Chris Powell column

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.

* * *

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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By Chris Powell

Connecticut last week was told to expect a 50% increase in electricity prices this winter and supposedly there is nothing to be done about it — except to rail against the electric utilities, though they are no longer responsible for power prices.

Twenty-four years ago state government took the electric utilities out of the power generation business, restricting them to distribution. Since then electricity users are supposed to do their own purchasing of power from generation companies, which route their power into the distribution system. People who don’t want to purchase their own electricity still can have their utility buy it for them, but the utilities just go into the market themselves to purchase the power and pass the cost along to their customers. The utilities don’t set electricity prices and make no money from them.

This system was enacted to inject price competition into power generation, but politicians and customers alike still like to blame the utilities for price increases. So the new controversy invites another reform — prohibiting the utilities from doing even the default buying for customers and requiring customers to do their own purchasing.

Misleading sales tactics by power generators could be specified and prohibited, with their offers restricted to the simplest terms, a fixed price over a single fixed duration.

Or the utilities authority itself could do the default purchasing. This would discourage politicians from demagoguery against utilities. But it also would make them take responsibility for something important that is watched closely, so it will never happen.

Democrats, including state Attorney General William Tong, blame the electricity price increases on Russia’s war against Ukraine. While the war has interrupted flows of Russian oil and gas to Europe, causing Europe to compete for other sources, there is a bigger cause of energy price increases in the United States. It is the national Democratic administration’s pledge to destroy the country’s conventional energy industry — not just coal, which still produces much electricity, but also oil and natural gas, the latter producing more than half the electricity used in Connecticut.

The attorney general says, “We need to take a hard look at our energy sources and reduce our reliance on sources like natural gas that produce these wild, unaffordable surges in rates.”

Nonsense. Natural gas didn’t cause its own price increase. Gas supply is fairly constant and the country can produce far more than enough energy for its own needs. Meanwhile alternatives to conventional energy are not yet adequate, reliable, or economical.

That is, the country has neglected its energy security and no one is taking responsibility for the policy mistake.

Maybe the most sensible observation about the electricity price increases came last week from the leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives, Vincent Candelora of North Branford. State government, Candelora said, should study whether its energy policy “balances concerns and concepts from environmentalists with the palpable stress of ratepayers who find themselves digging deeper and deeper to pay their bills.”

Maybe the colder the winter gets, the less persuasive environmental extremism will seem.

Rather than question conventional energy sources, as the attorney general urges, Connecticut should question where inflation comes from, since it is affecting everything and was raging long before the war in Ukraine began.

At bottom inflation is an imbalance between production and money creation, and since money creation is government’s work, inflation is a policy mistake of government. But since Donald Trump has been out of office for almost two years, Connecticut Democrats can’t figure out whom to blame.

* * *

Just a few weeks ago Governor Lamont disagreed with his Republican challenger, Bob Stefanowski, who advocated using state government’s surplus funds to ease financial burdens on state residents.

But now the governor and the Democrats who control the General Assembly have come out in support of using the surplus to do just what the Republican proposed. They would extend the suspension of the state gas tax, quadruple the “heroes fund,” and increase electricity subsidies for the poor.

What a nasty guy that Stefanowski was, huh?

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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

New Haven’s Board of Education last week awarded its teacher union a contract with raises so substantial that the union president, Leslie Blatteau of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, called them “life changing.”

The award seemed premature and even backwards. For the contract’s total cost had not yet been fully calculated, so the board really didn’t know what it was voting on. Just as backwards, the board had not yet determined how to pay for whatever the total cost would be. Two board members said finding the money might be difficult.

But, the union president said, “This contract makes teachers feel valued,” and that seemed to be all that mattered. Besides, for while the board may not know exactly where the extra money is to come from, it has a good idea.

The board’s vice president said he hoped for an increase in financing from state government, and the union president said the union would join the board in seeking more money from Governor Lamont and General Assembly.

After all, claiming victory on Election Night, the governor specifically thanked teacher unions for helping him achieve a second term, and those unions are the core of his party.

Even so, New Haven’s teachers have a fair claim.

The demographics of the city’s student population are awful. Even as the board was approving the teacher contract, it was told that the chronic absenteeism rate among city students remains high at 42%. It’s tough teaching students who, lacking parenting, miss so many days of school.

It is also tough for the city’s schools to keep good teachers when many suburban schools pay higher salaries for teaching students who are far better prepared and willing to learn.

Reducing teacher turnover is a primary objective of the new contract in New Haven. “Our salaries will become competitive with other districts,” the union president said, adding that city teachers will feel they can stay in New Haven and not be tempted by offers elsewhere.

But School Superintendent Iline Tracey warned against thinking that raising pay will solve the teacher turnover problem for long. She said suburban schools will be raising their teacher salaries too.

Of course those schools also will continue to offer far better student demographics.

This competition for teachers hints at why the decades-long clamor for “equalization” of education in Connecticut has never accomplished anything. For as long as any substantial local control is permitted over school financing and spending and municipal housing and zoning policy, school systems will differ substantially.

School systems in municipalities whose students have conscientious parents and healthy property tax bases will tend to have better facilities, teachers, and performance than school systems with bad demographics and tax bases.

State government financing of municipal school systems can offset some of the disadvantages, but they can never be substantially offset unless the better school systems are frozen in place — prevented from spending and offering more and better.

State government often has rewritten its financial aid formulas in favor of poor municipalities but never has frozen the better school systems even as the extra spending has not improved educational performance in the poor municipalities.

While Connecticut has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “magnet” schools in recent years, they have accomplished little economic and racial integration of students and indeed have [ITALICS] worsened [END ITALICS] the demographics of many schools in city neighborhoods, drawing their better students away.

Real equalization would require ending local control of education, with state government determining not only the salary and spending levels of every school system but also the demographic allocation of students. Parented and unparented students would have to be bused to school far from home and most school administration would be done by the state. Local school boards would be only advisory.

Of course that will never happen.

So instead Connecticut just spends more in the name of education every year to accomplish only the satisfaction of teacher unions, and, unfortunately, as a political matter that’s enough.

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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 this week saw still another indication that its public higher education is overpriced. To encourage applicants the University of Connecticut and three of the four regional state universities — Southern, Western, and Eastern — waived application fees for a day. Central Connecticut State University waived the fees for two weeks.

Of course the savings to applicants was small — UConn’s application fee is $80 and the fee for the regional universities is $50 — and the universities will more than recover the loss through their tuition. The regional universities are increasing tuition by 3%.

Meanwhile this week courts kept thwarting President Biden’s attempt to use an executive order to bestow forgiveness of college student loans. Even the president’s political ally, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, acknowledged long ago that student loans can be forgiven only through legislation. All along the president’s plan seemed to have been little more than a gimmick to build support for Democrats in the recent congressional election.

The clamor for college loan debt relief is essentially a [ITALICS] proclamation [END ITALICS] of the excessive cost — the lack of value — of higher education. For the rationale for college loans is that students will be able to repay them through the higher incomes they will earn because of their higher education. But that doesn’t work for millions of college students, graduates and dropouts alike. Their income expectations are disappointed and then their loan obligations crowd out family formation, home ownership, and the joy of life generally.

Along these lines, the employment agency Zip Recruiter reported this month that its survey of 1,500 job-seeking college grads found that 44% regret their field of college study, presumably for income reasons. The fields most regretted were in the liberal arts. Least regretted were those in science, technology, medicine, and business.

Elected officials trying to pursue the public interest rather than the special interest might respond by proposing to regulate eligibility for college loans and to restrict loan terms, thus inducing colleges to cut prices and reorder their course and degree offerings in favor of the fields in which graduates will be most able to repay their loans.

Instead the response from elected officials is mainly to have government assume college loan debt and pass it along to taxpayers, including people who paid their own way through college or skipped college because of the cost — the suckers!

Why is there such resistance to knocking down the cost of higher education? For the same reason there is such opposition to knocking down the cost of [ITALICS] lower [END ITALICS] education even as its performance declines.

That is, too many people draw their livelihoods from the failing systems and are comfortable with failure.

Most of these people are unionized, politically active, and connected to the Democratic Party, circumstances that especially in Connecticut preclude any acknowledgment of education’s excessive cost. But even in the rest of the country few Republicans want to risk the wrath of the education lobby.

Besides, how many parents want some elected official to tell them that while they were watching television or smoking dope instead of monitoring their children’s homework, elementary school students in Asia had become more educated and capable than high school graduates in the United States?

Last week the Washington Post scolded elite universities and particularly Yale University in New Haven for supposedly not being supportive enough of students who suffer mental breakdowns. The schools pressure these students to withdraw and seek readmission after medical treatment or a semester or two at another institution. Since gaining admission to an elite school once is hard enough, students fear that if they withdraw for mental health reasons their application to return may be tainted.

But universities fairly may want to avoid potential financial liability if troubled students kill themselves, as some do. Besides, if study at an elite institution is too rigorous for some students, that’s what makes it elite, and no one has to enroll — and maybe some students shouldn’t.

Yale says the demand of its students for psychological counseling has exploded, reaching 34% against an average of 11% in higher education generally. This too may be a sign of lack of rigor in lower education.

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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

One explanation offered for the failure of the Republican campaign in Connecticut’s state election rings hollow: that the Republicans are good complainers but don’t offer solutions.

Maybe, but even if so, this hardly explains the election’s results. For given the great advantages they had everywhere in the country — like inflation, open borders, and rising crime — on the whole Republicans performed poorly, and that performance was worse in Connecticut only insofar as the state is so Democratic.

The national Republican failure suggests that its causes were common across the country — the party’s association with the unpopular former president, Donald Trump, the desire of some Republicans to outlaw abortion, and the heavy support given to Democrats by national media organizations.

Even if Connecticut Republicans are light on solutions, it has been 12 years since Republicans were in charge in the state, and the state has many problems that have been around for decades. So where have the [ITALICS] Democratic [END ITALICS] solutions been all this time? Where were they on Election Day?

Poverty and dependence long have been rising in Connecticut, prompting state government to keep creating remedial programs.

School performance was crashing long before the recent virus epidemic.

Murders and shootings have risen lately and long have been common in the ever-impoverished cities. (Hartford had three murders last week.) Repeat offenders long have been and remain a major source of crime, but now elected officials boast of closing prisons.

For many years Connecticut has lagged the nation in economic growth and led the nation in the export of self-sufficient people.

The Democratic “solutions” to these problems have been little more than enlarging government and raising government pay. No big problems have been solved or even diminished much, but this has not prevented [ITALICS] Democrats [END ITALICS] from winning elections.

Along with the rest of the country Connecticut eagerly awaits solutions from anyone. But if Republicans lack solutions, why should Democrats, fresh from their sweeping victory, think Connecticut even needs solutions? For when you have a secure government job with a great salary, benefits, and pension, and tons of lucrative patronage to bestow, what’s the problem?

* * *

Sweating out the vote count on her campaign for re-election, Democratic U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes was indignant and bitter about having faced a strong challenge from Republican George Logan in Connecticut’s 5th District.

Hayes complained that her integrity and even her family had been attacked and that so much “outside” money had been spent on the race by political action committees.

Her hypocrisy was laughable.

For Hayes’ family became an issue only because she had put her children on her campaign’s payroll. (When Republicans do that, it’s nepotism. When Democrats do it, it’s love and trust.)

As for the “outside” money that descended on the 5th District, the television commercials the money paid for suggested that just as much of it was spent disparaging Logan as Hayes.

“Outside” money financed the frequent broadcast of a commercial misrepresenting Logan’s position on abortion. A vote for Logan, the commercial said, was a vote to ban abortion nationally as well as in Connecticut. But Logan was [ITALICS] against [END ITALICS] outlawing abortion.

That commercial became a reason to root for Logan. He fell 1,800 votes short, but if he had won, Hayes might have had to admit either that the people of her district want to ban abortion or that her “outside” money supporters had just been kidding about that.

* * *

The defeated Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, is being mocked for claiming that his campaign had some impact. Conceding to Governor Lamont, Stefanowski said: “This campaign was an example of what can be done when you stand up for what you believe in. We may not have won, but we changed the course of Connecticut by advocating for the people.”

This may not have been such an exaggeration. Stefanowski made taxes a big issue, particularly the state gas tax, whose suspension ends in a few days. During the campaign the governor was against cutting taxes. But the morning after his re-election he said he might support continuing the suspension of the gas tax.

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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

On the Friday before the state election, Governor Lamont and state Attorney General William Tong seized the last opportunity of their campaigns to show that most of Connecticut politics is empty posturing without relevance to daily life — indeed, to show that some of Connecticut politics is even a [ITALICS] denial [END ITALICS] of daily life.

Lamont and Tong held a press conference at the state Capitol to denounce a national gun rights group for asking a federal court to suspend enforcement of Connecticut’s law banning certain rifles, a law being challenged on constitutional and civil rights grounds. The governor and attorney general insisted that the law is saving lives — a claim without much evidence — but the attorney general went distressingly farther.

Tong declared: “Nothing is more unwelcome and offensive than radical extremists coming from outside Connecticut, using our courts to try to attack Connecticut’s gun laws, which we decided that we need here in Connecticut to keep our families safe. We reject these efforts by people from outside Connecticut trying to come in and tell us what to do, and the governor and I will push back very hard on it.”

Tong’s thought — darn those blankety-blank outside agitators — and his language were identical to those of the segregationists who disparaged the protests staged in the South for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Tong’s idea and language were just as mistaken.

For there are many adherents of gun rights who live in Connecticut and who support the litigation against the state’s ban on certain rifles. The lawsuit couldn’t have been filed without them. The Southern segregationists of old would smile at the attorney general’s implication — all the more remarkable coming from a lawyer — that people who question the constitutionality of state action have no business bringing suit about it in federal court.

The attorney general recently got a law passed to establish a special civil rights unit in his office. Now for a little chest thumping on camera he was condemning people for trying to vindicate civil rights in his own state.

But if it is evoked in a politically correct cause, even a fascist pose like the attorney general’s now can pass for liberalism in Connecticut.

While the governor and attorney general claimed that the law banning certain rifles is saving lives, handguns continued to blaze away around the state. Within days of the press conference three people were shot by handguns in two incidents in New Haven that happened within 40 minutes of each other. They survived. But there were fatal handgun shootings in Hartford and Norwich, and more non-fatal ones in Bridgeport, Waterbury, Newington, and East Hartford.

The “four more years of gun safety” promised by the governor’s campaign haven’t arrived yet. Neither have the last four years of gun safety.

Of course the two police officers who were ambushed and murdered last month in Bristol were killed by a drunken madman with a rifle, but this was an aberration in gun crime, and in an ambush the madman might have murdered the officers with handguns, which, as a gun nut, he also owned.

That is, the gun crime problem isn’t a problem of certain rifles. It isn’t even really a problem of guns, there already being so many in the public’s possession that they will never be taken away and always will be available to someone determined to break the law. The problem is [ITALICS] people, [END ITALICS] and law is little good where people are determined to break it — and yet in Connecticut government’s response to a problem is usually to enact more law pursuing the approaches already shown not to work.

For example, spending in the name of education is increased every year in Connecticut even as student performance keeps declining and becomes the rationale for still more spending. Since so many people draw their livelihoods from that spending, no other approach is possible politically.

Poverty programs long have failed to improve Connecticut’s cities, producing dependence instead of self-sufficiency, but that dependence requires ever more programs to sustain it and so no alternatives are possible politically.

The more laws and programs, the harder it becomes to change government’s course to make it work in the public interest — the less government becomes a means to an end and the more it becomes an end in itself.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

With the Democratic sweep in this week’s election, Connecticut remains pretty much a one-party state, which promises excess and even corruption more than good government. Changing the situation requires trying to understand what contributed to the election results.

Of course the controversies over former President Donald Trump and abortion were especially big advantages for Connecticut Democrats. Even the most pro-choice Republicans, like gubernatorial nominee Bob Stefanowski, couldn’t get past the abortion issue as his adversaries misrepresented his position.

Indeed, Stefanowski’s campaign this year was far better than his campaign four years ago, which didn’t go much beyond an unrealistic ambition to repeal the state income tax. This year Stefanowski addressed many issues specifically, drawing clear distinctions with Governor Lamont. But this time Stefanowski lost by more than three times as many votes as last time. The tide was against him and this time he was running against an incumbent.

The governor shamelessly exploited the advantages of incumbency, distributing during his campaign more state government financial patronage than any Connecticut governor in modern times had done. With $6 billion in state surplus funds, courtesy of “emergency” federal aid, the governor could camouflage state government’s shaky finances and deflect concerns about higher taxes ahead, as with the return of the state gas tax in a few days.

The governor and Stefanowski both financed their own campaigns, but the governor, with huge inherited wealth, appears to have spent at least twice as much as his Republican challenger. Unlike the governor, Stefanowski had to work for the money he spent on his campaign.

With the exception of the nominee for U.S. representative in the 5th District, George Logan, the Republican underticket was weak, which may have been inevitable, since the minority party doesn’t have much of a bench.

Leora Levy’s challenge to U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal was an embarrassment, as she won the Republican primary as a Trump devotee who would outlaw abortion only to try to shed both poses in the general election campaign.

Polls suggested that Blumenthal, having been in elective office for almost 40 years, was growing tiresome and vulnerable, and his age showed during his debate with Levy. But he would not be beaten by an imposter.

* * *

The scope of the Republican failure in Connecticut may be best illustrated by the party’s defeat in wealthy and traditionally Republican towns like Weston and in Fairfield County generally. Especially there Republicans should be asking themselves what future they have with Trump.

Indeed, if the party’s failure to meet election expectations nationally this week is tied to Trump and the candidates he induced the party to nominate, and thus prompts Republicans to start jettisoning him as a gross liability, it may be a blessing in disguise.

* * *

Governor Lamont and the renewed Democratic majority in the General Assembly have won a great mandate that will feed desires for more government programs that only employ more Democrats, erode the private sector, and make more people dependent on government.

Republican leaders sometimes like to talk about the need to rebuild their party in the cities, which produce Connecticut’s huge Democratic pluralities. But as government programs proliferate, the cities grow even more dependent on government and less open to political competition. Connecticut Democrats are proficient at merging government and party. Republicans are proficient at being quiet about it in the hope that the government employee unions won’t campaign against them as much. Government’s growth may already have locked Connecticut into being a one-party state.

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But mandate elections can undermine themselves by fostering arrogance, and Governor Lamont may be hard pressed to resist the arrogance that will suffuse his party’s legislative majorities despite the economic recession that has already begun.

In any case, if political competition in Connecticut is to be restored, it will have to begin with the Republicans who remain in the legislature. They will need to have something important to say and the courage to say it.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone in Connecticut purports to agree that the state needs more low-cost housing — just not wherever such housing happens to be proposed. The right place for low-cost housing is almost always someplace else.

Opposition to low-cost housing is easy to understand if not always justified. Low-cost housing is associated with poverty, and poverty is associated with antisocial behavior. Many people have fled the cities because of the pathologies of poverty that come out of low-cost housing. That is what exclusive zoning in the suburbs is about.

But housing is now so expensive that people who aspire to the middle class and would make perfectly good neighbors are being excluded and oppressed.

So maybe housing advocates should take some inspiration from Connecticut’s colonial history.

Back in the 1600s and 1700s as Europeans carved themselves a home out of the frontier in Connecticut, newcomers were not allowed to decide for themselves where they would live. The problem wasn’t the Indians as much as earlier Europeans themselves.

Life was hard and the settlers didn’t want just anyone living among them. They wanted only newcomers able to support themselves and unlikely to become a burden on the community. So newcomers were told to present themselves to a town meeting and apply to become an “admitted inhabitant.” Anyone rejected was “warned out” — that is, told to scram.

So when they present their proposals to municipal planning and zoning board hearings, developers of low-cost housing might do well to bring along a dozen or so people who would like to occupy the proposed housing and who would be able to pay the rent or mortgage and potentially strengthen the community.

This would put the faces of the self-supporting on the need for housing.

Of course some of those faces might belong to people already connected to the town — children or grandchildren of town residents or people already employed in town. Most probably would not have criminal records, but even those who did might be given a chance to explain how they have rehabilitated themselves and want to pay their own way, be good citizens, and add something to the community. Indeed, if housing wasn’t so expensive, [ITALICS] everybody [END ITALICS] might be able to add more.

Growth used to be considered good, a sign of health, something to be proud of. But in recent years Connecticut has become notorious for its lack of economic and population growth and, worse, for exporting its children to states that provide greater opportunity and are more welcoming. This defect in Connecticut won’t be fixed without more and less expensive housing.

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CARELESS COLLEGES: Government in Connecticut often seems to be a huge manufacturer of financial liability for the public, an impression confirmed the other day by a report in the Journal Inquirer about the State Colleges and University System, which operates the four regional state universities and the 12 community colleges.

According to the report, in the last three years the system has paid $2.5 million to settle lawsuits and employee complaints, perhaps the most disgraceful case being the firing and rehiring of Manchester Community College chief executive Nicole Esposito, who, in addition to being restored to her job, was paid $775,000 to withdraw her lawsuit charging sex discrimination.

Illegal discrimination is claimed by a bunch of the pending complaints against the system. Other complaints involve the denial of promotions.

Of course not all the complaints may be valid. The college system may generate so many financial claims not just because it is badly managed but also because the system is coming to be seen as a soft touch, willing to pay to settle complaints on a nuisance basis since the money to be paid is nobody’s money — that is, taxpayer money.

Governor Lamont and the General Assembly should be investigating this. While the legislature got rid of its Program Review and Investigations Committee years ago, presuming that state government’s operations no longer need scrutiny, the legislature still has a committee with jurisdiction for higher education. The committee is good at finding ways of spending more money. The many financial claims against the colleges and university system show that the committee could use some practice in economizing.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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