New Haven understands ‘sanctuary’ while Tong and Lamont pretend not to

By CHRIS POWELL

What are “sanctuary states” and “sanctuary cities”? 

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and Governor Lamont last week claimed not to know and to have no idea why the Trump administration has labeled Connecticut a “sanctuary state.”

Will Governor Lamont allow escape from unpublic education?

Poverty racket and kickbacks disgrace state government

Why can’t journalism pose key immigration questions?

“There is nothing in our laws or statutes that says Connecticut is a ‘sanctuary’ state,” Tong says. “We are not.”

The governor says: “I am focused on making sure people feel safe in our schools, churches, and elsewhere. Nothing about this makes Connecticut a ‘sanctuary’ in any legal or practical sense.”

But the U.S. Homeland Security Department provides a clear definition: “Sanctuary” jurisdictions have “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” 

That’s Connecticut. 

The state’s “Trust Act” explicitly forbids police agencies from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in most circumstances. It doesn’t matter that the “Trust Act” doesn’t use the term “sanctuary.” “Sanctuary” means “a place of refuge or protection,” which is what the “Trust Act” makes Connecticut for illegal immigrants.

The attorney general and the governor play their word game in the hope of not provoking the Trump administration, which, unlike its predecessor, is enforcing immigration law. But the game not only fails to avoid provocation; it also falsely suggests that the attorney general and the governor don’t know they are attempting nullification of federal law just as the segregationist states of the last century tried to do.

New Haven city government is just as nullificationist but it wasn’t playing the word game last week. An announcement from Mayor Justin Elicker was headlined: “Mayor Elicker applauds growing nationwide coalition of local governments challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to defund welcoming and sanctuary jurisdictions. …”

The announcement added: “Sanctuary policies make us all safer and ensure communities are welcoming places for everyone.” That is, “welcoming” even for people in the country illegally and even for people of bad intent. 

The attorney general and the governor note that no federal law requires police in Connecticut to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. But this refusal to cooperate very much impedes immigration law enforcement — the point of the “Trust Act.” 

State government and New Haven city government impede immigration law enforcement far more directly by issuing identification documents to illegal immigrants precisely to facilitate their violation of immigration law — state government by issuing special driver’s licenses to them, New Haven by giving them city identification cards. These identification documents make the state and the city direct and knowing accomplices in illegal immigration.

Pretending that the state is not providing “sanctuary” when it obviously is doing just that, the governor and attorney general take their constituents for fools. New Haven’s policy is the same and just as bad as the state’s but, unlike the attorney general and the governor, at least Mayor Elicker is honest about it.

FORBID ANONYMOUS LAWSUITS: In recent years Connecticut’s Judicial Department has transformed from the least transparent to the most transparent of the state’s three branches of government. But a civil lawsuit from Kent could push the department back to the old ways.

Former students and employees of the Kent School are suing the school in Superior Court for damages arising from what is said to have been a former school employee’s copying intimate photographs and other information about them from the school’s computer system. Three plaintiffs have asked the court to let them sue anonymously, using pseudonyms, to avoid embarrassment.

Judge Daniel Klau has denied the request, holding that the public interest in open courts outweighs the privacy interests of the plaintiffs, but the pseudonym issue has been taken to the Appellate Court.

Merely identifying the plaintiffs as is ordinarily done in lawsuits won’t make any intimate photos public, but concealing their identities will set an awful precedent. After all, many plaintiffs might prefer to sue anonymously. In effect that would close the courts to the public, since anonymity precludes accountability. 

Connecticut’s Constitution commands, “All courts shall be open.” If it has forgotten, the Appellate Court should look it up.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Will Gov. Lamont allow escape from unpublic education?

By CHRIS POWELL

How much more of a servant of the government employee unions does Governor Lamont want to be?

Poverty racket and kickbacks disgrace state government

Why can’t journalism pose key immigration questions?

Connecticut Democrats get hysterical as Trump proclaims the obvious

Connecticut will find out when the governor decides what to do about the new federal legislation that offers people a dollar-for-dollar tax credit of as much as $1,700 for making contributions to organizations that provide scholarships at private elementary, middle, and high schools.

It’s very clever school-choice legislation. It doesn’t cost state or municipal government any money. It doesn’t take any money from what style themselves public schools. To the contrary, it could save public schools money by removing some of their students.

Of course it’s more federal deficit spending, but nobody associated with public education has ever cared about federal budget deficits or the terrible inflation they have caused. When it receives the money, the public education colossus loves federal deficit spending.  

The only undeniable objection to the law is that it would engender more competition, especially for Connecticut’s many failing city public schools, and pressure state government to do something about them besides throw money at them without result.

Of course in the long run choice and competition in lower education would diminish enrollment, public support, and funding for government schools. But why shouldn’t those schools and the parents of their students start to be judged by educational results and face some accountability?

The big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it’s no longer public at all.

Wages and working conditions for school employees aren’t controlled by ordinary democracy — the election of school board members — but by binding arbitration of union contracts, under which unions have more authority than school boards do. Except for superintendents, nearly all school employees — even school principals — are unionized, so a school system has no actual management.

Connecticut’s minimum budget requirement law makes it nearly impossible for school boards to reduce spending even if enrollment declines.

Connecticut’s teacher tenure law makes it nearly impossible to dismiss poor teachers without prohibitive expense.

Connecticut freedom-of-information law exempts teacher evaluations from disclosure, alone among all government employee evaluations. People in Connecticut can see the evaluations of their trash collectors but not those of the teachers of their own children.

And now, as the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio disclosed the other day, a new state law requires municipal governments to report any year-end cash surpluses directly to their teacher unions but not to their own residents. The law’s objective is to ensure that the teacher unions get first grab at any extra money that might be lying around. 

This isn’t public education. It’s special-interest education.

A system of private education drawing its revenue from federal tax credits would be more accountable simply by providing an alternative to the system operated by and for the benefit of the teacher unions.

But under the new federal law, the scholarship contributions on which such a system would be based can’t qualify for federal tax credits unless a state’s governor approves the system or it is approved by some other state agency with authority over tax breaks. 

It’s not clear what such other state agency that would be in Connecticut, but whatever it was, it still would be controlled by the governor, a Democrat, or by the General Assembly, which has a big Democratic majority. Of course the government employee unions, especially the teacher unions, are the biggest components of the Democratic Party, and most of state government is a big kickback to the unions for their support of the Democrats at election time.

Government employee union support for the Democratic regime erases all concern for results in “public” education in the state. As a result most high school graduates never master high school math and English, the state’s schools have horrible racial performance gaps, and social promotion assures the graduation of illiterates, and school spending increases even as student performance and enrollment decline. 

For student performance doesn’t count politically. The only thing that counts politically is the satisfaction of the teacher unions and their control of the majority party.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Poverty racket and kickbacks disgrace state government

By CHRIS POWELL

Under investigation by a federal grand jury for having steered millions of dollars of state government anti-poverty grants to enterprises controlled by a friend, state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Bloomfield, insists, “I did nothing illegal.”

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Most people may not believe him, but McCrory is probably telling the truth. For steering money and other goodies to its favorites — patronage — is what state government does ordinarily. Sometimes those who steer the money and goodies get kickbacks, and if those kickbacks are paid in cash or negotiable instruments, they may constitute bribery. But if the kickbacks take the form of political support, campaign contributions, or personal favors, or if they can’t be tracked clearly to the recipients of the patronage, they are routine.

Don’t like it? Well, McCrory did not say he had done nothing wrong. He said he had done nothing illegal.  

Since, in an interview with Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, McCrory acknowledged widespread suspicion that he has been romantically involved with the woman to whom he steered those state grants and then said he would not discuss his personal life, his friend may make a career from poverty. Poverty is big business. 

Connecticut’s Social Equity Council, which distributes state marijuana tax revenue as patronage grants in communities where drugs were a big problem, is the embodiment of the poverty business, formalized by government and prettily disguised by its name.

The late editor of The Washington Monthly, Charles Peters — a liberal back when liberalism was idealistic and unselfish, before it was a business — saw enough of this stuff to draw a maxim from it. The big scandal, Peters discerned, is never what is illegal but what is perfectly legal.     

McCrory should be too smart to have ever taken cash for exploiting his office. But he may need luck if he doesn’t plead the Fifth Amendment and instead tries telling the grand jury what he told the Hearst papers: that he won’t discuss his personal life and his connection to the woman to whom he steered the grants.

Thanks to the work of the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio, it seems that the corruption of state government goes far beyond the poverty racket.

Two weeks ago Portfolio exposed the fraud of state government’s “Passport to Parks” program, in which, starting in 2018, a $24 surcharge was imposed on every three-year motor vehicle registration. The fee was pledged to finance improvements at state parks and to convey free parking there for Connecticut vehicles.

But now, Portfolio writes, most of the $27 million a year produced by the fee isn’t used for the parks. Instead nearly 60% is spent on state employee pensions and benefits. 

Of course most people don’t use the state parks much and would have preferred to pay for admission and parking at the point of use rather than to have to pay so much when registering their cars. The program was actually a racket to begin with, also prettily dressed up.

Last week Portfolio disclosed that the new state law establishing a trust fund for “early childhood education” has an obscure provision to help teacher unions get more municipal money. 

The provision requires school boards to produce an annual report on any money left over from previous budgets. But the objective is not transparency. 

Portfolio writes: “The law doesn’t direct these reports to parents, taxpayers, or even locally elected finance boards. Instead the reports must go directly to the state Department of Education — and to the unions. That means union negotiators and state officials get advance access to a district’s financial reserves — a significant advantage when labor contracts come up for negotiation. Local voters, by contrast, get no such direct insight unless they file freedom-of-information requests or search through meeting minutes.”

As always the teacher unions come first, taxpayers last.

The obscure provision was the product of the General Assembly’s Democratic majority, the longstanding tool of the unions, and the usual kickback will be union support for the Democrats in the next legislative election.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Why can’t journalism pose key immigration questions?

Connecticut’s television stations seem to prohibit their reporters from asking critical questions even amid brazen provocations.

Connecticut Democrats get hysterical as Trump proclaims the obvious

Euphemism can’t erase doubts about sex changes for minors

Who will notice prison audit? And Bronin has a health issue too

Nothing else well explains how a TV news reporter covered another protest against immigration law enforcement last week, this one at City Hall in New Britain. 

No protesters denied that most of the people recently apprehended and detained by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Connecticut were in the country illegally. Instead all the talk at the protest was about how unfair it is for illegal immigrants to have to obey the law. 

So should there be no immigration law?

No one quoted by the TV reporter was asked — and yet for viewers watching closely, video showed the story the reporter was failing to pursue.

Signs and banners carried by the protesters read “No borders, no cages, no ICE, no more deportation” and “Abolish ICE, no detention, no deportation.”

Protesters carried a Palestine flag and chanted “free, free Palestine.” What exactly did Palestine have to do with immigration law enforcement? Did the protesters want the people who are trying to annihilate Israel to be freely admitted to the United States so they can bring their theocratic fascism to bear against Jews and infidels here? Are all today’s protesters in the United States part of a cult aiming to bring the country down? For to open the borders and have no immigration law enforcement again, as under the previous national administration, would be to erase the country.

The TV reporter didn’t ask the protesters. She just gave them a lot of free airtime to propagandize about their idea of justice without having to defend it.

Not that print journalism does much better. Connecticut’s original “sanctuary city,” New Haven, keeps getting away with anything that supports illegal immigration. 

Last week the Connecticut Public news organization celebrated the Elm City Resident Card, issued by city government, as “a symbol of inclusion” even though it was created in 2007 precisely to hinder immigration law enforcement — to provide illegal immigrants with a document implying legality and helping them get housing and bank accounts.

New Haven city government and especially its school system are under great financial strain because of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of illegal immigrant children attending city schools and needing extra services, like tutoring in English and remedial education generally. Being short of money, the city just closed a school and eliminated staff positions.

But the financial consequences of illegal immigration to New Haven city government and state government have yet to be investigated journalistically, though state financial aid to New Haven is, like state Medicaid benefits, part of state government’s blank check for illegal immigration. New Haven could save millions of dollars by not being a “sanctuary city” just as state government could save tens of millions by not being a “sanctuary state.”

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker boasts about the housing construction his administration has been facilitating. He wants the city to gain 10,000 more housing units over the next 10 years and to increase its population by 14,000 to exceed 150,000 and thus become the state’s largest city.

Of course Connecticut badly needs more housing. But for whom is New Haven building housing — for legal residents or more illegal immigrants? Mayor Elicker has not been asked journalistically.

Housing construction in New Haven would do little to relieve the state’s shortage if it was filled by more people needing Elm City Resident Cards. Indeed, Connecticut’s housing shortage and the state’s high housing prices result in part from illegal immigration, for which state and municipal government have made no provision.

The problem here isn’t that all immigrants are bad or even that all illegal immigrants are bad. The problem here is that there are serious costs to subverting immigration law as Connecticut and New Haven do, that the sanctimony that excuses illegal immigration doesn’t address those costs, and that they won’t be addressed as long as journalism keeps failing to pose critical questions.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Connecticut Democrats get hysterical as Trump proclaims the obvious

By CHRIS POWELL

How easily President Trump can send Connecticut’s Democratic elected officials and its social-service industry into sanctimonious indignation and hysteria just by proclaiming the obvious.

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It happened the other day when the president issued another executive order, this one striking a pose about crime and mental illness. “Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe,” Trump wrote. He endorsed “civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”

Trump’s “order” doesn’t require anyone to do anything about homelessness and mental illness, since the president has no such authority. 

But at a press conference at the state Capitol last week leading Democrats and social-service officials shrieked that Trump was “criminalizing homelessness” and that state government has lots of policies and programs to cure homelessness and mental illness. 

Contrary to the shrieking, Trump endorsed confining only those homeless or mentally ill who “pose risks to themselves or the public,” not all the homeless or mentally ill — and, of course, state government hasn’t come close to curing homelessness and mental illness.  

Even a few Democrats at the press conference lamented that Governor Lamont, who had convened the event, had vetoed major housing legislation passed in the recent session of the General Assembly. But the legislation would have addressed homelessness and mental illness only indirectly by encouraging housing construction in the long term. It would not have provided more “supportive housing” and other help for the homeless and mentally ill.

Connecticut could use much more of those things but they will have to wait far behind the $100 million the Democrats have appropriated for raises for unionized state employees. There’s always plenty of money for that.

Connecticut also could use a few government mental institutions for the civil commitments Trump advocates. Until Trump made it politically incorrect for Democrats to acknowledge the obvious, decent people were still wondering aloud if Connecticut had been mistaken in closing its public mental hospitals decades ago and de-institutionalizing their residents without making better arrangements for them.

Until Trump issued his executive order, decent people in Connecticut also were acknowledging that homelessness has been increasing lately, a function of inflation, municipal zoning’s obstruction of simple housing, and the long decline of public education under social-promotion policy that has left the less-parented without work skills.

People living in Hamden particularly might be wondering if Trump is right about the need for more involuntary commitments of the homeless mentally ill. That’s because a few days before the press conference at the Capitol, two enclosed bus shelters adjacent to shopping centers in Hamden had been removed by city government because they had been taken over by homeless people who were obstructing and scaring people waiting for buses.

Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett — a liberal Democrat, not a MAGA Republican — explained that social workers had made daily visits to the “unhoused individuals” at the bus shelters and offered them health care and housing but were repeatedly refused. So the town will replace the enclosed bus shelters with shelters that have roofs but no walls to shield passengers from the cold wind, in the hope that the “unhoused individuals” will move along to frighten people elsewhere. 

This brilliant policy is just like Connecticut’s brilliant policy on troublesome bears — shoo them out of your yard and into your neighbor’s yard. Problem solved! 

Even as the shrieking at the press conference at the Capitol got underway, police in Waterbury announced an arrest in the fatal shooting last month of 17-year-old Carizma Fox as she sought to break up a fight on Willow Street in the city. The suspect is a homeless and unemployed man with a long criminal record involving drugs and assault. 

Will anyone in Waterbury be politically incorrect enough to wonder aloud whether the girl might still be alive if Connecticut had more involuntary commitments?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Euphemism can’t erase doubts about sex changes for minors

By CHRIS POWELL

Is “gender-affirming care” good or bad?

Whatever it is, it’s a euphemism, a term of camouflage to prevent something from being plainly understood and to present it in a favorable light — in this case to diminish the controversy that would be recognized if the proper neutral, impartial, and descriptive term was used: sex-change therapy.

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Since “gender-affirming care” is politically correct and most journalism seeks to be, journalism uses “gender-affirming care” to pretend that there is nothing questionable about it. After all, who could be against “care”?

But of course there are questions about it, and the controversy can’t be concealed any longer now that the Trump administration is siding with the politically incorrect side of the issue. 

First the Trump administration turned the federal government against transgenderism — men in women’s sports, bathrooms, and prisons — and now it is using the federal government’s enormous power over medical policy to dissuade hospitals from using drugs and surgeries to change the sex of minors.

As a result, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford is getting out of the sex-change therapy business for minors and Yale New Haven Health is canceling its use of drugs in sex-change therapy for minors while continuing to provide minors with mental health treatment for gender dysphoria.

Most hysterical about this in Connecticut is state Attorney General William Tong. “This is the next ugly front in the ongoing war on American patients, doctors, nurses, and health care providers,” Tong shrieks. “This is about scaring patients from seeking care and scaring doctors from providing care, regardless of who is harmed and the lives that will be lost. It’s unconscionably reckless and yet another disturbing intrusion of partisan politics on our private lives and choices.”

In Politically Correct World, where the attorney general resides, it’s impossible to have a good reason for objecting to drug and surgical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria — impossible to object because drugs and surgeries can have life-altering and irreversible effects on people who, according to law, are incapable of making such decisions for themselves, incapable of informed consent. In P.C. World the issue of informed consent simply vanishes amid gender dysphoria, even though many minors who have undergone sex-change therapy have come to regret it and many if not most young people with gender dysphoria seem to outgrow it.

Not only that, but in P.C. World anyone who does object cannot possibly have good intentions and cannot sincerely be concerned about the children who are to be subjected to life-altering drugs and surgeries. No, as the attorney general says, such people are just aiming to “scare” doctors and patients and are “unconscionably reckless.”

As for what Tong calls the “disturbing intrusion of partisan politics on our private lives and choices,” he hardly objected a few years ago when government was ordering people to submit to inadequately tested vaccines on pain of losing their jobs. Of course back then those vaccines, like the attorney general himself, were politically correct, though not so much now as harmful side-effects are more recognized.

Like it or not, with government so heavily involved in medicine, politics is heavily involved as well. If you lose an election, the government may change medical policies contrary to your liking. That’s democracy for you. 

Tong and P.C. World seem not to remember that the party of political correctness lost last year’s presidential and congressional elections in part because of its exaltation of transgenderism. But even if, as the attorney general insists, objecting to men in women’s sports, bathrooms, and prisons while upholding longstanding protections for minors is fascism, it’s a pretty tame version.

Governor Lamont is less hysterical than the attorney general but not much more thoughtful as he seeks to get his P.C. ticket punched. Responding to the change in federal policy on sex-change therapy, the governor says: “In Connecticut we do not turn our backs on kids in need.” Then maybe someone else can explain the thousands of Hartford and Bridgeport students recently reported to lack critical “special education” services.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

Who’ll notice prison audit? And Bronin has a health issue too

By CHRIS POWELL

Anyone seeking to learn how poorly state government runs would never start by paying close attention to the proceedings of the General Assembly, which remains largely indifferent to government operations. The legislature is much more interested in making government bigger than in making it more effective and efficient.

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Because it is grotesque, the case of an emaciated man of 32 from Waterbury who is said to have been imprisoned by his stepmother for 20 years until his escape this year continues to be questioned by legislators. But at this late date any negligence by child-protection authorities will be hard to establish, and legislators know that many recent child-protection failures are getting a pass even as child neglect and abuse are always being manufactured by the welfare system, which also gets a pass.

So it’s more practical to pay attention to the work of the state auditors of public accounts, like their report last week about management failures in the Correction Department in 2022 and 2023.

The auditors found that the department gave excessively long paid administrative leaves to nine employees — leaves that lasted from a year to 3½ years and thus unnecessarily cost the department $835,000 when, much earlier, the employees could have been put on unpaid leave, dismissed, or returned to work instead.

The Correction Department excuses itself by asserting that the cases involved investigations and proceedings conducted by police, prosecutors, and courts, investigations whose durations were beyond the department’s control. 

So were the police, prosecutors, and courts too slow? Couldn’t the department have placed the employees on unpaid leave after 15 or 30 days and settled up financially if their cases resulted in reinstatement?

If Governor Lamont or legislators thought that the $835,000 cited by the audit was a lot of money to waste, they could ask those questions. They’re not likely to.

The audit also found that the Correction Department lacked documentation controlling overtime, compensatory time, and union leave time.

The impression given by all this is that the department is being operated for the benefit of its unionized employees, not the public. Do the governor and any legislators want to know if that impression is correct? And if it is correct, would they really object or would they just be glad of another reason for the unions to support their re-election?

* * *

As he challenges longtime U.S. Rep. John B. Larson for the Democratic nomination for Congress in the 1st District, former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin’s platform is arrogant: Larson is too old and it’s my turn.

Bronin’s platform has prompted journalism to repeatedly recall Larson’s freezing up briefly during a speech in the House in February, an incident involving a heart valve replacement 15 years ago and erratic blood flow. Now, especially since Larson just turned 77, people are watching him for recurrences or evidence of decrepitude.

Meanwhile no one in journalism is asking about Bronin’s health. While he is only 46, for many years Bronin has suffered ulcerative colitis — an inflammatory bowel disease believed to be caused by a chronic auto-immune disorder — and during his second term in 2021 and 2022 he underwent surgeries to remove and rebuild his colon. He missed many weeks of work.

Bronin was candid about it and presumably has recovered and feels fit to pursue his political ambition again, which until a few weeks ago was the governorship. Governor Lamont wouldn’t make way for him and, while the governor, at 71, could be vulnerable on the age issue against a challenger contriving prejudice against age, he still seemed too strong for Bronin to challenge, so Larson became the easier target. 

But auto-immune afflictions can flare without warning, and the funny thing is that while Bronin now contends that injecting youth into the congressional Democratic Party by ousting Larson is urgent, it became urgent for him only after the governor decided to stay put.

Bronin may test Larson’s stamina and health. But Larson may test Bronin’s too — if journalism is willing to notice.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

‘Social equity’ is euphemism for patronage and redundancy

By CHRIS POWELL

Start with a false premise, dedicate a tax to it, create a bureaucracy for distribution of political patronage, put a nice name on it, and what have you got? 

Connecticut’s Social Equity Council.

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The Social Equity Council receives the revenue from Connecticut’s taxes on state-licensed sales of marijuana. The council is authorized to spend the money on projects that may remediate the damage done over the decades by the “war on drugs,” damage done disproportionately in poor and minority communities.

There was a lot of damage done there and damage still is being done there, but it wasn’t done by the “war on drugs” — criminal prosecution of drug dealers and users — as much as by the war on fathers, welfare policy that subsidized and thus encouraged childbearing outside marriage. The war on fathers impoverished countless households, depriving them of income and parenting, diminishing children’s education, demoralizing them, depriving them of work skills, and incentivizing them to try to gain a livelihood in the drug trade.

Catastrophically damaging as this was to the communities without fathers, most of the income from the drug trade was also earned in those communities. The trade was so lucrative that it never could be stamped out despite the many casualties of the “war on drugs” — the murders and other violence, convictions, and imprisonments. Even with marijuana purportedly legalized in Connecticut, the war on fathers, the “war on drugs,” and the war between drug dealers continue today, with increasing casualties because of powerful new drugs like fentanyl and the worsening demoralization of the poor by high inflation.

The Social Equity Council announced the other day that it has $36 million in marijuana tax revenue to distribute through scores of financial grants ranging from $25,000 to $100,000 in the 15 poor municipalities it has identified as primary casualties of the “war on drugs.”

But first the council must hire grant managers for each area, and its chief executive, former state Rep. Brandon McGee, D-Hartford, says many of the grants will be targeted for economic development, as if state government and municipal governments don’t already have economic development agencies. 

The expertise of those agencies often comes into question. So what is the economic development expertise of the Social Equity Council? Nothing in particular. 

As the council has done before, it will award grants largely as a matter of political or personal patronage in the targeted communities. There is no mechanism for evaluating the results. The council will find enterprises that seem to do good work or are connected to influential people and give them some money. Since the council has its own tax and is meant only as political patronage, the General Assembly won’t care about results.

McGee says the council also wants to help the transition of former prison inmates back into society. That is a compelling need and yet it is one in which the Correction Department and a venerable Connecticut nonprofit agency, Community Partners in Action, are already involved. Unfortunately the new state budget erased the $1.5 million grant Community Partners in Action was to receive next year. So why should the Social Equity Council be trying to reinvent the wheel here as well with economic development, except for the patronage in awarding its grants? 

Meanwhile the impoverished communities the Social Equity Council is supposed to help, including Bridgeport and Hartford, are short tens of millions of dollars for “special education” services needed by their many thousands of disadvantaged students, some of whom, if they continue to be neglected, may become the drug dealers of tomorrow. Overwhelmed by students needing “special education,” Bridgeport’s and Hartford’s schools perform so poorly that they have fallen under special supervision by the equally hapless state Education Department.  

Far more might be done for those communities by liquidating the Social Equity Council and redirecting its money to “special education.” But that would eliminate the council’s political patronage, which includes McGee’s annual salary and benefits of $236,000 and the lovely pension in sight for him down the road.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

-END-

Liberal reform squeezes Yale thanks to Trump and Republicans

By CHRIS POWELL

For many years the ravenous far left in Connecticut has advocated taxing Yale University in New Haven. Yale’s endowment long has been managed spectacularly well and now totals more than $40 billion, the second largest university endowment in the country, trailing only Harvard’s. 

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Indeed, the popular joke is that Yale is a hedge fund masquerading as a university. The popular resentment is that most real estate in New Haven is exempt from municipal property taxes and most of that exempt property, worth about $3.5 billion, is owned by Yale. 

Financial aid from state government, “payments in lieu of taxes,” makes up for some of the foregone property tax revenue but far from all of it. Of course if Yale’s property was fully subject to the city’s property tax, the city wouldn’t be any better off, given its awful management, but city employees might be able to retire at full pay after only two or three years on the job, since the satisfaction of its employees is city government’s highest objective.

Now reform is coming to Yale not because of leftists in Connecticut but, ironically, because of President Trump and the narrow Republican majority in Congress.

Their new federal tax and spending law imposes progressive taxes on college endowments. The biggest endowments, like Yale’s, will be taxed at 4% per year, and one study estimates that this will clip Yale’s for $1.5 billion over five years.

Of course Trump and the Republicans aren’t taxing college endowments out of any liberal belief in wealth redistribution. They are taxing the endowments because higher education has become the great engine of the political left and the Democratic Party, which is also why Connecticut state government, a leftist Democratic operation, has declined to tax the endowments of private colleges (Yale’s particularly) and has declined to subject private colleges (again, Yale particularly) to municipal property taxes. 

The Republicans want to cut higher education down to size politically while the Democrats want to keep it a strong source of patronage and propaganda.

Trump and the Republicans are right for the wrong reasons, but that’s better than being wrong. For as the college loan disaster has shown, higher education’s importance to the country is grossly overestimated. The country’s education problem is lower education, as shown by the few proficiency tests still permitted in elementary, middle, and high schools in Connecticut, and by their disgraceful racial performance gaps. 

COWARDLY, UNACCOUNTABLE, PATHETIC: How much more does anyone really need to know about the corruption and incompetence of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System than something that was reported a week ago?

The system is still embroiled in the scandal over its departing chancellor, Terrence Cheng, who last year was caught abusing his expense account despite his annual compensation of nearly $500,000. The system’s Board of Regents decided he had to go but feared that the contract the board had given him, which extended to next July, might be construed in court to prevent his dismissal. So it was agreed that he would leave the chancellorship on July 1 and become “strategic adviser” to the board for another year, doing amorphous stuff for the same compensation.

An interim chancellor, O. John Maduko, lately administrator of the community college system, has been appointed to serve for a year at a salary estimated at $425,000, not counting fringe benefits.

Fair questions remain about the college system’s administration and state legislators continue to criticize it. So a week ago, the Hartford Courant asked for an interview with the chairman of the Board of Regents, Martin Guay. He refused.

How cowardly, unaccountable, and pathetic for the chairman of a major government agency. 

Governor Lamont, a Democrat, who appoints most of the regents, should be embarrassed. 

Democratic state legislators should be embarrassed too. They should be emboldened to ask more critical questions of the regents and college administrators generally. Legislators could start with: Is it really impossible to hire a competent, public-spirited administrator for less than a half million dollars per year?  

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Let public broadcasting try living without government subsidy

By Chris Powell

Why shouldn’t the Corporation for Public Broadcasting be able to survive without the $500 million subsidy it has been getting every year from the federal government, a subsidy President Trump and the narrow Republican majority in Congress have just taken away?

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Most of that money has been distributed to the corporation’s local affiliates of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, like the Connecticut Public broadcasting operation, which has been getting $2 million per year. That’s less than 10% of Connecticut Public’s revenue and the network plans to cover the loss through more fundraising. 

Maybe some budget cuts will be required at Connecticut Public, but as this column reported in May, Connecticut Public has plenty of room to economize, with its chairman, Mark G. Contreras, being paid an annual salary of more than $600,000 and with 10 other officers and executives being paid between $204,000 and $321,000. These salaries are more like government.

But despite the recent controversy over public broadcasting’s finances, Connecticut Public seems never to have reported its own extravagant salaries. That’s not so “public.” 

The controversy over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR, and PBS has centered on their leftist bias in news and general programming. They deny it but unpersuasively so, since nearly all Democrats love NPR and PBS and nearly all Republicans hate it. 

Two years ago when Connecticut state government, an overwhelmingly Democratic regime, gave Connecticut Public a grant of $3.1 million to renovate its headquarters, it wasn’t because Connecticut Public had been so critical of the regime. It was because Connecticut Public was so supportive of what the regime purports to stand for.

Indeed, Connecticut Public long has been the voice of political correctness. 

But public broadcasting’s leftist bias isn’t its biggest problem. Public broadcasting’s biggest problem is that it would be compromised by its huge subsidy from the government even if it wasn’t overwhelmingly biased toward one side or the other politically.

Privately owned television and radio stations, newspapers, and news-oriented internet sites survive without financing from government, though for various reasons, including public education’s determined dumbing down of the population, the news business has gotten much harder lately. Privately owned news organizations find themselves competing with NPR and PBS not just for audience but for advertising as well. (Advertising on NPR and PBS takes the form of announcements thanking corporations and foundations for their donations.) 

Competition with government is seldom fair to the private sector.

Government at all levels — federal, state, and municipal — is full of publicists. (Indeed, Connecticut now may have more government publicists than private-sector news reporters.) Government also does a lot of advertising. Since government can rely on taxes for revenue, it always has the resources to get its message out on its own. So public broadcasting is not the necessity its advocates claim it to be.

Of course public broadcasting does some good things. But if they are good enough they should be able to find public support without government subsidy. To make up for that subsidy, the good things might command more candid and lucrative advertising.

More emphatic appeals by public broadcasting for donations might be successful, especially if they are combined with those of the Democratic state and national committees.

NOT JUST BILLIONAIRES: Democrats in Connecticut and nationally have been shrieking that the new Republican federal spending and tax law is going to help only millionaires and billionaires.

But the National Association of Realtors reported last week that the new law will provide a huge tax break to 18% of Connecticut’s homeowners — people whose municipal property taxes exceed $10,000, the current limit for property tax deductibility from federal income taxes. The new law raises deductibility to $40,000.

Even residents of impoverished Bridgeport will share in the increased tax break, since 39% of the city’s homeowners pay more than $10,000 in property taxes.

Increasing the federal tax exemption may not be good policy. Given the soaring federal deficit, no tax breaks may be good policy. But at least this one exposes Democratic demagoguery.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)