Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Republican state legislators around the country are proposing to require public schools to post all curriculum materials on the internet as an accountability measure, and the other day they got powerful if inadvertent support from Enfield’s school system.

Enfield’s school administration acknowledged that an eighth-grade class had been given an assignment in which students were instructed to choose pizza toppings as a sort of code to signify the sex acts they preferred. The objective seems to have been to teach the 14-year-olds that sex, like pizza, should be consensual and negotiated.

The Enfield incident, first publicized by a national parents group, was picked up by news outlets far and wide and put the town on the world map for stupidity.

The school administration apologized and attributed the assignment to a mistake of absentmindedness. That is, a different assignment involving pizza choices but without the sexual allusions, also aiming to teach consent and negotiation, was meant to be used. But this account evaded the big questions.

How did the pizza sex assignment get into the school system in the first place? Exactly where did it come from? Why is the school system receiving such material? Who authorized it?

And why, in a state where most students graduate from high school without mastering basic math and English, is a school system using a Family Health and Human Sexuality class to teach students, even without sexual allusions, what they already know from their own experience with pizza and life generally — that when ordering for more than oneself, the preferences of others must be considered?

It’s all beyond moronic, even if it is the work of people holding degrees in education and drawing at tax expense annual salaries of $100,000 or more.

Responding to the proposals to require all curriculum materials to be posted on the internet, teachers and school administrators around the country insist that they are not hiding anything and that they make curriculum materials available to anyone who asks. But this is evasive.

For having a misplaced faith in schools, few people do ask, and few people might think they need to ask to see any curriculum materials likening pizza toppings to sex acts or imputing to white students guilt for the mistreatment of racial minorities throughout history.

Yet such materials are indeed in use in American schools, precisely because they are not routinely publicized and easily accessible.

Enfield’s Board of Education may appoint a committee to look into the pizza sex assignment and how a recurrence might be prevented. This too is moronic, for the school superintendent already should be able to answer the big questions. It is distressing and revealing that they were not answered at the board meeting when the incident was discussed at length.

The problem here isn’t the sexual prudery of parents or other observers. The internet distributes pornography so widely that Enfield’s eighth-graders already may know more about sex than their parents do. No, the problem is the unaccountability of public schools.

Yes, posting on the internet all curriculum material will facilitate many questions and complaints, and some will be mistaken, arise from prudery, or have bad intent. But that’s democracy, which inevitably is less convenient for government than totalitarianism, a lesson schools should teach — perhaps most of all to their own staff.

But will any legislators in Connecticut propose a curriculum-posting law and thus risk the ire of the teacher and school administrator unions? (Yes, in Connecticut most school administrators, supposedly managers, are unionized too and so not really managers.)

Any such legislation shouldn’t stop with curriculums. It also should require the posting of school salaries and teacher evaluations, thereby repealing Connecticut’s law exempting teacher performance evaluations from disclosure, the law’s only exemption for evaluations of government employees.

Of course the teacher and administrator unions surely would dissuade the governor and General Assembly from enacting that much accountability in public education. But a discussion of accountability legislation at least might establish that the big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it’s not really public at all.

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

By Chris Powell

From Connecticut’s congressional delegation last week the watchwords of pious posturing were: “Stand with Ukraine.” Of course no one was proposing to stand with Ukraine enough to join the overmatched Ukrainian army in fighting the Russian invaders. The congressmen meant: Stand with Ukraine at a safe distance.

Indeed, while President Biden strove to look tough imposing largely symbolic economic sanctions on Russia, he did nothing that mattered much, since anything serious would damage Russia less than this country’s European allies, who are dependent on Russian gas, oil, and wheat imports. Looking tough was even harder for the president while he had to keep assuring Americans that U.S. troops would not get involved.

Even so, the United States is largely responsible for Russia’s attack.

When the Iron Curtain was torn open in 1989 and when the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union itself fell in 1991, Western officials gained Russian cooperation with the reunification of Germany by assuring Russia that NATO would not expand eastward and the former Soviet satellites would become buffers between the great powers. While these assurances were not put in a formal treaty, they made sense, since buffers help keep the peace — and then the assurances were betrayed.

Eventually the United States assisted the revolution in Ukraine that overthrew an elected government friendly to Russia. Then the United States started exploiting Ukraine economically, the exploiters including Vice President Biden’s influence-peddling and dissolute son, Hunter. And then came the tempting of Ukraine with membership in the Western military alliance, NATO.

Similar military intervention in Cuba by the Soviet Union in 1962 prompted the United States to blockade the island at the risk of nuclear war.

But U.S. intervention in Ukraine did not come with any capacity or willingness to defend that country amid the provocation being given to Russia. Russia’s attack violates international law and is murderous, but international law also has been violated by many U.S. military interventions in Latin America and around the world in the last 120 years.

Great powers make their own laws. Russia has just brutally reminded the world that it is a great power too.

Ukraine deserved better from the United States — mainly the advice that if you live near a bear, don’t provoke it.

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Maybe it was because he had just returned from a long trip abroad, but Governor Lamont may never have looked so exhausted and befuddled as he did Friday as he announced the immediate departure of his budget secretary, Melissa McCaw.

Two weeks earlier, amid controversy around his firing of McCaw’s deputy, Konstantinos Diamantis, the governor was asked if McCaw would be staying. He replied, “I hope so.” But she appears to have given him only a day’s notice of her departure and she did not join him as he announced that she was already gone, though the governor issued a written statement in which they thanked each other.

Three weeks earlier the governor had announced the departure of his chief operating officer and administrative services commissioner, Josh Geballe. Obscure deputies are replacing Geballe and McCaw, suggesting that there wasn’t enough time to plan anything else — and that the nepotism and school construction contract steering controversy around Diamantis is shaking the administration.

Yes, a federal grand jury is investigating the contract business, but the information available so far has revealed no corruption. As for the nepotism — Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo hired Diamantis’ ill-qualified daughter as his executive assistant while negotiating with Diamantis over raises for prosecutors — it may smell like bribery or extortion. But the executive assistant’s job is a patronage position and state government’s civil service rules usually leave plenty of room for patronage to sneak in anyway.

So if it wasn’t for the abruptness and bitterness of the departures of Diamantis and McCaw, their happening so close to Geballe’s departure, and the governor’s display of nervousness about them, there might not be such an impression of scandal.

Or maybe the governor, a Democrat, looked so exhausted and befuddled Friday because he fears that Republican rejoicing, while premature, is not entirely misplaced.

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

By Chris Powell

Nobody needs the federal investigation that is under way to grasp the basics of the racket that was being run from the state budget office — the Office of Policy and Management — by its deputy secretary, Konstantinos Diamantis, who a few weeks ago was fired by Governor Lamont, not by OPM Secretary Melissa McCaw.

Diamantis, who was in charge of state government’s financing of municipal school construction projects, steered no-bid contracts to a construction management company that employed his daughter, Anastasia. Diamantis also facilitated Anastasia’s hiring as the $99,000-a-year assistant to the chief state’s attorney, Richard Colangelo Jr., while Colangelo was seeking the budget office’s approval for raises for prosecutors.

Diamantis, a former Democratic state representative from Bristol, was also supervising for OPM the redevelopment of the State Pier in New London, a project that has been botched. It is a year behind schedule with costs of $235 million, 2½ times the original estimate, $93 million. Nothing corrupt has been exposed there yet, but maybe Anastasia will turn up again, this time as the vice president of a dredging contractor. At least that $142 million cost overrun provides lots more room for political patronage and payoffs.

In his address to the General Assembly on Feb. 9 the governor felt compelled to acknowledge the smelly transactions in his budget office.

“I have zero tolerance for any ethical malfeasance,” the governor said. “We hold ourselves to the highest standards. If you see something, say something, and if you don’t get the response you deserve, give me a call.”

But who wants to cross the agency that has so much discretion over state and municipal spending, discretion Diamantis abused to benefit his daughter? The governor himself should be doing the calling — starting with budget director McCaw.

Did McCaw know what her deputy was doing, fixing the job for his daughter in the chief state’s attorney’s office and steering the school construction contracts to her other employer? Was McCaw demanding explanations for the grotesque overruns in the pier project? What other business in the budget office might the FBI want to look at?

At a briefing about the governor’s budget Feb. 9, McCaw said she has a “close working relationship” with Lamont, but she signified resentment of his top aides. “As a Black woman and the first woman of color to hold the position of OPM secretary,” McCaw said, “it is not easy to work professionally at this high level in a field that has been dominated by white males.”

Since McCaw omitted specifics, her insinuation of racism may be construed as a cheap distraction and evasion of responsibility for the corruption that had exploded right under her nose, a big embarrassment to the governor in an election year. But she well may figure that because she’s Black, as a political matter she can’t be fired.

Meanwhile the governor said he hoped McCaw would remain budget director. This sounded more like nervousness than a proclamation of confidence. With the FBI rummaging through budget office records and interviewing the neighborhood, the Republican opposition also may hope that McCaw doesn’t leave too soon but sticks around for indictments.

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DON’T GUSH OVER HOSPITALS: Though Prospect Medical Holdings recently saved the hospitals in Waterbury, Manchester, and Vernon from bankruptcy, people served by those hospitals probably will be glad that Yale New Haven Health proposes to acquire them. Prospect is a financial company, not a medical one, while Yale New Haven operates four other hospitals in the state and has a national reputation in medicine.

But the consolidation of hospitals and medical practices in Connecticut is proceeding so fast that economies of scale are almost sure to be offset by the loss of competition, resulting in higher prices. With the acquisitions Yale New Haven Health would control 36% of hospital revenue in the state. And since Prospect Medical Holdings is a for-profit operation and Yale New Haven Health is a nonprofit, the three hospitals being acquired would be erased from municipal tax rolls, costing the municipalities millions of dollars.

A critical review, not the usual gushing approval, is needed here from the governor, General Assembly, attorney general, and hospital regulators.

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

By Chris Powell

Addressing the General Assembly last week, Governor Lamont touted state government’s comfortable financial position, a reversal of the position he inherited when he took office three years ago. As this is an election year, he proposed to spend a lot more money without raising taxes.

Some of the extra spending may make a difference, as with medical care for the poor.

More of the spending will please various special interests, especially members of municipal teacher unions, though what the governor intends with another big special interest, members of the state employee unions, remains unclear, since their new contracts are still being negotiated.

But it may be hard to identify any state budget in the last 50 years that made much difference to life in Connecticut, except for one: the first budget of Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr.’s administration in 1991, which, incorporating a state income tax that vastly increased state government’s revenue, secured the dominance of the government class and has prevented reconsideration of failing policies to this day.

So no matter how much more has been spent by state government since then, Connecticut has had the same old problems to a greater degree — urban poverty, inadequate education, neglected infrastructure, and an economy and a population declining relative to the rest of the country.

Standing out in Lamont’s budget in this respect is the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, which chronically runs big deficits, largely because of excessive personnel costs. Rather than address those costs the governor would appropriate another $50 million as deficit coverage. State government cannot economize in an election year — or any year, for that matter.

It is hard to see any policy rationale for the governor’s proposal to waive state taxes on income paid from pension funds. Pension payments are income just as much as ordinary wages and are enjoyed more by the financially comfortable than by the poor. So this is a tax break for the rich. Only the election ahead can explain it.

The governor proposes spending tens of millions more for mental health treatment in response to the explosion of distress arising during the virus epidemic.

But government itself caused most of that distress with its mistaken closures of the economy and schools when policy should have been focused on protecting those most vulnerable to the virus — the elderly, chronically ill, and otherwise unhealthy. Restoring normal life for those who are at no special risk from the virus might be mental health care enough.

The governor’s touting state government’s seemingly ample cash position, several billion dollars, is misleading. For that cash position remains small compared to state government’s grotesque unfunded pension obligations and long-term debt, estimated at as much as $100 billion.

But the worst misapprehension about the governor’s budget is that it doesn’t raise taxes.

This is because most of state government’s cash surplus results from the billions received from the federal government in epidemic emergency aid, money the federal government essentially created from nothing while government both hobbled the economy and paid people not to work.

This policy has diminished production of goods and services while increasing demand, driving up prices. Now inflation is soaring, running at the highest level in 40 years, probably at an annualized rate of 15%, well above the heavily manipulated and deceitful official figures.

Inflation at 15% is effectively a 15% increase in income and sales taxes. So while the extra cash state government and municipal governments have gotten from the federal government looks like free money, in fact it already has been extracted from the people through currency devaluation — and most of all from the poorest, people who have only wage income and don’t own much in real estate and stocks, which have risen sharply with inflation.

For the governor and state legislators, preparing to spend the extra money, and for the people they will spend it on, happy days are here again. For nearly everyone else, life has never been more expensive.

Will any candidates this year explain it to them?

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut lately has generated more than its share of silly paradoxes.

Having given up on the futility of criminalizing marijuana, state government is rushing into the marijuana retailing business with overregulation and overtaxation. This will make the drug even more available to minors while ensuring the black market’s continued profitability. Meanwhile the nanny-staters are campaigning to outlaw flavored vaping products because of the damage they do to the lungs of young people. Of course as with marijuana, what is forbidden may become only more enticing to the young.

The Connecticut Law Tribune has launched a campaign to repeal the First Amendment and overturn the press freedom on which the Law Tribune itself depends. The Law Tribune is advocating a “right to be forgotten” that would empower people to prevent news organizations from publicizing their criminal convictions after a certain interval. The General Assembly is already following that path, having legislated erasure of certain criminal records in the mistaken belief that such records, rather than a lack of job and social skills, is the primary impediment for former offenders.

If the Law Tribune gets its way, Miranda v. Arizona, the Supreme Court decision prohibiting use of a criminal defendant’s interrogation unless he had been advised of his right to a lawyer, may have to become Anonymous v. Arizona. Gideon v. Wainwright, the court’s decision establishing the right to counsel of every criminal defendant, may have to become Anonymous v. Wainwright. Griswold v. Connecticut, the court’s decision establishing the right to contraception, may have to become Anonymous v. Connecticut.

And so on until there is no telling criminal cases apart and crime loses the deterrent of dishonor.

But the most substantial paradox in Connecticut lately may be the boasting by Governor Lamont and his administration about the steady decline in the state’s prison population even as crime around the state becomes more brazen and a matter of such concern that the governor himself has just had to propose a big anti-crime program.

The governor doesn’t seem to have noticed that many of the worst crimes in the state, including those committed by juveniles, long have been committed by chronic offenders — people who have figured out that the first objective of criminal justice in Connecticut is not to deter them but to keep them out of prison with “wrap-around social services.” That’s the euphemism for replacing prison guards with social workers on the government payroll. It doesn’t reduce crime but it helps the government class to feel better about itself.

The governor proposes to spend a few million more on training and hiring police and probation officers. But mere apprehension is nothing without punishment.

The governor would spend more to track guns brought into the state illegally. But with hundreds of millions of guns already in private possession in the United States, obtaining a gun will remain easy.

The governor would require “ghost guns” to be registered, as if a gun registration law will deter someone who is not deterred by the laws against murder, robbery, and assault.

The governor would put more restrictions on “assault weapons,” as if “assault weapons” rather than handguns are much used in crime. And he would put more restrictions on gun storage, as if that will do more than hinder store owners from protecting themselves against the chronic offenders.

The governor’s crime program is filled with still more trivia to create the impression of comprehensive action against crime without risking the controversy of restoring what is crucially lacking in Connecticut and other far-left jurisdictions — deterrence. But the governor’s program also lacks any recognition of an even more basic cause of crime: the worsening social disintegration arising from poverty, child neglect, and inadequate education.

Guns are just as available in Avon, Woodbridge, and Darien as they are in Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, and gun law is the same in all those places, but crime is concentrated in the cities, with city people being most of both the perpetrators and victims. That won’t change as long as it remains a largely prohibited subject in politics and journalism.

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

By Chris Powell

How, in a wealthy and highly taxed state with scores of social programs and constant prattling about unmet human needs, does a 17-year-old girl approach adulthood missing six teeth and able to eat only soft food?

This month a report by Theresa Sullivan Barger of the Connecticut Health I-Team blamed the state Department of Children and Families for not taking custody of the girl soon enough after being notified that, after a long period of abuse and neglect, she had been expelled from her home and had to move in with a friend’s family.

DCF, always reluctant to remove children from their parents, replied that neglect, abuse, and an inability to function independently, criteria for removing a child, are usually harder to prove as children reach their later teens.

Of course there will be no definitive public accounting for the girl’s circumstances, because DCF case work is confidential by law until there is a fatality and the state child advocate investigates and reports. Only the girl herself and her supporters are fully free to talk and give their side now. Despite the journalism here that should stoke outrage, the governor and the General Assembly will ask no questions, much less investigate, though the girl’s case is another hint about the foremost problem of both Connecticut and the country — institutionalized child neglect.

Child-protection agencies seldom cause child neglect. Mostly they just clean up after it. Those agencies often can do little more than prevent kids from being maimed or murdered amid neglect or abuse. If children turn 18 and enter the world on their own with rotted-out teeth, child protection still can consider it a success.

But don’t stop with the missing teeth. How do most Connecticut children graduate from high school without mastering high school classes, many illiterate and qualified only for menial work as they reach adulthood?

A painful answer was provided in 2016 by Superior Court Judge Thomas G. Moukawsher in his decision in one chapter of Connecticut’s decades-long, futile, and misdirected school financing litigation: neglect by parents compounded by neglect by state government, whose only genuine educational policy is social promotion.

Just as it’s enough for state government that children should reach 18 alive, it is enough for state government that children should finish their education with diplomas they didn’t earn. Poverty begins at home, with fatherlessness generated by welfare stipends, and then is perfected in school by social promotion. Abandonment of life’s crucial standards is comprehensive.

Meanwhile ever more proclamations, policies, and programs emanate from a government that is oblivious to its failure to accomplish more than its own expansion.

The most effective way for government to end poverty might be just to stop manufacturing it — to ensure that children have parents, to stop pretending they are learning when they’re not, and to start treating government as the means to an end, not the end in itself — the end, the purpose, being the child, the future.

The writer, philosopher, and Catholic polemicist G.K. Chesterton raged about similar obliviousness in government in Britain a century ago.

Chesterton wrote:

“With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization.

“Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free and leisured mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.

“That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s. No, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image. All around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.”

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

By Chris Powell

Maybe all those people who in the last year or so have given up on New York City and its inner suburbs and moved to Connecticut are not so good for the state after all.

While they have offset the decline in population that Connecticut long has been suffering relative to the rest of the country, they also have driven up the state’s housing prices and rents and have worsened its housing shortage. People who own their homes may be glad of their unrealized capital gains, but these gains come at huge expense to people who don’t own their homes.

Average rents across the country are estimated to have risen 14% to nearly $1,900 a month last year, which should shock the many homeowners who can remember paying rents less than $500 when they were young. Of course housing price inflation has come amid enormous price increases in all other necessities, including food, energy, and medicine. Altogether lately inflation is running well above 10%, double the federal government’s deceitful official figure.

This is what happens when the government hobbles the economy with ineffective epidemic restrictions and then pays people not to work, whereupon production of goods and services declines and prices rise still more. Inflation has far overtaken wage gains for ordinary people while enriching the already wealthy — the owners of real estate and stocks, which soar with inflation.

Even three years ago, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, a quarter of renters in the United States were paying more than half their income for housing. That burden for renters is surely far heavier now.

The virus epidemic and government’s mistaken responses to it are the first cause of the worsening madness and despair in society — the crime, drug abuse, and general hatefulness. But when it consumes half or more of people’s income, the price of housing is a big part of what brings them to the end of their rope.

Since most people in Connecticut have adequate housing — housing they can afford and even achieve capital gains from — the state is largely indifferent politically to the harm done by rising housing prices. A housing scandal in Danbury is receiving little attention outside the city, whose Zoning Commission is refusing to let a social-service organization, Pacific House, continue to operate a shelter for the homeless in a former motel building.

Pacific House would like to turn the building into what is called “supportive housing” — housing that includes medical and rehabilitative services facilitating recovery for residents. But the commission wants none of it. The commission is ready to push these troubled people back out on the street — in the winter, no less.

State government purchased the former motel for Pacific House’s use, and without zoning approval the shelter is able to operate only because of one of Governor Lamont’s emergency orders. Those orders are to expire in a week.

The General Assembly should extend the one applying to the Danbury shelter and demand some humanity from the city’s Zoning Commission and the shelter’s neighbors, who haven’t been any more inconvenienced by the shelter than they were when the building was operated as a motel.

The cornerstone of the campaign of the likely Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, is an effort to make Connecticut more affordable. That objective will resonate widely.

But most Republicans, who ordinarily celebrate property rights and an “ownership society,” and most Democrats, who ordinarily pose as friends of the poor and struggling, are not enthusiastic about housing construction, at least not outside the already densely populated cities. No one wants more neighbors.

Even in the cities themselves, few people want greater population density and more facilities to help the troubled. Lately hundreds of New Haven residents have mobilized to block an addiction treatment clinic in their neighborhood, though the city is full of people needing such treatment — as are the suburbs.

Connecticut’s state motto sometimes seems to be “Not in my back yard.” But shunning problems doesn’t solve them. It worsens them and makes them more expensive. More housing could make the state less expensive.

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s best investigative journalism so far this year was probably the Jan. 2 report by the Connecticut Mirror’s Andrew Brown and Kasturi Pananjady about the lovely little racket state government has been running with its unclaimed property program. The program, the Mirror reported, collected $2.3 billion in the public’s lost assets over the last 20 years but had returned to its rightful owners only 37% of the money, in large part because the program, as operated by state Treasurer Shawn Wooden, wasn’t looking very hard for the owners.

Indeed, the treasurer was doing more to advertise himself — inducing a government contractor to place him in television commercials for the state’s college savings program — than he was doing to advertise the unclaimed property. The Mirror reported that unclaimed property items worth $50 or less, totaling more than $40 million, weren’t even being included on the internet list maintained by the treasurer. So the Mirror itself created a complete list and posted it.

The Mirror also reported that much of the money confiscated by the treasurer’s office was diverted to state government’s program of public financing for political campaigns, like the treasurer’s own. No wonder Wooden and state legislators saw no urgency in fixing the program.

Wooden hid when the Mirror reporters were investigating his malfeasance. Instead he assigned assistants to make his excuses. Among other things, Wooden’s aides said state law actually prohibited the treasurer from advertising the unclaimed properties worth $50 or less.

And when the Mirror’s story was published around the state and cited in this column, the treasurer again hid, instead assigning aides to write rebuttals calling the Mirror report and this column’s commentary a bunch of lies.

It turns out that the lies were Wooden’s own. Last week the treasurer came out in public at last to announce improvements to the unclaimed property program. Now the smaller properties will be included in the treasurer’s internet list, because state law really does not prohibit their listing, as Wooden’s aides originally said.

Additionally, claims for return of lost property no longer will have to be notarized, and claims for payment of less than $2,500 will be expedited.

Of course this doesn’t mean that Wooden won’t still exploit his office by having the state contractor advertise him in the college savings program’s TV commercials. This being an election year, maybe Wooden will have his office put him in commercials for the unclaimed property program too.

The treasurer isn’t the only high official in Connecticut recently caught taking personal advantage of his office.

Last week it was reported that U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, has been using her campaign fund to employ her son and daughter, her son getting more than $15,000 and her daughter more than $21,000 over the last three years.

The payments have been reported and legal, and Hayes isn’t the first member of Congress to do something like this. Nevertheless in Hayes’ case it looks like nepotism and it probably is, since it’s unlikely that the talents of her children are so extraordinary that no one could replace them in her campaign. Hiring one child would be questionable; hiring two is exploitation.

This is not the example that might be expected of a former national teacher of the year. While it’s not a matter of national security, it suggests that Hayes quickly has gotten too comfortable as a member of the political establishment.

Meanwhile Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo Jr. is being investigated for hiring, as an executive assistant at salary of about $100,000, the daughter of the deputy state budget director, Kostantinos Diamantis, while the chief state’s attorney was seeking budget office approval of raises for state prosecutors.

There was no search for other applicants for the executive assistant’s position, and the woman seems to have had no special qualifications for the job other than her father’s supervision over the raises Colangelo sought. Diamantis was fired when the scandal broke.

In response to the scandal, Governor Lamont says he wants his high appointees to undergo an ethics training seminar, though the Wooden, Hayes, and Colangelo cases might already constitute an ethics seminar in themselves.

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

By Chris Powell

For most of the last 70 years in the United States, ever since the Red Scare of the 1950s, the Republican Party has been the party of repression — more intolerant of political dissent, more inclined to censor, and more eager to use government to ruin livelihoods.

Of course the Democratic Party hasn’t always been faithful to civil liberties. Southern Democratic administrations enforced racial segregation. Two Democratic national administrations put Martin Luther King under FBI surveillance and one also spied on Vietnam war protesters. But on the whole the Democrats moved past those things.

Not anymore. Amid the virus epidemic and the growth of political correctness and the “cancel culture,” coercion of individuals now is almost entirely a phenomenon of the Democratic national administration, Democratic state administrations, and Democratic polemicists. Never before has the old joke been more accurate: that Democrats don’t care what you do as long as it’s mandatory.

The polling company Rasmussen Reports may not be the best in the country but it is generally taken seriously by leaders in both parties, and a poll it did last month on government policy toward the epidemic may be hard to dispute on the basis of published and broadcast news and commentary.

According to the Rasmussen poll:

— 55% of Democrats favor authorizing the government to fine people who do not accept COVID-19 vaccination, while only 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliated voters do.

— 59% of Democrats favor authorizing the government to confine to their homes people who refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccination. Republicans oppose that idea by 79% and unaffiliated voters by 71%.

— Worse, 48% of Democrats favor letting government fine or even imprison people who publicly question the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. Only 27% of all voters — just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliateds — favor making such criticism a crime.

— 45% of Democrats favor authorizing government to force people to live in “designated facilities or locations” if they refuse vaccination. This concentration camp idea is opposed by 71% of all voters, including 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliateds.

— 47% of Democrats favor having the government electronically track unvaccinated people. This is opposed by 66% of all poll respondents.

— 29% of Democrats favor taking children away from parents who refuse to be vaccinated, more than twice the level of support found in the rest of the population.

Of course especially when Donald Trump is around polls show that many Republicans also express belief in nutty things. But as reckless and repugnant as Trump could be as president, he was never a serious threat to civil liberty.

Despite the huge support among Democrats for more coercive policies amid the epidemic, Democratic governors, including Connecticut’s Ned Lamont, lately have been retreating from coercion, either because those policies seem to cause more damage than they prevent or because the governors realize that people are getting tired of coercion on the eve of election campaigns.

Nevertheless, with repression and coercion finding such support among Democrats — not just in regard to the epidemic but in regard to dissent generally — people who want to preserve civil liberty may want to test all Democratic candidates, up and down the party’s ticket, about the potential policies itemized in the Rasmussen poll, just as people might want to question Republican candidates about the return of Trump.

Meanwhile complaints from parents about public school curriculums and books stocked by school libraries are being called censorship. They’re not.

While the “cancel culture” seeks to drive dissenters out of all forums, complaints about school curriculums and libraries involve only what government chooses to teach or recommend to students. Even if the material being challenged in schools is removed, it will remain available elsewhere.

If a school is to be public, it must answer to the public for what it teaches and recommends, and school boards, superintendents, teachers, and librarians can’t be the last word about that. What is taught and recommended by public schools is ultimately for the public to decide.

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

Shall I join with other nations in alliance?

If allies are weak, am I not best alone?

If allies are strong with power to protect me,

Might they not protect me out of all I own?

— “A Puzzlement” from “The King and I,” Rodgers and Hammerstein.

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By CHRIS POWELL

Regarding foreign policy, Theodore Roosevelt famously advised: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” But in regard to Ukraine, President Biden embodies saber rattling. He warns repeatedly that Russia is sure to attack soon and makes a show of sending to eastern Europe what are only nominal forces, nothing that would much delay a Russian invasion.

Despite the saber rattling, everyone knows that the United States is not going to fight Russia militarily on Russia’s own border. Since conventional land forces are lacking in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, military resistance to a Russian invasion of Ukraine could be effective only with nuclear weapons, which would risk a world war — and for what?

The United States and NATO have no security interest in Ukraine and Russia’s other former satellite states, and those states, even the ones lately admitted to NATO, bring nothing to the alliance but liabilities. They aspire to be only trip wires compelling U.S. military intervention.

So in response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States will attempt only more economic sanctions, and even those may not be supported by other NATO allies, Germany foremost among them. Those allies know that Russia would have enough trouble just reincorporating Ukraine amid resistance from most Ukrainians — and those allies are desperately short of energy in the middle of winter, crippled by their stupid “green” policies, and probably won’t be able to get by without Russian natural gas for many years.

Meanwhile the United States is crippling its own energy industry.

That’s why the United States has nothing to lose by accepting Russia’s simple demand about Ukraine — to stop the eastward expansion of NATO and its placement of offensive weapons, potentially nuclear weapons, on Russia’s border.

Of course the United States made a similar demand of Russia — then the Soviet Union — in regard to Cuba in 1962, and, for nearly 200 years, via the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has claimed the right to repel foreign intervention in all the Americas.

Since the United States is not going to fight for Ukraine, it would give up nothing to get Russia’s promise to leave Ukraine alone as long as it stayed out of NATO. Of course the Russian regime is brutal and not particularly trustworthy, but having made such a deal, Russia would risk much by breaking it — not just sanctions but exposure of the true nature of its regime. Then even Germany might start to worry about relying on Russia so much.

In any case the European Union, home of many NATO members, is beginning to crack up under the weight of bureaucracy, political correctness, uncontrolled immigration, and nationalism. Every day NATO members in Europe are less inclined and able to defend themselves, much less the United States, while the United States remains obliged to defend them.

So it may be time for the United States to face the musical question:

“If allies are weak, am I not best alone?”

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THEY JUST WANT MONEY: State government, the Connecticut Mirror notes, has vastly expanded gambling in the state via sports betting and casino games on the internet and is tracking its new revenue closely without also tracking the increase in gambling addiction and without increasing gambling addiction services.

That’s sad in one way but in another it’s useful. For it proclaims state government’s highest priority is only to get more money by any means.

State government constantly prattles about the poor and sometimes appropriates money to be paid to them directly. Governor Lamont and other top Democrats now want to increase the state’s earned income tax credit for the poor. But making the poor more self-sufficient is something else.

No government that really wanted to help the poor and raise them to self-sufficiency would be hurling a lot more gambling at them on top of state-sponsored marijuana.

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