Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Accountability and integrity are slipping badly with the Connecticut state police.

The agency has failed to complete an investigation of trooper misconduct arising from a retirement party at a brewery in Oxford 22 months ago.

Security video reported last week by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers shows that state police Sgt. John McDonald drank heavily for five hours at the party. Leaving in a state police car, McDonald drove about three-quarters a mile before smashing into a car carrying a woman and her daughter, pushing them off the road and seriously injuring them.

McDonald was charged with driving while intoxicated, reckless driving, and assault with a motor vehicle, but he achieved a sweet plea bargain in court, where he pleaded guilty to two counts of reckless endangerment and was sentenced to a suspended six-month prison term and two years of probation.

While his police powers were suspended after the crash, McDonald has remained on the state police payroll doing administrative work, and the Hearst papers say that while serving his suspended prison term and probation he has been paid tens of thousands of dollars in overtime.

Paying overtime to a police officer while he serves a suspended criminal sentence and probation may be a first in Connecticut’s annals of government corruption.

Will McDonald’s misconduct cause him to be disciplined in regard to his job? That hasn’t been determined yet. A state police regulation prohibits officers from driving after drinking, but the plea bargain’s removal of the drunken-driving charge against McDonald may have been arranged precisely to prevent him from being disciplined in regard to his job.

Of course the bar video still establishes his violation — if state police executives can’t find another loophole so they can overlook the video.

That regulation also would apply to the other troopers drinking at the party if they departed in police vehicles, and supposedly the entire circumstances of the party remain under investigation.

Neither Governor Lamont nor any other state elected official has expressed concern about this case. Odds are that it won’t be resolved until McDonald has been able to pad his pension with still more overtime from administrative work and retires at something like $150,000 a year.

* * *

Connecticut’s secretary of the state, Denise Merrill, long has maintained that there is no election fraud in Connecticut. But the opportunity is vast.

Last year when the secretary’s office mailed absentee ballot applications to the 1.2 million voters eligible to vote in the August primaries, 8% were returned as undeliverable, signifying that many municipal voter lists are much out of date. Merrill said this was lower than the national average for undeliverable absentee ballot mail, as if that was much consolation.

A state administration that wasn’t so smug might have called hearings on the problem and proposed requiring annual audits of each town’s voter list. But Connecticut is an overwhelmingly Democratic state and such audits might only diminish the Democratic vote.

Now there’s another voter fraud case in Bridgeport, where a federal grand jury last week indicted a Democratic member of the City Council, Michael DeFilippo, on charges involving fraudulent absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots in city elections.

The secretary’s office has offered no comment about the indictment, and since Bridgeport is renowned for political corruption as well as for producing fantastic pluralities for Democratic candidates for state office, the state administration in which Merrill is a key player won’t look too closely at the city.

But those who don’t profit from the Bridgeport pluralities might fairly ask why the U.S. attorney is prosecuting the absentee ballot fraud and not the secretary of the state and a state’s attorney. Are those offices incapable of investigation? If witnesses were uncooperative, could not the secretary and the chief state’s attorney apply to the Superior Court to impanel a grand jury with subpoena power?

Merrill long has sought to impose secrecy on Connecticut’s voter lists. But unless voter lists are fully public, voter fraud will be nearly impossible for the public to detect.

Fortunately the secretary is not seeking reelection, so maybe her successor will be more favorably inclined toward election integrity.

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

By Chris Powell

Consolidation of the banking industry is gaining speed, in part because technology increasingly allows routine retail banking functions to be conducted via the internet and cell phones, reducing the need for branch offices. But there is another reason: Government’s indifference to the loss of competition.

The fearless financial journalists Pam and Russ Martens of Wall Street on Parade reported the other day that the Federal Reserve System has approved 3,576 bank mergers and acquisitions in the last 15 years and rejected none.

Connecticut has been the scene of many of these combinations, starting with successful local banks that sold themselves to bigger ones. Manchester provides a good example.

The venerable Savings Bank of Manchester, which once had a branch in every neighborhood in town, was acquired in 2004 in a combination with two other Connecticut banks that became NewAlliance Bank. In 2010 NewAlliance was acquired by First Niagara Bank, which was already a major national bank, and then in 2015 First Niagara was acquired by an even bigger bank, Key Bank from Ohio.

What used to be Savings Bank of Manchester now has only two branches in that town, which no longer has a locally based bank.

Maybe a local base for a bank doesn’t matter as much as it used to, since the internet provides access to banks all over the country, even the world. Local commitment may be lost but convenience gained — if, of course, the internet is working and nobody involved in the transaction has been hacked.

But don’t try arguing with Mayor Joe Ganim in Bridgeport, where Buffalo-based M&T Bank’s acquisition of People’s United Bank will cost around 661 jobs downtown and another 86 elsewhere in Connecticut. People’s United has been to Bridgeport what Savings Bank of Manchester was to Manchester.

So in protest Ganim plans to move as much as $50 million in city government funds out of People’s United. But the other banks in Bridgeport are nearly all big national banks that, like M&T, are often devouring competitors.

Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Bridgeport state Sen. Marilyn Moore also have expressed indignation about the acquisition of People’s United. Moore wants the General Assembly’s banking committee to hold a hearing about it. Blumenthal says he may appeal to federal and state regulators to stop or modify it.

Indeed, a month ago President Biden directed federal government agencies to start spurring competition in the economy rather than consolidation. Last week two big insurance brokers, Aon and Willis Towers Watson, canceled their merger in the face of the Justice Department’s opposition.

So maybe Blumenthal can get U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on the phone about the disaster befalling downtown Bridgeport.

Antitrust law gives the federal government great leverage over mergers. The law leaves much discretion to the government in evaluating degrees of loss of competition, and few companies want to bear the expense of fighting the government in court.

The federal government isn’t the only potential player here. States have their own antitrust and banking laws, and Connecticut’s elected officials never have shown much interest in applying them against combinations that diminish competition. The state well might be able to construe or rewrite its antitrust and banking laws to prevent combinations as big as M&T’s acquisition of People’s United.

State Attorney General William Tong says he is concerned about the bank combination. So it would be good if he reported publicly about whether state antitrust and banking laws can and should be applied against it and whether those laws should be strengthened to curb the consolidation trend.

Bank mergers and acquisitions have made many bank executives and shareholders rich, but much of that wealth has come from the liquidation of competition and jobs.

Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” elected officials long have gone easy on banks and financial firms because many campaign contributions originate there. So in the Bridgeport case the smart money will bet on the banks rather than the sincerity and wit of the elected officials piously grumbling about them.

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

By Chris Powell

Whatever “critical race theory” is, fears about it are easy to understand. It is seen as a mechanism for impugning the country and all white people for at least passive racism, for political indoctrination and inducing racial guilt, and for gaining power over not just education but all society.

This interpretation is strengthened insofar as “critical race theory” is supported by the politically correct crowd and enjoys camouflaging and euphemizing by school administrators, teacher unions, and other agents of the political left.

There are at least two problems with the advocates of “critical race theory.”

First they mistake racism and slavery as unique characteristics of the United States, conferring shame uniquely on this country. But racism and slavery were, and are, worldwide phenomena afflicting nearly all countries, races, and ethnic groups. Indeed, the Africans enslaved in the United States were first enslaved and sold by other Africans.

That doesn’t diminish the atrocity. But it transfers the guilt from any one nation to humanity itself.

Second, the advocates of “critical race theory,” as well as those of the “1619 Project” of The New York Times, mistake the great theme of American history, which is not racism and other forms of oppression but rather the struggle against oppression, the pursuit of democratization, the most extensive democratization attempted anywhere.

Yes, American independence and its Declaration did not democratize everything at a stroke. But they threw off the mightiest monarchy of the era and the divine right of kings — a truly revolutionary accomplishment — and set the stage for progress throughout the world.

Abraham Lincoln, who may have understood the Declaration better than anyone and devoted his political life to its principles, explained it to an audience in Springfield, Illinois, in 1857:

“I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects.

“They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal — equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This they said, and this meant.

“They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth — that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon.

“They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all — constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”

For decades after the country’s founding, restricting slavery was usually the foremost political issue. It developed into the Civil War, where liberty was won and then betrayed by Reconstruction and then won again by the civil rights movement.

Another war, the First World War, facilitated the emancipation of women in the 1920s, vindicating another great struggle, much neglected by history.

All this took time, and of course there remain unfair racial and gender disparities, but they are the subjects of constant political clamor. No one claims perfection for the country even as advocates of “critical race theory” proclaim the country’s eternal taint.

This history can be taught comprehensively and honestly, the good and the bad, without mistaking the country’s direction and its leading place in the ascent of man. The heroism and sacrifices made and the brutal and heartbreaking defeats suffered and then overcome on behalf of progress here are astounding.

If taught fairly, without pursuing political gain or revenge, this can only inspire students with love of country and a desire to contribute to that progress, to heed the Union general and U.S. senator, Carl Schurz:

“My country, right or wrong. If right, to be kept right — and if wrong, to be set right.”

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

By Chris Powell

Last week’s well-attended forum on juvenile crime and justice, called by Glastonbury’s Town Council, was illuminating, just not so much about juvenile crime and justice.

Dozens of people expressed their anger about the inability of state and municipal government to curtail the explosion of car thefts, burglaries, and other misconduct by young people who have realized that there will never be any punishment for them, just therapy, now that political correctness controls juvenile justice.

Mostly the forum illuminated Connecticut’s social contract, whereby the Democratic Party is permitted to operate the cities as poverty and patronage factories, with their daily murders and assaults on top of car thefts, robberies, burglaries, and other mayhem and their thousands of helpers ministering to the perpetual dysfunction, as long as the middle and upper classes can move to the suburbs and put “Black Lives Matter” signs on their lawns in mock solidarity.

Connecticut’s anger about juvenile crime has been simmering for more than a year, with police complaining that their arrests of young perpetrators quickly come to nothing in juvenile court. This anger was brought to the boiling point June 30 when New Britain police announced that the 17-year-old charged with driving the stolen car that ran down and killed Henryk Gudelski in the city the day before was a chronic offender who in the last 3½ years had been arrested 13 times, some of the charges being serious, but who was nevertheless free.

So for the month since Gudelski was killed the big questions have been:

Why was this chronic offender free?

Who in the juvenile justice system handled his cases?

How were they handled, and why?

Who is responsible and where is the accountability?

Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo Jr. attended the forum in Glastonbury and was pressed vigorously about why the chronic offender in the New Britain case had been free. Having had more than three weeks to examine the atrocious failure and at least a few days to prepare for the forum, Colangelo replied uselessly: He didn’t know. Nor did Colangelo pledge to find out and make a report.

Also in attendance were Glastonbury’s three state legislators — state Reps. Jill Barry and Jason Doucette and Sen. Steve Cassano, Democrats all — and they didn’t promise to find out and report either.

No, apparently everything in the juvenile justice system is to remain closed to the public even when the system’s failure kills someone.

Indeed, two years ago Democratic state legislators and Governor Lamont enacted legislation to impose secrecy even on murder and rape trials of juveniles and young adults. Fortunately federal courts found the law unconstitutional, but it still signifies the secrecy and unaccountability for which many Connecticut Democrats strive.

That’s why nearly all discussion now about possible “reforms” for juvenile justice is meaningless.

Representative Barry told the forum she would increase police access to juvenile criminal records, release an arrested juvenile only to an adult taking responsibility for him, transfer more juvenile cases to adult court, and put juvenile defendants under house arrest monitored by electronic tracking.

But none of this would address the failure with chronic offenders.

None of this would achieve accountability in particular cases.

None of this would provide any mechanism for ensuring that reforms are followed.

Barry’s proposals all could be enacted and the public still would not know why the chronic offender accused of killing Henryk Gudelski was free after 13 arrests in 3½ years.

Nor would Barry’s proposals provide any accountability in any other juvenile crime cases.

Accountability is possible only by ending the secrecy of the juvenile justice system.

Liberal Democrats are responsible for this disaster. A few years ago they closed Connecticut’s secure juvenile treatment facility — a softer sort of prison — and decided that social work without detention could fix everything. The liberal Democrats believe that every troublesome young person should have his own special-education teacher, therapist, social worker, police officer, public defender, and probation officer — all unionized, of course — as well as infinite chances, but no parents.

This policy has not only worsened juvenile crime but increased the demand for guns as people realize that Connecticut’s politically correct government lacks the nerve to protect them against the social disintegration it has been causing.

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

By Chris Powell

Hesitancy about COVID-19 vaccination is becoming resistance and even hostility in Connecticut and throughout the country, news reports say. Blame is cast on former President Donald Trump, though he began and touted the vaccine development program. Also blamed are some crazy Republican officials for spreading misinformation.

But few in authority and journalism seem able to acknowledge the sound reasons for vaccine hesitancy if not resistance and hostility.

For starters, misinformation about the vaccines has come from the top of government, President Biden himself. Last week on national television the president falsely declared: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

Yet the world is full of acknowledged cases of vaccinated people contracting the virus anyway. Connecticut’s health department reported Friday that it has logged 938 cases among people who had been vaccinated, 160 of them having been hospitalized and 20 dying. There is at least one “breakthrough” virus case on His Incoherency’s own staff at the White House.

The government and the medical establishment proclaim that the vaccines are safe. But that is misleading. In fact the vaccines have been authorized by the government only for “emergency” use precisely because they have not been tested enough as traditional vaccines have been and so cannot be deemed safe in the usual sense.

All vaccines carry risks and cause adverse reactions in some people. Typically these are rare and the risk is considered worthwhile to both individuals and society. But there are already tens of thousands of adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines, and governments have acknowledged them, requiring the vaccines to carry warnings of the risk of specific hurtful and even dangerous side-effects, including blood clots, myocarditis, pericarditis, and Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

That is, everyone who receives a COVID-19 vaccine is essentially participating in a worldwide medical experiment.

That requires respect for individual choice, not the ridicule, disparagement, and threats of compulsion coming from government and medical officials and news organizations.

Meanwhile some people complaining about vaccine hesitancy, resistance, and hostility are impugning themselves. The White House admits urging social media organizations to censor virus “misinformation” and has even specified internet postings it wants removed. It is fascism when the government decides what can be published, a repudiation of the First Amendment, which in guaranteeing freedom of expression guarantees the right to be wrong.

No government that resorts to censorship like this can be trusted.

Confidence in the response to the epidemic is also diminished by government conduct elsewhere.

The Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is blocking a Republican bill to require disclosure of intelligence about the virus epidemic at its point of origin, Wuhan, China, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to the president, continues to dissemble about the virus research undertaken at the Wuhan institute by a contractor for his agency. Even if that research was innocent and did not involve, as it seems to have involved, “gain of function,” why should the U.S. government have been subsidizing virus research under the control of the world’s worst totalitarian regime?

Then there is the indifference shown by the government and mainstream journalism to the growing evidence that the inexpensive anti-parasite drug ivermectin, classified by the World Health Organization as an “essential medicine” and established as safe by 40 years of use, successfully treats and prevents COVID-19 infection. Indeed, India, the Czech Republic, South Africa, and some Latin American countries have already authorized ivermectin’s use against the virus.

Last week researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem said they had identified 18 drugs effective against the coronavirus in laboratory tests.

So no one needs any help from Trump and Republican crazies to be skeptical of government’s enthusiasm for experimental vaccines and indifference to potentially safer treatments.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut has its own aspiring terrorist and subversive group, and it’s not the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys, or even al-Qaida.

No, it’s the Self-Defense Brigade of “the Reverend” Cornell Lewis of Hartford and Power Up Connecticut founder Keren Prescott of Manchester, who are stomping around the state displaying guns and other weapons to show they are serious about interfering with anyone they dislike and eventually overthrowing democratic government.

In candid interviews with the Journal Inquirer’s Eric Bedner, published last weekend, Lewis and Prescott maintained that they aren’t going to follow the laws and rules of decent conduct that apply to everyone else. Their politics elevates them above those things.

The Lewis-Prescott gang first paraded its guns at a protest June 9 at the site of construction of an Amazon warehouse in Windsor in which two nooses had been found without any accompanying explanation. “There is nothing like Black people exercising their Second Amendment right to get folks moving,” Prescott said. “We are tired of being nice.”

Of course flaunting guns is a bit more threatening than whatever those unattended nooses meant.

Two days later on the Windsor town green the Lewis-Prescott gang broke up a “unity” rally against racism. Gang members, supposedly foes of racism, hurled racist taunts at the rally’s organizers.

Prescott warns: “We are going to continue to disrupt.”

Indeed, Lewis threatens the warehouse project with destruction. “We’re going to close it down,” he says. “They’re not going to be able to work on that site for a while after we’re finished with it.”

Lewis’ ambition goes farther. “Democracy,” he says, “has failed the oppressed in this country. I believe democracy gave birth to and continues to nurture the endemic racism that the oppressed face. We must disrupt, dismantle, and then disperse the democratic system because it does not help us in our existential condition and the oppression we live with.”

Of course the country is full of self-obsessed loons who ordinarily are of little importance. The problem with the Lewis-Prescott gang is that state and local government officials, members of the clergy, and other well-meaning people, especially in Windsor and Manchester, have been humoring the gangsters either in the belief that their objectives have merit or out of fear of becoming their next target.

But the more the gangsters are humored, the more threatening they get.

The country and Connecticut are also full of racial disparities arising from pernicious government policies, like social promotion in schools, subsidies for fatherlessness, and exclusive zoning. But the Lewis-Prescott gang’s obsession and fetish, the nooses found at the Amazon warehouse, could not be less relevant to racial justice. One of these days the worthies who have been humoring and helping to publicize the gang should find the courage to stop and leave them to the police and FBI.

* * *

For a few days six weeks ago the killing of Henryk Gudelski was a sensation in Connecticut. But it has disappeared from the news and discussion at the state Capitol, where legislators expressed concern about it before adjourning. Gudelski was the 53-year-old New Britain resident run down in the city June 29 by a stolen car apparently driven by a 17-year-old boy with a long criminal record who still had been freed by the juvenile justice system.

Legislative leaders said they would review juvenile justice procedures but nothing has happened, probably because nobody in authority wants to press the crucial questions, which were implied by a former state legislator and criminal justice expert who discussed the case in a radio interview two weeks ago. Somebody, the former legislator acknowledged, had “really messed up.”

Indeed — but exactly who, how, and why, and how can the public and its representatives find out as long as the juvenile justice system remains secret by law? How does that secrecy benefit justice?

Of course it doesn’t. Secrecy benefits only the proprietors of the system.

But this secrecy will be preserved because in Connecticut exempting government employees and failed policies from accountability remains more important politically than Gudelski’s life — and anyone else’s.

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

By Chris Powell

Good for Governor Lamont and the state legislators who approved the new state budget, which is providing 7½% raises to about 1,700 managers in state government, along with $2,000 bonuses for some, adding up to more than $15 million. It’s not just good in itself. It’s also good for demonstrating just how incompetent state government is generally.

There [ITALICS] is [END ITALICS] a strong case for the raises. Not being unionized, many state government managers are paid less than the unionized employees they supervise, since the compensation of the nonunionized managers has been a lot easier to control. As a result, many managers have petitioned to unionize and have been allowed to do so in pursuit of higher pay.

It’s ridiculous but now, for example, assistant attorneys general, state police captains and lieutenants, deputy prison wardens, and child welfare supervisors are unionized. That is, the managers are organized against management.

Only about 6 percent of state government employees are true managers, not being union members, or about one for every 17 employees. That’s hardly any management at all.

Quite apart from fairness, the raises are compelling because many senior state managers are considering retiring next year, and replacing them with experienced employees within state government will be impossible if promotion to management means a pay cut.

Fortunately the new budget provides that from now on raises for nonunionized managers will match those for unionized employees. But while this linkage should prevent more devaluation of management, it won’t address the perpetual lack of management. So unionization of managers in state government now should be prohibited and the percentage of managers should be increased.

This should start with the management groups that recently unionized, whose unionization should be undone and prohibited by law. It should continue with the repeal of the law recently enacted by the General Assembly, at the behest of Democratic legislators and the unions that control them, that injects union representatives into orientation meetings for state government’s new hires and provides unions with the new hires’ home contact information. The new law makes state government sabotage itself.

Additionally, the governor and legislators should start asking: How does the public benefit from collective bargaining for government employees? Of course nearly all legislators, including Republicans, are too scared of the unions to ask that question, though collective bargaining in state government has mainly abolished management, discipline, and accountability and turned the workforce into a political army for the majority party at election time.

* * *

Interviewed by Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers the other day, Governor Lamont sounded more like a Republican than a leader of the state’s Democratic Party.

“Every governor since Bill O’Neill has raised taxes,” Lamont said. “It didn’t result in lower property taxes. It didn’t result in any efficiencies. I’m not sure it really resulted in better services. And it was creating an incredible cloud of doubt hanging over the state.

“I’m not going to raise taxes unless we’re really in an impossible pickle. It’s a terrible thing to do.

“I’ve raised revenues,” the governor added, citing what he calls his “highway user fee on trucks,” legal marijuana, and sports gambling. “And if you really want to raise revenues, grow the damn economy.”

The governor apparently wasn’t asked about his bumbling effort to impose highway tolls, from which he was rescued first by loud opposition and then by the virus epidemic. But now with billions in emergency federal money, Lamont’s position on taxes seems secure against the tax hunger that moves his party’s state legislators.

Maybe someday the governor will be pressed about his observation that raising taxes hasn’t accomplished anything — at least not for the public interest. Of course raising taxes long has worked well in one sense, sustaining the government class, the core of the governor’s party.

But before that issue is raised again, the governor may want to talk a lot about things that make him sound more Democratic — like transgender rights, Juneteenth, Indian mascots, and other politically correct trivia.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s state employee unions may be rendering great service to Governor Lamont’s probable campaign for re-election by complaining about him. This service may be greater than their usual provision of manpower to Democratic campaigns. For their complaining suggests that the governor isn’t their tool as most Democrats are.

Last week the unions protested the governor’s recalling their members back to work at state government offices. Among other things the unions argued that by working from home they are reducing carbon emissions. Yes, the unions are always looking out for the planet first, not themselves.

Then the unions held a rally at the state Capitol complaining that in contract negotiations the governor opposes giving them raises. Since state employees kept full pay and benefits during the virus epidemic when so many others lost jobs and income, and since state employees are already paid much better than private-sector employees in similar jobs, the unions’ case for raises is less compelling than contemptible.

DISCRIMINATION DISGUISED: Political correctness would not let any male or Republican member of Congress get away with what Connecticut’s 5th District representative, Democrat Jahana Hayes, is getting away with.

The congressional research company LegiStorm reported last week that the average salary for male members of Hayes’ staff is $127,000 while the average salary of her female staff members is less than half that, $56,000. Hayes’ spokeswoman noted that this differential is not as bad as it looks, since Hayes has only one male staffer, her chief of staff, and 13 female members of lesser rank.

But the gender differential in salary isn’t most questionable here. What’s most questionable is that 93 percent of Hayes’ staff is female and only 7 percent male. Where’s the “diversity”?

Her spokeswoman says Hayes aims “to actively recruit women and minorities.” But 93 percent is far more than active recruitment.

Maybe the 93 percent really are superior people and were not hired because “active recruitment” disguises sex discrimination so well. But male and Republican members of Congress better not get caught with similar extreme disparities on their staffs. They’ll be crushed by the hypocrisy of political correctness.

PRIMARY FOR PATRONAGE: Two years ago Justin Elicker was elected mayor of New Haven, defeating the incumbent, Toni Harp, in both the Democratic primary and the general election, largely because of city property taxes. Elicker didn’t have to say much about taxes, since Harp had just raised them by 10 percent and voters needed little help to notice.

Now as Elicker seeks re-election the tax issue is being raised against him by a challenger in the Democratic primary, Karen DuBois-Walton, executive director of New Haven’s Housing Authority. With emergency money from the state and federal governments covering New Haven’s chronic deficits, Elicker hasn’t raised property taxes. But DuBois-Walton contends he should have reduced them by now.

Maybe he should have, but that would have required the mayor to reduce city employee compensation and public services, and DuBois-Walton refuses to specify which expenses Elicker should have cut. That refusal makes her a demagogue and demonstrates her lack of political courage. Of course if the mayor had cut spending to cut taxes, DuBois-Walton now would be condemning him for that instead.

DuBois-Walton is a longtime apparatchik of the city’s Democratic machine, while Elicker’s record in politics is that of an outsider. So the primary seems mainly a scrum over patronage.

FILIBUSTER PHONIES: Democrats around the country are clamoring for repeal of the U.S. Senate rule that facilitates filibustering — the mechanism by which legislation favored by the majority can be talked to death by the minority and democracy thwarted.

Meanwhile Democrats are cheering the Democratic state legislators from Texas who left the state to deny the state legislature the quorum necessary to pass Republican legislation on election procedures. But abandoning one’s office to prevent a quorum has the same purpose and effect as a filibuster — to thwart democracy.

Filibustering is one more thing that’s bad when Republicans engage in it but heroic when Democrats do.

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

By Chris Powell

At Governor Lamont’s order state government is reducing its direct subsidies to businesses coming into the state or expanding here — cash grants, discounted or forgivable loans, and tax credits. These subsidies have reeked of political patronage and corporate welfare, have sometimes cost more than they gained, have incurred financial risk to the government, and have been unfair to businesses already in the state, which get nothing for staying.

The Lamont administration’s new idea is to subsidize incoming businesses by rebating to them some of the state income taxes paid by their employees. This would incur little financial risk and expense to the state.

But this system still wouldn’t be fair, for unless the line of business of the new company was unique in the state, state government still would be subsidizing the new company against its in-state competitors.

Last week the Yankee Institute offered a better and perfectly fair idea: Eliminate grants, loans, and tax credits to new businesses and simply repeal Connecticut’s corporation business tax.

The Yankee Institute suggests that the tax’s annual revenue to state government, averaging $834 million per year, isn’t so much, only about 5 percent of the state’s general fund receipts.

This analysis underestimates the problem, since state government never can bring itself to reduce spending at all. But to make Connecticut much more attractive to business, it would not be necessary to repeal the whole corporation business tax. Repealing even half of it would send a remarkable signal around the country.

Of course state government is always enacting tax cuts for the future and then repealing them when the future arrives. So to be believed, a corporation business tax cut would have to offer a contract to every business in the state and every arriving business guaranteeing that its tax would not be raised for, say, 20 years. But a big differential between Connecticut’s business taxes and those of other states really might pay for itself far better than spot subsidies.

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OVERKILL ON YEARBOOK: Pranking high school yearbooks is a tradition almost as old as the yearbooks themselves. What would any high school yearbook be without a defaced photograph or gross caption?

But police in Glastonbury are treating the recent yearbook pranking there as a felony, having charged the suspect, an 18-year-old student, with two counts of third-degree computer crime, each count punishable by as much as five years in prison.

That makes the offense sound like terrorism.

Meanwhile young people with 10 or more arrests, many of them on serious charges like assault, robbery, and car theft, are being released by Connecticut’s juvenile court system without any punishment at all and now apparently are moving on to kill people, confident that the state lacks the self-respect to punish them for anything.

The irony here probably will turn out to be superficial, for the Glastonbury student almost surely will get similarly lenient treatment from the criminal-justice system, whose dirty little secret is that it seldom seriously punishes anyone for anything short of murder, seldom at all for a first offense.

If the offenses attributed to the student occurred before he turned 18, he may qualify for “youthful offender status,” whereby a criminal case is concealed and offenders can be let off, maybe with a little social work, and no public record of their misconduct is maintained.

If the offenses occurred after he turned 18 and he is a first offender, the student can apply to the court for “accelerated rehabilitation,” a probation that suspends and eventually cancels prosecution and erases the charges.

So despite his serious charges, the student won’t be going to prison. But since the publicity will make the case harder to whitewash, the court might grant the student “accelerated rehabilitation” on condition of a public apology, especially since the yearbook publishing company, with spectacular generosity, has agreed to repair the yearbooks without charge.

Turnabout being fair play, the best justice here might come if the newspapers published and television stations broadcast the student’s mug shot with various defacements and a gross caption to see how he likes it.

That might send him well on his way toward a career in computer hacking, politics, or journalism.

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

By Chris Powell

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” Oscar Wilde wrote. But sometimes it’s awful both ways.

Many years ago an episode of the television drama series “Law and Order” showed police detectives entering a dingy New York City apartment where an abandoned baby was crying. The detective played by Jerry Orbach remarked: “How about if I just take him to Rikers now?”

Of course Rikers is the city prison on Rikers Island, but the detective’s remark wasn’t just bitter cynicism. For “Law and Order” scripts often were inspired by actual criminal cases, and real life continues to provide similar cases, not only in New York but in Connecticut’s cities as well. Take the case in New Haven last month.

According to the New Haven Register, police with a search warrant broke into a house in pursuit of a man wanted for gun crime. The suspect fled through a window. Inside the house a red laser beam was pointed at the officers. It came from the gunsight of a loaded pistol held by a 2-year-old boy.

The officers safely got the gun away from the boy. They also found a woman who lives in the house, who told them that the man they sought must have put the gun under a pillow near the boy before escaping. A search of the house discovered heroin, cocaine, and marijuana.

The man who fled was caught nearby and he and the woman were booked on drug, gun, interfering, and risk-of-injury charges. The man already has at least one felony conviction. The state Department of Children and Families placed the 2-year-old with “another woman,” presumably a relative.

Since state government policy makes Connecticut’s cities concentration camps for the poor, uneducated, dysfunctional, and disturbed and enslaves the cities to the government employee unions, the cities are impossible to govern well. New Haven isn’t helped by the “woke” intellectuals associated with Yale University, who, as the bullets fly around them and the city’s murder rate runs two-thirds ahead of last year’s, busy themselves with how city policy can avert climate change.

Even so, Mayor Justin Elicker’s remarks on the case of the armed 2-year-old were hapless if not pathetic. After praising the police for their courage and restraint, the mayor said the city is promoting safe gun storage and gun buybacks — as if criminals give a hoot about those things and as if those things have any bearing on the social disintegration that has made New Haven and other cities ungovernable.

That’s why the couple arrested here aren’t so important. They are probably long lost causes already. But the life of the 2-year-old isn’t ruined yet. What will become of him?

The Department of Children and Families sometimes does work as heroic as police work. But the public seldom has any way of knowing what the department does in particular cases, since nearly everything is kept secret.

The department’s goal with abused and neglected children is almost always “family reunification,” on the premise that children grow up best with blood relatives if not their parents. When family reunification seems too dangerous for a child, the department arranges foster placements and adoptions.

But particular cases are always a judgment call for the department — a call that permits no outside evaluation, except when a child is killed and the state child advocate investigates and reports publicly.

This isn’t good enough amid the generational poverty long manufactured by Connecticut’s welfare, education, and urban policies. Under current rules there can be no independent follow-up on the 2-year-old who was living in a drug den and pointed a loaded pistol at police officers as if it was a toy.

DCF will do whatever it will do with the boy, Connecticut will hope for the best — and city and inner-suburb demographics will keep getting worse.

So more than legal marijuana, expanded gambling, faster commuter trains, better-funded government employee pensions, road and bridge maintenance, politically correct high school athletic mascots, and declaring pizza the official state food, Connecticut needs to find out:

Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?

That requires ending the secrecy of both child protection and juvenile court and enabling and undertaking legislative and journalistic investigation.

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