Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Last week the U.S. Labor Department admitted that inflation is running at nearly 8%, the highest rate in 40 years. Since the government’s inflation measures have been revised many times in those 40 years to diminish the calculation of price increases and thereby mislead the public, some experts outside government maintain that the real inflation rate is 15% or even 20%.

Also last week Connecticut’s members of Congress boasted about all the goodies — “earmarks” — they had inserted into the $1.5 trillion federal appropriations bill.

The legislation, according to Connecticut’s delegation — all Democrats — is providing $144 million for 122 projects in the state. (Altogether the legislation is said to have more than 4,000 “earmarks.”) Among Connecticut’s are $2.5 million for the Boys and Girls Club in Milford, $105,000 for an after-school program in Waterbury, $2 million to start a worker-owned commercial laundry in New Haven, $1.5 million to replace a bridge in Middletown, $1.8 million for water and sewer pipes in Manchester, $900,000 for Johnson Memorial Hospital in Stafford, $34,000 for South Windsor’s emergency operations center, and, with perfect irony, $160,000 for “waste and sludge disposal” in West Haven, whose city government lately has been full of waste and sludge — the insiders who looted several times that amount from the city’s most recent federal grant.

Nobody in authority in Connecticut last week put the record inflation together with another bloated appropriations bill or any recent appropriations bill. Nobody in authority linked the goodies to an increase in federal taxes.

For Congress has discovered that federal taxes are obsolete because the government can create money to infinity — as long as the Federal Reserve is ready to monetize government bonds and as long as nobody cares about the devaluation of the currency that results when the increase in the money supply outruns not just national production of goods and services but, since the dollar is the reserve currency for the world, international production as well.

Instead the Biden administration blamed the record inflation on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though the new inflation figures were calculated before the invasion and before economic sanctions disrupted international markets.

At least inflation has become a political issue in Connecticut, with Governor Lamont and both Democratic and Republican state legislators aiming to suspend or reduce state taxes on gasoline, now that gas has reached $4.50 per gallon and seems likely to go higher while state government has a large financial surplus.

Yes, people deserve some relief.

But will anyone in authority in Connecticut note that, from its beginning three years ago, the current Democratic state administration and many Democratic state legislators were openly striving to drive up the cost of conventional energy in the hope of making “green” energy more viable? With gas approaching $5 a gallon, the Democrats now are getting exactly what they wanted — or what they wanted until they got it. If markets return to normal, the Democrats may return to their agenda of higher energy costs, even though “green” energy is far from able to replace much conventional energy.

Will anyone in authority in Connecticut risk telling people that, nice as some of the “earmarks” in the federal appropriations bill are, few are relevant to the responsibilities of the federal government and that most are arbitrary patronage pork? And will anyone in authority tell people that the pork is not really free, that people are paying for it not through regular taxes but through currency depreciation — inflation — which is a tax as regressive as the gas taxes politicians now want to suspend?

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PATRIOTISM FADES: Americans watching television and admiring the brave Ukrainians defending their country against invasion should take a moment to look in the mirror instead.

According to a Quinnipiac University poll last week, only 55% of Americans say they would stay and fight if their country was invaded, while 38% say they would leave. By a margin of 68%-25%, Republicans say they would fight. Unaffiliated voters say they would fight by 57%-36%. But Democrats are closely divided, 52% saying they’d fight, 40% saying they’d leave.

Such lack of patriotism may cheer Russian President Vladimir Putin and tyrants everywhere.

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

By Chris Powell

Announcing goodies for various municipalities and organizations lately, Governor Lamont has been using government money to win support for his re-election campaign, as any incumbent would. But all the goodies awarded so far don’t come close to the expense the governor would incur in favor of the state employee unions, the main engine of his party, the Democrats.

The master contract of the State Employee Bargaining Agent Coalition is expiring and this week the Connecticut Mirror reported some basic terms of the new contract proposal on which the governor and the unions are agreed. Those terms are extremely generous.

Unionized employees would get signing bonuses of $3,500 by July and 2.5% raises in each of the next three fiscal years, as well as annual “step” raises for gaining seniority. While the seniority raises are not yet known, they easily might bring the total annual raises to 5%, or 15% over three years.

Since the country’s real inflation rate is about 15%, the signing bonuses and the raises in the proposed contract won’t fully protect state employees against erosion of their living standards. Even so, the gains from the contract seem likely to exceed any wage gains private-sector workers and taxpayers will be receiving.

In any case, everyone in Connecticut who is not employed by state government should have the chance to review the contract long before it goes to the General Assembly for ratification.

The governor and the unions don’t want that to happen. Their plan is to withhold the details until the unions ratify the contract and it is presented to the General Assembly, whereupon public examination and participation in the issue will have been greatly curtailed even as the unions already will have long been pressuring legislators.

Yankee Institute President Carol Platt Liebau notes: “Connecticut state government has an unfortunate history of governors negotiating bad labor deals that deliver higher taxes and lower-quality services. In an election year where state officials will be seeking endorsements from many of the powerful unions with which they’re ‘negotiating’ now, it’s important that taxpayers see exactly what’s on the table and have a chance to weigh in on the promises being made in their name.”

The leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives, Vincent J. Candelora of North Branford, smells corruption. “That the governor is giving out bonuses right before an election reeks of political payoff,” Candelora says.

Of course in an election year nearly everything state government does is likely to involve political motivation if not quite a payoff. Payoff or not, the purpose of the state employee unions is not to advance the public interest but to crush it, and if the unions are happy with their new contract, the public will be getting less value from government, not more.

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The General Assembly should enact legislation requiring the state housing commissioner to study the effects of the law enabling housing developers to override zoning in exclusive towns, though not for the reasons offered by the bill’s sponsor.

The bill has been introduced by state Rep. Jennifer Leeper, D-Fairfield, who complains that the zoning override law is increasing population density too much in her town and other suburbs and is causing much political division.

But then the exclusive zoning of many suburbs and rural towns long has caused too much division as well — economic class and racial segregation.

Yes, as the zoning override law’s opponents note, more housing may require some towns to increase their infrastructure. But that’s progress. If the Indians had thought of zoning, Connecticut wouldn’t be here.

There are two good things about Leeper’s bill. First, it shows that support for exclusionary zoning comes not just from Republicans but also from suburban Democrats like Leeper.

The other good thing about the bill is that the study might conclude that the zoning override law is not really having much effect at all. For housing prices have exploded in Connecticut, demonstrating a desperate shortage of housing not just for the burdensome and much-feared poor but also for young people starting out on their own and the middle class.

Since housing is a necessity, rising prices for housing are as hurtful as rising prices for food and gasoline.

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

By Chris Powell

Liberal Democratic members of the General Assembly again are pursuing what they call fairness in taxation, their euphemism for state government’s raising and spending a lot more money. Governor Lamont, a Democrat, opposes increasing taxes while state government has a lot of emergency federal cash on hand. But the governor may be glad of the tax fairness clamor, since it emphasizes his moderation in his party as he seeks re-election in a campaign that increasingly seems competitive.

According to the tax fairness clamor, the poorest people in Connecticut pay a bigger percentage of their income in taxes than the state’s rich do. But then the poor also receive more in direct government benefits than nearly everyone else and cause far more problems than most other people. Poverty hasn’t yet become a civic virtue, even if few people remember Teddy Roosevelt’s contention that the first duty of the citizen is to pull his own weight.

That so many able-bodied people in Connecticut can’t pull their own weight has not prompted the tribunes of liberalism to ask why, though some questions are elementary. How does the welfare system’s depriving so many children of fathers help them grow up able to pull their own weight? How does social promotion in the schools incentivize them to learn what they need to pull their own weight?

Instead these government policies proletarianize children to grow up to be dependent on government.

The country’s tax structure is set up to make state and municipal taxation less progressive — to be much less geared to personal income. Federal income taxes are heavier than state and municipal income taxes and produce far more revenue. Since the federal income tax is so heavy, states and municipalities don’t tax income as much, relying instead on sales and property taxes, which tend to be regressive.

But citizenship requires even the poor to feel some of the burden of government, and in its totality the tax system is more progressive than its seems at a glance. After all, states and municipalities receive, especially now, enormous amounts of financial aid from the federal government and the federal government finances the bulk of assistance to the poor through medical insurance, housing, and food programs.

More progressive taxation on the state level is never advocated for progressivity’s sake alone but always as a more tolerable mechanism for increasing government revenue and spending.

For state government easily could achieve more progressivity in taxation without raising taxes on anyone and without spending more — just by reallocating appropriations.

For example, state government could end the priority given to government employee raises and benefits and use the savings to reduce the sales tax, a regressive tax. State government could use the savings to assume the full cost of “special education” in municipal schools, thereby enabling reduction of the municipal property tax, another regressive tax, especially damaging in the cities, where most of the poor live.

Indeed, if more progressive taxation is a matter of justice, why do Connecticut’s liberal Democrats seek repeal of the $10,000 limit on the federal income tax deduction for state and municipal taxes? Nearly all the tax benefit of lifting the cap would go to wealthy people, but in high-tax states like Connecticut, many wealthy people are Democrats and major political donors.

Liberalism in Connecticut sees fairness in taxation as little more than compelling someone else to pay for what you get, with government employees taking a cut as the money is moved around.

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GET MORE ACCOUNTABLE: Connecticut shouldn’t be done with the issue of police accountability.

The recent legislation that appears to remove the “qualified immunity” enjoyed by police officers against damage lawsuits should be reconsidered, since no one is sure how it will be construed.

And a new legislative proposal should be enacted: to prohibit police departments from hiring officers who, after due process, have been fired for misconduct or malfeasance by other departments.

It’s bad enough that Connecticut school systems trade teachers who have performed poorly or engaged in misconduct, a practice facilitated by the state law preventing disclosure of teacher evaluations.

But at least teachers don’t carry guns at work.

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

By Chris Powell

Most people seem to like Governor Lamont’s proposal to reduce from 45 to 29 mills the state’s limit on municipal property taxes on cars and to have state government reimburse the revenue lost by municipalities that have car tax rates above 29 mills. The proposal supposedly would save people a lot of money.

But there’s not really any money to be saved here. For the car tax reimbursements would cost state government $160 million per year, so what people gained in one pocket they would lose from another — losing whatever else state government could do for them with that $160 million.

People who own homes or rent apartments but don’t own cars — many city residents — might prefer that $160 million to be spent reimbursing residential property taxes, not car taxes.

Poor people might prefer that $160 million to be spent on improving their state medical insurance.

Retail merchants might like the money spent to reduce the sales tax.

Many people might prefer using the money to reduce their state income tax.

Government employees might prefer that $160 million to be spent on their raises and pensions. And so on.

The more serious argument for the cap on car taxes is not savings at all but rearranging Connecticut’s tax burden, shifting it a little from municipal governments, which can raise substantial revenue only from their property tax, to state government, which has many ways of raising revenue, and from the poor to the better-off.

The car tax is said to be terribly regressive — that is, falling more heavily on poor people. But this is exaggerated. Car taxes are light on old clunkers and heavy on new and expensive cars.

More than burdensome, car taxes are simply annoying. Unlike the property tax on residential and business property, which for many people is built into monthly mortgage payments, for most people car tax bills, though predictable, show up unexpectedly in the mail, since few people escrow funds for them.

But the car tax capping proposal raises an interesting question: If Connecticut can limit property taxes on cars, why can’t the state cap municipal property taxes generally, as some other states have done?

The car tax cap has been proposed only because state government is flush with emergency money from the federal government. Sustaining the cap for more than a year or two will require big appropriations when that federal money is gone.

Capping property taxes not just on cars but on everything else would require huge new state government appropriations for municipal government revenue reimbursements, and maybe extensive regulations on how municipalities could spend the state money. Or else it would require unprecedented restraint on municipal spending, most of which goes for municipal government employees, whose unions are usually the most politically influential group in any town.

So the car tax cap may prove to be no more than a gubernatorial election-year gimmick and then be raised or allowed to expire once the governor and legislators are re-elected, imagining that they can propose the cap again four years hence on the eve of the next gubernatorial election.

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WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY?: A rookie state trooper caught shoplifting at a gun store in Newington last year will suffer only a 10-day suspension and a transfer from the Hartford barracks to the barracks in Danielson, according to the Connecticut Examiner.

Meanwhile a state police spokesman acknowledges that the department’s investigation into a trooper’s retirement party at a brew pub in Oxford 2½ years ago has concluded without more discipline than the light punishment imposed on a sergeant who drove away drunk in his state car and caused a serious crash.

Other troopers were said to have been drinking at the party and to have driven away in state cars, contrary to regulations. But the department concluded that it could not prove such misconduct — after long seeming not to want to investigate it seriously enough to prove it.

Democratic state legislators act as if police accountability involves only mistreatment of minority groups. Republican legislators don’t want to press the accountability issue at all. This is leaving plenty of room for misconduct.

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

By Chris Powell

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has rocketed the United States into a whirlwind of pious but ineffectual posturing.

In his State of the Union address the other night President Biden told Congress that the United States would make Russian President Vladimir Putin pay heavily. Members of Congress and ordinary people keep going to rallies showing “solidarity” with Ukraine. And liquor stores and restaurants are removing Russian vodka from their shelves, as well as vodka with Russian brand names that was actually made outside Russia, some of it in the United States itself.

But as he gave his address the president had not yet even identified the Russian banks that supposedly were to be blocked from taking or making payments in the United States. Nor had he even prohibited the import of Russian oil into the United States. Russian oil lately has constituted 8% of U.S. oil imports, about 200,000 barrels a day, more than $17 billion in purchases annually — and oil and gas, not vodka, constitute the great bulk of Russia’s foreign income.

Western Europe is playing the same game, blocking transactions with Russia for nearly everything except the energy Western Europe depends on and makes the most money for Russia.

In his address the president urged Congress to enact a dozen pieces of far-left legislation but said nothing about restoring the energy independence the country had until he capitulated to “green” craziness and began hobbling the country’s energy industry, thereby empowering Russia on the eve of its aggression against Ukraine.

A few members of Congress could smell the hypocrisy. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, said he would introduce legislation to block the import of Russian oil, something the president could do by mere decree. “We cannot stop Putin with Russia’s gas in our cars,” Markey said.

To assist besieged Ukraine are Americans willing to sacrifice more than a stiff drink? Are they ready to endure gasoline at $4 or $5 a gallon until the aggressor is driven out?

And before totalitarian China, emboldened by Russia’s aggression, attacks democratic Taiwan, will Americans notice that they are now dependent on China for all sorts of necessities no longer much manufactured in their country, including antibiotics?

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A Connecticut state legislator last week got remarkably relevant about criminal justice. Even more remarkable, the legislator was a Democrat, state Sen. Stephen T. Cassano of Manchester, a member of the General Assembly’s Public Safety Committee.

At a forum in Manchester, a town that recently has seen an alarming increase in crime, including a shooting at a gas station, Cassano acknowledged the central problem of repeat offenders.

“I think the thing that bothers people the most is people who have been arrested and they’re back on the street the next day,” Cassano said. “We’ve got to stop the repeats. If we stop the repeats, we can dramatically reduce the crime rate.”

Indeed, people are noticing that many of Connecticut’s worst and most brazen crimes are committed by men and boys with long criminal records who are still free, having served little if any time in prison. The most notorious such case in the last year involved the killing of a New Britain man, Henryk Gudelski, the victim of a hit-and-run crash in June. Police said the car, which had been stolen, was driven by a 17-year-old boy who had been arrested 13 times in the previous 3½ years but was free all the same.

Meanwhile Governor Lamont boasts about the decline in Connecticut’s prison population.

Two other legislators at the forum with Cassano, Rep. Jason Doucette, D-Manchester, and Rep. Jeff Currey, D-East Hartford, both members of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, did not approach relevance. They said their committee will examine criminal-justice proposals, as if nobody knew that.

One of those proposals should be to open juvenile court to the public. Otherwise there can be no accountability — not just for the 17-year-old charged with killing Gudelski but also for everyone in the criminal-justice system involved in the teen’s many previous cases. Nor can there be any accountability in the rape and murder, also last June, of a 13-year-old Manchester girl, Zaniya Wright, for which a 14-year-old boy has been charged.

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

By Chris Powell

Are things getting so bad for the Democrats that even Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, is worried about winning re-election this year?

That might have been construed from the senator’s silly pandering last week about gas taxes.

Blumenthal — for 20 years the “eternal general” who now, at age 76, is seeking a third six-year term in the Senate — called for suspending the federal gas tax, which is 18 cents per gallon. Because gas prices have risen dramatically in recent months, the senator said, people need immediate relief. Meanwhile, the senator added, the federal gas tax isn’t needed because its revenue is dedicated to highways and the federal government has just appropriated billions of dollars for highways.

Blumenthal’s rationale raised some big questions he didn’t address.

That is, where did those billions of dollars for highways come from if not from federal gas taxes?

Mostly they were just created electronically from computer keystrokes.

And if finding money for highways is that easy, why has the country bothered with the federal gas tax in the first place — or, for that matter, with any taxes at all?

While the federal highway fund may not need any revenue, Blumenthal’s colleague in Connecticut’s congressional delegation, 1st District Rep. John B. Larson, might remind him that the Social Security Trust Fund is projected to be insolvent in another decade and might be glad to take whatever money the highway fund doesn’t need.

But even if the federal gas tax is suspended as Blumenthal and other members of Congress propose, people still will be paying its equivalent. Most just won’t understand how they pay, nor that they are already paying — through the devaluation of their money, the inflation tax on their wages and savings, which is already running at about 15% annually once the government’s deceitful skewing of the data is corrected.

This inflation is largely a matter of the imbalance between government’s money creation and national and — since the U.S. dollar is the world reserve currency — international production. Much more money lately has been created than goods and services have been produced.

Indeed, when it comes to government appropriations there is hardly any discussion anymore of where the money is to come from. It now is widely assumed that money is infinite, even as inflation screams that production is not.

Political responsibility for surging inflation is bipartisan, but since Democrats control the presidency and Congress, they will catch the blame. Blumenthal’s pose on the gas tax shows he realizes this and is planning an escape.

A big part of the production problem is entirely a Democratic responsibility — the Biden administration’s crippling of U.S. energy production in pursuit of “greener” energy even as “greener” energy isn’t close to being ready to replace the oil and natural gas supplies that are being diminished.

The environmental fanaticism of the Democrats is feeding Russia’s imperialism toward Ukraine and the other former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe. Western Europe has crippled its conventional energy production even more than the United States has and long has been heavily dependent on Russian natural gas, which can be cut off if its recipients get serious with economic penalties against Russia.

Meanwhile, since it has hampered its own energy production, the United States is unable to help Europe much at this crucial moment.

Until a few months ago Governor Lamont, a Democrat, and many Democratic state legislators sought to raise Connecticut’s gas tax invisibly through a regional scheme to raise wholesale gas taxes without providing people with any transportation alternatives, though cars are a necessity for most in a state as suburban as Connecticut.

The explosion in gas prices and inflation has prompted the governor and those Democratic legislators to shelve their hidden gas tax idea. But the Democrats long have been Connecticut’s tax-raising party and bear most responsibility for making the state so expensive to inhabit — and for what? Are the state’s cities any less destitute and violent? Are its poor any more self-sufficient? Are its socially promoted children any better parented and educated?

Or is inflation the main result of policy on the state level too?

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

By Chris Powell

While the redrawing of congressional districts in other states has become more partisan, anti-democratic, and disgraceful — as shown by Democrats in New York and Republicans in North Carolina — Connecticut’s mechanisms for redistricting avoid the racket.

In Connecticut redistricting of both congressional and state legislative districts is assigned to a bipartisan legislative commission and any deadlocks are settled by the state Supreme Court, as the court settled the state’s new congressional district plan the other day.

This year the legislative commission didn’t disagree much on the new congressional districting plan, but Republicans hoped that sending the decision to the court would see the justice of ending the division of Torrington between the 1st Congressional District, centered on the Hartford area, and the 5th, centered on the Waterbury area.

As it turned out, the court wanted to avoid being responsible for big changes and so devised a plan changing district borders only as much as was necessary to achieve equal population. So the “lobster claw” in the current districting map endures, the 1st District grabbing towns in the northwest part of the state and the 5th grabbing Meriden. This map does not serve community of interest so well but doesn’t disenfranchise many voters.

Even so, as Quinnipiac University’s Fred McKinney noted last month in an essay in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, the scandal of gerrymandering could be ended easily — by eliminating congressional districts and electing all members of Congress, not just members of the Senate but members of the House of Representatives as well, on a statewide basis.

This almost surely would make congressional elections more competitive and representative of a state as a whole. Without districts, voters could not be dispersed or concentrated to minimize their impact. Running at large, candidates for the House would have incentive to appeal to a state’s full range of interests, not just local ones.

Additionally, formally freed from district lines, political parties could pick better and stronger candidates, drawing from the whole state for every nomination instead of drawing only from a district. Voters would have far more choice for Congress and the option to split their tickets.

Congressional districts are just a tradition, not a requirement of the federal Constitution. Even now members of the House are not required to live in the districts from which they are elected, though many voters may remain parochial and even a candidate who lives just across the street from the district in which he seeks election risks being scorned as a “carpetbagger.”

Indeed, while it is not widely known, for many years Connecticut dispensed with congressional districts to some extent or entirely, electing what were called congressmen-at-large.

During Connecticut’s early years in the Union, from 1789 to 1837, all its U.S. representatives were elected on a statewide basis. The state also elected all its U.S. representatives on a statewide basis from 1903 to 1913.

Connecticut’s older residents may remember that from 1933 to 1965 Connecticut elected at large the sixth member of the U.S. House to which the state then was entitled. This single at-large House election allowed the state to avoid a politically troublesome redrawing of its five remaining districts.

Since those were the days of “balancing” political party slates by ethnicity, both major parties came to reserve their congressman-at-large nominations for candidates of Polish descent. Ticket balancing, an early version of “affirmative action” — tokenism — assured both inclusion and exclusion. For from 1933 to 1965 Connecticut almost always had one congressman of Polish descent but never two.

Could Connecticut back then not have survived having two Poles in Congress simultaneously? Since the party leaders of that era have long departed, we may never know, though, thankfully, ethnicity has lost most of its appeal in structuring state tickets today.

While the advantages of at-large congressional elections are clear, the reform isn’t likely to be adopted in Connecticut any time soon. For Connecticut is a heavily Democratic state and no majority party has any interest in making elections more competitive.

If this reform is to advance in Connecticut, Republicans will have to advocate it.

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

By Chris Powell

Whatever one thinks about guns, this month’s $73 million lawsuit settlement paid by the insurers of the former Remington gun manufacturing company to the families of victims of the 2012 school massacre in Newtown is based on a false premise pursuing an unconstitutional objective.

Federal law exempts firearms manufacturers from liability for criminal misuse of their products. The Second Amendment establishes the right of the people to own guns. So how could Remington be responsible for the massacre in Newtown?

The company wasn’t found responsible in court. Instead, its insurers settled the case without explanation.

The theory of the plaintiffs was that Remington violated Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act with its advertising for the rifle used in the massacre, advertising that was said to have appealed to disturbed young men like the massacre’s perpetrator.

But there is no evidence that the perpetrator here ever saw any Remington advertising. Indeed, he didn’t even purchase the rifle. That was done by his mother, who, despite her son’s longstanding mental illness, took him target shooting and built his interest in guns. On the murderous day he stole her rifle and made her his first victim.

Of course the plaintiffs themselves don’t believe that Remington’s advertising caused the massacre. They were not seeking to regulate gun ads but to close down the entire gun industry.

When the settlement was announced, co-plaintiff Nicole Hockley was candid about it. She said that the lawsuit and settlement had shown gun makers, their insurers, and their bankers that “this is a high-risk market, it is not profitable, and you will be held accountable.”

Deprive any industry of its bankers and insurers and it will go out of business or go underground. When the gun industry goes out of business or underground, the Second Amendment will have been nullified without any democratic decision of the people and the states to repeal or modify it.

Everyone sympathizes with the families of the massacre victims. Many people support enacting more restrictive gun laws. Like the Newtown plaintiffs, some people would even repeal the Second Amendment and confiscate all guns in private hands. But if the Newtown plaintiffs get their way, they will destroy not only the gun industry but democracy as well.

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Governor Lamont has a worsening scandal on his hands — a budget office that was a contract-steering racket undermining competitive bidding for state government work.

Remarkably, the governor would make it worse. He wants to cripple — or keep crippled — the state Contracting Standards Board, which was created in response to the contract scandals of the Rowland administration two decades ago.

The board operates with a few volunteer members. Lamont not only refuses to appropriate money to hire staff for the board to make it effective; he also would eliminate its authority to block contracts it deems improper.

The governor says the board should refer to the state auditors any doubts it has about contracts. But the auditors aren’t well-staffed either and have no enforcement powers. They can only publicize mistakes and improprieties.

The governor’s budget would add three positions to the staff of the auditors. But since there is so little accountability in state government and since the General Assembly eliminated its Program Review and Investigations Committee years ago and investigates nothing about state government operations, the auditors should be given more than another three positions.

In his campaign commercials the likely Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, proposes to audit every state government department. That can’t be effective and timely without hiring many more auditors — and even auditing every department won’t audit what most needs to be audited about state government. What most needs auditing are state government’s most expensive policies, which, no matter how honestly implemented, often fail to accomplish what they are supposed to, like self-sufficiency for the poor and academic proficiency for high school students.

If the governor really thinks state government is already as efficient and honest as it should be, his premise should be put to the campaign ahead.

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

By Chris Powell

Republican state legislators around the country are proposing to require public schools to post all curriculum materials on the internet as an accountability measure, and the other day they got powerful if inadvertent support from Enfield’s school system.

Enfield’s school administration acknowledged that an eighth-grade class had been given an assignment in which students were instructed to choose pizza toppings as a sort of code to signify the sex acts they preferred. The objective seems to have been to teach the 14-year-olds that sex, like pizza, should be consensual and negotiated.

The Enfield incident, first publicized by a national parents group, was picked up by news outlets far and wide and put the town on the world map for stupidity.

The school administration apologized and attributed the assignment to a mistake of absentmindedness. That is, a different assignment involving pizza choices but without the sexual allusions, also aiming to teach consent and negotiation, was meant to be used. But this account evaded the big questions.

How did the pizza sex assignment get into the school system in the first place? Exactly where did it come from? Why is the school system receiving such material? Who authorized it?

And why, in a state where most students graduate from high school without mastering basic math and English, is a school system using a Family Health and Human Sexuality class to teach students, even without sexual allusions, what they already know from their own experience with pizza and life generally — that when ordering for more than oneself, the preferences of others must be considered?

It’s all beyond moronic, even if it is the work of people holding degrees in education and drawing at tax expense annual salaries of $100,000 or more.

Responding to the proposals to require all curriculum materials to be posted on the internet, teachers and school administrators around the country insist that they are not hiding anything and that they make curriculum materials available to anyone who asks. But this is evasive.

For having a misplaced faith in schools, few people do ask, and few people might think they need to ask to see any curriculum materials likening pizza toppings to sex acts or imputing to white students guilt for the mistreatment of racial minorities throughout history.

Yet such materials are indeed in use in American schools, precisely because they are not routinely publicized and easily accessible.

Enfield’s Board of Education may appoint a committee to look into the pizza sex assignment and how a recurrence might be prevented. This too is moronic, for the school superintendent already should be able to answer the big questions. It is distressing and revealing that they were not answered at the board meeting when the incident was discussed at length.

The problem here isn’t the sexual prudery of parents or other observers. The internet distributes pornography so widely that Enfield’s eighth-graders already may know more about sex than their parents do. No, the problem is the unaccountability of public schools.

Yes, posting on the internet all curriculum material will facilitate many questions and complaints, and some will be mistaken, arise from prudery, or have bad intent. But that’s democracy, which inevitably is less convenient for government than totalitarianism, a lesson schools should teach — perhaps most of all to their own staff.

But will any legislators in Connecticut propose a curriculum-posting law and thus risk the ire of the teacher and school administrator unions? (Yes, in Connecticut most school administrators, supposedly managers, are unionized too and so not really managers.)

Any such legislation shouldn’t stop with curriculums. It also should require the posting of school salaries and teacher evaluations, thereby repealing Connecticut’s law exempting teacher performance evaluations from disclosure, the law’s only exemption for evaluations of government employees.

Of course the teacher and administrator unions surely would dissuade the governor and General Assembly from enacting that much accountability in public education. But a discussion of accountability legislation at least might establish that the big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it’s not really public at all.

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

By Chris Powell

From Connecticut’s congressional delegation last week the watchwords of pious posturing were: “Stand with Ukraine.” Of course no one was proposing to stand with Ukraine enough to join the overmatched Ukrainian army in fighting the Russian invaders. The congressmen meant: Stand with Ukraine at a safe distance.

Indeed, while President Biden strove to look tough imposing largely symbolic economic sanctions on Russia, he did nothing that mattered much, since anything serious would damage Russia less than this country’s European allies, who are dependent on Russian gas, oil, and wheat imports. Looking tough was even harder for the president while he had to keep assuring Americans that U.S. troops would not get involved.

Even so, the United States is largely responsible for Russia’s attack.

When the Iron Curtain was torn open in 1989 and when the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union itself fell in 1991, Western officials gained Russian cooperation with the reunification of Germany by assuring Russia that NATO would not expand eastward and the former Soviet satellites would become buffers between the great powers. While these assurances were not put in a formal treaty, they made sense, since buffers help keep the peace — and then the assurances were betrayed.

Eventually the United States assisted the revolution in Ukraine that overthrew an elected government friendly to Russia. Then the United States started exploiting Ukraine economically, the exploiters including Vice President Biden’s influence-peddling and dissolute son, Hunter. And then came the tempting of Ukraine with membership in the Western military alliance, NATO.

Similar military intervention in Cuba by the Soviet Union in 1962 prompted the United States to blockade the island at the risk of nuclear war.

But U.S. intervention in Ukraine did not come with any capacity or willingness to defend that country amid the provocation being given to Russia. Russia’s attack violates international law and is murderous, but international law also has been violated by many U.S. military interventions in Latin America and around the world in the last 120 years.

Great powers make their own laws. Russia has just brutally reminded the world that it is a great power too.

Ukraine deserved better from the United States — mainly the advice that if you live near a bear, don’t provoke it.

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Maybe it was because he had just returned from a long trip abroad, but Governor Lamont may never have looked so exhausted and befuddled as he did Friday as he announced the immediate departure of his budget secretary, Melissa McCaw.

Two weeks earlier, amid controversy around his firing of McCaw’s deputy, Konstantinos Diamantis, the governor was asked if McCaw would be staying. He replied, “I hope so.” But she appears to have given him only a day’s notice of her departure and she did not join him as he announced that she was already gone, though the governor issued a written statement in which they thanked each other.

Three weeks earlier the governor had announced the departure of his chief operating officer and administrative services commissioner, Josh Geballe. Obscure deputies are replacing Geballe and McCaw, suggesting that there wasn’t enough time to plan anything else — and that the nepotism and school construction contract steering controversy around Diamantis is shaking the administration.

Yes, a federal grand jury is investigating the contract business, but the information available so far has revealed no corruption. As for the nepotism — Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo hired Diamantis’ ill-qualified daughter as his executive assistant while negotiating with Diamantis over raises for prosecutors — it may smell like bribery or extortion. But the executive assistant’s job is a patronage position and state government’s civil service rules usually leave plenty of room for patronage to sneak in anyway.

So if it wasn’t for the abruptness and bitterness of the departures of Diamantis and McCaw, their happening so close to Geballe’s departure, and the governor’s display of nervousness about them, there might not be such an impression of scandal.

Or maybe the governor, a Democrat, looked so exhausted and befuddled Friday because he fears that Republican rejoicing, while premature, is not entirely misplaced.

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