Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

West Haven may be providing the perfect metaphor for government and politics in Connecticut.

The small city has been suffering from financial excess so long that since 2017 it has been operating under the supervision of the state’s Municipal Accountability Review Board. Because of a federal criminal indictment announced a few weeks ago, the city discovered that it had been looted of $636,000 of its emergency federal epidemic assistance money, allegedly embezzled by its state representative, who had been double-dipping as a salaried assistant to the City Council.

Nevertheless, Mayor Nancy Rossi’s defense against the scandal right under her nose — her obliviousness — was accepted by the voters, who narrowly re-elected her Nov. 2.

Then enterprising journalism by the Connecticut Mirror found that apart from being embezzled, some of West Haven’s emergency federal money was also spent to hire a marching band for the city’s Memorial Day parade, to buy Christmas decorations, and to purchase services from a City Council member’s company. The New Haven Register already had reported that some of the federal money was spent to pay town officials for “compensatory time.”

While the state accountability board had placed an agent at City Hall, he missed the fraud as well. So maybe the board needs to be investigated as much as city government does.

In another state such a scandal might prompt the legislature to hold hearings to investigate. But Connecticut’s state legislators have left the corruption issue to federal prosecutors, just as the state’s own prosecutors have.

Nevertheless, an estimated $4 billion more in federal money will be sent to Connecticut for highway and bridge improvements under the “infrastructure” legislation recently approved by Congress. Connecticut Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, says the money is all about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

But thousands of jobs, including many highly paid jobs in manufacturing, are already open in the state and can’t be filled. Indeed, that marching band for the West Haven parade had to be imported from New York.

At least the federal infrastructure money may demolish the long-running argument for reimposing tolls on Connecticut highways. The money also may demolish the argument for joining what is called the Transportation Climate Initiative, an increase in the wholesale tax on gasoline in the name of raising money for less-polluting modes of transportation.

And if, as many members of Congress hope, their next spending bill includes a national program of paid family and medical leave, Connecticut will be able to repeal its own recently enacted program, for which the state income tax was raised by a half percent.

Federal money is considered better than state money because it can be created without taxation and thus can seem free — as long as people don’t start wondering why their fast-food hamburger and fries now cost more than $10 and gasoline more than $3 per gallon.

Whatever happens, government in Connecticut already has far more emergency federal money than it knows what to do with. That’s why some has been spent on a marching band.

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COMING OR GOING?: Governor Lamont and other dignitaries gathered Nov. 3 to celebrate the revival of Tweed New Haven Airport, which is the new East Coast hub for startup Avelo Airlines. There are great plans for Tweed — lengthening its runway to handle larger jetliners and construction of a terminal accommodating more traffic.

But Avelo is not what Connecticut really needs at Tweed. For the airline plans only flights to six cities in Florida, to which thousands of state residents relocate in the winter, often for tax purposes, the Sunshine State not taxing personal income.

Instead of more ways of sending people to Florida, Tweed and the New Haven area need flights to hub airports, like the American Airlines flights to Philadelphia and Charlotte that Tweed had until the virus epidemic devastated the travel industry.

If Tweed could recover those flights and gain flights to Chicago or Dallas, the airport would put New Haven on the national map for business development. Suddenly more people might have reason to come to Connecticut than to leave it.

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

By Chris Powell

Construing the results of the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections as rebukes for his party that justify his politically moderate stance, Governor Lamont remarked last week that he is Connecticut’s “first governor in 30 years who didn’t raise taxes.”

Lamont, a Democrat, is far better on taxes than his predecessor and most of his party’s members in the General Assembly. But his claim about his record on taxes wasn’t quite right. For along with his party’s majority in the legislature, the governor imposed a special state income tax of a half percent to finance a program of family and medical leave for private-sector workers.

The program strikes a politically correct pose but it’s not much to boast about. It is essentially a very limited form of self-insurance, something anyone could have arranged for himself with an ordinary savings account. While the program can be used only for family and medical leave, an ordinary savings account could be used for any personal emergency, not just to replace income lost from taking time off from work but for car or home repairs or medical expenses.

People who never need family or medical leave will never recover what they pay in the special half-percent income tax. But people who self-insure with an ordinary savings account will always have access to their money. Thus the leave program creates a state agency to do less for people than what they could do on their own.

In addition, the governor keeps advocating what is called the Transportation Climate Initiative, a new tax on gasoline at the wholesale level, where it can be hidden, even as gasoline and other energy costs are exploding.

Its relative restraint on taxes is not that much to the Lamont administration’s credit, since it has been enabled in large part by hundreds of millions of dollars of emergency aid from the federal government for recovering from the virus epidemic. When that money stops raining down on Connecticut, the relative restraint on taxes may end — conveniently after next November’s gubernatorial and legislative elections.

But even with all that federal money, the Lamont administration is essentially pleading poverty in regard to at least $30 million in unemployment compensation benefits mistakenly paid to Connecticut residents since the epidemic began, two-thirds of which state government must repay to the federal government.

Few of the mistakes were fraud. Most resulted from misunderstood rules, use of an antiquated computer system, rehirings that weren’t promptly reported, other changing conditions, and a ten-fold increase in weekly claims that inevitably overwhelmed the state Labor Department.

Yet having recently suffered serious unemployment, many recipients of the mistaken payments remain poor and can hardly afford to pay the money back.

State government could pay it back for them by appropriating the necessary funds.

But the Lamont administration is negotiating new contracts with the state employee unions, contracts that are likely to provide generous raises, and on top of that the unions want “hero” pay for having worked during the epidemic. It’s no matter to the unions that the epidemic cost hundreds of thousands of private-sector workers their jobs and wrecked them financially.

Maybe Connecticut will see who really counts when the poor are forced to repay their unemployment compensation while state government employees who never lost a day of work get raises again.

There seems to be plenty of money to waste over at the state police department, which last week announced the resolution of a scandal.

A sergeant who more than two years ago got drunk at a state police retirement party at a brew pub in Oxford and caused a serious car crash in Southbury as he drove away, injuring two people, has resigned. But he did so only after receiving a cushy plea bargain and remaining on the payroll all the while, even collecting overtime during his criminal probation.

Supposedly state police officials have been investigating other possible misconduct at the party — evidence that other troopers were drinking and driving, contrary to department regulations. But now that more than two years have passed, it seems that the regulations are being waived and one case of discipline is all the department can stand.

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

By Chris Powell

What do you do when state government policy doesn’t work? In Connecticut the answer is simple: You do more of it.

So disaster may be the most likely outcome of a new state program that aims to reserve $175 million per year in bonding for improvement projects in 34 of Connecticut’s poor and distressed municipalities.

A spokesman for Governor Lamont hopes the program achieves “generational” change, and a news report about the program says the distressed municipalities are being encouraged to “think big.”

But thinking big is what Connecticut’s three biggest, poorest, and most distressed cities have been doing for many years, only to become poorer and more distressed.

Since the 1960s in the name of revitalization Hartford has relocated its downtown three times at enormous cost: first to Constitution Plaza, then to the Hartford Civic Center, and then to Adriaen’s Landing. The first project is now a sleepy office plaza. The second project is largely empty and needs expensive renovation. The third project is stumbling and has yet to accomplish anything. While the city also has added a minor-league baseball stadium and an outdoor concert arena in its era of revitalization, living standards in Hartford have declined and poverty has grown more concentrated.

New Haven opened its Coliseum downtown in 1972 and then, acknowledging its failure to revitalize the city, tore it down in 2007. The Connecticut Tennis Center was opened in New Haven in 1991 but the idea of revitalization via tennis tournaments was another failure. This year the tennis center was converted into a concert venue as if New Haven hadn’t already been full of concerts for many years. New Haven now isn’t just poorer and more dysfunctional; it has become the murder and drug abuse capital of Connecticut.

Bridgeport opened a downtown minor-league baseball stadium in 1998. It was beautiful but couldn’t cover its costs and so was closed in 2017. This year the stadium also was converted to a concert arena. Bridgeport is no better off for it — still impoverished, distressed, and full of crime despite its great location on Long Island Sound on the railroad line to New York and the ferry route to Long Island.

So instead of thinking big and glamorous, it might be better for the poor and distressed municipalities to think ordinary and prosaic.

According to the Hartford Courant, the northern part of Hartford has chronic sewer and storm water drainage problems that damage residential and business properties and could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix. So why not start to fix them?

The three most distressed cities have schools without air conditioning and modern ventilation whose students are easily distracted. They also have bad streets and abandoned buildings.

But if the cities really want to think big, they might, along with state government, undertake a study to discover why, despite so much expense incurred over so many years in the name of revitalization, they remain poor and distressed, and especially why so many of their residents are still poor.

Can it really be a lack of downtown relocations, stadiums, and concert arenas? Is the problem really something bonding money can fix?

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HEIL HYPOCRISY!: A few weeks ago state Rep. Anne Dauphinais, R-Killingly, likened Governor Lamont to Hitler on account of the governor’s exercising emergency powers granted to him by the General Assembly, just as Hitler, soon after coming to power, exercised emergency powers granted to him by the Reichstag.

Since people could tell the difference between how those powers were exercised in Connecticut and Germany, Dauphinais was roundly denounced for her hyperbole, and leaders of both political parties in the General Assembly declared that people in politics should avoid analogies to Nazism.

But just a few days before the recent municipal elections, the Democratic Party organizations in Manchester and South Windsor broadcast cable television commercials likening Republicans to Nazis. While local Republicans were peeved by this hyperbole, there was no denunciation at the state level. For in Connecticut, where the demagogic far left runs almost everything, what is sauce for the Republican goose is not sauce for the Democratic gander.

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

By Chris Powell

Republicans did fairly well in Connecticut’s municipal elections this week, picking up many suburbs and smaller towns, holding the mayoralties in some smaller cities — New Britain, Danbury, and Norwich — gaining the mayoralty in Bristol, and nearly gaining the mayoralty in heavily Democratic and poorly managed West Haven, which was being looted right under the mayor’s nose by one of her confidants.

“The map is setting up beautifully for 2022 for Republicans,” their state chairman, Ben Proto, crowed.

But not so fast.

First, municipal elections are the least determined by party principles and the most by local personalities. Indeed, municipal government in Connecticut has little to do with public policy. Most of its finances are on automatic pilot, a matter of just signing off on government employee union contracts devised under the pressure of binding arbitration and causing the great majority of municipal expense.

Second, Connecticut remains a solidly Democratic state. Nobody this week paid much attention to the usual huge Democratic pluralities in the big cities, since the election results there were pre-ordained. But those pluralities will reappear next year in the statewide election, where they are usually decisive no matter how well Republicans do elsewhere.

And third, Donald Trump didn’t haunt Connecticut Republican campaigns this year. Since next year’s election is a congressional election and Trump seems to be planning to run for president again in 2024, Connecticut voters soon may be reminded of him a lot more. The Biden administration is so incompetent and extreme leftist that it may be possible to imagine Trump winning in 2024, but it is not possible to imagine him carrying Connecticut. It is easy to imagine him destroying the Republican Party here next year and in 2024 just as he destroyed it last year, wiping out the gains Republicans had been making in the General Assembly.

Escaping Trump remains the great challenge of any Republican who wants to win in Connecticut. It shouldn’t be impossible, since many Republican policies could win a referendum in Connecticut and can be advocated without reference to Trump, while the Trump problem is mainly a matter of his hateful character and demeanor. But many Connecticut Republicans — maybe a majority of the most active ones, primary voters — are devoted to that character and demeanor and rather than give them up might prefer to lose on policy forever.

Using specific state issues against his Democratic opponent, Virginia’s new Republican governor-elect, Glenn Youngkin, held Trump at bay without alienating Trump supporters. So the more Connecticut’s Republican candidates press specific issues next year, the more they may cause people to put policy ahead of Trump. As the village rabbi in “Fiddler on the Roof” replied when asked if there was a blessing for the czar: “May God bless and keep the czar — far away from us.”

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CRAZY LEFT WILL HELP: In any case going into next year’s state election Connecticut Republicans are likely to get help from the craziness of the leftists who dominate the state’s Democratic Party and make it hard for Governor Lamont to maintain a moderate stance.

City administrations, including Hartford’s, are sure to provide Republicans with plenty of campaign fodder if the Republicans have the nerve to risk controversy. For example, according to the Hartford Courant, last week a city government committee drafted plans for the city’s experiment with a program of “universal basic income.”

The idea is to give $500 a month, unconditionally, to 25 single parents or guardians. But the committee thinks it needs a mechanism for determining whether the money really reduces stress in the lives of the recipients. So the committee may propose making recipients undergo invasive tests to measure their stress hormones.

Of course winning a lottery’s grand prize or inheriting a great amount of money may cause the stress of figuring out what to do with it. But since when is any special research needed to determine whether $500 more per month will make someone’s life easier?

The movie “Animal House” famously depicted the statue of college founder Emil Faber inscribed with the moronic motto “Knowledge is good.” Hartford could add, so scientifically: “Money too.”

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

By Chris Powell

Even as his party’s leaders in the state Senate kept insisting that Connecticut has no serious crime problem and that the crime clamor is a Republican contrivance, last week Governor Lamont called a press conference at the state Capitol to acknowledge the issue and pledge to act on it.

The governor, a Democrat, said he would appoint more judges to address the purported backlog in Connecticut’s secret and thus grossly unaccountable juvenile courts. If more judges don’t solve the problem, at least they will provide patronage opportunities.

The governor also described having just met privately with the mother and grandmother of the latest victim of the juvenile crime wave his party’s leaders deny, a 14-year-old boy from Hamden who was fatally shot in the head in the middle of the night somewhere near Waterbury.

The boy had been in trouble with the law, the governor related, and his mother and grandmother wished that juvenile court had been stricter with him and had monitored him more. When the court took off his ankle bracelet, he took off too.

As is usual in such cases, there apparently was no father in the home to help keep the boy out of trouble. The governor didn’t address this and indeed such circumstances cannot yet be discussed in polite company.

Even the Republicans pressing the juvenile crime issue don’t dare to approach its underlying cause. Instead of asking where all the messed-up kids are coming from and what government policies facilitate the child neglect that is fatherlessness, the Republicans join the Democrats in bleating about the need for more “wraparound social services” for chronic young offenders.

The bipartisan suggestion is that all might be well if every difficult kid had his own special-education teacher, therapist, social worker, police officer, public defender, and probation officer — all unionized government employees, of course, getting overtime if “wraparound social services” ever happen to be needed on Columbus Day — because fathers aren’t necessary. But at least fathers might be less expensive.

The Republicans can claim a political victory in the governor’s addressing their issue. But Lamont’s hand was forced mainly by the atrocities and bodies that have been piling up so high in newspapers and broadcast news. The governor surely knew that he was starting to look oblivious.

Even so, every political response to the problem so far is just posturing, and mere posturing from now until the election next November won’t stop the atrocities and the bodies from piling up higher. That will make the governor and the Democrats look feckless, and since the Democrats run the state, few will notice that the Republicans are feckless on the issue too.

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IT WASN’T THE VIRUS: There was a lot more obliviousness going around last week. Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy held a discussion with various officials and “behavioral health providers” about the impact of the virus epidemic on mental health.

But the epidemic isn’t what has driven the country crazy. What has driven the country crazy is government’s response to the epidemic — lockdowns and mandates, like requiring people to submit to an experimental vaccine that has ever-increasing side-effects — a response that has disrupted all aspects of life in the name of preventing fatalities from an illness that, far from being a new plague, has a 99.8% recovery rate.

This policy evokes the oblivious observation attributed to a U.S. Army major after a battle during the Vietnam war: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

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LIQUOR AND INTEGRATION: Prosperous Woodbridge, with a median household income of $158,000, got its first liquor store last week after town zoning regulations were relaxed. The regulations had prohibited liquor stores near residences, and they continue to prohibit other ordinary property uses near just about anything else.

This is highly exclusive zoning. It has pushed many things into other towns so Woodbridge residents can have quieter lives while other towns have had to deal with the traffic of Woodbridge residents looking for liquor and other stuff.

Exclusive zoning is partly why the population of Woodbridge is only 3% Black, far below the state average. But then maybe liquor is more important than racial integration.

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

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont is in a “strong position” for re-election a year from now, according to the results of a statewide opinion poll announced last week.

But while the governor, a Democrat, is surely the favorite, Connecticut being heavily Democratic, the poll was largely a con job, less interesting for confirming the governor’s front-runner status than for some findings its announcement didn’t emphasize.

The poll was undertaken by a North Carolina-based operation that, while high-mindedly named Public Policy Polling, is heavily affiliated with the Democratic Party. Indeed, the poll was commissioned by Democrats for Education Reform.

On top of that, the poll’s policy questions were ladled with goodies associated with Democratic campaigns even as popular positions associated with Republicans were omitted.

That is, this was a “push poll,” framed to elicit particular responses.

The figures touted by the poll’s announcement showed the governor comfortably leading the two most likely candidates for the Republican nomination for governor — 52-36% over the 2018 Republican nominee, Bob Stefanowski, and 52-32% over former state House Minority Leader Themis Klarides.

But the governor’s lead fell sharply when poll participants were asked if, today, they would vote for Lamont or think it’s “time for someone new.” Then the governor led by only 50-41%, with 9% undecided.

Similarly, more people viewed the governor “unfavorably,” 36%, than Stefanowski, 30%.

The poll’s ranking of important issues was not so favorable to Democrats either. The issues most important to voters were jobs and the economy, at 36%, and taxes, at 21%. All impartial evaluations say Connecticut’s economy is weak and its taxes remain extremely high.

So the poll did not really suggest much enthusiasm for Lamont even as it implied a few openings for a Republican campaign.

With the Biden administration sinking in public esteem so much that, amazingly, many people are starting to miss Donald Trump, Connecticut Democrats may need more than push polls by next November.

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THE MISSING CONVERSATION: Another issue on which Connecticut Democrats are weak is crime. They boast about a declining general crime rate even as criminal atrocities and enforcement failures explode, as others did last week.

Hartford police said a gang member fired a gun through the driver’s side window of a police cruiser, nearly striking the officer inside, just hours after murdering a woman in an apartment nearby. The suspect was caught and police said he had a long criminal record with more than a dozen arrests, including some lodged just 11 days earlier for weapons, narcotics, and probation violations.

Hartford police Chief Jason Thody and Mayor Luke Bronin said the suspect’s record showed he should have been held without bond for the most recent offenses charged to him before the murder and the assault on the officer. The mayor said “we need to have a serious conversation” about why the suspect was free.

But there is no mystery about why career criminals are on the loose in Connecticut. The state doesn’t deter them. Many repeat convictions leading only to probations or token punishments often precede murders and other serious crimes. Connecticut tends not to take chronic offenders seriously until they kill someone, and the state has no incorrigibility law. Last week even a “10 strikes” law might have prevented that murder in Hartford.

This is the “serious conversation” Connecticut hasn’t had yet, because it would be politically incorrect.

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DON’T REDUCE SCHOOLING: But obliviousness is not yet politically incorrect here. So some boards of education in the state are being asked to add a holiday to their school calendars — Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.

The holiday’s advocates seem not to have noticed that because of the virus epidemic many Connecticut students have just lost a year of education.

Incorporating religious holidays in school calendars must be determined by the number of families needing them. Diwali doesn’t come close to qualifying yet, and given the recent loss of education, nothing new should.

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

By Chris Powell

As a practical matter “critical race theory” may be little more than the assertion that nearly everybody and everything is racist and that anyone who doesn’t comply with the demands of its advocates is even more racist. Whatever “critical race theory” is, it does not seem to be formally taught in schools in Connecticut.

But there is plenty of evidence that, propelled by “critical race theory,” race is being injected into school curriculums in Connecticut and elsewhere with psychology and propaganda in the name of diversity and inclusion. This is what the “critical race theory” controversies in Guilford and other towns is really about, and it is fairly challenged on two fronts.

First, it’s unlikely that younger students need any racial focus to learn to treat each other decently. Emphasis on race at an early age is bound to make children self-conscious and uneasy and to inflict fear, guilt, and grievance even as the basic integration of racial and ethnic groups may be the best lesson schools can provide. The normality of integration and diversity can overcome fear and erase self-consciousness and uneasiness about race and ethnicity — if schools ensure discipline and quickly and visibly punish bigotry.

Second, “critical race theory” is politically opportunistic and simpleminded. For issues of race and ethnicity, including slavery, are not peculiar to the United States. They are the fundamentals of human history. Most nations were built on race and ethnicity.

So while racial and ethnic issues must be taught, they need to be formally taught as history — world history as much as U.S. history — not raised as an insinuation that particular students or their ancestors bear special responsibility for history or that history owes privileges to particular students or their ancestors.

Since U.S. educators belong overwhelmingly to the extreme political left and are members of far-left unions like the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, parents are well entitled to be suspicious of what goes on in classrooms in regard to race and other controversial subjects like transgenderism. This suspicion is deepened because, by design, what happens in classrooms is seldom accessible to the public, and because school administrations are often as secretive, unaccountable, and resentful of scrutiny as any corporation.

Schools everywhere long have been notorious for concealing staff misconduct, and even now, at the insistence of Connecticut’s teacher unions and school administrators, teacher evaluations are uniquely exempt from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law. Parents mustn’t know anything that really counts.

Education’s resentment of the public was reflected the other day when former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, nominated by the Democratic Party for a non-consecutive second term and supported by the education establishment, confronted school controversies. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe declared. He boasted that he had vetoed legislation to require schools to alert parents when instructional materials include sexually explicit content.

While parents don’t directly tell schools what to teach, of course they elect school boards and legislators who set such policy and they comment at school board meetings. That some parents lately have been behaving badly at meetings doesn’t diminish the public’s right to scrutinize and be heard. Any misbehavior at meetings is easily addressed by local authorities, as by having a police officer or two at meetings where angry people are expected.

This isn’t enough for the education establishment. Last month the top two executives of the National School Boards Association sent an open letter to President Biden likening the expression of anger at school board meetings to “domestic terrorism.” That charge led Attorney General Merrick Garland to direct the FBI and federal prosecutors to devise “strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” as if local police can’t and don’t already do that job.

The association’s board quickly repudiated and apologized for the letter from its executives. Parents, the board acknowledged, must be heard. But how much the public can be permitted to know about its schools remains a question, nationally and in Connecticut.

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

By Chris Powell

Two decades ago government corruption in Connecticut was a spectacularly Republican phenomenon.

First state Treasurer Paul Silvester, appointed by Gov. John G. Rowland to fill a vacancy, was caught taking bribes for awarding pension fund management contracts. Silvester and nine others were convicted on federal charges and Silvester went to prison.

Then Rowland himself was caught taking from state contractors gifts that might as well have been bribes. Facing a bipartisan impeachment inquiry by the General Assembly, Rowland resigned, was indicted on federal charges, confessed, and went to prison too.

But today corruption in government in Connecticut is mainly a Democratic phenomenon, if only because there is so little Republican administration anywhere. Two Democratic state legislators now are under federal indictment.

The first, Bridgeport state Sen. Dennis A. Bradley, is charged with campaign finance fraud along with his treasurer, and one of his campaign aides has already pleaded guilty.

The second legislator, West Haven state Rep. Michael DiMassa, who resigned this week, was also an aide to the City Council and is charged with embezzling more than $600,000 from the city’s federal virus epidemic relief money, using phony invoices from a dummy company. The scheme described in the indictment seems so threadbare that it has impugned the rest of city government, raising suspicion DiMassa had help.

But then management long has been lacking in government in West Haven. Because of its former insolvency, since 2017 the city has been operating under the supervision of the state Municipal Accountability Review Board.

Last month a City Hall employee in the Democratic bastion of Hartford was fired for destroying financial records of the office where she handled cash and fee payments. Her office had just come under audit.

Of course there always will be corruption in politics and government, and Connecticut Democrats may argue that the recent charges are not really so much when the party runs nearly everything here. But as Republican legislators note, with state and municipal governments now rolling in more federal emergency aid than they know what to do with, comprehensive auditing is required.

The state Office of Policy and Management promises more auditing, but that office belongs to the governor, also a Democrat, who, preparing to seek re-election next November, may not be eager to overturn every rock in every city and town with a Democratic administration. Ideally some of the emergency federal money should be used to hire outside, politically unconnected auditors — a lot of them.

But then little in government in Connecticut is seriously audited, and the fraud suggested by the indictments of the legislators and the firing of the Hartford City Hall employee is the least of the fraud problem. For expensive policies from which thousands of state and local government employees and contractors draw their livelihoods long have failed to educate, lift the dependent to self-sufficiency, and repair the cities, even as those policies keep devouring hundreds of millions of dollars each year without getting a fraction of the attention given to West Haven by the “accountability review” board.

Since they sustain so many dependents, those failing policies might defeat even an army of auditors.

Presiding in the DiMassa case, U.S. District Judge Sarah A.L. Merriam said the defendant is being treated for gambling addiction. The indictment says DiMassa used some of the embezzled money to buy thousands of dollars in casino gambling chips.

But having recently legalized sports betting and put itself into the bookmaking business, state government will just shrug at West Haven’s financial loss and the wreckage of DiMassa’s life. They will be considered a cost of doing business, sure to be offset by state government’s increased take from gambling, which includes monthly tribute from the state’s two Indian casinos.

Casino gambling and embezzlement always go hand in hand and no thought will be given to this latest evidence.

But the governor and legislature at least should wonder why the latest political corruption indictments are federal. Do Connecticut’s own prosecutors have no resources for pursuing political corruption, or just no interest?

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

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.