Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Writing last week in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, state Rep. Christine Palm, D-Chester, argued that raising gasoline prices by what she estimates as 5 cents per gallon under the Transportation Climate Initiative advocated by Governor Lamont would be no big deal, because people just shrug off rising gas prices.

Yes, gas price increases tend to be accepted, but that is because gas is a necessity of life. That’s why rising prices for food, housing, and medical care — other necessities — tend to be accepted as well. Contrary to Palm’s cavalier suggestion, this acceptance does not imply approval and a lack of hardship. After all, inflation is already exploding and gas prices are only part of it. There is much hardship and government shouldn’t worsen it.

But imposing hardship is the very objective of the Transportation Climate Initiative – to coerce people into driving less and using less gas and thus to generate less pollution on pain of having less to spend on food, housing, medical care, and everything else. Since Palm acknowledges that rising gas prices probably don’t cause people to drive less, she must also acknowledge that instead of cutting pollution, the TCI will just reduce living standards.

Essentially the TCI would be another hidden tax on gas imposed at the wholesale level, like Connecticut’s gross receipts tax. It would make the tax increase look like a price increase imposed by gasoline businesses, not government policy.

Contributing to this deception, Palm’s essay injected some demagoguery. Why, she asked, are some people upset about a possible 5-cent increase in gas taxes that might result “if petroleum distributors were actually held accountable for their enormous, devastating carbon footprint?”

Oh, yes — it’s those big, bad petroleum distributors, not Palm’s own constituents who drive the cars that burn the fuel that causes the pollution, as if the distributors would keep pushing out fuel even if no one bought it, and as if the problem is the supply, not the demand.

Palm estimates that the TCI would cost a typical Connecticut resident $15.60 per year, which, she writes, is a fraction of the extra money people already have been paying on account of the recent increase in gas prices. But Palm offers only the old rationale for all tax and price increases – that it is just a little more — as if incrementalism doesn’t add up.

Connecticut didn’t get to be highly taxed all at once. The state achieved that dubious distinction by heeding the calls of legislators like Palm to pay a little more here and a little more there, over and over again.

Besides, Palm and other TCI advocates don’t really believe their own claims of a climate emergency. If they did, they would search more broadly for the revenue needed to address it, not settle on raising the cost of a necessity of life.

State government is full of inefficiency and exploitation, especially in its government labor policies, but these are overlooked because their beneficiaries are special interests more influential than ordinary taxpayers and, in the eyes of the TCI’s own advocates, more important than any climate emergency itself. For example, sustaining Columbus Day as a paid holiday for government employees continues to take precedence over any climate emergency and the provision of the many goodies and benefits Palm imagines being financed by the TCI:

“Clean electric buses. A dramatic reduction in asthma rates. … Shuttles for the elderly. … Light rail systems. … Conveniently located charging stations. And, of course, jobs.”

But those imagined benefits require big presumptions: that state government won’t keep diverting transportation money to general purposes, and that as many jobs might not be created or sustained just by letting people keep and spend their own money.

While pollution needs to be curtailed, local and regional undertakings like the TCI aren’t likely to accomplish much, since any reduction in pollution in Connecticut could be offset by increases in pollution in other states even as Connecticut kept disadvantaging itself with higher taxes. It’s a national and international problem requiring rules with much wider application.

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

By Chris Powell

More complaining about Alden Global Capital’s dismemberment of the storied newspapers it recently acquired from the Tribune chain appeared this month in a long and — to journalists, anyway -– infuriating essay in The Atlantic magazine by its reporter McKay Coppins.

This dismemberment, Coppins noted, includes the Chicago Tribune’s former headquarters, the landmark Tribune Tower, which has been converted into an apartment building.

But at least what remains of the newspaper still has modest offices in an industrial area across town near the newspaper’s press. Another former Tribune property, the Hartford Courant, no longer has even that much. Somehow Alden acquired the Courant’s headquarters on Broad Street in Hartford and kicked the newspaper out even before acquiring the Courant itself and the other Tribune papers. The Courant now seems to be entirely a work-from-home operation, and like several other Connecticut papers, including the Journal Inquirer, now is printed by the Springfield Republican. The Courant’s address has become a post office box.

From Los Angeles to Chicago to Baltimore to New York and to Hartford, how the mighty have fallen, though the journalists who remain in the formerly great papers of old soldier on bravely and sometimes well.

Of course the dismemberment of the former Tribune papers is just part of the decline of serious state and local journalism generally. But while Alden may seem especially predatory in its liquidations, the company is not a cause but just a symptom of what has gone wrong with the news business — and not just the rise of the internet and the transfer of advertising there but, more so, the public’s loss of interest in state and local news.

This is in large part a matter of declining demographics.

After all, newspapers survived major challenges from competing new technologies before — first radio and then television, whose main products are entertainment, not news, and whose state and local news reporting always have been and remain weak. Even now anyone who wants to be well informed about state and local government and community events and to participate in public life has to subscribe to a newspaper.

While some places — including Connecticut — now have a few internet sites providing state and local news, most are niche operations that don’t attempt to serve any area comprehensively. They concentrate on government and their audiences tend to be smaller even than newspaper audiences. They are not any more profitable than most newspapers, and many are operated as nonprofits supported by donations, if sometimes large ones from foundations. This method of operation is hardly a business plan and may subject the internet sites to more political pressures than advertising subjects newspapers to.

But if more people wanted state and local news and commentary, newspapers and news-based internet sites would have more readers, and as their audiences grew, they might become profitable from increased advertising.

The movement to convert newspapers to nonprofits and to operate internet news sites that way presumes that substantial interest from the public is no longer attainable.

It is hard to argue with that presumption. After all, throughout the country and even in Connecticut most young people, the products of social promotion, graduate from high school without ever mastering basic math and English. Most gain little if any knowledge of the country’s history and civics. Even in Connecticut, a comparatively wealthy and well-educated state, the typical high school graduate or college freshman cannot identify the three branches of government. (You know: the lawyers, the teacher unions, and the liquor stores.)

That is, most young people are not being prepared to become citizens in a democracy, much less followers of state and local news.

This may be the underlying reason Alden is liquidating so much of the former Tribune papers, draining away their capital, like their real estate, and why no one outbid Alden for the Tribune papers with the confidence that solid journalism could be made profitable again. For the future isn’t just disruptive technological change but also social change, which may be far more disruptive.

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

By Chris Powell

Success in politics is often believed to require making a lot of noise purporting to address issues without really doing anything about them, since doing anything might upset people invested in the status quo. Introducing their juvenile crime proposals last week, the state Senate’s Republican minority followed this formula. The juvenile crime issue exploded in Connecticut in June when a man jogging on a sidewalk in New Britain, Henryk Gudelski, was run down and killed by a stolen car apparently driven by a 17-year-old boy who had been arrested 13 times in the last 3½ years. Though some of the charges were serious, the boy had remained free. Since then the juvenile crime issue has been intensified by a rash of car thefts and even shootings committed by juveniles.

The Republican senators argue that more offenses charged against juveniles should qualify for transfer from juvenile court, which is secret, to adult court, which is public and can impose heavier sentences. But this would leave discretion with juvenile court — the same discretion that, in the New Britain case, piled arrest upon arrest without any accountability to the public.

The Republican senators would allow juvenile offenders to be detained for more than six hours when arrested. But not having gotten a trial, such juveniles will be released soon anyway. This wouldn’t be adjudication, and any greater safety would be temporary.

The Republican senators propose 24-hour electronic monitoring of juveniles charged with violent crime who are already awaiting trial on other charges. But this presumes that chronic young offenders should remain free indefinitely, as in the New Britain case. That also makes no one safer.

The Republican senators propose next-day arraignments for juvenile offenders. But an arraignment doesn’t resolve a case. The teen in the New Britain case probably had many arraignments before Gudelski was killed.

And then the Republican senators propose what seems obligatory prattle in discussions of juvenile crime: a lot more social work for juveniles.

Like everything else lately suggested about juvenile crime in Connecticut, the Republican proposals miss the crucial point. That is, no purported reforms could be evaluated in the future any more than anything in juvenile justice can be evaluated now unless the whole system was made public, as the state Constitution requires when it proclaims that “all courts shall be open.” The problem is that state government long has been violating the Constitution without being held to account.

Indeed, the General Assembly could enact any law about juvenile justice and still never be sure it was being followed unless juvenile courts were opened to the public just like other courts. That’s why the Republican proposals are meaningless. They brought the senators some publicity without threatening to exact any accountability from the juvenile justice system.

So now everyone is happy.

Reform requires accountability and should start with a public investigation by the legislature of the many cases involving the teen charged with killing Gudelski as well as the cases of the many other chronic juvenile offenders. The legislature’s Democratic majority, the party of social work, doesn’t want any case investigated, and now even the Republican senators have forgotten Gudelski’s name.

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SECRECY COSTS $705,000: While secrecy in juvenile justice is costing lives, secrecy in city government has just cost Meriden $705,000.

According to the Meriden Record-Journal, that’s how much the City Council has agreed to pay former City Manager Guy Scaife to settle his federal lawsuit charging that he was wrongfully fired four years ago in retaliation for alerting the council to improper expenses the council turned out to want to conceal. An audit of those expenses is said to have been commissioned but no results have been announced.

Scaife charged that in violation of Connecticut’s open-government law, the council’s Democratic and Republican caucuses met secretly about concealing the expenses.

While the council denies Scaife’s charges, $705,000 is far more than a nuisance settlement. Obviously the council set out to hide wrongdoing and, in paying Scaife so much to go away and avoid a trial, plans to keep hiding it.

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

By Chris Powell

You’d never know it from the constant clamor by Connecticut’s news organizations and politicians about “domestic violence,” but the wisdom of the ages may still apply insofar as two people can keep living as cheaply as one — at least if they can stand each other. Not all married people in Connecticut or throughout the country are trying to kill their spouses.For a study published Oct. 5 by the Pew Research Center confirmed the old saying. The study reported that married and romantically partnered couples in the United States are more prosperous and healthier than single people.

The study’s bad news is that the married share of the population has been declining for 30 years and a larger share of the population now remains single well into adulthood.

Of course in theory single life may leave people with more options. Unfortunately their greater chance of getting stuck in poverty or illness may curtail their options. While in some respects people curtail their options by marrying, in other respects their greater prosperity increases their options.

The growth in the single adult population implies the disaster the country long has been facing with childrearing. Children can’t have too many people to love, protect, and encourage them, but these days millions of children are lucky to have even one parent or guardian and so they start life at a disadvantage, compounded by government’s failure to draw policy conclusions from studies like this new one.

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BIDEN REHABS TRUMP: What has the Republican Party done this year to earn the resounding approval it has gotten in the most recent national poll by the Gallup organization?

Nothing. The Republicans have just sat around like everyone else watching as the incompetence of President Biden and his administration makes the country miss Donald Trump.

According to Gallup, more people now consider the Republicans superior to the Democrats on both economic issues and international affairs. Some polls even show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical presidential rematch in 2024, though it is hard to imagine Biden maintaining the necessary stamina for even another year.

Of course 2024 is a long way off. But campaigns are already starting for next year’s elections for Congress, and the Democratic majorities there are paper thin. A switch to Republican majorities seems likely.

More than dissatisfaction with the Biden administration would be required to make next year’s Republican nominations for governor and Congress desirable in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut. But in addition to crime, Connecticut is full of serious issues that state government long has overlooked. Maybe the national polls will encourage Connecticut Republicans to try getting more relevant.

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DON’T FEED AFGHANS: Now that the supply of dollars has been cut off with the fall of the U.S. puppet regime in Afghanistan, Reuters reports that officials of Western governments and the United Nations are working to turn the spigot back on to prevent the country’s economic collapse. The new theocratic fascist Taliban government is no more capable of running the country than the puppet regime was. Indeed, Afghanistan is hardly a country at all, more like a grouping of medieval tribes.

The plan, Reuters says, is to get money to the Afghan people without also underwriting the Taliban. This is a silly delusion.

For a gangster regime like the Taliban easily can confiscate whatever it wants from the people, and any money sent to and kept by the Afghans will make them more content to be ruled by the gangsters. But hunger and general privation may encourage Afghans to overthrow the regime.

The Biden administration’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan forfeited to the Taliban military equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Taliban can sell that equipment to Iran or China and already may have begun to do so. In any case under U.S. occupation the Afghans had their chance to build and sustain a decent government. Being so primitive, most Afghans couldn’t have cared less, and the United States was stupid for thinking they ever might have cared.

If the Afghans are hungry or need medicine, their country has great mineral wealth and can sell the mining rights to China, which, having a gangster regime itself, will have no problem underwriting gangsters elsewhere.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut was pretty normal this week. The cities again were full of shootings and other mayhem. Group home workers went on strike because, while they take care of people who are essentially wards of the state, their own compensation omits medical insurance.

Hundreds of health care workers were suspended for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccination. Tens of thousands of children went to school without learning much, since at home they have little in the way of parenting and thus no incentive to learn.

The two longstanding scandals in the state police — the drunken retirement party at a brewery in Oxford and the fatal shooting of an unarmed and unresisting mentally ill 19-year-old in West Haven — remained unresolved, the authorities apparently expecting them to be forgotten. They’re probably right.

And Governor Lamont called for sticking with football at the University of Connecticut despite its worsening record and expense.

Nevertheless, the great political controversy of the week was something else — a Facebook post by state Rep. Anne Dauphinais, R-Killingly. It likened the governor to Adolf Hitler on account of the emergency powers that Lamont repeatedly has claimed and his party’s majorities in the General Assembly have granted him in regard to the virus epidemic even though there no longer is any emergency — at least none involving the epidemic.

Rather than apologize for her intemperance and hyperbole, Dauphinais “clarified” that she meant to liken the governor to the Hitler of the early years of his rule in Germany, not the Hitler of the era of world war and concentration camps. This wasn’t much clarification, since the Nazi regime established concentration camps just weeks after gaining power in 1933 and unleashed wholesale murder on its adversaries just a year later, on June 30, 1934 — the “night of the long knives” — more than five years before invading Poland.

But so what if a lowly state legislator from the minority party got hysterical on Facebook?

Her name calling did no actual harm to anyone. The governor’s skin is far thicker than that. Indeed, to gain sympathy any politician might welcome becoming the target of such intemperance and thus gaining sympathy.

Besides, Dauphinais’ hysteria wouldn’t even have been noticed if other politicians didn’t make such a show of deploring it over several days. The top two Democratic and top two Republican leaders of the General Assembly went so far as to issue a joint statement condemning the use of political analogies to Nazism. In separate statements they criticized Dauphinais by name.

They all seemed to feel pretty righteous about it.

But meanwhile they had little to say about the state’s problems that really matter, problems affecting the state’s quality of life, problems on display throughout the week. Maybe they should thank Dauphinais for the distraction she provided them.

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Will his support for UConn football be Governor Lamont’s Afghanistan? Is the state just throwing good money after bad?

Now that Hartford wants to tear up Brainard Airport for commercial development, could Pratt & Whitney Stadium in East Hartford be leveled and Rentschler Field rebuilt as the airport it once was, replacing Brainard?

And will anyone ever take responsibility for anything at UConn?

Probably not. For even if UConn football is a disaster forever, it will cost far less than the disasters of Connecticut’s education and welfare policies.

Why get upset at UConn football when the more Connecticut spends in the name of education, the less education is produced and the poorer students do, or when the more that is spent on welfare and social programs, the less people become self-sufficient and the more they become dependent on government?

The problem with UConn football is that results are still the object of the program and the public easily can see them — the weekly scores during football season and the losing record.

By contrast, the educational scores — the results of standardized tests — are publicized only occasionally and not on the sports pages, while the results of welfare and social programs are never audited and reported at all. With education and welfare, results are no longer the objective. They have become an end in themselves.

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

By Chris Powell

Rallies around the country and Connecticut this month supporting abortion rights and opposing the new anti-abortion law in Texas were full of bluster and slogans but offered little sound argument.

Foremost among the slogans was “My body, my choice,” but no one seemed to notice the far larger violation of that principle happening with the COVID-19 vaccines though they remain experimental.

Vaccine coercion and abortion libertarianism are contradictory principles of the political left.

At the rally in Salisbury, Laurence Rand, a retired teacher who called himself a scholar of constitutional law, noted fears that the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to overthrow its 1973 precedent in the abortion rights case of Roe v. Wade. “We have a Supreme Court that is out of touch with the will of the people,” Rand said. “Nowhere is that more evident than in its recent decisions regarding abortion.”

But real constitutional scholars understand that in this country courts are commanded to decide cases not according to the popularity of the litigants and their propositions but according to the law. Since neither the federal nor state constitutions mention abortion, it is reasonable to argue that states may legislate about it, as Texas and Mississippi lately have done so controversially.

Rand added that the country will have proper abortion policy “only when we have as many women in Congress and state legislatures as we do men.” But this suggestion that men are the main culprits behind restrictive abortion law is ridiculous.

For women are prominent in the anti-abortion movement, and of course many men support abortion rights — among them men who find that they have impregnated women and don’t want the responsibility of fatherhood. Even a few politicians who have struck anti-abortion poses have advocated abortion in their personal lives.

Protesting at the Supreme Court in Washington, Elaine Baijal, 19, a student at American University, said that in the 1970s her mother marched with her mother in support of legalizing abortion. “It’s sad,” Baijal said, “that we still have to fight for our right.”

But it’s not sad at all. It’s democracy. The country remains much divided on abortion and no strong national consensus has been democratically reached, though it’s possible to imagine one — a libertarianism that ends upon the viability of the fetus outside the womb. Such a policy would hardly be oppressive, since so many contraceptive devices are available and essentially free for those unable to pay, including “morning-after” pills, and since abortion itself is essentially free for those unable to pay.

Even the greatest liberal of his era in the U.S. Senate, New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called abortion-rights absolutism — the demand for late-term abortion — infanticide.

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HOORAY FOR HOBGOBLINS: According to state Rep. Christine Palm, D-Chester, and Frank Hanley Santoro, a former assistant U.S. attorney, who wrote an essay published last week in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, “dark money” from far-right hobgoblins like Koch Industries and the DeVos Family Foundation are financing citizen groups around the country that are challenging school boards over their racial curriculums.

If so, hooray for the hobgoblins, since political influence on public education is not from the far right at all but overwhelmingly from the far left, starting with the teacher unions, which pretty much control the Democratic Party nationally and in Connecticut.

In Connecticut teacher union members commonly serve on school boards where they negotiate and vote on contracts with the local affiliates of the union to which they belong in the nearby towns where they are employed. This is a conflict of interest but it is seldom noted by news organizations or even rival political campaigns.

In Connecticut campaign money and volunteer work provided by teacher unions dwarfs any support provided by the far-right hobgoblins to skeptics of the education establishment.

Indeed, Connecticut has a law actually forbidding school systems from reducing their spending even if their enrollment collapses. The law’s point is to ensure that any financial savings in education are diverted to raises for teachers, not returned to taxpayers.

The Koch Brothers and Betsy DeVos didn’t push that law on Connecticut. The teacher unions did.

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

By Chris Powell

Nearly everyone on Planet Earth with internet access seems to use the social-media platform Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram even as last week’s U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing over which Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal presided suggested that Facebook is an evil scheme to push young teenage girls into bulimia and other psychological disorders.

Facebook and Instagram certainly have brought out the latent narcissism of hundreds of millions of people, allowing them to spend half their day inflicting on others every trivial detail of their lives. But of course no one is compelled to participate in social media, and young teenage girls can participate only if their parents provide them with cell phones, computers, and internet access and pay little attention to what the kids do with those things.

This seemed lost on last week’s hearing, as Senator Blumenthal read aloud a text message he said he had received from an unidentified father:

“My 15-year-old daughter loved her body at 14, was on Instagram constantly and maybe posting too much. Suddenly she started hating her body — her body dysmorphia, now anorexia — and was in deep, deep trouble before we found treatment. I fear she will never be the same.”

So who is responsible? The hearing accused Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

And what is the remedy? The hearing seemed to be demanding censorship by the government.

“Facebook and Big Tech are facing a ‘Big Tobacco’ moment,” Blumenthal said, referring to the tobacco industry’s long struggle against regulation of its product and its concealment of research showing that — as everyone with half a brain had known for hundreds of years — using tobacco is unhealthy.

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testified that the company knows that teenage girls are especially vulnerable to what may be said about them on social media — as if anyone needed confidential company documents to confirm the neurotic tendencies of teenage girls.

But Facebook’s product and the major product of technology companies is not tobacco. It is speech and self-expression, freedom of which is constitutionally guaranteed even when it is narcissistic, stupid, mistaken, and capable of being construed destructively. All other vehicles for conveying expression and information are just as capable of facilitating the harm being attributed to Facebook and Instagram.

Haugen suggested that Congress repeal the law exempting internet companies from being sued for content posted by their users. That well might be the end of social media, since there is no way to police large volumes of social media postings except by using computer programs to target keywords, a mechanism that censors the innocent and the guilty alike.

And what about the individual privacy of communicating by internet? Should the government be empowered to compel Facebook and other social media companies to become general censors? If government can do that to social media companies, it can do that to newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, e-mail service providers, and even telephone companies.

While the teen years always will be full of psychological stress, most young people in the land of the free have recovered more or less and grown up to be glad of their freedom.

Yet last month the FBI reported a 30% annual increase in murders in this country, from which no one will be recovering. The country is coming apart, and it’s not because of Facebook and bulimia.

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INCORRIGIBILITY IGNORED: Farmington’s police union president, Sgt. Steve Egan, blames Connecticut’s new police accountability law for the severe injury inflicted on Officer James O’Donnell last month when a man driving a stolen car sped off, crushing the officer against his cruiser.

No evidence has been provided for the union president’s claim. But a failure of law can be seen here. For the man charged in the incident is reported to have a long criminal record. That is, a state with an incorrigibility law already might have put him away for life, or at least for enough years to eliminate his capacity for crime.

Connecticut is not such a state. Instead of enacting an incorrigibility law the state keeps closing prisons and letting incorrigibles hurt people.

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

By Chris Powell

For decades the state’s intelligentsia has lamented that there are “two Connecticuts,” a prosperous one in the suburbs and a poor one being oppressed in the cities — oppressed by disparities in property tax rates; by state government’s not spending enough on education and welfare programs, though such spending long has been increasing; and, now, by “systemic racism.”

Hearing this an outsider might assume that Connecticut is a stronghold of reactionary Republican politics — that it twice chose Donald Trump for president, that it has been electing Republicans to Congress and the General Assembly since anyone can remember, and that government here is starving under a low-tax regime.

But the state sent its last Republican to Congress in 2006. Connecticut’s last Republican governor left office 10 years ago. A Republican majority hasn’t been elected to either house of the General Assembly since 1994, 27 years ago. Taxes here are high.

So if Connecticut has been oppressing its poor lately, some other political party has been doing it. Indeed, the failure to elevate the poor here in recent decades correlates closely with the policies advocated and implemented by some of the very people lamenting the two Connecticuts.

Of course there are two Connecticuts. But after all these years of fattening the state’s government class only for the divide to worsen, the problem may not be so connected to the state budget. It may be mainly cultural, since the two Connecticuts inhabit separate worlds.

Upper Connecticut is gainfully employed, at least somewhat educated, and engaged with community life and institutions.

Lower Connecticut is uneducated and unskilled, pressed financially as inflation outpaces the income paid for menial work, and increasingly demoralized, alienated, and even violent.

Upper Connecticut’s policy response to this lately has been mainly to increase the availability of intoxicating drugs and gambling, tax revenue from which will mainly compensate the government class. Indeed, what should be most distressing about the two Connecticuts is that amid the recent mayhem in Lower Connecticut — the murder of a teenager in Waterbury by a mentally ill man just out of the hospital; the daily shootings and almost daily murders in Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport; the increasingly arrogant crimes of juveniles who have realized that society has lost the nerve to discipline them — there really is no relevant policy response at all.

Upper Connecticut is oblivious to Lower Connecticut and crowns its obliviousness with virtue, the mock concern expressed by its new bleating about “systemic racism.”

Since most children in Lower Connecticut lack parents and parenting, the schools can’t educate them no matter how much money is spent.

Not being educated, many of these children grow up unable to support themselves in middle-class life and become dependent on welfare programs or resort to crime. Government keeps creating programs to remediate their lives but there are ever more lives coming along needing remediation, so the programs never catch up.

So Lower Connecticut — the underclass — becomes full of antisocial behavior, and then people who don’t want it near them are called racist. But as members of racial minorities themselves increasingly move away from the underclass, the repulsion has little to do with race anymore.

Connecticut’s news organizations report well enough the basics of the daily mayhem in the underclass. But the larger forces that bring people to their ruin or their doom are seldom reported. To Upper Connecticut the daily mayhem is the natural order of things.

After all, the FBI reported the other day that the big increase in murders is a national phenomenon, and as he chases the mayhem in his city, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker can’t do much more than keep reminding people that the local social disintegration they see is also happening throughout the country. That is, it’s not his fault.

Yes, there are two Americas too. But as the intelligentsia of a wealthy and educated state, Upper Connecticut has less excuse for failing to examine the social disintegration and failing to seek its causes, less excuse for pretending to be enlightened when it is really just on the payroll of the status quo.

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

By Chris Powell

Look who has just signed up for the politically correct speech police in Connecticut — not, as usual, more sanctimonious Democrats but two prominent Republicans, just so they could take a cheap shot at Governor Lamont.

Answering questions from news reporters at the state Capitol last week, Lamont spoke about state government employees who might claim a religious objection to his administration’s order that they get vaccinated against COVID-19. Of the religious claim Lamont asked: “Is this something that is being exploited, or is this a very small group of Mother Teresas who come forward and feel deeply?”

Scolding the governor, the leader of the state Senate’s Republican minority, Kevin Kelly of Stratford, said Mother Teresa, a saint of the Catholic Church, should not be “denigrated as a joke or used as a veiled sarcastic insult.”

Chris Healy, executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Conference and a former Republican state chairman, said Lamont had portrayed the saint as “some kind of eccentric character” so he could “demean people of legitimate faith.”

While Lamont indeed had been sarcastic, he had not denigrated the saint or “people of legitimate faith.” No, his sarcasm was directed at those who claim that their religion forbids vaccination. But there is no religion — at least not as religion long has been commonly understood — that forbids vaccination, not even Christian Science.

Opposition to vaccination may be claimed as personal morality, and personal morality may be considered a sort of religion. But that kind of religion can be construed to excuse anything, including crime, racial discrimination, and refusal to pay taxes.

Of course the world is full of wonderful jokes that draw on religious references without doing any harm. Even Kelly and Healy may have laughed at a few of them, at least when they were not striving to strike a pompous pose.

Quite apart from dubious religious claims, there are perfectly rational reasons to object to vaccination and particularly the COVID-19 vaccines.

First, perhaps, is that since the shots use new technology, they are not traditional vaccines and as a practical matter are really still experimental. Even now they remain authorized by government as an “emergency” measure.

Many of their side-effects were discovered only after government’s “emergency” authorization put them into general use. Other side-effects may still be discovered. Because the COVID-19 vaccines are so new, their long-term impacts can’t be known.

Additionally, as shown by the clamor about “booster” vaccinations, the long-term efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines is also unknown and increasingly in question, even as effective treatments for the virus are increasingly available, making vaccination less compelling. Lately in Connecticut new cases of infection have not been matched by rising deaths and hospitalizations. On any day there may be more than a thousand new positive virus tests but hospitalizations decline.

It’s all a matter of balancing risks, and dragging religion into the calculation is mainly a mechanism for precluding discussion.

But the governor did seem to get something wrong in his comments last week on state employees who refuse vaccination.

“There will be some people who say ‘hell no,'” Lamont said, “and I’m sorry but that means you’re not safe. You’re not safe to the people around you and you’re not safe to the people you’re treating.”

That sounded like an assertion that people vaccinated for COVID-19 can’t infect others. But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has acknowledged that vaccinated people can be infected and can spread infection even when they show no symptoms. Lately a quarter of Connecticut’s hospital patients being treated for the virus were fully vaccinated before getting sick — that is, “breakthrough” infections.

This doesn’t nullify the benefits of vaccination, especially for people more at risk of serious illness, like the elderly. It does mean that unvaccinated people are not the only source of risk in the workplace.

The most secure system of preventing infection might regularly test the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated — if, of course, COVID-19 really must continue to be treated like the medieval plagues instead of an ailment from which 99.8% of the infected recover.

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

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont is ready to use the Connecticut National Guard to compensate for any crucial labor shortages this week as his requirement for state government employees to be vaccinated or regularly tested for the COVID-19 virus takes effect and those employees not in compliance are placed on unpaid leave.

Any such shortages may be compounded by state government’s work calendar, since next Monday is another of Connecticut’s many gratuitous government employee holidays: Columbus Day. That’s when state and municipal government give their employees a day off with pay in the name of honoring someone now widely despised among the politically correct for introducing the Old World to the New.

Most of state government’s 50,000 full-time employees probably will be at their leisure next Monday even if state government is facing a disaster. But having just persuaded the General Assembly to extend his emergency powers to rule by decree to manage the virus epidemic, the governor presumably could repeal or suspend the holiday, bring everyone back to work, and reassign workers as necessary.

Of course such a proclamation might create a political emergency, the alienation of the army of the governor’s political party, the state and municipal employee unions. It would be a rare Democrat who didn’t let the hospitals and prisons close first.

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SCAPEGOATING INSTAGRAM: Having approved spending trillions of dollars on “nation building” in Afghanistan during his 10 years in the U.S. Senate without offering an apology for his role in that catastrophic failure, Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal now is demanding accountability — from social media company Facebook and its subsidiary, photo- and video-sharing service Instagram.

Last week at a Senate hearing Blumenthal berated a Facebook executive for what he said was the harm done to children by their use of Instagram.

“My office did its own research,” Blumenthal said. “We created an Instagram account identified as a 13-year-old girl and followed a few easily findable accounts associated with extreme dieting and eating disorders. Within a day its recommendations were exclusively filled with accounts that promote self-injury and eating disorders. That is the perfect storm that Instagram has fostered and created.”

Apparently Instagram is supposed to police the ages of its users, as if that is practical any more than it would be for internet and email providers, telephone companies, and even the U.S. Postal Service. Instagram is just another bit of communications technology that can be used for good or ill.

If there is a problem here it is one of parenting. New communications technologies always make parenting harder in some ways and easier in others.

Blumenthal himself hasn’t made parenting any easier. He long has advocated a right to virtually unrestricted abortion, even abortion of fetuses able to survive outside the womb, and his state allows 13-year-olds both to use Instagram and to obtain abortions without the knowledge of their parents or guardians. Those abortions are allowed even though every such pregnancy is at least statutory rape and some abortions for minors have resulted from prolonged sexual abuse by adults, with abortion protecting the perpetrators.

That so many children have inattentive parents or none at all is a problem — maybe the country’s most urgent one. Public policy may have something to do with it. But unless a corporate scapegoat can be found, will Blumenthal ever bring it to a hearing?

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NO BOOKS ARE BANNED: Last week was Banned Books Week, observed annually by the American Library Association and other groups to celebrate free expression and oppose censorship. But censorship today has nothing to do with books and everything to do with the electronic media — the internet, television, and radio, which increasingly yield to government pressure to suppress certain subjects and contentions.

The removal of controversial books from school curriculums is often cited as censorship, but it is no more censorship than any library’s decision to stock one book and not another — and libraries themselves make such decisions far more often than schools do. Schools and libraries alike have the right to decide which books to use. Those decisions may be stupid or cowardly but they are not censorship.

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