Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Maybe the economic recession that has begun will loosen up Connecticut’s housing market, but it will take a while even as the poor get poorer. The housing shortage is already making life desperate for many of the poor. But state government doesn’t yet consider it an emergency, not even in the face of what seems about to happen in Danbury.

For the two years of the virus epidemic a former hotel building in Danbury has been operated as a shelter for the homeless by a social-service organization based in Stamford, Pacific House. The organization got state financing to purchase the building for use as a shelter but Danbury’s zoning board has refused to approve it. The shelter has stayed in operation only because of one of Governor Lamont’s emergency orders arising from the epidemic, but those orders expire Dec. 28.

The former hotel is adjacent to Interstate 84 and few residences are nearby, so the shelter is no more of a nuisance than the hotel was. While it is far from medical and commercial facilities and thus not the most convenient location for the homeless, Pacific House can bring services to them or help them get where they need to go as they work to gain self-sufficiency.

If state government really cared about the poor and troubled, it would pass a law exempting shelters from zoning regulations just as it has exempted group homes for the mentally handicapped.

Danbury lacks any facility that can accommodate all the people now being housed at the former hotel. Most may be out on the street at the end of the month just as the dead of winter sets in. Surely state government can put aside less essential matters until it solves the emergency housing problem.

CROOKED GUARDS: Connecticut’s Correction Department lately worsened the state’s housing problem. It was inadvertent but predictable.

Since prison guards work in tightly confined spaces and were at more risk of contracting Covid 19, the department used federal epidemic emergency money to let them rent hotel rooms so they might avoid infecting their families.

But, the Connecticut Mirror reports, state auditors found that the program was badly abused. Correction Department employees, the Mirror says, “used the program to book hotel rooms during a wedding, to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and to live full-time in the hotels with their families. … Others booked rooms in multiple hotels on the same days, and at least one correction officer used the program while he was on military leave.” Some employees used the program to live in hotels for five months or more.

There were rules again this kind of thing but since this was an emergency, no one was hired to enforce them. Some employees who abused the program suffered short suspensions but it seems that no one was fired or prosecuted.

Of course much federal emergency money has been defrauded throughout the country, just as it was defrauded by the corrupt city government in West Haven, where more than a million dollars was stolen or misdirected by a City Council aide who was also a state representative.

The lesson seems to be that any emergency’s first order of business should be to hire extra auditors.

WHAT PROTECTION?: Another Connecticut woman who had a protective order was murdered last week, apparently by the former boyfriend she got the order against. Julie Minogue of Milford was battered to death with an ax after her ex had harassed her with hundreds of text messages. An arrest warrant application for the harasser had been pending, left incomplete, for weeks.

The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence says there have been 12 intimate partner murders in the state so far this year.

The only way to stop them is to require police, prosecutors, and courts to give priority to domestic threats and violence and to impose heavy penalties upon conviction, even for first offenses. Here too state government is always doing many less important things.

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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

What does it mean that, as Dan Haar of Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers notes in a recent column, all of Connecticut’s 19 cities have white mayors though most of them have large populations of racial or ethnic minorities?

There has been no “voter suppression,” and many members of racial minorities hold other elected office in the cities. In recent years Hartford and New Haven each have had two Black mayors, and Hartford has had two Hispanic mayors as well.

Some say the lack of minority mayors diminishes trust in local government. Maybe, but that presumes some racism among members of minority groups themselves — a belief that only fellow members of minority groups can honestly care for them in high elected office.

For several years the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and Yale University have been undertaking a program to encourage members of minority groups to get involved in politics and government in the state. Perhaps intimidated by history or tradition, minorities may need this special encouragement. But then politics and government need more attention from everyone — especially from those who don’t mean to draw their livelihoods from government.

After all, mayors from minority groups are not any more inherently virtuous than white mayors. A recent minority mayor of Hartford was convicted of corruption, while the most recent minority mayor in New Haven was not especially competent, raised city property taxes atrociously, and was soundly defeated for re-election by a white man.

Bad consequences can arise from minority mayors in big cities through no fault of their own. That’s because Connecticut treats its cities mainly as repositories of the poor and the government and welfare classes and could hardly care less about the results of its urban policies. The steady decline of living conditions in the cities has given the impression that the cities and their inhabitants are hopeless, when what [ITALICS] really [END ITALICS] is hopeless is [ITALICS] state policy [END ITALICS] toward the cities — a policy of throwing money at them only to placate their most vocal dependents.

While Hartford’s current mayor, Luke Bronin, a white man, is the city’s best mayor in many years, his relative successes — financial stability and some downtown development — are mainly functions of state government financing, as with the state’s extraordinary assumption of the city’s enormous bonded debt, a favor not granted to other cities, and state government’s financial underwriting of city projects. Without that heavy support from state government, Hartford almost surely would have continued sinking during Bronin’s administration too.

So without profound changes in state policy, what would more Black and Hispanic mayors do for Connecticut’s cities other than rearrange local patronage? The big challenge is not to change the race of the mayors but to change state policy toward the cities.

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MORE COMPETITION LOST: Just months after the controversial acquisition of People’s United Bank by M&T Bank, more competition in Connecticut’s banking industry is about to be lost. New York-based NBT Bancorp plans to acquire Salisbury Bancorp and its 14 offices in the northwestern part of the state, southwestern Massachusetts, and east-central New York.

NBT Bank already has more than 135 banking branches in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

When M&T, another New York bank, moved on People’s United, based in Bridgeport and having more than 400 branches in Connecticut and elsewhere in New England, the acquiring bank gave assurances that layoffs and branch closings would be minimized. Of course they weren’t. Elected officials harrumphed and pretended to get tough with the bank but they didn’t either.

People’s United was already a big, full-service bank and its acquisition by M&T brought no gains to the public, only gains to the bank’s owners from the reduction in competition.

Will the public gain anything from the loss of Salisbury Bank? Almost certainly not. But will Connecticut’s attorney general, William Tong, and the U.S. Justice Department bring antitrust law to bear against the continuing destruction of competition in banking in Connecticut? If they do, it will be a first.

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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

For the third time in four years, Connecticut’s state auditors have chided the state police for the excessive overtime paid to many troopers and even dispatchers. The most recent audit surveyed the records of 25 state police employees and found that 20 of them were earning more in overtime than in base pay and 16 were working an average of 13 hours per day in 14 consecutive days.

Apart from the financial inefficiency, this is a recipe for burnout and poor performance. This was famously demonstrated two years ago when a state trooper was video-recorded exploding, unprovoked, into crazed rage at a motorist he had stopped in New Haven, screaming that he hated his job and the crummy civilians he had to deal with and couldn’t wait to retire. It turned out that he too had been working far too much overtime.

But as the state government employment system does generally, the trooper employment system encourages excessive overtime, with troopers eligible to retire with full pensions after only 20 years and with their pension pay calculated as half the average of their three highest-paid years. Thus a trooper can retire at age 45 with an annual pension of $100,000 or more and have another 20 years to build a second career.

This incentive to work overtime is perverse for the public interest. It would be far better financially and for upholding standards of service to hire more troopers and remove overtime pay from pension calculations.

The state police have expressed concurrence with the last three audits about excessive overtime. The Lamont administration acknowledges that state police ranks are much lower than authorized and that it means to get to full strength. But somehow it never happens, and state legislators don’t make a fuss over it. They too seem not to take the auditors’ work seriously.

ELECTRICITY SHELL GAME: Electricity prices in Connecticut are going up because energy prices worldwide have gone up. Since the state’s electric utilities have been barred from the generation business for more than 20 years, elected officials can’t as easily resort to their usual scapegoating.

Since most of Connecticut’s elected officials are Democrats, they don’t want to do the most [ITALICS] relevant [END ITALICS] thing — press the national Democratic administration to reverse its insane policy against domestic production of conventional energy.

So now Connecticut’s elected officials are contemplating more mere [ITALICS] shifting [END ITALICS] of electricity costs among users or throughout society generally, along the lines of what the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority already is doing by requiring the electric utilities to reduce rates for the poor and raise them for everyone else — to make electricity rates part of the tax and income redistribution system.

Progressive taxation — higher tax rates on higher incomes and greater wealth — can be sound policy to an extent if it is forthright. But hiding taxes and other social costs in electricity bills is not forthright — it’s a shell game. Nor is it really fair, since poverty is not automatically a virtue and sometimes is the result of vice. Should irresponsible people get a discount on electricity and responsible people get a surcharge?

At a certain point government’s cost shifting not only misleads people but also distorts and corrupts the entire market economy, which is a far more efficient and far mechanism for distributing production of goods and services than government is.

The French economist and statesman Frederic Bastiat may have seen Connecticut coming two centuries ago. “Government,” he wrote, “is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”

PRONOUN DISTRACTION: What’s the most pressing problem in Bridgeport’s schools?

It’s not the awful academic performance, what with more than 70% of students lacking proficiency in reading and nearly 90% lacking proficiency in math.

Instead of solving that problem Bridgeport’s Board of Education is developing a policy on the pronouns to be used for transgender and gender-ambivalent students, lest they be “misgendered” — that is, addressed as members of their biological gender.

Will the kids even be able to spell their new pronouns? Like the chronic excessive overtime for the state troopers, that’s an old challenge Connecticut seems to keep declining.

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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

Student performance and even attendance in Connecticut’s public schools are crashing, but not to worry. With Governor Lamont presiding, the state Education Department and the state’s five officially recognized Indian tribes announced the other day that they will create a model curriculum in Native American studies. The curriculum will be offered to the schools, where, if it is used, it may crowd out basic academic teaching, as “social-emotional learning” already is doing.

Indeed, the Native American studies curriculum may be especially useful for distracting from the crash of public education. Everyone in authority can keep looking busy while carefully avoiding relevance to the disaster.

Of course if students ever managed to read at grade level, it would be great to have a more accurate and comprehensive account of the country’s history, overcoming what kids pick up from cowboys-and-Indians theater. But such an account is not likely to emerge from anything assembled by the Education Department and the Indian tribes. The curriculum probably will be constructed to rationalize perpetual grievance, victimhood, and privilege. After all, legislation to create the curriculum was proposed by state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Foxwoods.

A news report about the curriculum suggested that the history of the Indian tribes and the European settlers who founded Connecticut is such a sensitive subject that it will be uncomfortable to relate, apparently because some think that imputing guilt will be necessary.

Nonsense. For the Connecticut history to be taught here is only the history of mankind — tribalism and the struggle to overcome it, with the peculiarly American denouement whereby, as society began to overcome it, tribalism was seen as an excellent mechanism for delivering political patronage and so was restored and embedded in law for perpetuity.

In early Connecticut there were more than two tribes, the Europeans and Indians. There were [ITALICS] multiple [END ITALICS] Indian tribes with shifting alliances, and the peace was broken as much by the Indians as the Europeans. The Pequots, whose remote descendants today claim entitlement to perpetual victimhood because of the tribe’s near-extermination in a battle in Mystic in 1637, oppressed other Indian tribes and so were hated by them. The name “Pequot” meant “destroyer.”

So the Mohegans, Narragansetts, and Niantics joined the Europeans to destroy the Pequots themselves — men, women, and children alike, an atrocity far greater than the atrocities that had been inflicted by the Pequots on their enemies, atrocities that had prompted the war.

The Pequot chief Sassacus, who was away with a raiding party at the time of the Mystic massacre, fled to the west and was killed not by the Europeans but the Mohawks, who sent his severed head and hands to the Europeans in Hartford as an offering of friendship.

Of course the extermination of the Pequots was not quickly followed by an age of equality, light, and happy assimilation. Indian lands were bought or expropriated, more easily because the Indians did not share the Europeans’ concept of private property. Hewing to its old ways, Indian culture faded under the burden of discrimination.

But over the decades intermarriage and vast new immigration hastened assimilation of Connecticut’s ethnicities, and eventually, though only a half century ago, full equality under the law, if not quite in actual living conditions, was established. Now the descendants of the old tribes and the various ethnicities were trying to make a living more or less in the same culture.

Whereupon government, in its endless thirst for revenue, contrived to dress up casino gambling as a form of ethnic reparations for ancient wrongs that lacked surviving victims. In southeastern Connecticut certain people who lived in raised ranches and worked at Electric Boat like everybody else suddenly could claim to be oppressed on behalf of their distant ancestors. In the name of this ancestry state government gave them a casino duopoly and thus perpetual wealth to be inherited by their descendants at the expense of the rest of society.

Almost as quickly as it had arrived in Connecticut, equality under the law was undone. As a political matter this new ethnic privilege will require perpetuating the false impression of victimhood. Hence the Education Department’s new curriculum.

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

By Chris Powell

Despite Connecticut’s high housing costs and severe shortage of housing, Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported last week that half the federal government housing vouchers issued in the state in the last three years have expired unused. That’s about 3,000 vouchers.

The federal government estimates that about $1.6 million in available housing subsidies is going unspent in Connecticut each month, money that might cover shelter for about 1,700 families.

Meanwhile homelessness in Connecticut has begun to rise again after declining for years under state government’s effort to provide more of what is called supportive housing — small apartments linked to social services. With many troubled people, getting a secure room with some privacy is the crucial first step toward recovery of their mental and physical health.

Of course part of the problem with the unused vouchers is Connecticut’s general shortage of housing. Even when they receive vouchers, poor people in Connecticut have great difficulty finding suitable housing they can afford in the areas where they need to reside. Many vouchers are valid only in the towns that issued them, though housing in nearby towns might suffice. Federal, state, and municipal rules for voucher use can be complicated and discouraging. And some landlords are reluctant to accept vouchers, in part because of delays in processing them, but also because poor people are less desirable tenants.

A woman cited in the Hearst report said she ended up moving to Ohio when her six-month effort to use her housing voucher in Connecticut failed.

This problem with housing vouchers would seem to call for urgent legislative investigations at both the state and federal level. Could vouchers be made redeemable everywhere, not just in the city or town whose housing authority issued them? Could the government create and maintain a master regional registry of rental housing openings where vouchers are accepted? Could voucher rules and processing be streamlined? And, of course, what can Connecticut do to increase housing construction generally?

Maybe Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat just re-elected to a third six-year term, could look into helping people get housing with government vouchers when he’s not so busy helping people get Taylor Swift concert tickets.

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West Haven’s scandal with the embezzlement of $1.2 million in federal virus epidemic relief money jumped to Ansonia last week. Former Democratic state Rep. Michael DiMassa, who was simultaneously a West Haven city government functionary who ran the embezzlement and who has pleaded guilty to federal charges, testified in court in Hartford that he arranged for some of the relief money to be paid to three women with whom he was having romantic relationships. He said one was his colleague in the General Assembly, Rep. Kara Rochelle, D-Ansonia, who got a city government check for $5,000, supposedly for consulting work about a new city firehouse.

Rochelle insists that she was qualified to do the consulting. But the Valley Independent Sentinel reports that Rochelle was given no contract or written description of her responsibilities, that her work for West Haven lasted only two months, that the city also employed a New York company for consulting on the firehouse project for much more money, $180,000, and that the project was canceled.

Rochelle’s evasion of the central question — whether she had an intimate relationship with the man who got her the money he embezzled from West Haven — undermines her indignation about being questioned. She says, “I will not stand by while politically motivated gossips use the oldest sexist tropes in the book to attack me.”

But there is nothing “sexist” in pursuing how and why embezzled government money was spent. Nobody would be asking about Rochelle’s personal life if it wasn’t tangled up with that money.

Besides, state legislators should be wary about drawing income from municipalities, lest they seem to be using their office for personal gain.

Despite Rochelle’s evasiveness, Democrats in her district are standing by her, and the party’s leadership in the state House of Representatives is looking the other way. After all, the next legislative election is two years off.

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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

Ever since terrorism descended on the United States 21 years ago, government has urged Americans: “If you see something, say something.” A recent incident in New Jersey that extended into Connecticut suggests that keeping your mouth shut may may be a lot better.

In the town of Caldwell a 9-year-old girl went out walking along her street spraying something on trees and sidewalks. A neighbor saw her and was puzzled and concerned and so, in accordance with government policy, he called the police on their non-emergency line and reported what he had seen.

An officer responded and found that the little girl had been following government policy too. She was spraying spotted lanternflies, invasive insects that cause serious damage. Agriculture departments have been encouraging the public to eradicate them.

Confronted by the officer, the little girl was afraid she was in trouble. But having heard her explanation, the officer assured her she wasn’t, and the neighbor who called the police was told that there was no problem, for the little girl was doing a good deed.

So far, so good. Little girl, caller, and police officer all had done what they should have done.

But the little girl and her mother are Black, and the mother was offended by the call to the police and complained about it at a town council meeting, accusing the caller, who is white, of racism.

The accusation of racism caused the incident to start getting national publicity, prompting a Black professor at Yale University to invite the little girl and her mother to visit the university to learn more about science and see how the university welcomes Black students. The visit produced more publicity suggesting that a racist wrong had been committed.

But according to the lawyer for the man who called the police, the man twice apologized to the little girl’s mother and explained that if he had realized who the little girl was and what she was doing, he would not have called. The lawyer says the mother refused the apologies.

The less-reported angle of the story is that the mother is a local Democratic Party official and her target is a local Republican official. The Republican says he is being defamed and getting threats. But at least now he may realize that as racial politics convulses the country, if you see something strange involving someone of a different race, saying something can be dangerous. For some people today [ITALICS] want [END ITALICS] everything to be racist, seeing it as an opportunity.

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BAIT AND SWITCH: If Connecticut state government was subject to the rules it applies to others, it would have to prosecute itself for a big bait-and-switch. For during the recent election campaign Governor Lamont and Democratic state legislators promised to pay $1,000 each to employees of essential businesses who stayed at work during the worst months of the recent virus epidemic.

But state government didn’t appropriate enough money to fulfill the promise. Many more people applied than expected, so last week during a special session of the General Assembly the program was amended to reduce its payments, many of them by 80% or more.

No matter to the Democrats, since the election is over, they won big, and defaulting so heavily on their bribe saves money that might be used to buy more votes in the next election, when people probably will have forgotten about this year’s default.

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PRICE REGULATION FAILS: This year Connecticut’s Insurance Department played chicken with medical insurer ConnectiCare. Last week the department lost. So did the public.

ConnectiCare had requested an increase of 29% for its small group medical insurance policies but the department approved only 15%. So ConnectiCare has decided to leave the small group policy business. The company says it has lost tens of millions of dollars in the last year as demand for medical services and prescription drug prices soared.

Now about 20,000 state residents will have to find other insurance.

A few months ago Harvard Pilgrim also quit Connecticut’s small group medical insurance market, so now only four insurers covering small groups remain in the state.

State government does not seem to realize that vigorous competition is better than price regulation.

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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

Now that loony ideology is trumping biology and the country is entering an age where merely wishing or thinking is supposed to make it so, why stop with transgenderism? If boys and men can be girls and women, and vice versa, even for competitive sports and bathroom use, thereby nullifying Title IX and sexual privacy, how can age restrictions be fair anymore?

If you’re really only as old as you feel, mandatory retirement ages must go. So must age group rules in sports.

If wishing or thinking makes it so, who has the right to tell any 40-year-old that he can’t play on a Little League team and enjoy hitting a 12-year-old’s pitches out of the park or knocking over the 13-year-old trying to tag him as he slides into third base?

For a few years Connecticut has been nervously humoring this nonsense with the rationale offered by Governor Lamont — that it hasn’t happened much, just famously in high school girls cross-country meets. This is only to say that it doesn’t matter because it has happened to [ITALICS] someone else’s [END ITALICS] daughters. To object risks being called a “transphobe” or worse, though no one is denying the right of people to impersonate the other sex outside of competitive sports and bathrooms.

Similarly, people in Connecticut are being mocked or worse just for arguing that schools should not press topics like transgenderism on the youngest children.

Lacking good argument, the transgender cultists rely heavily on intimidation, because it works better. So the nonsense may not end in Connecticut until the women’s basketball teams at Stanford or Tennessee recruit some 6-foot-9, 275-pound transgender forwards who leave UConn players writhing on the court with ACL tears or worse.

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MORE UNPUBLIC EDUCATION: New London High School’s football coach says he has been forced to resign because of an insignificant incident during a game with Ledyard High. According to The Day of New London, the school’s athletic director refuses to explain because, he says, it’s a personnel matter.

That’s public education in Connecticut, again resorting to the oldest non-sequitur of government — that there never can be any accountability with personnel, so go away. Unfortunately most people do go away.

But the law does [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] say that personnel matters in government cannot be reviewed and discussed in public. To the contrary, while teachers enjoy a special-interest exemption for their annual performance evaluations, the law makes public other records of school employment and particularly records involving misconduct.

A request to New London’s school superintendent for access to all records involving the coach might show the public what happened with him and let the public make an informed judgment about it. If the superintendent refused that much accountability, the city’s Board of Education could be appealed to, and then the state Freedom of Information Commission.

School administrators might be able to delay accountability for a year or two — probably not forever. But stalling accountability for a year or two is usually enough for public education to avoid being public.

Public education won’t really be public at all until the “personnel matter” non-sequitur is challenged whenever it is cynically trotted out.

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LET WINE JOIN BEER: Supermarkets in Connecticut have renewed their campaign to persuade the General Assembly and governor to change state law to allow them to sell wine. That certainly would be a convenience. While supermarkets already are allowed to sell beer, anyone who would buy wine or liquor has to make a separate trip to a liquor store.

There is no good reason for this trouble, only a bad reason — Connecticut’s long subservience to the retailers and distributors of alcoholic beverages, accomplished through laws sharply limiting alcoholic beverage retailing permits and prohibiting price competition, essentially turning the alcoholic beverage business into political patronage and what is called rent seeking. As a result Connecticut has unnecessarily high alcoholic beverage prices.

Supermarkets should be allowed to sell beer, wine, and liquor just as liquor stores should be allowed to sell groceries — that is, if government ever means to serve the public interest rather than the special interest.

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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

Has a Connecticut teacher union ever declared that the compensation and working conditions of its members are wonderful and need no improvement?

Probably not. So more than a few grains of salt should be sprinkled on the last week’s report from the Connecticut Education Association, whose October survey of more than 5,600 public school teachers from kindergarten through high school found that 74% are inclined to retire earlier than they thought they would a few years ago.

Sixty percent of respondents said Connecticut’s schools are declining, almost three quarters were unhappy with their working conditions, and nearly all said their top concerns are stress and burnout.

The union’s solution: More hiring of school staff, reducing workloads and supervision for teachers, and raising salaries, as if Connecticut hasn’t pursued such policies since its Education Enhancement Act became law in 1986.

Just a few weeks ago as he campaigned for re-election Governor Lamont proclaimed that Connecticut’s schools are the best in the country, and the CEA endorsed him. So if, as the CEA’s survey claims, schools in Connecticut actually have sunk into an emergency, why did the union endorse the governor and withhold its survey until the election was safely past?

Yes, Connecticut’s schools have serious problems. But if they were problems of money, they would have been solved long ago, and if the state’s politicians cared about anything more than pleasing the teacher unions, they might have noticed by now that rising spending long has correlated with [ITALICS] falling [END ITALICS] student proficiency.

Of course the most recent disaster in public education was not the virus epidemic itself but government’s decision, made without good evidence, to close schools and convert to “remote” learning. That mistake, robbing as many as half of Connecticut’s children of as much as two years of education, was made largely under the pressure of the teacher unions themselves.

The stress teachers now complain about arises largely from the remediation that must be done for the long interruption of schooling.

But long before the epidemic schools were suffering from the collapse of the family that has been caused by the welfare system. Many students in Connecticut now are classified as chronically absent, especially but not exclusively in the cities. It’s hard enough to teach children who miss 10% or more of their classes; it can be nearly impossible when many of them are so neglected at home and so disturbed when they do show up that they misbehave and disrupt learning for everyone else.

Standards can’t be upheld in school if they are not upheld at home. But neither teachers nor elected officials dare to risk the controversy inevitable from approaching that problem. As always their only proposed solution is to spend more money even as such a policy long has failed to produce results in learning.

Perhaps better than anyone except police officers, teachers see society’s disintegration. They might do much to help identify and reverse it if their union wasn’t devoted to exploiting it for financial advantage.

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NADER’S NEWSPAPER: Seemingly indestructible at 88, Connecticut’s most famous native son, Ralph Nader, continues trying to hold government and corporations more accountable and to encourage people to take the responsibility of citizenship.

Now he is going against the grain in the most remarkable way yet. As journalism and civic engagement decline, Nader has started a monthly newspaper that offers only a print product, not an internet edition.

It’s the Capitol Hill Citizen, assembled by a small group of freelance but skilled journalists covering news unreported by mainstream publications. Poking fun at the Washington Post’s self-satisfied motto — “Democracy dies in darkness” — the Citizen’s motto is: “Democracy dies in broad daylight.”

Nader gained fame a half century ago by exposing unsafe automobiles, and while the country might think that issue has been solved, a recent edition of the Citizen showed that some big corrections are still lacking.

Predictably enough, the Citizen’s perspective is left-wing but it hits fair targets. A donation of just $5 made via the paper’s internet site — Capitol Hill Citizen dot com — buys a mail subscription.

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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

Most serious crime in Connecticut occurs in the cities and most of its victims are members of racial and ethnic minorities. Last week in Hartford two men were shot on Buckingham Street and survived, but two other men, young brothers, were shot and killed in an apartment on Barker Street.

So Connecticut chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued urgent statements. They demanded a vigorous police investigation — not of the shootings but of the noose that had just been found in the boys’ locker room at RHAM High School in rural Hebron.

Willimantic-Windham NAACP Chapter President Leah Ralls declared: “We are tired of things like this being dismissed as child’s play. This is not child’s play. This is a serious, life-threatening episode. A noose is a weapon just like a gun.”

Connecticut NAACP President Scot X. Esdaile agreed. “The Black community has to take this seriously,” Esdaile said. “We’re not going to wait until a person is hanging from one of those nooses.”

But it is hard to find even one wrongful death by noose in Connecticut in many decades, and many more decades may pass in the state before a noose turns out to be used here as “a weapon just like a gun.”

A year ago some nooses were found at the site of a warehouse being built in Windsor. Nobody was killed or injured by them, but at the insistence of the NAACP and other race fanatics, investigations were undertaken not just by the local and the state police but even the FBI.

Nothing criminal was uncovered. Indeed, it’s not illegal to make a noose in Connecticut, though placing one on public or private property with intent to intimidate or harass is a misdemeanor.

Yes, threatening is a crime, but no one in particular had been threatened by the nooses. While some people contend that [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] noose is a threat against [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] Black people, if the nooses in the Windsor warehouse and the high school in Hebron were threats, they were empty ones, and without proof of intent to intimidate or harass, the First Amendment protects even hateful expression.

Besides, as a practical matter, what can be done about what well may have been stupid juvenile pranks?

Indeed, after reviewing surveillance video at RHAM High, the state police arrested a 17-year-old student from Willimantic for the noose at the school. (The murderer of the Hartford brothers, like many other murderers in Connecticut, remains at large.)

What do the people who purport to be terrified want done with the kid charged with the noose? Should he be hanged with it?

Connecticut’s policy toward nearly all juvenile offenders is to give them mere counseling in secret rather than punishment — which may be why there are so many chronic juvenile offenders just as there are so many chronic adult ones.

So why bother investigating and prosecuting a mere annoyance when nothing will come of it with juveniles and even adult perpetrators can just laugh it off, routinely obtaining special probations like accelerated rehabilitation?

The hysteria generated about mere nooses while murder and mayhem are accepted as the natural order of things in Connecticut seems to be how the NAACP and other race fanatics strive to conceal their irrelevance to the big problems that disproportionately affect members of racial minorities.

The race fanatics have nothing useful to say about crime, educational and parental failure, welfare dependence, poverty, and the ever-rising cost of self-sufficiency, which is increasingly out of reach for people whose lack of education and job skills qualifies them only for menial work.

Of course any suggestions that could diminish those problems might be politically impossible to implement, since they would offend one interest group or another, but some organization like the NAACP should try anyway.

Instead the race fanatics may keep selecting nooses as the target of their mock outrage precisely because nothing practical or meaningful can be done about them and because the authorities responding to them often can be made to appear ineffectual or wrongly indifferent, being able to do little more than kowtow and sympathize, knowing that if they talk back to the hysteria and try to put things in perspective they’ll be called nasty names.

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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 government lately has tried to increase the accountability of police officers, equipping more of them with dashboard and body cameras, establishing the office of inspector general to investigate police use of force, and diminishing the immunity of officers from lawsuits for actions on duty.

But strangely state government has done nothing to increase the accountability of [ITALICS] criminals [END ITALICS] even as serious crimes have increased and many are committed by chronic offenders who never should have been let out of prison. Many crimes by chronic offenders have been well publicized but the governor and state legislators seem to pay no attention.

Odds are that an especially horrible case involving a chronic offender this month will be ignored officially as well. That is, the man charged and being sought in connection with the murder of his baby girl in Naugatuck has a serious criminal record — drug dealing, assault, and resisting arrest — for which he served time in prison, and, the Waterbury Republican-American says, at the time of the murder was both on parole and free on bonds totaling $375,000 on new charges of carjacking, assault, robbery, and burglary.

Of course the suspect in the baby’s murder hasn’t been convicted of it yet. Even so, given his record of convictions and the additional serious charges that already were pending against him, someone in authority should be asking why he was free on both parole and bonds for new crimes and why prosecution of his pending charges was not hastened. When someone has been killed and the suspect is a career criminal, the case should be worth at least a hearing before a General Assembly committee.

Yes, police should be held more accountable. But how about courts, prosecutors, probation officers, and social workers and therapists who work with criminals who reoffend?

Accountability is still lacking in the case of Henryk Gudelski, the jogger who last year was run down and killed in New Britain by a stolen car allegedly driven by a 17-year-old boy who had been arrested 13 times in the preceding 3½ years but had been repeatedly freed by juvenile court.

The governor and legislature have never taken note of that case either, and no accountability has been achieved by their recent legislation allowing police to detain arrested juveniles for an extra two hours while seeking a detention order from a judge. While the governor and legislators touted the change, police say it is no practical help.

Indeed, instead of dealing with chronic offenders, the criminal justice issue gaining momentum in Connecticut seems to be faster restoration of voting rights to felons. How “woke”!

If only “woke” really meant having awakened to what’s going on.

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OPEN PRIMARY MISCHIEF: While he is no friend of Republicans, columnist and talk-radio host Colin McEnroe says he has the remedy for the party’s poor performance in Connecticut: open primaries. If unaffiliated voters were allowed to help choose Republican candidates, McEnroe writes, the party would not nominate extreme conservatives who can’t win. McEnroe cites Connecticut’s two most recent Republican governors, John G. Rowland and Jodi Rell, as proof that Connecticut will elect Republicans.

But Rowland and Rell were not extreme conservatives. They were hardly conservatives at all, and they were nominated without open primaries.

Besides, open primaries are undemocratic because they can impair like-minded people from maintaining a party, and they invite mischief like what recently occurred around the country as Democrats intervened in Republican nominations, assisting candidates associated with former President Donald Trump because they would be easier to defeat. This intervention by non-Republicans helped nominate the less electable Republican candidates.

Connecticut Republicans could restrict their open primaries to unaffiliated voters, nominally excluding Democrats. But in Connecticut changing registration from a party to unaffiliated and back is easy and quick, so mischief in open primaries would be easy too.

Of course Democrats in Connecticut long have been winning elections without open primaries — indeed, often without any primaries at all. So maybe the ability to dispense a lot of government patronage is more helpful than open primaries.

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

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