Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Should the restraints on state government spending that were imposed by bipartisan majorities in the General Assembly several years ago be repealed outright or evaded by enacting strategic exceptions, what Governor Lamont disparages as “gimmicks”?

Such clamor has arisen from liberal legislators, social service groups, and other advocates of enlarging government in the face of ever-increasing human need. They note that state government’s finances seem ample. 

Yet appearances are deceiving. While state government’s unfunded pension and medical insurance obligations are being whittled down, they remain in the tens of billions of dollars, far above the hundreds of millions sought by those who would repeal the “fiscal guardrails.” Weighed against the vast unfunded obligations, which will burden Connecticut far into the future, the state surplus is tiny.

Meanwhile a national economic recession has begun and probably will reduce state tax revenue substantially in a year or so.

But far more important than this, increasing state government spending is not likely to do much more than increase the compensation of government’s own employees and dependents. After all, the clamor for more spending implies that living conditions in Connecticut have not improved much if at all throughout the recent decades of government’s growth. The clamor suggests that there is more suffering and need in the state than ever.

How could this have happened?

It is probably because the steady increases in state government spending have erased most political pressure to evaluate government agencies and programs for results. Every special interest clamors for more and nearly everyone gets more, and as the most influential special interests are relatively satisfied, few people in those interests or in politics pay much attention to whether anything works well or at all. What major social problem in Connecticut has been solved or even much alleviated?

An indication of this deficiency came the other day from a surprising source — state Sen. Douglas McCrory, a liberal Democrat from Hartford who serves on the legislature’s Education Committee. Supporting a controversial budget amendment to authorize a charter school in Danbury, an amendment that was defeated, McCrory declared that Connecticut’s public schools are failing many children from racial minorities. Rebuking his colleagues, McCrory added: “No one has spoken about outcomes for children this whole session.”

Yes, there always will be clamor for more money, most of all in the name of education, but no inquiry into results, which lately have been especially bad, as student performance has been declining for many years, since long before the virus epidemic.

Most students in Connecticut long have failed to master high school math and English before receiving their diplomas. Most students do not perform at grade level but are promoted and graduated anyway. Meanwhile public higher education demands huge spending increases even as lower education collapses.

Does Connecticut want its young people to grow up capable of self-sufficiency or to join the ever-growing underclass in dependence? It looks like the latter.

More spending has not necessarily been improving outcomes because few people of political influence care about outcomes, since no one has to care. This indifference hints at the advantage of restricting spending, as the governor is inclined to do, since the tighter the budget, the greater the incentive for interest groups to scrutinize each other for failure and waste and claim to be more deserving.

Nonprofit agencies that perform much of state government’s social services have an especially strong claim for more money. Their employees long have received only mediocre raises, if any, and have fallen far behind inflation. But a few weeks ago those agencies and their employees had nothing to say when the legislature and the governor easily found $50 million in bonuses for unionized state government employees who already had gotten big raises in their recent master contract.

If interest groups were ever compelled to scrutinize each other, Connecticut might have the most effective and efficient state government in the country. Only budget restraint can accomplish that.

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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 residents may be forgiven for thinking that two of their most successful politicians of recent years, Joe Lieberman and Dick Blumenthal, invented the modern practice of the state attorney general’s office, whereby they posed as “the people’s lawyer” and constantly thundered and brought suit against all sorts of villains abusing society, as long as those villains were not part of the government itself.

But the practice of modern attorney generalship is only a variant on an eternal theme of mankind. H.L. Mencken summarized it a century ago. “The whole aim of practical politics,” he wrote, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Sometimes this is not much different than scapegoating, as it was the other day when Connecticut Attorney General William Tong praised the U.S. Supreme Court — which he usually denounces as the hateful tool of the political right — for refusing to interfere with state lawsuits accusing energy giant ExxonMobil of deceptive trade practices. 

A statement from Tong’s office said: “Connecticut sued ExxonMobil in September 2020 under the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act, alleging an ongoing, systematic campaign of lies and deception to hide from the public what ExxonMobil has known for decades — that burning fossil fuels undeniably contributes to climate change. Connecticut is seeking to stop ExxonMobil’s lies, to hold ExxonMobil accountable for these unfair and deceptive practices, and to force civil penalties, disgorgement of profits, and full disclosure of their climate research.”

That is, climate change is the oil industry’s fault.

Evidence abounds of profound change in Earth’s climate for eons before the industrial age. The Arctic holds fossils of tropical flora many thousands of years old, and the Sahara Desert is full of artifacts showing that in ancient times it was a fertile savannah. But Tong maintains that ExxonMobil must be responsible for climate change because the company didn’t disclose research suggesting that the oil it drilled and sold — oil that created and sustained the industrial age and was heavily taxed by government — produced heat and pollution, as if nearly all energy sources don’t also, and as if government and people generally haven’t always known this.

Someday solar and wind power may change this substantially, but even then the power needed to manufacture solar panels and wind turbines is not likely to be fully supplied by solar and wind power themselves. Indeed, nothing is likely to replace conventional energy for many years, and the recent increase in conventional energy prices has been far more damaging to the world than any climate change that lately can be directly traced to conventional energy.

Tong wants the people of Connecticut to think that they are not responsible for climate change but that ExxonMobil is — as if his constituents and state government itself haven’t continued to use conventional energy throughout the climate change hysteria. 

But even if, as the attorney general seems to believe, climate change is caused by conventional energy and not, for example, by the ages-old precession of the Earth’s axis and the sunspot cycle, Tong’s own constituents are still more responsible than ExxonMobil is, since no energy company can force people to use its products. Conventional fuels remain a choice. 

Government energy policy will always impose heavy costs. They will not be explained away by scapegoating.

POSTPONE EARLY VOTING: Despite the enthusiasm shown last year by elected officials and the voters themselves with approval of a state constitutional amendment authorizing early voting, it won’t happen this year.

Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas says obtaining new voting machines, devising procedures, and allocating costs between state and municipal government will require more time than remains before November’s municipal elections.

Connecticut’s next chance to try early voting will be the national and state election in 2024 — a major election that should not be experimented with. So the early voting experiment should be postponed until the municipal election of 2025.   

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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

Everybody seems to love federal appropriations for “infrastructure” — free money, conjured not with taxation but with inflation and the rest of the world’s purchase of U.S. government debt. Such appropriations can pay for big and expensive things, like modernizing the country’s creaky passenger rail system.

But will people always be as approving when a big project begins its construction phase?

Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy raised the question the other day in remarks to the Eastern Connecticut Chamber of Commerce. He acknowledged that using the many billions recently appropriated to improve the passenger railroad between Boston and Washington will involve “dislocation” in eastern Connecticut.

Straightening track to increase rail speed will infringe on many properties in towns that value their relative isolation from the modern age and its noise. Constructing a new, much straighter route between New York and Boston, running from southwestern Connecticut through the central and eastern parts of the state, about which planners have mused, might cut an hour off rail travel time at the cost of trampling hundreds of properties under eminent domain.

This makes sense from a railroading perspective. But, much set in its ways, Connecticut can hardly reach consensus on eliminating a grade crossing.

Besides, is improving intercity passenger rail service really as compelling as it seemed a few years ago, now that the internet has eliminated so much commuting to work and so many in-person business meetings? Recent clamor in Washington and at the state Capitol has been almost entirely about needs like public health, housing, and education, with little said about getting from one city to another a little faster.

So it is possible and maybe even likely that Connecticut will see no big passenger rail improvements or any transportation improvements at all any time soon. While state government recently started commuter rail service between New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield, the per-passenger subsidy is huge and likely unsustainable, and for decades state government has failed to complete even the easiest and most obvious road projects, like extending the Route 11 expressway from Salem to Interstate 95 in Waterford and I-384 from Bolton to the Rhode Island line.

Credit Senator Murphy for noting that big thinking imposes big challenges. Will he strive to meet those challenges when it starts inconveniencing many of his constituents? Will he even still be in office when Connecticut confronts any big challenge?

*

But Murphy, a Democrat, resorted to demagoguery when he responded to former President Donald Trump’s remarks to the recent convention of the National Rifle Association in Indianapolis, where the former president and other leading Republicans pledged to protect Second Amendment rights.

“Republicans,” Murphy said, “are going to make it clear that, given the choice between our families and the gun industry, they are choosing the gun industry again. The Republican Party continues to put the gun industry and the gunmakers before the safety of our kids and our families.”

Like other Democrats, Murphy continues to misrepresent the obstacle to his legislative objectives about guns. For the obstacle is not the “gun industry” at all.

The “gun industry” — gun manufacturers — is not among the most influential special interests, many of which are aligned with Murphy’s party. What most influences elected officials about guns are gun owners, many of whom are vocal and politically active. Their views may not be those of the majority but they are the people elected officials hear from most on the gun issue.

*

Most people may favor, as Murphy does, mandatory, no-exception federal background checks for the purchase of and transfer of guns. Most people may even favor outlawing any rifle that looks scary, though it may operate no differently than an ordinary pistol. But most people won’t bother to contact their elected officials about those issues or remember how those officials perform on them, while many gun rights supporters will.

That’s democracy for you — not just with guns but with everything else. As the great journalist James Reston wrote, the first rule of politics is the indifference of the majority. There is majority rule only when the majority bestirs itself to rule. Until then, political minorities are often in charge.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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