Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Maybe the best measure of Bob Stefanowski’s vast improvement as a candidate for governor is how quickly he scared Democratic leaders and left-leaning observers into attacking him upon his formal announcement last week that wants a rematch with Governor Lamont.

Though Stefanowski still has to win the Republican nomination, for which he has three challengers, Democratic State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo called him “too extreme,” condemned him for accepting President Trump’s endorsement four years ago and campaigning against the state income tax then, and warned that he would “devastate” schools and medical care. Stefanowski, DiNardo added, doesn’t think climate change is a big issue for the state — as if many others don’t either.

Hugh Bailey, opinion editor of the Connecticut Post and New Haven Register, condemned Stefanowski and other Republicans for making an issue of worsening crime, especially in the cities, though New Haven police have failed to make an arrest in 78% of the city’s soaring number of murders in the last two years and though that issue and the crime issue generally had been raised weeks earlier by New Haven’s own city council.

With his declaration Stefanowski did mean to do a little scaring, but of his Republican rivals, not Democrats. He said he had committed $10 million of his own money to his campaign and he led the state news cycle for 24 hours, doing many interviews signifying familiarity with a range of issues. The income tax came up only when his interviewers raised it. To accusations that he is a loser, Stefanowski noted that he came fairly close to winning four years ago and that the governor himself had been defeated in his first two campaigns for state office.

Stefanowski’s critique of government in Connecticut was fair enough — that the state has become less affordable for the middle class and less safe. But he did not offer a detailed platform. While he noted that Connecticut can’t cut taxes without cutting spending, he didn’t specify where this should be done.

He pledged “forensic audits” of every state agency and of the spending of emergency federal financial aid. But while such audits are bound to find waste and fraud, big savings can result only from challenging mistaken policies that no one in authority dares to address, as with labor union contracting, education, and welfare.

Citing his business background, Stefanowski said, “I know how to restructure.” But the government employee unions and the special interests drawing their sustenance from state government know just as well how to prevent restructuring. The unions and special interests may have more influence over state legislators, even Republican legislators, than a Republican governor would have.

Stefanowski looks and speaks more like a political leader than Lamont does, but the incumbent enters the campaign with huge advantages.

Connecticut remains a Democratic state. While state government’s unfunded pension obligations make it technically insolvent, it is loaded with cash at the moment and the governor can use it to buy votes. The more relevant Stefanowski becomes on policy, the harder the unions and the other special interests will work against him. The governor is far richer and easily will be able to outspend Stefanowski despite his $10 million. And Stefanowski will have the Trump problem.

But then someone should ask the governor if he wants President Biden to campaign for him.

Maybe the Trump and Biden problems will wash each other out in time for state issues to be discussed.

Whoever becomes the Republican nominee will need to itemize the many management failures in state government — starting with recent ones like the Ollie and Katsouleas scandals at the University of Connecticut; state government’s concealment of thousands of the unclaimed properties it has seized from financial institutions; the constant release of chronic criminal offenders, adults and juveniles alike, who laugh at the law and the damage they cause; and the payment of more than $340,000 in salary to a Superior Court judge who hasn’t shown up for work in two years.

State government is full of such failures. Lamont and the General Assembly ignore them but voters might resent them if properly reminded.

---

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

By Chris Powell

Another spectacular embarrassment for the University of Connecticut, and thus for the state itself, exploded last week — the $11 million wrongful termination award for former men’s basketball coach Kevin Ollie. It was compounded because there is no one really in charge at the university these days.

University President Thomas Katsouleas resigned last June after less than two years on the job, bailing out in a golden parachute to a tenured UConn professorship with a $330,000 salary. His temporary successor, UConn Health CEO Andrew Agwunobi, who held on to his medical position even as he became interim president of the whole university, announced Jan. 14 that he is leaving to run a subsidiary of health insurer Humana.

UConn’s vice president for research, Radenka Maric, had barely been lined up as the university’s second interim president of the year when the award to Ollie was announced.

Maric’s first task as president may be to decide where that $11 million is to come from, since the arbiter ordered it paid fast. UConn’s athletic department had just reported a $47 million deficit.

But after Maric finds the $11 million, she will be obliged to inquire into the Ollie disaster, because it was not just the fluke or the bad luck suggested by the university’s statement, which, remarkably, was anonymous, unattributed to any UConn official. The statement called the arbiter’s decision “nonsensical” and complained that it “seriously impedes the university’s ability to manage its athletics program.”

Of course Maric will do nothing about the disaster, because it is actually the result of the university’s own mistaken policies and misjudgments.

First, UConn’s contract with Ollie allowed his dismissal only for “just cause.” Anyone being paid $2.8 million per year in taxpayer money, as Ollie was, should be subject to dismissal simply for management’s loss of confidence.

Second, UConn allows its coaches to be members of the professors union, whose contract bestows additional job guarantees. While the university is sore that the arbiter concluded that the union contract superseded parts of Ollie’s personal contract, the university had allowed an employee paid $2.8 million per year to be part of the union.

That is, UConn had already compromised itself.

Third, nearly everyone who follows UConn basketball sensed that Ollie was fired four years ago not just because of a few national collegiate rule violations and some dissembling about them but because, despite having already taken his team to a national championship, he had just presided over two losing seasons. A coach whose team had done better recently would not have been punished so severely. He would have been reprimanded short of dismissal, as his predecessor, Jim Calhoun, had been after rules violations. But UConn was in a hurry and fired Ollie long before the National Collegiate Athletic Association issued its formal findings about him.

Fourth, in the four years since Ollie’s firing the university probably could have negotiated a financial settlement with him well short of $11 million, out of decency if not strategy. But UConn’s incompetence was crowned by arrogance.

And fifth, UConn’s come-and-go presidents aren’t the only ones who have been presiding over the Ollie case. The university has a Board of Trustees that either has been informed about developments in the case or hasn’t been and hasn’t cared to be. Somehow the board has gotten away with hiring Katsouleas as president only to discover that they couldn’t stand each other and with failing to condition the professorial sinecure in his contract on any length of service as president.

Governor Lamont appoints the trustees but has been indifferent to their performance. So under Lamont working at UConn is good but getting fired is even better.

Yes, UConn is not the only part of state government that always gives the store away, but even so this is a scandal that screams for investigation by the General Assembly.

Since the legislature investigates nothing and since UConn long has been exempt from scrutiny generally, the state will be lucky if even one journalist questions the governor and his challengers about the scandal during the election campaign ahead.

---

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

By Chris Powell

Having supported the futile U.S. war in Afghanistan throughout their congressional careers, helping to flush $2 trillion down the toilet of that primitive and ungovernable land, Connecticut U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy this week flew off to Ukraine in the hope of getting their country into a war with Russia — right on Russia’s own border.

The senators said they wanted “to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to Ukraine,” which long was part of the Soviet Union and, indeed, was the birthplace of Russia itself.

Many Ukrainians want nothing to do with Russia anymore, but some do, and Russia is meddling in their civil war, incentivized by the eagerness of the anti-Russian side to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and thereby oblige the United States and Western Europe to defend Ukraine militarily.

Russia doesn’t want U.S. and NATO forces in Ukraine for the same reason the United States doesn’t want Russian forces in Cuba and Mexico. That is, both sides want some distance between them and any forces that could attack quickly.

The Russian regime is brutal. But buffers between great powers help keep the peace. The expansion of NATO into eastern Europe has been a provocation to Russia. Murphy says this expansion would “protect U.S. national security interests,” but the United States has none in Ukraine, whose government is incompetent and corrupt, just like Afghanistan’s was and remains.

If the United States and NATO stay out of Ukraine and Russia invades anyway, Russia will have more of a problem than anyone else as it tries to subdue a hostile population. The West’s battle lines are simply not defensible so far east.

---

FIRST HE MADE IDIOTS: Accountability isn’t a problem only in police work in Connecticut, as the General Assembly thinks. Accountability is just as much a problem in public education, which often isn’t public at all, as the Board of Education in Windsor Locks is demonstrating.

The board recently proposed to prohibit at its meetings any public criticism or complaint about school personnel or anyone connected with the school system. The proposal said any criticism or complaints involving school staff should be made to the superintendent, presumably in private.

While the board’s chairman, Dennis Gragnolati, seems to be backing away from the proposal, he said the new policy was needed because teachers and administrators who are criticized at board meetings can’t defend themselves. Nonsense. Particular teachers or administrators may not be present when they are criticized at a meeting, but they can be invited to respond at a later one.

The Windsor Locks teachers union fairly suspects that the censorship policy was proposed in retaliation for criticism the union president directed at the superintendent at a board meeting in November, and thus the policy is meant to silence teachers as well as townspeople. Of course criticism of school personnel still could be made in other public forums, like newspapers, internet sites, and television and radio broadcasts, but criticism is most relevant when made directly in public to the officials who have jurisdiction over who or what is being criticized.

At least it’s nice to see a teacher union in Connecticut clamoring for openness, since those unions long have been benefiting from and defending unaccountability in a different way.

That is, at the insistence of Connecticut’s teacher unions, for almost 40 years state government has exempted teacher evaluations from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law, an exemption granted to no other state and municipal employees.

It’s still legal to criticize teachers in Connecticut but concealing their evaluations makes it much harder to criticize them with any authority — the objective of the evaluation secrecy law.

No one gets rich serving on a school board. There is no financial compensation. It’s community service.

But as Harry Truman said, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you can’t stand the controversy of a school board but remain on the board anyway and impose censorship like what has been proposed in Windsor Locks, you validate Mark Twain’s observation: “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made school boards.”

---

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

By Chris Powell

Despite its two years of painstaking effort, Connecticut’s Police Transparency and Accountability Task Force last week recommended little to increase transparency and accountability in police work.

The task force proposes some good things: standardizing police policies and record keeping and requiring policies and department censuses to be posted on the internet, as well as creating a central state registry of complaints against officers.

But transparency and accountability in police work are mainly matters of ensuring that what police do can be promptly seen and reviewed by the public, and the task force has failed on that. It would impose secrecy on complaints against officers and has made no recommendation on whether police union contracts should continue to be allowed to obstruct public access to investigations of officers.

Of course officers don’t want false, misleading, or unsubstantiated complaints against them to become public. But unless the public has immediate access to all complaints, police management can conceal or minimize even valid complaints, as police management often has done.

Requiring that court proceedings and trials be public, Connecticut’s Constitution presumes that the public can understand that not all allegations may be reliable until due process proves them. The public more easily can understand this in regard to complaints against police officers, since their accusers are usually criminals.

The task force gets more relevant with its observation that between a third and half the people killed by police have “disabilities,” a euphemism here for mental illness. So the task force recommends that police departments assemble behavioral crisis response teams consisting of social workers who would help officers respond or relieve them of responding to disturbances involving the mentally ill.

This sounds good and is fashionable but it presumes that social workers particularly and government generally know what to do about mentally ill people who are prone to misconduct. But they don’t know, and facilities for the chronically disruptive mentally ill have been lacking for decades since governments closed most of their mental hospitals in the belief that letting the chronically disruptive mentally ill run loose is more humane.

Replacing the police approach to the chronically disruptive mentally ill with the social worker approach has been well discredited by the case of Mubarak Soulemane, 19, of New Haven, who was fatally shot — executed, really — by a state trooper two years ago this month.

Soulemane had threatened people with a knife in Norwalk and then stolen a car and led police on a chase along Interstate 95 before being blocked by cruisers in West Haven. Police video shows that while Soulemane sat quietly in the stopped car with the windows up, threatening no one, the trooper shot him seven times.

Like other investigations of police misconduct, a prosecutor’s investigation of the case has been stalled so long that it has become a cover-up, so it may be concluded that Soulemane was shot not because of any danger he posed at that moment but because of the trooper’s adrenaline and rage.

But Soulemane’s family and doctors share responsibility for his predictable demise. His mental illness was well known for at least four years. His family often had called New Haven police to help restrain him and had taken him to Yale New Haven Hospital at least 10 times. A few months after he was killed, his sister, Mariyann, told the Connecticut Mirror: “It was a constant battle: Mubarak versus schizophrenia.”

That is, nothing worked, and motorized battalions of social workers aren’t likely to work either. Mental hospitals might but they are still considered less humane than letting the chronically disruptive mentally ill run loose as threats to themselves and others.

But the task force gets nuttier than its naïve belief in social work. Noting that, likely because of their greater poverty, Black and Hispanic motorists are stopped by police more often than white motorists for vehicle equipment and registration violations, the task force proposes suspending enforcement against such violations.

The task force doesn’t speculate on what will happen when word gets around Connecticut that your car doesn’t need a license plate, registration, headlights, or taillights anymore.

---

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

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont and state Attorney General William Tong, both Democrats, are pressing in federal court to restore a lucrative tax break for the rich. But somehow they are escaping criticism from those in their party who clamor for taxing the rich more.

The governor and attorney general have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeal of Connecticut and other states that claim that it is unconstitutional for the federal tax code to limit to $10,000 the annual deductibility of state and local taxes — the SALT cap.

The SALT cap may have been the only liberal change to the federal tax code enacted during Donald Trump’s administration. Anyone who pays more than $10,000 a year in state income and local property taxes is doing pretty well. Indeed, most of the benefits of lifting the SALT cap would go to the very wealthy.

Lamont and Tong claim that the SALT cap violates state’s rights — that it interferes with Connecticut’s tax system. But it doesn’t. The cap just reduces the federal government’s subsidy to high-tax states.

Acknowledging as much, a federal district court and a federal appeals court have already rejected Connecticut’s case and the Supreme Court almost certainly will do so too.

The governor and attorney general claim that the SALT cap was “politically motivated,” since the high-tax states are Democratic and the cap was imposed by a Republican national administration. But of course nearly everything in government is politically motivated to some extent, political motivations are not unconstitutional, and many principled Democrats acknowledge that the SALT cap is fairer than the previous policy, unlimited deductibility of state and local taxes.

The Lamont administration’s appeal of its defeat in the two lower federal courts is politically motivated too — doubly so.

First, the administration wants to prevent Connecticut’s high-tax policy from aggravating the state’s many wealthy residents who lately have been voting and contributing Democratic, especially in Fairfield County, where many people find Trump repugnant and may not vote Republican again while the party is in thrall to the former president.

Since the SALT cap makes state and local taxes more burdensome, wealthy people who have lost the federal deduction may start resenting high state and local taxes more. If Republicans can free themselves of Trump, those people may transfer their disdain to the special interests that consume so much state and local government revenue and are the core of the Democratic Party in Connecticut.

And second, with its appeal against the SALT cap the Lamont administration rides an issue that might rile up those Democratic special interests as a state election approaches. By pressing the appeal, the administration tells those special interests that it is striving behind the scenes to protect high taxes so that those special interests remain well-compensated, even as the governor, when being watched more closely, tries to restrain taxes.

The SALT cap also makes hypocrites of Connecticut’s members of Congress, all Democrats who advocate repeal of the cap even as they complain about other tax breaks for the rich. But if a federal tax break for the rich helps keep Connecticut a high-tax state more able to sustain the Democratic Party’s army, the delegation will suspend its supposed principles.

* * *

SKIP ETHNIC STUDIES: Connecticut law requires public high schools to offer a course in Black and Latino studies, and the other day two students at Trinity College in Hartford wrote an essay for the Connecticut Mirror calling for schools to be required to offer a course in Asian-American studies as well.

While there is much to be learned in these subjects, they are best incorporated into U.S. history courses. Separated, ethnic studies will crowd out general history, which is already neglected.

And while the law requires high schools to offer the Black and Latino studies courses, it doesn’t require students to take them. Presumably it would be the same with an Asian-American studies course — more politically correct but oblivious posturing even as most Connecticut high school students, enjoying social promotion, graduate without ever mastering English and math.

---

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

By Chris Powell

Teachers and nurses in Connecticut who are government employees, along with employees of nursing homes, whose industry is mostly funded by government, are feeling so overworked because of the virus epidemic that their allegiance to Governor Lamont and the Democratic Party is coming into question.

Surveying leaders of the teachers and nurses unions last week, the Connecticut Post’s Ken Dixon found no rebellion but little enthusiasm. Some union leaders acknowledged that state government had made special efforts for their members but insisted that more was owed to them. Prison workers weren’t surveyed but might have expressed the greatest bitterness, since the prisons are full of virus cases.

But beyond government’s employees and quasi-employees, parents of schoolchildren and relatives of people ailing with something other than the virus have resentments too. For the more safety measures are demanded by teachers and nurses, the less schooling will be delivered and the less medical care will be available to people afflicted with something other than the virus. Some people whose treatment was delayed have died.

While teachers and nurses think of themselves as workplace martyrs to the epidemic, they are hardly alone.

Restaurants, bars, and the rest of the hospitality industry have been devastated. Even when restaurants and bars have been allowed to reopen, many customers have stayed away.

Retailers have been devastated too, as personal incomes were cut throughout the nation by a decline in working hours. Even when hours were restored, wages were overtaken by inflation, which in part is a result of the government’s distributing so much free money even as millions of people have stopped working and producing things to buy.

Amid the hysteria of the government and news organizations, which treat even asymptomatic virus cases as the plague, workers in all sectors of the economy increasingly call out sick. This hobbles far more than schools, as society discovers that school bus drivers and trash haulers are really “essential workers” too.

There may be only one set of workers who are neither overworked nor forced to sacrifice income and benefits: employees of the government bureaucracy, many of whom, in Connecticut, are allowed to work from home most of the time, pushing electrons when they are not pushing paper.

In the name of “solidarity forever” could these employees sacrifice a little income or time on the job in favor of the government employees and quasi-employees who are overwhelmed in schools, hospitals, and nursing homes? Of course not; the paper and electron pushers will insist on every last cent of their wages and every last restriction on their working conditions as promised by their union contract. And since the paper and electron pushers are represented by unions affiliated with the unions of the teachers and nurses, the teachers and nurses will give them a pass anyway — in the name of “solidarity forever.”

So now that the epidemic in Connecticut is suddenly worsening after fading for many months, on whom should the state’s political resentments fall?

The Communist government of China might be the place to start, since the virus seems to have originated from bio-weapons research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But Americans can’t vote for the Chinese government; even the Chinese themselves can’t.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has gotten off easy for funding research at the Wuhan laboratory. Americans might be tired of Fauci, but he’s not elected either.

President Biden ordinarily would be a prime target of resentment, but as he dodders ineffectually from day to day — spending a quarter of his time away from the office, apparently to regain his senses — what would be the point of bashing him?

That leaves Governor Lamont, who got all the credit when the epidemic was fading and who is up for re-election this year and thus the most available target. At least Lamont didn’t constantly make a mess of things as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio did, but how much enthusiasm will be sparked by a campaign slogan like “It Could Have Been Worse”?

---

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

By Chris Powell

Bribing people with their own money is a standard technique of politics, and with a state election coming up, Connecticut’s Democratic and Republican leaders are already at it.

Governor Lamont, who will be nominated by the Democrats for a second term, says he is likely to propose increasing the property tax credit on the state income tax. The Republican minority in the state Senate proposes cutting sales taxes a little.

Both sides assume that these tax cuts are possible without cutting spending because state government is rolling in money at the moment, as a booming stock market has produced lots of capital gains tax revenue and the federal government has bestowed on the state hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency epidemic aid. In recent days the governor has seemed eager to give away tens of millions as fast as he can, first with bonuses to recipients of the earned income tax credit, then to a job-training program, since so many young people graduate from Connecticut’s high schools without job skills and without mastery of math and English.

While state government has a lot of cash in the bank at the moment, its bonded debt and unfunded pension obligations remain overwhelming, beyond $100 billion. This money is borrowed from the future. Tax cuts without spending cuts disregard this debt and will make it more burdensome.

But few politicians care about the future beyond the election in November. Indeed, Connecticut’s political history suggests that whatever taxes are credited or cut to honor election promises will be reimposed when state government’s financial position worsens. The tax credits and cuts under discussion may not last even two years.

Tax cuts built on spending cuts would be something else, a gift that might keep on giving. But in joining the governor in proposing tax cuts without spending cuts, even the Republicans are declaring that no efficiencies in state government can be found and that there is nothing in state government spending even worth auditing — not in education policy, though social promotion produces ignoramuses; not in welfare policy, though it produces dependence instead of self-sufficiency; and not in urban policy, though living conditions in the cities have been declining for more than 50 years.

Last week an arbiter of state government employee union contracts ruled that state employees have the right to challenge in arbitration any order that they must work in their office more than one day per week, rather than from home most of the time. This ruling was another diminishing of management in state government, completely contrary to the public interest and sure to impair efficiency and accountability.

But the arbiter’s ruling passed without comment from Democrats and Republicans alike at the state Capitol, where serving the government employee unions comes far ahead of serving the public.

The Capitol crew is confident that most people will never notice that any tax relief they get will be brief and financed by money already taken from them.

---

TRUMP OR VICTORY?: The prodigy of Connecticut politics, state Sen. Will Haskell, D-Westport, who was elected in 2018 at age 22, defeating a long-time Republican incumbent, and re-elected in 2020, announced last week that he won’t run again but instead will go to law school.

Haskell bravely has advocated imposing highway tolls and raising gas taxes, so he might have been vulnerable this year. While he would not have been elected twice if he was not a good campaigner, he also probably would not have been elected either time without the taint brought to the Republicans by then-President Donald Trump, whose demeanor has especially alienated voters in Fairfield County suburbs that ordinarily lean Republican.

Haskell’s retirement presents a great opportunity for Republicans to recover his seat, as they recovered the Greenwich-Stamford Senate seat in a special election last year after Democratic Sen. Alex Kasser resigned. But Democrats in Connecticut will keep running against Trump this year and will try to tie him to all Republican candidates. That strategy has worked well twice and might work again.

So how will Connecticut Republicans choose — for Trump or a chance to win?

---

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

By Chris Powell

How, some readers ask, can this column, written by a mere layman, assert that the COVID-19 vaccines aren’t very effective?

First, it’s because the COVID-19 vaccines are not really vaccines at all as vaccines were defined prior to the current epidemic.

That is, vaccines previously were defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as inoculants that “produce immunity to a specific disease.” But last September, as the failure of the COVID-19 vaccines to “produce immunity” was realized, the CDC changed the definition. Now the CDC defines a vaccine as “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”

The new definition contains nothing about the sufficiency of the immune response stimulated by the vaccine. Presumably a preparation that produces even an insufficient immune response can be considered a vaccine now.

The CDC acknowledges that fully vaccinated people can become infected with the COVID-19 virus and, even while without symptoms, can infect other people. Indeed, last week more than 30% of the people in Connecticut hospitals who were being treated for COVID-19 were fully vaccinated, and state government has recorded more than 80,000 cases of fully vaccinated people who still have come down with the virus.

This doesn’t make the COVID-19 vaccines useless. Those 80,000 cases were only 2.3% of all people in the state known to have gotten the virus.

Rather this makes the COVID-19 vaccines not very effective as vaccines were defined until recently. It makes them therapies that, at least for now, prevent or mitigate symptoms for most infected people. Even so, these therapeutic vaccines produce far more adverse reactions than traditional vaccines, and as adverse reactions keep being discovered, the COVID-19 vaccines remain experimental. So they are less effective on their own merits as well as less effective than traditional vaccines.

Second, the COVID-19 vaccines are not very effective because they require more booster shots.

Just last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration shortened from six months to five the duration between the first two inoculations and the third doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech SE and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, since they are losing effect faster than first thought.

Meanwhile concerns are growing that such frequent boostering may damage the human immune system.

Even leading medical authorities in government admit these deficiencies.

Last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, joined two other doctors in writing: “As important as these vaccines are, however, their protective efficacy wanes over time, necessitating booster doses. Vaccination has also been unable to prevent ‘breakthrough’ infections, allowing subsequent transmission to other people even when the vaccine prevents severe and fatal disease.”

Because of these deficiencies, Fauci and his colleagues wrote, “We urgently need universal coronavirus vaccines” — that is, vaccines that don’t have to be tailored to particular coronaviruses.

Last week the chairman of the British government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, said booster shots should be suspended. “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four to six months,” Pollard said. “It’s not sustainable or affordable.”

Pollard said there is no point in trying to stop all infections. Instead, “We need to target the vulnerable.”

Indeed, while the polio vaccines have been widely available for more than 60 years, the planet is not yet fully vaccinated against that crippling disease. Prosperous Americans may consider boostering every four or five months to be no trouble, but residents of the developing world probably won’t. Frequent boostering in Connecticut’s poor cities probably won’t be so effective either, since vaccinating people there even once has been a struggle.

By contrast, because of their ease of delivery, certain therapies against COVID-19, especially those taken by mouth, can be quickly effective. Several such therapies, cheap and safe, have been successful against COVID-19 outside the United States, far from the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. People who advocate these therapies here are censored and blacklisted.

---

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut occasionally sees state Treasurer Shawn T. Wooden touting state government’s college savings program in television commercials with two young actors impersonating his sons. Since the commercials are financed by a contractor that helps run the program for the treasurer’s office, this is essentially public money. As the commercials portray Wooden as a conscientious father as much as they tout the savings program, they are really state-financed political ads, signifying the treasurer’s exploitation of his office.

But last week Wooden was nowhere to be seen as the Connecticut Mirror reported that the state program he supervises to return unclaimed financial property to state residents has been mostly ripping them off instead.

The Mirror’s Andrew Brown and Kasturi Pananjady found that in the last 20 years the treasurer’s program has collected $2.3 billion in unclaimed financial property from banks, insurance companies, and the like but has returned only 37% to its rightful owners. State government kept more than $1.5 billion of the unclaimed property.

State government doesn’t hold on to most of the unclaimed assets it seizes. Instead it liquidates them, spends the money, and enters a liability on its books in case the rightful owners turn up and have to be paid.

That’s better than letting financial institutions keep the unclaimed property. But the Mirror found that the public list maintained by the treasurer’s office to publicize unclaimed property and its owners does not include the properties worth less than $50. The Mirror also found that the treasurer’s office hardly advertises the list in the first place, unlike the college savings program in whose commercials the treasurer stars.

Wooden wouldn’t speak to the Mirror about the ripoff he supervises, instead referring questions to staff members, who deepened the scandal by pointing out that state law actually prohibits publicizing the smaller unclaimed properties, making their recovery almost impossible.

Maybe the law does that because, as the Mirror reported, much of the money from the unclaimed property — $219 million — has been spent financing political campaigns.

While Wooden didn’t want to answer for the ripoff, he can’t claim to have been unaware of it. The Mirror reported that the treasurer’s annual report to the General Assembly boasts of the money raised from the unclaimed property program for state government to spend.

A more public-spirited officeholder might have exposed the ripoff before journalism did, thereby embarrassing the legislature and the governor into ending the concealment of the smaller unclaimed properties and requiring more aggressive efforts to find owners. Such public-spiritedness would have done more for the public’s regard for Wooden than his sappy college savings plan commercials.

But such public-spiritedness would have engendered resentment from Connecticut’s political establishment — of which Wooden now has been exposed as perhaps its most cynical member.

* * *

TONG KEEPS PILING ON: But giving Wooden a close run is Attorney General William Tong, who continues to obstruct the proposed interstate settlement of the bankruptcy of pharmaceutical manufacturer Purdue Pharma, maker of the infamous painkiller OxyContin. The settlement would liquidate the company to raise maybe $4 billion for the benefit of drug rehabilitation programs and the estates of those who overdosed on the drug.

Tong argues that the settlement would let the company’s founders, the Sackler family, keep too much of the wealth they gained from the company, and maybe it would. But even if all the Sacklers are horrible people, the clamor against them is demagogic. For the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug for general use in 1995 and thousands of doctors went on to prescribe it, many knowing the risks it poses.

So where are Tong’s lawsuits against the FDA and those doctors? Without them OxyContin never would have escaped the laboratory and no one would have gotten addicted to it or died from an overdose.

But suing the FDA for what it did during a national administration run by Tong’s party and suing thousands of doctors would cause political problems, even as railing against drug companies is always popular.

—–

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

By Chris Powell

For months the prevailing view about the forthcoming election for governor has been that Governor Lamont’s handling of the virus epidemic in Connecticut would be a big advantage for him, since the state was getting along better than other states and, in exercising emergency powers, Lamont has been less imperious than other governors.

That view must be questioned now that new virus infections are breaking records, hospitals are stressed again, “virus-associated” deaths have risen sharply, and commerce, schools, and municipal governments are reimposing restrictions that the governor has declined to reimpose himself under his responsibility-shifting local-option policy. The main amusements of the state’s winter, the University of Connecticut men’s and women’s basketball seasons, are being destroyed.

What had seemed like progress against the epidemic has quickly turned into regression, compounded by last week’s embarrassment arising from the governor’s touting delivery of virus testing kits that didn’t show up as planned and then arrived only partially. Amid the competition for epidemic-related supplies and the disruption of supply chains, this should not have been so surprising, but Lamont’s touting what he was unable to achieve impugned the special competence that had been attributed to him.

In some recent public appearances the governor has looked exhausted, as he is entitled to be with the epidemic entering its third year, and he was criticized for taking a vacation to Florida, though it had been well-earned.

Meanwhile the public mood is souring again, with murders rising and lesser bad behavior more noticeable. Of course this isn’t peculiar to Connecticut, but state residents may hold their governor accountable for anything.

National affairs aren’t helping the governor, as President Biden now seems less popular than former President Trump, which is doubly astounding insofar as the Biden administration, governing with the narrowest Democratic majorities in Congress, has flooded the country with trillions of dollars in seemingly free money that state and local officials can use to buy political support in the name of epidemic relief. Accordingly last week Lamont ordered $75 million in bonuses paid to recipients of Connecticut’s earned income tax credit even as hospitals were reporting shortages of medicine needed to treat virus patients.

The governor and other Democrats in Connecticut may boast of having increased the state’s minimum wage and created a program of paid family and medical leave. But, in part because of all that “free” federal money, inflation continues to run far ahead of wage gains, and that paid leave program is only a system of self-insurance that, like the “free” money from Washington, also may reduce living standards for more people than it helps.

The number of Democratic U.S. representatives declining to seek re-election is rising as polls predict that the next House will shift to a Republican majority. Being equally divided between the parties, the Senate could shift to a Republican majority too.

But Connecticut remains a heavily Democratic state. Could state residents ever be so dissatisfied with their Democratic regime as to elect Republicans again, even if the state’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat seeking re-election this year, just spoke at a Communist Party rally and the state Supreme Court devises more competitive congressional districts?

No criticism of the governor and Connecticut’s members of Congress will be entirely fair if it neglects to offer alternatives to their policies.

What different policies might have gotten the state out of the mire of the epidemic by now?

And as awful, incompetent, and politically correct as the Biden administration may be, Republicans in Congress are characterized more by Georgia’s nutty and incendiary Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is seeking re-election, than by Ohio’s thoughtful and consensus-seeking Sen. Rob Portman, who is retiring.

But criticism doesn’t always have to be fair to work politically. People have a right to be sore and feel cheated, especially now, and to vote on that basis alone. If the people of Connecticut were asked Ronald Reagan’s famous question from 1980 — Are you better off today than you were four years ago? — they well might say no.

---

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