asking where they can go to escape the Israeli bombardment that was launched in response to this week’s devastating and barbaric missile and ground attack by Hamas on Israel.

The question is pathetic, for its answer is obvious, even if international journalism misses it too.

Gaza has been governed by Hamas for 17 years — that is, since the territory’s first and last election, when the people installed Hamas. They have done nothing to remove it.

If Gazans don’t like the war their government long has been waging against Israel, if they don’t like the partial blockade that Israel imposed in response, and if they are looking for somewhere to go, they should head for the seat of their gangster government and make a change — carrying whatever weapons are available to them. 

The cheering in Gaza that greeted Hamas fighters as they returned from Israel with their hostages showed that many Gazans support the war even as it has brought them still another catastrophe. Since Hamas is sworn to Israel’s destruction, peace can come only with the destruction of one side or the other. As with Palestinians generally, many if not most Gazans prefer hate, war, and death forever over any peace shared with Jews.

Yet some people in the United States and Europe who consider themselves enlightened maintain that Israel should continue to supply Gaza with food, water, fuel, and electricity even as Gaza wages war on Israel. Indeed, Israel has provided those necessities to Gaza ever since evacuating the territory in 2005 in the hope that Gazans would choose peace, and continued to provide the necessities throughout Gaza’s frequent missile attacks. So Israel rather deserves the mendacity of its critics.

Israel’s critics lament that Israel has made Gaza “an open-air prison,” as if that isn’t explained by Gaza’s persistence in war. 

Of course if the United States was attacked by missiles from Mexico, it would nuke everything all the way down to Guadalajara. Any self-respecting nation with military might would respond similarly to missile attacks by a neighbor. But Israel’s critics maintain that the country must not defend itself, or must defend itself only “proportionately” — this is, not enough to win.

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Since the Hamas government of Gaza stages its missile attacks from densely populated areas, and since Gazans don’t object, nearly everything in Gaza is a fair target. Even so Israel should be explicit about its policy: that there will be no end to the destruction and no food, fuel, water, electricity, and medicine until Gaza surrenders, installs a new government that makes peace, releases its hostages, delivers its criminal leaders, and accepts a long occupation and reformation as the defeated totalitarian powers of World War II had to do.

Israel will lose if it again makes release of hostages its primary objective. To win, Israel must acknowledge that the hostages probably will be murdered — and ensure that they are avenged.  

Of course without the complete destruction of their territory many Gazans will oppose surrender. Like the Palestinians on the other side of Israel, those in Gaza first must have their civil war, just as the Jews had their civil war in the years prior to Israel’s re-establishment in 1948 — a civil war to decide whether to settle with the neighbors or press on with a war for their extermination.

*

There are irreconcilables on both sides, but they are much stronger on the Palestinian side. Any Palestinian leader and almost any Arab leader who pursues peace with Israel risks assassination by the irreconcilables, just as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin were assassinated for pursuing peace. 

But no Israeli invasion of Gaza is necessary — no horrific house-to-house fighting. Without food, water, fuel, electricity, and medicine, Gaza soon enough will collapse into mass misery, starvation, disease, and death. This best can be prevented by the Gazans themselves. They cannot escape responsibility for their government any more than the people of any other country can escape responsibility for theirs. 

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

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By Chris Powell

Announcing last week the retirement of his state police commissioner, James C. Rovella, and deputy commissioner, Col. Stavros Mellekas, Governor Lamont prompted speculation that the festering scandal over fake traffic tickets may turn out to be far more extensive than has been indicated.

The governor explained the departures as a matter of his wanting a “fresh start” with the state police for his second term. But his second term began nine months ago and the audit reporting many racial discrepancies with traffic tickets issued by state troopers wasn’t released until five months later.

Four investigations are underway — by the U.S. Justice Department, the U.S. Transportation Department, one commissioned by the governor and assigned to a former U.S. attorney, and one by the state police department itself. The tickets under review are suspected of misreporting the race of the motorists, thereby concealing racial discrimination by troopers. If innocent mistakes in data entry caused the discrepancies, one of those investigations might have concluded as much by now. But even the state police themselves have not provided any firm explanation.

If the misreporting was not innocent but dishonest or malicious, firings will be necessary to maintain public confidence, even as the state troopers union already has voted no confidence in the department’s management while failing to provide any explanation of its own about what happened.

The audit found misreporting was probable with the tickets written by as many as 130 current or retired state troopers, so dozens of troopers might have to be dismissed or otherwise disciplined. The problem wouldn’t end there, since the implication of any trooper in official dishonesty may prompt challenges to his testimony in criminal cases already decided and risk undoing them.

Additionally, as crime and traffic violations are becoming more brazen amid general social disintegration and increasing mental illness, the state police are understaffed, and dismissals or suspensions will worsen that understaffing.

Connecticut needs its police more than ever, but they are no good if they lack integrity. Integrity is their foremost qualification. If state troopers have been lacking integrity lately — and lax discipline in some recent cases suggests as much — solving the problem will have to go far beyond replacing the commissioner and his deputy.

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Last week Connecticut’s librarians and some elected officials and advocates of using schools to indoctrinate students without their parents knowing about it celebrated a misnomer self-righteously: what they called Banned Books Week.

No books are banned in the United States. The recent controversies are about challenges to books in school and public libraries and school curriculums — whether certain books, especially those of a sexual nature, are appropriate for certain ages or appropriate for stocking in a school or public library at all.

Appropriateness is always a matter of judgment and thus always a fair issue. While some challenges may be crazy or bigoted, the real issue is always whether in a democracy the public has the right to express its judgment on the management of public institutions and to seek to have that judgment implemented through elected officials, or whether librarians and school administrators are always right and must not be questioned.

But addressing the real issue candidly would diminish the power of the people in charge by legitimizing questions about their judgment. So instead the people in charge frame the issue as that of “banning” books, since banning books is plainly fascism and commands little support.

Of course dismissing the public’s concerns about the operation of public institutions is fascism too, but now that Connecticut is run by the political left, fascism is thought to be impossible here.

The irony is that if keeping a book out of a library or curriculum is “banning” it, librarians and school administrators themselves are the biggest book banners. For libraries and curriculums are usually very small while the supply of books is virtually infinite, so librarians and school administrators are always having to choose against millions of books, including some pretty good ones.

What vindicates their choices? That’s what Banned Books Week is for.  

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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

Either most elected officials in Connecticut don’t read the newspapers, which remain the primary sources of state news, or they’re indifferent to the increasing negligence in state government. Two shocking developments in recent days seem to have passed without prompting alarm from anyone in authority.

First Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported that the state Psychiatric Security Review Board has ordered the release of Tyree Smith, who in 2011 used an ax to kill a homeless man in Bridgeport, ate his brain and eyeballs while drinking sake, and, after his apprehension, told a psychiatrist he wanted to eat more people.

At trial in 2013 Smith was found insane and sentenced to 60 years at Connecticut’s psychiatric hospital. But after only 10 years in captivity, the board says, he has reached “clinical stability,” is “medication-compliant,” and has been “symptom-free for many years.” So he will be sent to a group home in Waterbury.

What do his prospective roommates think? What do Waterbury residents generally think? Mayor Neil O’Leary’s opinion on the issue might be interesting, as well as the opinions of the candidates nominated to succeed him.

After all, what is the necessity to release Smith from the psychiatric prison? Troublesome people sometimes stop taking their medications, and while not all of them are ax-wielding cannibals, the Psychiatric Security Review Board cannot guarantee that Smith will not suffer a relapse. No one will be watching him around the clock to ensure that he takes his medicine.

In any case imprisonment of just 10 years for such a grotesque murder cannot seem like justice, no matter how many academic degrees are held by the board members who have decided to set the cannibal free.

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The ink on the cannibal story was hardly dry when The Day of New London reported that a former teacher at Stonington High School, Timothy Chokas, who resigned in 2019 amid complaints that he sexually harassed and molested female students for many years, has regained a teaching license from the state Education Department.

The chief of the department’s Bureau of Investigation and Professional Practices, Nancy Pugliese, told The Day that Chokas took an ethics course and underwent counseling to “make sure he understood where the boundaries were.”

Did Chokas really not know when he became a teacher that teachers must not exploit students sexually? That has been state law for a long time. And other than the political influence of teacher unions, what was the necessity for restoring Chokas’ license? Can he do no job that doesn’t involve children?

Stonington’s school administration handled the Chokas case typically — that is, badly.

The state child advocate’s office found that complaints about the teacher were not pursued seriously nor documented in his personnel file. In exchange for his resignation in the middle of the school year, Stonington’s Board of Education agreed not to fire him, to pay him six months’ salary, and to conceal the reasons for his departure. The Day confirmed that there are no records in Chokas’ personnel file about the complaints against him, though some were put in writing and some meetings about him were held.

The school administration decided to protect its employee, not its students.

*

For decades this has been the practice in public education in Connecticut — to wait until the evidence of a teacher’s misconduct is overwhelming and can’t be concealed anymore and then induce a quiet resignation, facilitating the teacher’s hiring by another school system.

Stonington’s school administration did not seek to revoke Chokas’ teaching license. Revocation happened two years after he resigned when the state Education Department heard of the trouble and undertook its own investigation.

A 2020 Stonington High graduate who served as student representative to the school board, Alexandra Kapell, calls the renewal of Chokas’ license “insane.” She asks, “How is he ever allowed to teach again?”

State legislators should put the question to the Education Department.

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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

Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but these days racism may be the first.

Responding the other day to the latest absentee ballot scandal in Bridgeport, supporters of Mayor Joe Ganim held a rally to charge that the scandal’s central figure, Wanda Geter-Pataky, a City Hall employee and vice chairwoman of the Democratic City Committee, is being criticized by the campaign of the mayor’s challenger in the Democratic primary, John Gomes, and by news organizations, because she is Black.

But no one denies that Geter-Pataky is the woman shown in the sensational security camera video making four trips to an absentee ballot deposit box outside City Hall in the early-morning darkness a week ahead of the primary and stuffing it with what apparently were absentee ballots. It is illegal for absentee ballots to be delivered by anyone who is not a member of the family of the voter or the voter’s caretaker, and the state Elections Enforcement Commission recently, if belatedly, asked the chief state’s attorney to investigate Geter-Pataky and two other Ganim campaign workers for absentee ballot fraud in the Democratic mayoral primary four years ago.

Other video appears to show a Gomes supporter making eight deposits in a different absentee ballot box before the primary.

Absentee ballots often have made the difference in Bridgeport elections and there is evidence that Ganim’s absentee ballot efforts this year particularly targeted residents of government housing who might feel vulnerable to eviction if they were found to be on the wrong side of the city administration. Ganim campaign workers soliciting absentee ballots might not want to let such voters complete and return the ballots by themselves. Those campaign workers might want to help the voters complete and deliver their ballots.

All that would be illegal, but this is Bridgeport, which has become notorious for its absentee ballots without prompting alarm from state government, whose Democratic regime relies on Bridgeport for decisive pluralities in state elections.

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Geter-Pataky has been inaccessible since the infamous video was disclosed and broadcast. She may fear criminal prosecution involving both the recent primary and the one in 2019. But as a city government employee and vice chairman of the Bridgeport Democratic City Committee, and as someone who is said to be devoted to the city as well as to the mayor, she might be thought to have an obligation to come clean fast.

All she has to do is answer elementary questions in public. Is that her in the video? What was she doing both inside and outside City Hall before dawn on the Tuesday before the primary? What was she putting into the absentee ballot box? If she was depositing completed absentee ballots, where did she get them? Were they provided by other Ganim campaign workers? If so, who were they and where did they get the ballots? And how is it racist to ask her such questions?

Of course the mayor could hasten accountability here too. As a city government employee Geter-Pataky — lately the greeter at City Hall, but placed on leave following disclosure of the video — answers to him. He could put the questions to her himself and then report to the public. He also could be asked what he knows about his campaign’s absentee ballot operations. So could Gomes.

*

Failing such appearances by Geter-Pataky and the mayor, Gomes’ lawsuit seeking another primary and the chief state’s attorney’s investigation of Bridgeport’s absentee ballot practices probably won’t produce anything before the election on Nov. 7.

But would Bridgeport’s voters, having already elected Ganim mayor twice since he returned from a federal prison sentence for corruption during his long first stint in office, really care much if there were definitive findings before the election? Amid state government’s long indifference to the plight of their city, are they so demoralized that they think corruption is simply Bridgeport’s fate?

If they do, this may be one case where mere thinking indeed makes it so.

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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

Why did a 2-year-old boy fall to his death through a window of his third-floor apartment in Hartford in July?

A long report by the Connecticut Mirror the other day attempted to answer that question. It attributed the boy’s death to “generational poverty” and, more so, to government’s failure to make sure the boy’s mother had everything she needed to raise her five children, all under 13, on her own, since the children’s father or fathers were not providers. 

If only, the report lamented, government had given the woman free day care and longer classes about parenting and had applied current housing code standards to the family’s apartment building, which was exempt because of its age.

Well, maybe. 

But the report did not address the most compelling issue as it strove to acquit the woman of the manslaughter and risk-of-injury charges she faces for having left her children unattended in squalor as she went to work as a part-time taxi driver, purportedly expecting the 2-year-old’s father to arrive soon to watch the children. It could not have been surprising that he was fatally late.

That is, how does a woman of limited education and job skills who can’t support herself come to have five children but no husband or committed helpmate in the state that gave rise to the constitutional right to contraception and sometimes seems to consider abortion the highest social good?

One pregnancy may be an accident. Five are not. Five children born to someone unprepared to support them is irresponsibility, though political correctness forbids any such acknowledgment.

*

But the Mirror report inadvertently hinted at an explanation.

First, the report said, the woman always wanted to be a mother. Of course many people want to be parents, but some still know that parenthood imposes obligations of preparedness.

Second, and perhaps crucially, the report elaborated: “When she was in high school, she moved in with an older man. Her family sent her to Connecticut after graduation to get her away from him, but she had little beyond the clothes on her back when she moved. She lived in a homeless shelter for several months and rang the Salvation Army bell at Christmas to earn money to pay the security deposit for her first apartment. When she got pregnant with her first daughter, she qualified for a housing choice voucher. …

“She paid $469 per month for the apartment, and her housing choice voucher covered the rest of the $1,550 rent.”

Of course in addition to that heavily subsidized housing there would be free medical insurance and food and other benefits. So who needs to be prepared, competent, self-supporting, and responsible and have a committed spouse when government will lavish money on irresponsibility that holds children hostage?

And so the disastrous cycle began again — four more children without a spouse, more dependence on government, more child neglect, mental illness for one of the children, and the horrible death of the 2-year-old boy, following constant problems that prompted frequent visits by social workers from the state Department of Children and Families, on which Connecticut spends more than $800 million each year to minister to thousands of similarly dysfunctional households with similarly neglected children, without ever establishing as a matter of policy that this is no way to live since it imposes a catastrophic burden on both the children held hostage and society.

*

Few children monitored by DCF fall out of third-story windows, but some die after ingesting narcotics left within their reach, others suffer serious injuries at the hands of their reckless custodians, and many come to school far behind in social development or with learning disabilities and behavioral problems. The $800 million spent annually by DCF is only part of the cost of this lifestyle, a cost that extends to schools, courts, and prisons.

That is, what is called the child-protection system pays for and thus rationalizes, institutionalizes, and encourages child neglect.

While the poor may be demoralized, like everyone else they respond to financial incentives. They are not stupid. But government can be, and journalism doesn’t always make it smarter.

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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 complaints of racism, sexism, and age discrimination, former state Public Health Commissioner Renée D. Coleman-Mitchell has cadged another $200,000 out of Connecticut’s taxpayers.

That’s what Governor Lamont’s administration has agreed to pay her to withdraw her federal lawsuit over her firing three years ago at the onset of the virus epidemic. As part of the settlement, state government’s record of Coleman-Mitchell’s firing will be changed to signify that she “resigned in good standing,” a polite fiction, and she will be prohibited from rejoining the health department, a provision that repudiated the polite fiction even before the ink on the settlement was dry.

Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, but Coleman-Mitchell’s complaint was always ridiculous. No Connecticut governor has been more politically correct than Lamont, concerned more with “diversity” in government than competence, and if he was really racist, sexist, and ageist, why would he have appointed Coleman-Mitchell, a Black woman, in the first place?

But a trial would have been ugly, with the former commissioner charging that the governor’s aides sidelined her as the epidemic got serious and the aides presumably contending that they doubted her medical and political competence.

While state government’s response to the epidemic is fairly criticized in some respects, the governor emerged with high marks from the public, an indication that the health commissioner’s dismissal was no great loss.

Besides, Coleman-Mitchell seems not to have noticed that commissioners serve entirely at the pleasure of the governor. He has to answer for them. Amid all the restrictions state government imposes on itself to keep the state employee unions serving happily as the majority party’s army, a commissioner’s subservience to the governor is most of what’s left of accountability in state government.

It would be a shame to lose that accountability because of opportunistic and self-serving claims like Coleman-Mitchell’s.

While there might have been more expense, the public interest might have been better served if the administration had declined to settle with Coleman-Mitchell and instead forced her to try to prove her claims in court. For as was noted by the late Charles Krauthammer, perhaps the best newspaper columnist of recent years, the country will know racism is over when people can be not just hired but also fired regardless of race.

The small fortune being paid to Coleman-Mitchell shows the country is not there yet.

*

A much bigger settlement at state government expense was announced the other day but failed to prompt the serious questioning it deserved — $25.2 million to be split between Shawn Henning and Ricky Birch, convicted by juries of the gruesome murder of a man in New Milford in 1985 and then acquitted on appeal after serving 30 years in prison. Their acquittal involved claims that the former head of the state forensics laboratory, the now-renowned Henry Lee, fabricated evidence — what was said to be a faint bloodstain on a bathroom towel.

Lee denies fabricating anything, and it’s hard to see how the towel constituted evidence against the two defendants in the first place. For it didn’t connect their blood to the crime and wasn’t tested by Lee until long after the murder, and bloodstains on towels in bathrooms, where shaving is done, are routine.

Indeed, according to the Associated Press, “No forensic evidence existed linking Birch and Henning to the crime.”

The defendants seem to have been convicted mainly because of their dissolute lifestyle. They were drug-abusing teenage burglars living out of a stolen car. 

As with other wrongful-conviction cases recently publicized in Connecticut, going back to the still-infamous Peter Reilly case 50 years ago and the Richard Lapointe case 30 years ago, this one well may have been a matter of a jury’s lack of appreciation for reasonable doubt and its reflexive deference to law-enforcement authorities. It has always been bad enough that, as the saying goes, prosecutors can persuade a jury to indict a ham sandwich. Now it’s starting to seem as if a jury in Connecticut might convict one too.

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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’s minimum wage will increase by 4.6% to $15.69 on Jan. 1, the first annual increase required by a recent state law tying the minimum wage to the federal government’s employment cost index, a gauge of inflation. Governor Lamont celebrated the increase the other day. “This is a fair, modest increase,” the governor said, “and the money earned will be spent right back into our own economy and support local businesses.”

Most businesses are not as enthusiastic as the governor implied they should be. For while minimum-wage earners can use the raise, its presumption is that businesses can afford to pay it and many don’t think they can. While President Biden is campaigning for re-election on what he calls “Bidenomics,” polls show the public thinks the economy is weak and many economists anticipate a recession. 

The prompt for the increase in the minimum wage is inflation, which has been soaring for several years at a rate far higher than the rate calculated by the government, which long has been fiddling with price measurement criteria to manipulate the official inflation rate downward. The necessities of life in Connecticut — food, housing, fuel, insurance, and such — have been rising much more than 4.6% per year. For many people living standards are falling.

Since the increase in the minimum wage is just a reflection of inflation, it is nothing to celebrate. Indeed, inflation should be a major political issue, but no one in authority in Connecticut, from the governor to the state’s congressional delegation on down, seems to be inquiring into inflation’s causes. It’s as if inflation is a force of nature, like the weather, beyond human control. 

Meanwhile those elected officials constantly announce government’s distribution of new goodies or propose new goodies and programs without also specifying how they are to be financed. The assumption is that no taxes are necessary because everything now can be financed simply by money creation. There is no official acknowledgment that if money creation exceeds the economy’s increase in production of real goods, it might have something to do with inflation and the demand for an increase in the minimum wage.

While the federal government says a family of four is impoverished if its income is below $30,000 per year, this month the United Way of Connecticut said that inflation has been so high lately that to avoid poverty a family of four in the state needs an annual income of $126,000. Of course criteria for calculating poverty are arguable, but given current prices, even a single person would find it hard to survive in Connecticut on $30,000 a year, and the political clamor about how difficult life is becoming here suggests that living standards in the state are going in the wrong direction.

That’s what is really signified by the increase in the minimum wage — not prosperity but government’s failure to achieve it.

WHY SUBSIDIZE COMMUTING?: With ridership failing to recover on Connecticut’s section of the Metro-North Railroad between New Haven and New York as well as on the Shoreline East railroad between New Haven and New London, the state Transportation Department plans to reduce the frequency of service and to increase fares, which are heavily subsidized by state government.

Of course running fewer trains and charging more to ride them may reduce ridership even more. It’s not the way to build the railroad and get people out of their cars and into mass transit.

But with people increasingly working from home rather than commuting, there is no longer as much need for trains. Working from home already has emptied much office space in the cities. Why should rail service be immune from such changes? 

Indeed, why should state government keep subsidizing people to live so far from their places of employment in the first place? Hasn’t daily commuting long been blamed for the impoverishment of the cities as government, with highways as well as trains, has subsidized the middle class to move out?

Passenger rail has some big advantages but it may have to be rebuilt on trips longer than commuting.

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

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