Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Good for New York that it’s getting a new governor as Andrew Cuomo resigns amid a sexual harassment scandal and is succeeded by Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Cuomo was vastly overrated, presiding over years of the state’s decline. He was lionized by news organizations even as he sent virus-infected patients into nursing homes where they infected more of the most vulnerable people, causing many deaths, and then he tried to conceal the casualties.

Cuomo was a bully and, as it turned out, a sexual predator as well.

Hochul is qualified by long experience in government and pledges that the notoriously oppressive environment in the governor’s office will end when she gets there.

But where was she as that environment seethed with abuse?

It seems that nearly everyone in politics, government, and journalism in Albany long knew about it but said nothing or even helped keep it quiet. The governor was exposed only because a few brave women finally came forward, after long keeping quiet about it themselves.

Hochul has not yet been inaugurated but already has declared herself a candidate for election to a full term as governor. Since New York is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, she is expected to have much competition for the Democratic nomination.

Maybe her Democratic challengers will ask what she knew about Cuomo’s conduct and when she knew it, or how she could have been so ignorant.

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Why isn’t the liberal argument for abortion rights — sometimes summarized as “My body, my choice” — being made in defense of people who don’t want to take one of the COVID-19 vaccines?

Yes, a woman’s decision on whether to get an abortion doesn’t pose a threat to anyone else, except, of course, to her unborn child, while it may be argued that someone’s refusal to be vaccinated makes him a threat for contagion.

Yet research suggests that vaccinated people can be without symptoms but carry the virus and infect others just as unvaccinated people can. And the list of serious side-effects linked to the vaccines is growing, even if those risks may be worth taking, especially for people more at risk of becoming seriously ill with the virus, like the elderly.

The General Assembly recently rejected “My body, my choice” in regard to vaccination of students against childhood diseases, repealing the religious exemption to such vaccinations. But those vaccines are long established and their side-effects are known and rare. The COVID-19 vaccines are new and not fully tested, with side-effects still being discovered.

That’s why COVID-19 vaccination should be left to individual choice, while requiring weekly testing of unvaccinated people in environments where the risk of contagion seems greatest.

Besides, it’s hard to blame people for being skeptical of vaccines being pushed by a government that gave them the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq in pursuit of imaginary “weapons of mass destruction,” 20 years of war and nation building in Afghanistan, the Tuskegee syphilis study, constant market rigging and secret bailouts of investment banks, and a lot of contradictory talk about COVID-19 itself.

Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the virus epidemic may be the failure of journalism to put critical questions to government and medical authorities. Journalistic skepticism seems to have departed with Donald Trump when he left the White House.

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POSING ON PRECEDENT: Now that conservatives are in charge of the U.S. Supreme Court, liberals are vigorous defenders of protecting legal precedents, especially in regard to abortion and Roe v. Wade.

Of course liberals didn’t always strike this pose. Liberals concur that the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott vs. Sandford, which held that a former slave could never be a citizen, had to be overturned, though it took a civil war. Liberals agree that Plessy v. Ferguson, which legitimized racial segregation, had to be overturned too, along with Lochner v. New York, which prevented government regulation of the economy.

The reverence for precedent is largely political opportunism. If you like the way things are, you make a principle of precedent. If you don’t like the way things are, you dismiss precedent. There’s little principle involved.

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

By Chris Powell

How strange that Connecticut and the country are being condemned as “structurally” and “systemically” racist even as the latest U.S. census finds that they are more multiracial and multiethnic than ever and demographers expect that the country soon will have a nonwhite majority.

These trends do not suggest oppression. Rather they suggest acceptance and equality. They provide hope that within the lifetimes of today’s young people the current obsessions with race and ethnicity will seem quaint and people will see each other first as people — and maybe as Americans too.

Lincoln foresaw that day, as did the country’s founders, the proclaimers of the Declaration of Independence.

In Chicago campaigning for the Senate shortly after Independence Day in 1858, Lincoln noted that half the people in the country then were not descendants of those who had fought the Revolution but instead were recent immigrants.

“If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood,” Lincoln said, “they find they have none. They cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us.

“But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration — and so they are.”

The day of deliverance from tribalism has been a long time coming and it is not here yet, but the census shows that it is coming.

Racial and ethnic composition aren’t the important things about this country. What is important is the commitment to a democratic and secular culture and to the objective of raising everyone to economic self-sufficiency, reducing the extremes of wealth and poverty so that everyone has a vital stake in that democratic and secular culture.

The census suggests that race and ethnicity will be taking care of themselves, that the country may be more integrated in those respects than some think it is. Economic inequality has become the bigger challenge.

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Not that the United States ever should have cared much about Afghanistan, but how was that country to resist a return of the theocratic fascism of the Taliban when the United States planned to evacuate so many Afghans who didn’t want to live under theocratic fascism and most Afghans didn’t care much about how they would be governed?

The rationale offered for this evacuation was that these Afghans were helping the United States. To the contrary, the United States was helping them build a country without theocratic fascism.

That effort, costing thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars, failed mainly because most Afghans themselves are indifferent to how they are governed. As soon as the U.S. and NATO troops began to withdraw from the country, Afghan soldiers deserted or surrendered and Afghans who desire freedom failed to mobilize.

If the Afghans themselves cared so little about their freedom, why should the United States have cared more?

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States were not the consequence of the sanctuary Afghanistan provided to some of the terrorists. They were the consequence of the failure of the United States to enforce its own immigration law, to pursue intelligence that a spectacular attack was being planned, and to maintain security in air travel.

Who rules in Afghanistan now will be far more a problem for Russia, China, Pakistan, and Iran than for the United States.

But the United States still fails to enforce immigration law. Even as the federal government and state governments are busy devising social controls in the name of reducing the spread of the COVID-19 virus, the country’s southern border is wide open, with the Biden administration admitting thousands of immigration lawbreakers even when they are known to be infected.

The United States can let the Taliban have Afghanistan, but one of these days it should control its own borders.

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

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

Nearly every day a member of Connecticut’s congressional delegation announces some major federal grant for a local capital project or civic organization, many of the awards credited to the “American Rescue Plan.” More such announcements will come upon passage of what is being called the Biden administration’s national “infrastructure” legislation, though apparently much of the money contained therein will go for social welfare programs, not “infrastructure.”

Until recently few in politics seem to have known just how easily infinite money could be tapped for such patronage purposes. Indeed, there has been little if any discussion about where all this money is coming from — not mere billions of dollars but trillions. These days in government it seems that money is no object.

Those familiar with economics may wonder if the federal government now is operating under what is called Modern Monetary Theory, which is actually the very old understanding that a government that issues its own currency does not need to impose taxes to raise revenue but instead can create money until the currency is destroyed by inflation. While MMT is not formally government policy now, as a practical matter it is policy, what with the Federal Reserve and foreign governments monetizing so much U.S. government debt.

But while Americans are not being openly taxed for all the largesse being bestowed on them by their beaming members of Congress, they are being taxed indirectly — for inflation has broken out all over. The federal government’s Consumer Price Index long has been rewritten and rigged to understate inflation, but nothing can conceal all the price increases of recent months. While the government contends that annualized inflation lately is running around 5% and the Federal Reserve keeps saying this inflation will be “transitory,” traditional measures put the rate well above 10 percent.

Whatever the exact rate, a recent analysis by Harvard University economics professor Jason Furman concluded that recent consumer price increases already have wiped out the nominal wage gains enjoyed since President Biden was inaugurated. Prices, Furman concluded, are rising faster than wages.

That is in large part how Americans are starting to pay for all those seemingly free goodies. The inflation tax burden will grow heavier as foreign governments, scared by the federal government’s unprecedented profligacy, reduce their purchases of U.S. government debt.

This doesn’t mean that much recent money creation wasn’t necessary to repair the damage to the economy done by government’s frightened and often ham-handed response to the virus epidemic. Instead it means that, as always, there is no free lunch — that there are limits and that the government is far exceeding them, amassing trillions more dollars in debt for the Fed to monetize eventually, promising more inflation or else rationing, price controls, and the destruction of what’s left of the market economy.

Then today’s goodies will be forgotten, but the members of Congress who bestowed them and got re-elected on them will be retired and collecting their ample government pensions — adjusted for inflation every year, of course.

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THE REAL MILITIA: Public life is usually understood as what happens in government, politics, and other civic doings, but as was demonstrated last month by a remarkable event in Cornwall, public life can be much more important than those things.

As reported by Leila Hawken in the Tri-Corner News, CBS News reporter Richard Schlesinger was out for his daily walk on a rural road near his home when he suffered a heart attack and collapsed unconscious, as good as dead. And yet, miraculously, within minutes a dozen people — passers-by from out of state, a state trooper, volunteer emergency personnel, and neighbors had come to his aid, doing chest compressions, restoring Schlesinger’s heartbeat, and getting him into an ambulance to Sharon Hospital and thence into a Lifestar helicopter to Hartford Hospital, where he underwent successful heart bypass surgery and was sent home to recover and try to track down and thank all who had saved him.

These heroes showed that what is called the militia is not really anti-government gun fanatics running through the woods preparing for the end times but all of us — citizens ready to drop everything to help in an emergency.

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

By Chris Powell

Legislators belonging to what might be called the General Assembly’s social work caucus gathered at the state Capitol the other day to insist that there really isn’t much wrong with juvenile justice in Connecticut but that, of course, it always could use more social workers and “programs” to help keep young people out of trouble.

The social work caucus members insisted that while some car thefts and other crimes lately committed by juveniles have been brazen and atrocious, the recent increase in car thefts is a national phenomenon and over the long term car thefts have actually declined.

But the legislators were careful not to get close to the recent case that ignited the juvenile crime controversy in Connecticut — the death of Henryk Gudelski, struck by a stolen car alleged to have been driven by a 17-year-old boy who had been arrested 13 times in the last 3½ years, many of the charges being serious, but who was nevertheless free.

The legislators insisted that police, prosecutors, and juvenile court judges have the ability to ensure that young chronic offenders are detained. Police and prosecutors disagree, and the issue cannot be settled while the law excludes the public from juvenile court.

Wherever the truth lies, how did the defendant in Gudelski’s death manage to be free long after establishing his incorrigibility and the failure of the social work applied to him?

Exactly how were his cases handled, and by whom?

Which police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers, public defenders, social workers, and judges are responsible?

Who will investigate the case?

The social work caucus won’t say. For the social work caucus doesn’t want to find out what happened and doesn’t want the public to know. It wants only more social workers.

Nor does the social work caucus want to get near the cause of the juvenile crime problem — the lack of parents and parenting for the troublesome kids and the welfare system’s destruction of the family. A third or more of the country’s children are living in homes without a father, with fatherlessness approaching 90 percent in the cities, where, as a result, mayhem and social disintegration are worst.

No, the social work caucus always calls for more buckets for bailing out flooded basements but never for turning off the busted pipes.

With the increase in car thefts and other crimes by young people, Connecticut’s suburbs are starting to reap the consequences of their indifference to the disintegration of the cities under the management of the social work caucus. Out of sight has been out of mind. While juvenile crime is out of sight no longer, juvenile justice still is and is being kept that way precisely because that ineffectual but expensive system can’t bear scrutiny.

Scrutiny is the only reform, and the social work caucus is the big obstacle.

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THEY WEREN’T NAZIS: Connecticut’s indignation industry went into overtime recently when unknown people briefly posted a banner in Southbury accusing the Democratic Party of being the “modern-day Nazi Party” and depicting Democratic donkeys wearing swastikas.

The banner condemned Democrats for supporting socialism, eugenics, and hate and opposing America, Israel, and the Second Amendment. This was wildly hyperbolic and distasteful but it was not what its critics construed it to be, advocacy of Nazism. The banner plainly opposed Nazism and attributed it to Democrats.

With the indignation industry so easily triggered these days and political leaders being so hyperbolic themselves, few people in public life want to make even obvious distinctions. But accusations of Nazism haven’t always riled people so.

When Richard Nixon, a Republican, was president and presiding over the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, protest signs spelled his last name with a swastika substituting for the “x.” The militarism of two other Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, also provoked hateful feelings on the political left and so they too were called Nazis. Respectable Democrats overlooked it and even Republicans just shrugged it off.

But today everyone in public life seems to be expected and even to feel obliged to deplore any bit of meaningless hysteria that best would be ignored and denied publicity.

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

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont seems to realize that Connecticut probably won’t stand for another catastrophic lockdown in the name of controlling COVID-19, a virus that 99.8% percent of afflicted people survive. But rather than acknowledge this plainly and caution people that they must take the primary responsibility for protecting themselves, the governor has passed the buck to the state’s 169 municipal governments.

The governor is putting them in charge of determining whether and where people should be required to wear masks again. This may lead to giving local officials the authority to set other rules of virus safety.

With the cities lagging badly in virus vaccinations, their mayors seem eager to order masks back on, which will push retail and restaurant business out of the cities and into the suburbs, as if city businesses can afford it.

Local option on virus safety makes little medical sense. Crowds in a suburb may pose no less risk than crowds in a city. But henceforth the resentment felt about the virus epidemic and government’s regulations about it may be directed at mayors and town councils instead of the governor.

Lamont is a Democrat and Republicans long have wanted the General Assembly to end his emergency authority to rule by decree, and now, with his epidemic management no longer so successful, the governor may be happy to go along. Call it decentralization, with potentially different rules in 169 little republics and thousands of offices, stores, and restaurants.

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TREATMENTS VS. VACCINES: While the government and the medical establishment keep insisting that the virus vaccines are absolutely safe, every week brings word of a new side-effect unknown when the vaccines were authorized for emergency use and said to be so safe. Last week the vaccines were linked to eye problems.

Meanwhile the virus is mutating into “variants,” more vaccinated people are becoming infected if not seriously ill, and there are signs that the vaccines may lose effect with time, perhaps as little as six months, thereby requiring frequent booster shots or entirely new shots each year, like ordinary flu shots.

So maybe eventually the government and medical authorities will start wondering whether the approach to the virus should shift to treatment and away from vaccination.

After all, doctors and hospitals have learned to treat virus patients with far more sophistication than shoving ventilators down their throats, as was the practice at the beginning of the epidemic. Does anyone remember the clamor a year and a half ago for production of millions more ventilators? They turned out to kill as many patients as they saved and the clamor stopped.

For there are effective treatments for COVID-19, and two more were announced last week by Israeli scientists.

The first was about a study validating use against the virus of the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. Its efficacy has been established by other studies but U.S. authorities seek to suppress it lest it interfere with the vaccine campaign.

The second announcement revealed that a medicine based on the CD24 molecule, found naturally in the human body, cures 93% of seriously ill virus patients in less than five days.

These treatments appear to be inexpensive and unlike the vaccines have no side-effects. Also unlike the vaccines, there’s no big money in them, which may be their weakness.

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“EQUITY” ISN’T FAIR: Government in Connecticut has a funny idea of what it calls “equity.”

Marijuana retailing permits are to be reserved for “communities” that disproportionately suffered from the futile “war on drugs.” But those “communities” also disproportionately profited from the contraband drug trade. For every drug dealer who was prosecuted there were several who made a lot of money and were never caught.

So where is the patronage for people who, despite the futility of the “war on drugs,” obeyed the law and forfeited their chance to profit from contraband?

And to overcome skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccines, government is offering prizes and cash bounties to people who accept vaccination after rejecting it so long.

So where are the prizes and bounties for the people who, heeding government’s urging, got vaccinated as soon as they could?

“Equity” sounds mainly like a way of discouraging questions.

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

By Chris Powell

A century ago and then again 70 years ago there was, if the political hysteria of the times was to be believed, a Red under every bed. Today’s political hysteria imagines a racist under every bed.

But as it was with the Reds of yesteryear, most of these racists are ghosts. The people who affect to see them can’t identify them.

So Connecticut’s General Assembly and town councils throughout the state have passed resolutions declaring racism a “public health crisis” and then have appointed committees to search for evidence supporting the pre-ordained conclusion.

Of course the country is full of racial disparities, but are all racial disparities the result of racist laws and policies and racist government administration — laws, policies, and administration meant and designed to oppress people? And if so, exactly what are those laws and policies and exactly who are those administrators?

In the old days many states had frankly racist laws, policies, and administration. They are infamous today and can be clearly identified. But such identification is not done much today, if only because it doesn’t have to be done for the race mongers to achieve their political objectives, what with nearly everyone being too scared to challenge any accusation of racism, just as in the old days nearly everyone was too scared to challenge any accusation of communism.

Today accusations of racism are simply accepted as long as no individual or agency is specified.

The political right undertook the Red scares of old to intimidate and defeat the political left. The racism scare today is waged by the political left to intimidate and defeat the political right and to extort for the left vast new grants of government patronage that can be dressed up as social justice.

But none of this addresses the most damaging racial disparities, since they are caused by policies that, while failing to reach their nominal objectives, enrich the government class and thus the political left and the race mongers.

For example, for decades Connecticut has purported to try to remediate its mortifying racial gap in school performance. This effort has been mainly to spend a lot more money on schools with large minority populations. But every year most minority students still graduate high school without ever mastering the basics. While this profoundly handicaps them for the rest of their lives, disqualifying many of them from more than menial employment, it still provides great careers for teachers and school administrators.

No one is ever held accountable for this policy failure, and the governor and General Assembly never audit it, for any serious inquiry would explode the two great false premises of education in Connecticut — that school spending correlates with educational performance and that social promotion, exempting students from having to learn anything to be promoted, is better for them than enforcing standards, that as long as students are in school it is better to pretend that they are being educated.

When they leave school and get their rude shock, they are society’s problem.

Examination of the failure of education policy would reveal an even bigger failure — welfare policy’s destruction of the family, disproportionately among minority groups, with its pernicious incentives for childbearing outside marriage and fatherlessness, by which so many children and their households are stuck in poverty rather than raised to self-sufficiency.

Here again too many government employees and contractors draw their livelihoods from the failing policy, so it can’t be examined politically and no one can be held accountable.

Connecticut’s prattling about racism rises to high pitch over trivia like “microaggressions” and nooses left at work sites but ignores the lack of education and fathers for so many minority children. That’s why the prattling about racism is just cover for gaining patronage for the prattlers.

Even a public mobilized against the real racism would have trouble overcoming the special interests that thrive on racial prattle, and the public is ever more demoralized politically, resigned to letting the government class have its way. Saving Connecticut will require some candidates brave enough to say that the state’s racism isn’t where anyone is looking.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s top elected officials quickly accommodated themselves to the disgrace of Joe Ganim’s return to the mayoralty in Bridgeport in 2015 despite his having served eight years in prison upon conviction in federal court for vast corruption in office.

After all, just a year after Ganim was sent away in 2003, Gov. John G. Rowland resigned and pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges as well. Rowland was a Republican and Ganim a Democrat, so together they more or less normalized and bipartisanized betrayal of public office.

Of course no one in state government could have refused to deal with Ganim in his return as mayor without also disenfranchising all of Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest and most troubled city. But looking away from corruption and failure in Bridgeport, as state government long has been doing, has become a betrayal in itself.

The city’s newspaper, the Connecticut Post, notes that federal prosecutors have charged five Bridgeport officials with corruption in the last 10 months. The city’s former police chief, Armando Perez, and personnel director, David Dunn, close associates of Mayor Ganim, pleaded guilty to the rigging of the chief’s test for promotion. They are in prison. State Sen. Dennis Bradley and Board of Education member Jessica Martinez are charged with campaign finance fraud. City Council member Michael DeFilippo is charged with absentee ballot fraud and has resigned.

The problem in Bridgeport isn’t something in the city’s water supply. (More than water, Ganim drank expensive wine extorted from city contractors, among other “gifts.”) More likely the problem arises from a lack of political competition in the overwhelmingly Democratic city, the ease of fooling impoverished and disengaged constituents, the corner-cutting hunger for government employment that grows amid poverty — and the indifference of the governor, state legislators, prosecutors, and civic leaders.

For it is hard to find anyone in authority who has spoken out about corruption and failure in Bridgeport, even as there is speculation that federal prosecutors are pursuing more corruption.

The cheating on the police chief test was done to secure the job for Perez, the mayor’s crony, and while it may be hard to prove that Ganim directed or knew of the cheating, it is hard to believe that he had no hint about it.

The election fraud charges pending against the other three Bridgeport officials can’t be tied to the mayor, but violating election law has become a tradition in Bridgeport.

The attitude at the state Capitol seems to be to keep throwing money at Bridgeport and Connecticut’s other troubled cities without ever auditing them for results. This causes unaccountability and colossal waste. No one in authority seems bothered that fantastic amounts appropriated over many years have yet to diminish poverty and mayhem or improve school performance in Bridgeport and the other cities. Contenting the government class that presides over chronic failure seems to be enough.

Has anyone in authority in state government ever contemplated what Bridgeport’s restoration of Ganim said about the city — its demoralization and desperation?

But now with so many corruption charges being brought in Bridgeport in such a short time, someone in authority in state government should be asking why only federal prosecutors investigate such offenses. Have the state police and state prosecutors been given confidential instructions or advice to avoid looking into corruption in state and municipal government? Or are they just afraid or incompetent?

For its own sake as well as the state’s, Bridgeport should be under perpetual investigation by a special team of state auditors. But is such investigation impossible under a Democratic state administration because Bridgeport sends the largest delegation to Democratic state conventions and produces enormous pluralities for the party?

If that’s why corruption and failure in Bridgeport draw no concern from state government, Democrats are the party of corruption in Connecticut.

After all, Republicans have no power in the state, and while denouncing Donald Trump makes Democrats feel good about themselves, Trump isn’t president anymore and bashing him won’t clean up Bridgeport or correct any expensive policy failures.

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

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.

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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.