Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

What an extraordinary claim the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system made for itself last week. The system, representing the regional universities and the community colleges, declared that its institutions long have been cannibalized by employee compensation costs and so now need big new appropriations to restore their academics and make it possible for more students to attend for “free” — that is, with taxpayers paying for them.

Accordingly, the system proposes to nearly double its spending over the next three years, from $318 million to $597 million. But rather than helping students, the plan seems meant mostly to keep the institutions going amid their declining enrollment. After all, if the universities and colleges cannot induce students to pay at least something for their tuition, just what is the value of the education that is proposed to be given away for nothing?

The cannibalizing complained about by the regional universities and community colleges is not confined to higher education, Two weeks ago the state comptroller’s office reported that state employee compensation increased in 2022 at the fastest rate in years, nearly 10%, exceeding $5 billion for the first time even as state government’s workforce fell by 2,000 people, or 4%, from 51,500 to 49,500.

In any case state government’s obsession with higher education is excessive in light of the steady decline in student proficiency in Connecticut’s [ITALICS] lower [END ITALICS] education. While some of that decline results from the interruption to schooling caused by the recent virus epidemic, test results show that the decline began long before. In the unlikely event that it ever can be established that increased spending improves education in Connecticut, [ITALICS] lower [END ITALICS] education is where it should go.

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ABORTION WORSHIP: Abortion fanaticism reached its highest point last week as a group of Connecticut Democratic state legislators and other Democratic officials, styling themselves the Reproductive Rights Caucus, proposed that state government establish a fund to pay the expenses of residents of other states who come to Connecticut for abortions.

Suddenly it was as if all human need in Connecticut itself had been sated and the state had achieved such prosperity that it could take financial responsibility for the rest of the country.

But even as the Reproductive Rights Caucus was staking its claim on behalf of paying for the abortions of Texans and Alabamans, other interest groups were clamoring at the state Capitol about the many unmet social, medical, educational, nutritional, and business development needs of Connecticut’s own residents.

Governor Lamont heard them and announced that state government would spend another $12 million to help poor tenants catch up on overdue rent payments. But what about medical care for illegal immigrant children? What about the thousands of Connecticut students said to be going to school hungry because their families don’t feed them at home? And how will Connecticut pay for the hundred thousand low-income apartments it is said to lack?

Will the Reproductive Rights Caucus reply to that clamor and explain why abortion is actually the highest social good in the world and should have a superior claim on Connecticut’s resources, no matter the origin of the desire for abortion?

And will any Democratic officials who participate in the clamor for Connecticut’s needy find the nerve to rebuke their colleagues who put abortion above everything else?

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POLITICAL PAYOFF: State politics got even more cynical last week when the Lamont administration announced the appointment of Rob Hotaling as a deputy commissioner in the state Department of Economic and Community Development. It was said that Hotaling was appointed because he made a good impression on Governor Lamont last year as the Independent Party’s candidate for governor.

But that’s not likely the big reason why the governor thinks well enough of Hotaling to give him a job. Rather, last year Hotaling prevented the Independent Party from repeating its 2018 cross-endorsement of the Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski. Last year Hotaling kept the Independent Party’s 12,000 votes from going Republican, the only way those votes might have meant anything in the election. The supposed Independent turned out to be a Democratic tool.

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

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By Chris Powell

While state government is all geared up to distract itself with trivia, news organizations are full of reports indicating Connecticut’s worsening impoverishment, especially its child neglect. In recent days these reports have told of thousands of students coming to school hungry because their families don’t feed them at home, and of a city school system — Waterbury’s — that is making around-the-clock tutoring available to students, 80% of whom are described as “high needs,” a euphemism for neglected.

Of course poverty in Waterbury or any city isn’t a surprise, but the report about it added that more than half of [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] students in Connecticut are now classified by the state Education Department as “high needs.”

News reports always indicate that most of Connecticut’s needy are unmarried women with children whose fathers play little if any role in their lives. But no one in authority draws a connection between this phenomenon and the poverty, child neglect, and drug abuse afflicting the schools and criminal justice.

One of the recent reports, drawing from the state Sentencing Commission, says 80% of Connecticut’s prison inmates are mentally ill or suffer from drug abuse. Those have been the circumstances in the prisons for decades, since many “high needs” children become higher-needs offenders over time.

Unless their neglect is reversed early, “high needs” children enter adulthood without a strong basic education and are qualified only for menial work, highly susceptible to the temptations of drugs and crime, and unable to contribute much if anything to society.

But there is no plan to transform the lives of Connecticut’s neglected children or even to acknowledge their neglect and its causes. Instead legislators are offering only the usual pandering and empty gestures.

State Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, has introduced a bill to prohibit people convicted of sedition, rebellion, or insurrection from holding public office or any government job.

Connecticut hasn’t run into that problem yet, but just down the road from Norwalk, in Bridgeport, Joe Ganim has been serving his second stint as mayor after having done a long prison term for corruption committed during his first stint. No state law prevented his return to office.

Now Ganim is even seeking to recover his license to practice law.

But, like Duff, Ganim is a Democrat, so distant “insurrectionists” can be used to distract from the taint upon government close to home.

State Rep. Christopher Rosario, D-Bridgeport, proposes to authorize the two Indian casinos in the southeastern part of the state, as well as a few bars in the state’s cities, to sell alcoholic beverages as late as 4 in the morning, even as wrong-way driving has exploded in Connecticut and has just killed one of Rosario’s legislative colleagues and even as state-authorized marijuana will increase driving while intoxicated.

More pandering to the Indians comes from the bill introduced by Rep. Anthony Nolan, D-New London, to rename the Thames River as the Pequot River, after the tribe that terrorized the rest of the inhabitants of Connecticut 400 years ago, causing the European settlers and the other Indian tribes to unite to destroy them. (“Pequot” itself meant “destroyers.”)

What possibly could justify the honor Nolan proposes? Only the great wealth of the distant descendants of the Pequots who now operate one of the casinos. Government awarded them a spectacularly valuable duopoly and now humiliates itself before them.

Governor Lamont offered the most trivial proposals of the month as he claimed to be seeking “to eliminate gun violence.”

He would “invest” another $2.5 million in “community violence intervention programs,” whereby unstable young men are asked nicely to behave. He would prohibit carrying guns openly in public, as if criminals don’t already conceal their weapons until they strike. He would prohibit people from buying more than one handgun per month, as if nearly everyone who wants a gun doesn’t already have one. And he wants registration of “ghost guns,” as if criminals will comply.

Nothing proposed so far in the legislative session will impede gun violence or slow or even acknowledge Connecticut’s social disintegration.

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

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By Chris Powell

For many years Hartford’s North End, the heavily Black area of the city, has suffered extensive sewage overflows into basements from its antiquated sewer system, and the other day residents there complained about it again, this time to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The problem is universally acknowledged but nothing is being done about it. According to the Hartford Courant, one community leader calls it “environmental racism,” an increasingly fashionable and politically opportunistic complaint.

Yes, fixing the problem would cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe more. Yet all the responsible agencies are full of cash, from the regional water and sewer agency, the Metropolitan District Commission; to Governor Lamont’s administration, which is sitting on billions of dollars in surplus funds; to the federal government, which has created so much money in recent years, much of it in the name of infrastructure improvements, that it has drowned the world in a devastating inflation.

Even the city of Hartford itself, while on the brink of bankruptcy a few years ago, chose against fixing the North End sewers and instead decided to build a minor-league baseball stadium downtown.

This prompted a sneaky maneuver by the Democratic state administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to have state government assume the entirety of Hartford’s $500 million bonded debt while doing nothing about the heavy indebtedness of Connecticut’s other troubled cities — a gesture of spectacular patronage to the city.

None of this was “environmental racism.” It was ordinary politics for which the political party that claims to be the tribune of the poor and racial minorities, the Democratic Party, is comprehensively responsible, since it has controlled all levels of government involved with the North End sewer issue — local, state, and federal.

Lately Connecticut’s two U.S. senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, have been voting essentially for blank checks for Ukraine in pursuit of a war against Russia whose aims the U.S. government has yet to specify. Indeed, as the North Enders renewed their complaints about the sewer issue, Blumenthal flew off to Ukraine again.

The Hartford area’s U.S. representative, John B. Larson, lately has been pressing to spend as much as $17 billion in infrastructure money not on fixing the North End’s sewers but to relocate the Hartford area’s highways and put many miles of them in tunnels.

Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin has been advancing various expensive housing and commercial projects around the city, apparently figuring that leadership on the North End sewer problem can be left to the MDC, state government, the EPA, or someone else.

The North End’s sewers never get fixed not because of “environmental racism” but because the residents there are poor, insufficiently engaged, have terrible political representation at every level, and [ITALICS] accept [END ITALICS] it.

Having just won a new four-year term, thanks in part to the usual huge plurality from Hartford, and presiding over most of the administrative assets that can fix the sewer problem, Governor Lamont should be the target of the North End’s clamor. But does anyone representing the North End even know where to find him?

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EXPOSE CHILD RAPE: Having hit a homerun with their proposal for a huge and quick reduction in Connecticut’s electric rates — removing the state government charges hidden in electric bills — the General Assembly’s Republican minority now may press another good issue. Some Republican legislators propose to require parental notification for abortions performed on minors.

The legislation may not even get a hearing, since the legislature’s Democratic majority is so extremist on abortion. But at least raising the issue may show how the Democrats seek to weaken the family, just as they are striving to weaken it by concealing from parents how schools handle the sexual dysphoria of their children.

Opponents of parental notification contend that it would expose child neglect or abuse at home or elsewhere — as if such neglect or abuse [ITALICS] shouldn’t [END ITALICS] be exposed and acted against. Indeed, in Connecticut abortions for minors are arranged by their exploiters and rapists to conceal their felonies. Yet to Democratic legislators, abortion is the highest social good and so any abortion is better than exposing child sexual abuse.

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

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By Chris Powell

Could Stamford, a Democratic-controlled city, be tired of forfeiting its financial management to government employee unions?

That’s the implication of a vote by the city’s Board of Representatives — the city council — at its first meeting of the new year. The board voted 23-7 to reject a proposed contract with the school administrators union on the grounds that it is too expensive. It would have provided 10.5% raises over three years. While that would be much less than inflation, school administrators long have been highly paid.

So now, under Connecticut’s democracy-destroying government labor law, the contract will go to binding arbitration, in which, as the board was warned, the city may lose and have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fees.

According to the Connecticut Examiner, the big majority against the contract included both Democrats and Republicans, and they meant to caution other city employee unions and the city’s Board of Education against asking for too much.

Whether Stamford’s school administrators deserve those raises isn’t the big point here. The big point is whether Stamford’s elected representatives should determine the city’s payroll. With binding arbitration, state law maintains that the special interest — government employee unions — should have power equal to or even greater than that of elected officials. This is a big reason why Connecticut is so highly taxed and expensive.

The law is a consequence of the cowardice of governors and legislators going back four decades. As government employment rose and government employee unions became more influential, governors and legislators didn’t want to get caught between those unions and taxpayers. (Most municipal officials didn’t want to either.) So ultimate control over government labor costs was transferred to arbiters, enabling elected officials to shrug at the expensive results and claim there was nothing they could do.

The argument for binding arbitration for government employee union contracts has been that it prevents strikes. This is false.

Strikes are prevented by [ITALICS] giving in. [END ITALICS] If government employees are ever dissatisfied enough with an arbitrated contract, they might strike anyway — if they want to risk breaking Connecticut’s law forbidding strikes by government employee unions. (In 1978 an illegal strike by teachers in Bridgeport prompted Connecticut’s extension of binding arbitration to teacher unions the following year.)

Some people who recognize binding arbitration law’s affront to democracy suggest repealing both the arbitration law and the law forbidding government employee union strikes. But there is no public interest in allowing such strikes, since government represents everyone but a union only a few.

It’s different in the private sector, where the public interest is much less if ever at stake.

Of course since Connecticut is controlled by Democrats and the government employee unions control the Democratic Party, the state won’t see reform of government employee labor law any time soon. But maybe someday a brave state legislator will propose the reform that would expose binding arbitration and its advocates as enemies of democracy.

Such legislation would preserve binding arbitration but elect the arbiters and put government employee union contracts to referendum.

Then the government employee unions might have to explain to the public why democracy is bad.

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KEEP DEBT LIMIT: With Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives, concern is growing that they won’t approve an increase in the federal debt limit and that, in freezing the debt limit, they will trigger a shutdown of the government.

This is nonsense. For the federal government could continue operating just fine without raising the debt limit. Instead it could raise taxes or reduce spending or both. So responsibility for any shutdown also would fall on those members of Congress who wouldn’t raise taxes or cut spending.

There is so much bloat in federal spending, so much special-interest favoritism in tax law, and so much inflation caused by excessive spending and debt monetization that freezing the debt limit is needed to prompt some of the auditing and economizing the federal government needs.

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut may have had its “All power to the Soviets!” moment the other day as more than 200 people summoned by the Democratic Socialists of America gathered on the internet to call for a law to limit residential rent increases to 2½% annually. Five Democratic state legislators have co-sponsored the legislation and thus have tainted themselves with its demagogic scapegoating, its accusation that landlords are uniquely responsible for inflation.

“Our rent increases every year and our incomes do not,” a tenants union activist said — an excellent point immediately discredited by the failure to acknowledge the wider world.

That is, real wages throughout the country long have been falling behind inflation in [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] important respects — not just the cost of housing but also food, electricity, gas, medicine, education, and other essentials.

So where is the legislation to limit [ITALICS] those [END ITALICS] costs?

Such legislation can’t be introduced without exposing the scapegoating being done to the landlords, nor without revealing that inflation is caused by government itself as its creation of money far outstrips the production of  goods and services.

While Connecticut has a severe shortage of inexpensive rental housing, the rent-control legislation has just struck a powerful blow against efforts to get more such housing built or renovated.

For what housing developer or landlord will want to risk his money building or renovating apartments when state government may prohibit him alone from fully protecting himself against inflation?

Under the rent-control legislation, everyone else in commerce will remain free to raise prices by any amount to cover himself against inflation, and apartment tenants will be free to demand higher wages in any amount. But the rental housing business will be strictly limited to price increases far below the inflation rate.

The result of this will be still more scarcity inflating housing prices. Under rent control housing providers will be effectively expropriated by inflation.

That’s “democratic socialism” for you — diverting the blame from government without ever solving the problem government itself caused. Whom will the “democratic socialists” scapegoat next?

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TEACHER UNION GREED: Guess how Connecticut’s teacher unions want the state budget surplus distributed.

It’s not to do anything compelling. No, the teacher unions want to use the surplus to increase their members’ pay, which is already nearly the highest in the country.

Connecticut does have a problem with teachers, as it does with police officers. As social disintegration worsens, especially in the cities, fewer people want to teach where as many as half the students are chronically absent and many misbehave, and fewer people want to work in law enforcement where respect for law has collapsed.

As a result many teachers and police officers in the cities have been leaving for jobs in the suburbs, where social disintegration isn’t as bad and they are paid more for easier work.

But that is no reason to increase compensation for teachers [ITALICS] generally. [END ITALICS] It is a reason to increase salaries for teachers where more teachers are most needed [ITALICS] particularly [END ITALICS] — and not just in the cities but in particular subjects.

Typically teacher union contracts won’t allow that. So any new state money addressing the teacher shortage should be exempt from union contract restrictions.

Any new money also should come with audit requirements to determine if the money improves student performance, which is so bad in the cities that no additional spending is likely to accomplish anything unless it hires parents for the kids.

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UNREAL BRIDGEPORT:The Board of Education in Bridgeport, whose schools long have been in turmoil and whose students perform terribly, wants to hire a public relations company. According to the Connecticut Post, the company would “manage the district’s reputation, provide risk mitigation and consultation services, develop a crisis response plan, and train administrators in crisis communications.”

It’s as if the board has never heard that to change the image, it’s necessary to change the reality. But then all Connecticut seems to have given up on changing the cruel reality of its cities.

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

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By Chris Powell

Seldom does the New York Times pay attention to Connecticut unless it involves something edible, and so it was again the other day when the newspaper identified New Haven as one of 52 places around the world that everyone should visit this year for “food, culture, adventure, and natural beauty.”

Certainly for adventure, since in the first eight days of the new year New Haven endured four shootings, three of them fatal, which didn’t make the national newspaper of record even as the city’s pizza did. Nor, for that matter, were the shootings noted at the state Capitol. They never are.

Yes, go out to a great dinner in one of New Haven’s many wonderful restaurants and then keep your head down as you return home to the suburbs, putting safe distance between yourself and the social disintegration that long has afflicted that city and others and now is creeping out into the rest of the state.

But as reported by the New Haven Register, at least a flicker of insight about the shootings came from Mayor Justin Elicker and Police Chief Karl Jacobson. Acknowledging the city’s spike in violent crime, the mayor and the chief said a small group of repeat offenders is responsible for most of the trouble and that the city will ask the General Assembly to legislate higher bonds or longer sentences for them.

This may have been the first official acknowledgment of what Connecticut long has most needed in criminal justice: an incorrigibility law, whereby repeat offenders, upon a sufficient number of convictions, would be sentenced to life terms. Instead for years now Governor Lamont and other leading Democrats in the state have boasted about the decline in the state’s prison population even as repeat offenders have run wild.

Also while New Haven’s mayor and police chief were recognizing the necessity of putting repeat offenders away for good and readers of the Times were deliberating whether to pursue Italian, Spanish, or Thai dinner in the city, the Register reported the 48th arrest of a particular New Haven resident, this time for robbing a bank in Fairfield.

The accused already has three convictions for bank robbery and many encounters with the law for burglary, theft, and drug crimes.

The heck with a “three strikes” law. Even a “20 strikes” law might have put this criminal away by now.

Will Connecticut let him get to 50 arrests? If he does, will he win a prize? Why was he still on the loose?

As the Times, the governor, state legislators, judges, and prosecutors might say: Who cares? Let’s eat!

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Connecticut’s high school students may be pretty dumb, insofar as half never master high school math and English before being given their diplomas and encouraged to apply to a state college. But the students probably aren’t as dumb as state Rep. Holly Cheeseman, R-East Lyme, seems to think they are.

Cheeseman has introduced legislation to require teen-agers applying for a driver’s license to take a course of at least four hours’ duration about the dangers of driving while intoxicated from marijuana, which state government has just purported to legalize, though its possession remains a violation of federal law. State law already requires young license applicants to take a similar course on the dangers of driving after consuming alcohol or other drugs.

But even high school students who have failed math and English already know perfectly well that they can get intoxicated from marijuana.

For of course that’s exactly [ITALICS] why [END ITALICS] they smoke or eat the stuff — to get intoxicated. It’s the same with everyone else who indulges.

Cheeseman’s legislation may forestall intoxicated driving by the kids by all of four hours, the time it takes them to complete the marijuana class. To her credit, she opposed putting state government into the marijuana business.

But the only deterrent to driving while intoxicated from [ITALICS] anything [END ITALICS] is more serious criminal prosecution than what Connecticut imposes for first offenders — a few hours taking a “drug and alcohol education course” in which people also are told what they already knew but chose to disregard. Such a light penalty doesn’t deter many people, but so many people drive while intoxicated that most legislators don’t want much punishment.

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

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By Chris Powell

Only one practical proposal has been offered for immediate reduction of Connecticut’s electricity prices, the highest in the continental United States. But the practical proposal is the least publicized one.

The practical proposal is [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] the legislation offered by state Rep. Christine Conley, D-Groton, to give the General Assembly the authority to decide on rates charged by electric and natural gas utilities. Under political pressure, such a system would become the expropriation of utility companies, requiring them to sell their products below cost.

The current rate regulation system, operated by the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, puts some distance between rate setting and politics, on the premise that the public interest requires keeping utility companies financially sound.

If the legislature is to set utility rates directly, the only fair way of doing it would be for state government to purchase and operate the utilities. That would not be cheap.

Connecticut’s largest utility company, Eversource Energy, is a public company with a market capitalization of more than $29 billion. Not all of that value arises from Connecticut, since the company also serves Massachusetts and New Hampshire. But the fair market value of the Eversource operations in Connecticut is certainly well above $10 billion and acquiring them would require state government, already the highest indebted per-capita, or close to it, to make a bigger mess of its finances and debt burden.

Even then anyone might guess what would happen: State government would start transferring electricity costs and hiding them in other accounts in the state budget to camouflage its inability to control costs any better than the former utility companies did. Indeed, even under the current system of purportedly nonpolitical rate regulation, state government long has been shifting its own costs into electric rates.

That’s where the one practical proposal for an immediate reduction of rates comes in. It was made by state Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield, in a recent essay in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers.

“A fresh look at the various camouflaged costs on our monthly utility bills is in order,” Hwang wrote. “A significant portion of those bills does not actually pay for electric generation and distribution.”

That is, state government has enacted various social and environmental policies and programs that have substantial costs but has shifted those costs to the electric companies, which add them to customer bills. The companies get the blame for these costs and elected officials take the credit for whatever good the policies and programs accomplish.

United Illuminating, Connecticut’s second largest electric utility, declines to discuss the camouflaged costs, apparently fearing political retaliation. But, when pressed, Eversource has estimated them as constituting as much as 20% of electric bills.

That is, if Connecticut electric customers had a clue about this cost shifting, they could be lining up behind — or preferably in front of — the teacher unions and other special interests at the state Capitol that are clamoring for a share of the state budget surplus Governor Lamont and many legislators boast about. If electric rates are really as burdensome as the governor and legislators contend, why aren’t they taking state government’s costs out of electric bills and moving them into the state budget where they belong?

The governor and legislators are ignoring Hwang’s hint because they don’t want to lose the political advantages of shifting and camouflaging costs and blaming the utilities for costs that are really the government’s own — and not just the costs of state government’s policies and programs but also government’s impairment of domestic energy production.

This racket could end sooner if journalism ever exposed it.

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SUDDENLY SILENT: A few weeks ago Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal denounced Southwest Airlines for breakdowns that caused thousands of customers to be delayed or stranded for days. Since then the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s air-traffic control system has broken down twice, once in Florida, once nationally, delaying or stranding many more travelers than Southwest did.

But the senator, usually so vocal and indignant, had nothing to say about it.

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

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By Chris Powell

News organizations and state government proclaimed last week that marijuana is now legal in Connecticut. But it’s not really.

Pressed about the issue, the U.S. attorney’s office for Connecticut quickly confirmed that while Connecticut and other states have repealed their criminal laws on marijuana, possession and sale of the drug remain violations of federal law. The marijuana business is going into the open in many states only because for some years now the federal government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, has decided not to enforce the federal law.

As U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has told Congress: “I do not think it the best use of the Justice Department’s limited resources to pursue prosecutions of those who are complying with the laws in states that have legalized and are effectively regulating marijuana.”

Of course there is always much discretion in law enforcement, like the patrol officer who issues an oral warning instead of a ticket to a speeding motorist, or the Justice Department that raids the home of a former Republican president in pursuit of classified documents but not the office of a former Democratic vice president who also took classified documents with him when his term expired.

But discretion in a particular case is nothing compared to a decision to suspend entirely the enforcement of a law. There is no authority for that, since the Constitution requires that the president, the head of the federal executive department, “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The Constitution does not say that the president shall choose which laws to enforce.

That is totalitarianism — the end of law.

Attorney General Garland’s rationale for not enforcing federal marijuana law in states that are facilitating the marijuana business — the Justice Department’s “limited resources” — is even weaker.

For to close the state-sanctioned marijuana business, the department would need only to make an arrest at a single marijuana retailer in each state that is sanctioning the business. The industry would fold up within hours. Indeed, it would not have sprung up at all without confidence in federal indifference.

This doesn’t mean that marijuana should remain criminalized. While it can be addictive and cause harm, it is mild as illegal drugs go and can have medical uses. Decades of criminalization probably have caused more problems than they have prevented. The bigger problem now is respect for law.

States should be simply repealing their criminal laws on marijuana, leaving enforcement to the federal government. States should not be facilitating sale of the drug, which is essentially nullification of federal law — just what Connecticut and some other states have been doing with illegal immigration, obstructing federal immigration agents and giving state identification documents to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking.

Meanwhile Congress should take marijuana out of federal criminal law and strengthen pursuit of more dangerous drugs, especially fentanyl.

The present circumstances with marijuana — legal and illegal at the same time in the same place — invite contempt for law and government.

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According to the Connecticut Mirror, the idea of U.S. Rep. John B. Larson, D-1st District, to relocate the Hartford area’s highways and put miles of them in tunnels at the cost of maybe $17 billion and decades of construction work is starting to be taken seriously by state transportation officials.

It shouldn’t be. For while it might be nice for the Hartford bank of the Connecticut River to be covered with parks and condominiums instead of highways, getting around the Hartford area is easy enough and is getting easier as rush-hour commuting for office work is replaced by telecommuting.

Meanwhile Connecticut’s public health system has big gaps; its cities remain sunk in generational poverty; its electricity, railroad, and sanitation systems are creaky; its schools are failing; and its government employee retirement system is underfunded — all amid high inflation caused by too much government spending.

None of those things will be visible from an interstate highway tunnel but they will still be there. First things first.

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

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By Chris Powell

What is likely to be done about Connecticut’s high energy costs and particularly its exploding electricity rates?

Judging from an informational meeting held by Connecticut and Massachusetts officials the other day, nothing that is politically possible would make any difference.

Should Connecticut’s two major electricity distributors, Eversource and United Illuminating, which purchase electricity for people who can’t be bothered to purchase their own, purchase that “standard offer” electricity more frequently than the current six-month intervals?

The meeting did not reach a conclusion on that, and whatever the frequency of bulk purchasing, electricity prices still will be set by market forces reacting to supply and demand. When electricity demand rises, as it does in winter’s cold and summer’s heat, demand and scarcity increase prices.

Should the “standard offer” be eliminated and people be required to buy their own electricity directly from generating companies? It’s easy and it would be good for people to have to shop for electricity just as they shop for groceries, an option Connecticut residents have had for 20 years. But no one in authority proposed this, perhaps because it would diminish the ability of elected officials to blame the electric utilities for the inflation caused by elected officials themselves.

It was acknowledged at the meeting that increasing energy supply to Connecticut could solve the price problem, as by running high-capacity power lines into southern New England from Quebec, which has an abundance of clean hydropower to export, and by running more natural gas pipelines across New York into Connecticut. But Maine, New Hampshire, and New York have been objecting and stalling those projects, and no one in authority has proposed inducing Governor Lamont and Connecticut’s congressional delegation to seek the federal government’s intervention to increase supply.

Of course more electricity could be generated from oil, and more oil-based generation facilities could be built in the state. But the Biden administration and liberal Democrats in both the General Assembly and Congress want to destroy the domestic oil industry, believing that conventional fuels are ruining the planet. So no one in authority in Connecticut is proposing any electricity solution involving oil either.

Connecticut apparently will wait a few years if not longer for electricity to arrive from windmills yet to be installed on platforms in Long Island Sound, which themselves may be delayed by someone else’s objection.

In the face of rising electricity prices, Connecticut’s elected officials seem able to offer no more than increasing subsidies for electricity use by the poor, thereby transferring and camouflaging costs and worsening inflation by increasing the money supply without increasing the power supply.

For the time being there is no way to get electricity prices down except through greater production and delivery of conventional energy. That is, the only solution is politically incorrect, and few elected officials have the courage to tell their constituents that political correctness will not keep their lights and heat on and electricity bills down this winter.

* * *

PUBLIC DOESN’T COUNT: With Connecticut’s supermarkets launching a campaign to change state law so they can sell wine in addition to the beer they already sell, a recent poll of viewers of Hartford’s WFSB-TV3 found a huge majority in favor. This was hardly surprising, since one-stop shopping would be so much more convenient and the only objection comes from those who want less competition and higher prices — most liquor stores.

But the more the supermarkets press the issue, perhaps the more Connecticut residents will see that the public interest seldom determines state law. Instead the special interest does.

Amid the campaign by the supermarkets state legislators will hear repeatedly from the liquor stores in their districts — on average, eight in each state representative’s district and 30 in each senator’s. Their business model is what economics calls rent seeking — that is, a permanent government subsidy at the expense of everyone else. Legislators will hear from few consumers.

Journalism might change this by vigorously questioning legislators about their subservience to the liquor lobby. But as journalism declines, all special interests will thrive.

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

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By Chris Powell

When three young men from Bridgeport were shot, one fatally, another mortally wounded, in a car on the Wilbur Cross Highway in Hamden early New Year’s Day, state police called it “an isolated incident.” This meant that the crime was not believed related to any other crime or prospective crimes, did not indicate a threat to others, and so should not cause more alarm.

But police throughout Connecticut long have been reporting similar “isolated” incidents of mayhem nearly every day. While the incidents seldom involve the same perpetrators, they [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] related in another and crucial sense.

For most of these incidents emerge from something to which Connecticut’s intelligentsia and most state residents pay no attention — a burgeoning underclass that lives in a world of its own, without connection to the communities covered by news organizations.

These people live on the fringes of society, scraping out a living in menial jobs or the informal or illegal economies, especially the drug trade, which will [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] be eliminated by state government’s clumsy legalization of marijuana and use of its regulated retailing as political patronage.

The New Year’s Day incident in Hamden fairly could be called a mass shooting, the kind of thing that sends the intelligentsia into hysterical clamor for more “gun control.” But since the incident involved the underclass and may have been just the brutal end of another drug transaction, it passed unremarked and was quickly superseded by shootings elsewhere in the state.

Connecticut is known as a wealthy state, and it’s not surprising that the rest of the country doesn’t recognize that the state has a large underclass, since the state itself hardly recognizes it, even as the underclass took over the state’s cities many years ago. State government seems to think that its huge and ever-increasing appropriations in the name of rehabilitating the cities are working.

But these appropriations mainly just distract from their longstanding [ITALICS] failure, [END ITALICS] and they facilitate the dismissal of the evidence of this failure as “isolated incidents.”

As long as social disintegration can be dismissed as “isolated incidents,” no one in authority will be compelled to inquire into the genesis of the underclass. That genesis may include perpetual poverty, child neglect, and educational failure — heavy stuff.

But the biblical observation that “the poor you will always have with you” needn’t be construed as Connecticut seems to construe it, as command or excuse for indifference and irrelevance. Instead it may have been a lament. Things can’t be fixed until they are seen and understood. The underclass isn’t — at least not in Connecticut.

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BLUMENTHAL’S BLUSTER: Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, re-elected in November to a third six-year term, remains fairly adept at identifying the failures and offenses of corporations, as the other day he blustered about the breakdown of operations at Southwest Airlines amid a winter storm that snarled transportation throughout the country.

The senator proposed legislation to guarantee all sorts of financial reimbursement to airline passengers whose flights are canceled or delayed or who lose their luggage. This is a fair issue, though such legislation probably will increase the cost of air travel.

But with perfect irony, even as Blumenthal was announcing his legislation, the breakdown of a federal air traffic control center was causing serious delays for more than 130 flights into and out of southern Florida. Would the senator’s legislation also require the [ITALICS] federal government [END ITALICS] to reimburse passengers for that kind of thing?

The senator says the airline industry is full of monopolistic practices. So where is his rebuke of the Justice Department for not already having brought antitrust enforcement to bear against those practices?

Indeed, the failures of the federal government are infinitely more costly to Americans than the failure of Southwest Airlines, but they often have gotten a pass from the senator. For example, where do Americans go for a refund of the trillions spent on the failed 20-year nation-building experiment in Afghanistan, whose appropriations the senator always supported? What about the blank checks lately being sent by the federal government to Ukraine with the senator’s endorsement? Will Ukraine become another forever war?

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

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