Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That makes the offense sound like terrorism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?

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

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

By Chris Powell

Fall out of bed and kill yourself in Connecticut and your state legislators well may introduce legislation memorializing you by purporting to do something about the manner of your demise.These laws have little actual impact; mainly they aim to console the families of the victims. So Connecticut recently has enacted laws purporting to prevent “coercive” conduct by murderously bitter divorce litigants, reckless walking and driving around ice cream trucks, and kids playing with guns.

Meanwhile murders, shootings, and other crimes have been exploding in Connecticut’s cities as the social disintegration there worsens.

So, New Britain legislators, how about a memorializing law that might actually do something important? You could call it “Henryk’s Law.”

Henryk Gudelski was the New Britain man killed last month as he was struck by a stolen car said to have been driven by a 17-year-old with a long criminal record who nevertheless had been freed by the juvenile justice system, one of the many young chronic offenders Connecticut won’t punish.

Henryk’s Law would end secrecy in juvenile court, thus exacting accountability from court officers and offenders alike, and imprison chronic offenders of any age who meet a standard of incorrigibility — if not a “three strikes” law, then a 10- or 20-strikes law.

State legislators, if not yet Governor Lamont, seem embarrassed by the New Britain atrocity, but the concern of Democratic leaders in the General Assembly is mainly about how to distract from the problem.

Last week House Speaker Matt Ritter pretended the problem is that juvenile court judges called to arraign young defendants at night don’t have access to their criminal records. But such access would only facilitate a few more hours of temporary detention prior to adjudication of a juvenile’s case. It would have no bearing on a sentence.

Ritter said he found this lack of access “shocking,” as if he has been unaware of the historic secrecy of juvenile court. That secrecy may conceal a few other shocking things if the speaker ever dares to look.

Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney said Republican legislators are using the New Britain atrocity only to “score political points in an effort to push failed, excessively punitive policies from the ’80s and ’90s.”

In fact the Republicans haven’t proposed anything “excessively punitive.” Their ideas are tentative and timid.

Looney continued: “Republicans lost all credibility on public safety when they were silent on the U.S. Capitol insurrection, refused to fund proven urban gun violence prevention programs, and sought to defund or underfund many critical urban aid programs. Law and order is an issue for Republicans only when they can target the urban youth of our state but not when their political base tries to overthrow our democracy and kills a U.S. Capitol police officer.”

OK, Republicans are awful, but Looney’s demagoguery doesn’t address the atrocity in New Britain.

As for those “excessively punitive policies from the ’80s and’90s,” Henryk Gudelski’s survivors might not find an incorrigibility law so excessive.

Instead of distracting from the failing juvenile justice system, legislators more conscientious and less demagogic, ideological, and partisan than Looney might consider the experience recounted last week by New Britain’s police chief, Christopher W. Chute.

The chief said nine juveniles are “the worst offenders” in his city, having been arrested an average of 18 times between the ages of 12 and 17. One has been arrested 25 times on charges including assault on a police officer and evading responsibility. Another has been arrested 40 times since age 12 on charges including assaulting officers, armed robbery, burglary, and car theft.

Connecticut, Chief Chute noted, tells juvenile offenders “there are no consequences for your actions.” He added: “Most of these problems started a decade ago when the juvenile age was raised from 16 to 18.”

Indeed, two years ago Senator Looney and the General Assembly’s Democratic majority enacted a law imposing secrecy even on the trials of juveniles and young adults charged with rape and murder. Fortunately the federal courts found the law unconstitutional, but it remains a monument to the Democratic objective with juvenile justice: to conceal the expensive and even deadly failure of their policies.

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

By Chris Powell

Enrollment at Connecticut’s community colleges has been collapsing, probably because the state’s economy is weak and most students being admitted are unprepared for higher education, having never mastered high school work but having been promoted anyway. So what are the colleges doing?

The Connecticut Examiner says that instead of cutting staff, the colleges are hiring 174 advisers to help boost enrollment and student performance.

This isn’t to benefit students as much as the colleges themselves — to preserve their jobs when the billions of dollars in emergency money from the federal government runs out and state government has more incentive to notice that the colleges are consuming a lot more than they’re producing.

The bigger danger to the colleges is that when the federal money runs out someone in state government will notice as well that Connecticut’s education problem is not higher education at all but [ITALICS] lower [END ITALICS] education — that social promotion in elementary, middle, and high school is leaving many if not most graduates unqualified for higher education and, indeed, unqualified for more than menial work, and that more spending does not produce more education generally.

Connecticut doesn’t need more college students. It needs more high school grads who deserve diplomas.

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SECRECY FUELS FAILURE: Another expensive mistaken premise of government in Connecticut that needs to be questioned urgently is the secrecy of juvenile court. Even some Democratic state legislators seem to be nervous about the atrocity in New Britain June 29, when a jogger was struck and killed by a stolen car said to have been driven by a 17-year-old who already had a long and serious criminal record but was free anyway.

The premise for secrecy in juvenile court is that young people should not suffer any stigma for their criminal misconduct. Unfortunately young criminals now see that this means that society has lost the self-respect to punish them for anything they do, especially car theft for joyriding — hence the explosion of that crime lately.

In addition to encouraging juvenile crime, this mistaken premise prevents any accountability in the juvenile justice system. For example, in the New Britain atrocity, while police itemized the 13 offenses with which the defendant already had been charged in the last four years, journalism and the public are unable to examine the details of those cases and how they were handled by prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, and social workers.

Who failed to lock up a chronic offender? Who failed to rehabilitate him? Such knowledge is prohibited.

This secrecy doesn’t serve the public. Since there are now so many repeat juvenile offenders, on top of so many repeat adult offenders, the whole juvenile justice system is failing, providing neither deterrence or rehabilitation, so the secrecy isn’t serving even the young offenders it is supposed to protect.

Instead secrecy here serves only the juvenile justice system’s employees and associates, insulating them from any accountability. They can’t be identified any more than the young offenders themselves.

But lately the Democratic Party’s position on juvenile crime in Connecticut has been to increase secrecy. The Democratic majority in the General Assembly and Governor Lamont enacted a law to impose secrecy even on trials for juveniles and young adults charged with rape and murder. Fortunately the law was quickly ruled unconstitutional by federal courts.

Connecticut Democrats are devoted to maximizing government’s scope and employment, and the failure of the juvenile justice system exposes their objective: for every child to have his own special-education teacher, therapist, social worker, police officer, and probation officer — but no parents.

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SCHOOL POWER LIMITED: At least the U.S. Supreme Court reduced the scope of government the other day. The court ruled that a public school in Pennsylvania did not have the authority to punish a student for vulgar speech outside school — that her First Amendment rights prevail outside school, even if she insults her school itself.

Of course this doesn’t make the student a nice person or justify the tirade for which she was punished. It just confines a school’s authority to a student’s conduct in school. Police and parents — for those kids who have any — can take it from there.

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

By Chris Powell

Enrollment at Connecticut’s community colleges has been collapsing, probably because the state’s economy is weak and most students being admitted are unprepared for higher education, having never mastered high school work but having been promoted anyway. So what are the colleges doing?

The Connecticut Examiner says that instead of cutting staff, the colleges are hiring 174 advisers to help boost enrollment and student performance.

This isn’t to benefit students as much as the colleges themselves — to preserve their jobs when the billions of dollars in emergency money from the federal government runs out and state government has more incentive to notice that the colleges are consuming a lot more than they’re producing.

The bigger danger to the colleges is that when the federal money runs out someone in state government will notice as well that Connecticut’s education problem is not higher education at all but lower education — that social promotion in elementary, middle, and high school is leaving many if not most graduates unqualified for higher education and, indeed, unqualified for more than menial work, and that more spending does not produce more education generally.

Connecticut doesn’t need more college students. It needs more high school grads who deserve diplomas.

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SECRECY FUELS FAILURE: Another expensive mistaken premise of government in Connecticut that needs to be questioned urgently is the secrecy of juvenile court. Even some Democratic state legislators seem to be nervous about the atrocity in New Britain June 29, when a jogger was struck and killed by a stolen car said to have been driven by a 17-year-old who already had a long and serious criminal record but was free anyway.

The premise for secrecy in juvenile court is that young people should not suffer any stigma for their criminal misconduct. Unfortunately young criminals now see that this means that society has lost the self-respect to punish them for anything they do, especially car theft for joyriding — hence the explosion of that crime lately.

In addition to encouraging juvenile crime, this mistaken premise prevents any accountability in the juvenile justice system. For example, in the New Britain atrocity, while police itemized the 13 offenses with which the defendant already had been charged in the last four years, journalism and the public are unable to examine the details of those cases and how they were handled by prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, and social workers.

Who failed to lock up a chronic offender? Who failed to rehabilitate him? Such knowledge is prohibited.

This secrecy doesn’t serve the public. Since there are now so many repeat juvenile offenders, on top of so many repeat adult offenders, the whole juvenile justice system is failing, providing neither deterrence nor rehabilitation, so the secrecy isn’t serving even the young offenders it is supposed to protect.

Instead secrecy here serves only the juvenile justice system’s employees and associates, insulating them from any accountability. They can’t be identified any more than the young offenders themselves.

But lately the Democratic Party’s position on juvenile crime in Connecticut has been to increase secrecy. The Democratic majority in the General Assembly and Governor Lamont enacted a law to impose secrecy even on trials for juveniles and young adults charged with rape and murder. Fortunately the law was quickly ruled unconstitutional by federal courts.

Connecticut Democrats are devoted to maximizing government’s scope and employment, and the failure of the juvenile justice system exposes their objective: for every child to have his own special-education teacher, therapist, social worker, police officer, and probation officer — but no parents.

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SCHOOL POWER LIMITED: At least the U.S. Supreme Court reduced the scope of government the other day. The court ruled that a public school in Pennsylvania did not have the authority to punish a student for vulgar speech outside school — that her First Amendment rights prevail outside school, even if she insults her school itself.

Of course this doesn’t make the student a nice person or justify the tirade for which she was punished. It just confines a school’s authority to a student’s conduct in school. Police and parents — for those kids who have any — can take it from there.

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

By Chris Powell

Suffield has opted out of what First Selectwoman Melissa Mack calls the “flag wars,” which are being fought over attempts to use government flagpoles for proselytizing or propaganda by non-government groups.

The town’s Board of Selectmen voted 3-1 last month to reserve town government flagpoles for government’s own flags, denying a request to fly the “rainbow” or “pride” flag celebrating sexual minorities. The board felt that everyone is welcome in Suffield but realized that flying non-government flags would require the board to endorse or reject particular groups, to play favorites, and thus risk unnecessary controversy.

Of course the meaning of non-government flags isn’t always clear.

Does the “pride” flag mean only “live and let live,” or does it also mean that men who identify as women should be able to use women’s rest rooms and participate in women’s athletic competitions?

Does the Black Lives Matter flag mean equal rights and respect for Black people, or does it also mean “defunding” or even eliminating the police?

Does the peace sign flag mean ending stupid imperial wars, or does it mean unilateral disarmament as well?

Of course the country could argue forever about the positions expressed or implied by such flags. Better to reserve government flagpoles for flags that represent a whole town, a whole state, or the whole country, and let the interest groups proselytize and propagandize elsewhere.

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FALSE PRIDE: While people should not have to conceal their sexual orientation, and while the law long has conferred sexual freedom on everyone, it is a little strange that sexual orientation should be claimed as a source of “pride.” Something that, like sexual orientation, is natural and inherent or a mere personal preference is hardly earned or an achievement. While even now acknowledging one’s sexual orientation may take some courage, if not as much in Connecticut and other socially liberal states anymore, courage and pride are different things.

Dictionaries define pride as “inordinate self-esteem.” Informally the word is often used just to signify something that people are glad about or satisfied with, but in biblical terms pride is plainly to be avoided, since Proverbs says it “goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Given the disparagement and persecution suffered by sexual minorities in the past, it may be understandable for some of them now to want to strut or thumb their nose in society’s face, though society hardly cares about people’s sex lives, except for celebrities.

Since most people today have bigger concerns, the more they hear about “pride” in sexual orientation, the more they may be reminded that what was, in the last century, “the love that dares not speak its name,” cannot, in this century, shut up.

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COLLEGE POLITICS: Manchester Community College is producing trivial infighting worthy of the snootiest Ivy League university.

Last month the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system was about to fire MCC’s chief executive in secret, without giving a reason. So she hired lawyers to go public with objections and mobilized her supporters to praise her, whereupon the firing was stalled. Even so, the college system’s spokeswoman refused to explain what was going on, saying it was a “personnel matter” — the stupidest non-sequitur in government, since nearly everything in government is a personnel matter and no law forbids explaining. The “personnel matter” dodge is a proclamation of unaccountability.

Then the college system issued a report saying MCC is wracked by racial tension. But the report could cite little more than supposed “microaggressions” against minority employees and the open questioning by colleagues of the credentials of two Black women being promoted. So even in this age of “affirmative action” — racial preferences that inevitably impugn hiring and promotions — questioning the credentials of Black government employees is apparently unconstitutional, or at least a hate crime.

It all evokes the wry reflection by the Pulitizer Prize-winning historian, author, and Trinity College English professor Odell Shepard, who served a term as Connecticut’s lieutenant governor in the 1940s. Shepard said he had seen politics at the state Capitol and politics in the academy, and politics in the academy was far more cutthroat.

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

By Chris Powell

.So much in government in Connecticut is euphemism. Political patronage is called “equity” and “social justice.” Increasing the compensation of teachers is “aid to education.” Raising gasoline taxes is a “climate initiative.”

And now the new state budget, at the instigation of the House chairman of the General Assembly’s finance committee, Rep. Sean Scanlon, D-Guilford, is directing the Lamont administration to undertake another study of how “fair” Connecticut’s tax system is.

“Fair” is almost sure to be defined again as something that raises more money for state government. That is the only possible purpose for such a study, since the basics of tax incidence — which groups pay how much — long have been clearly established.

But contrary to the assumption made for the new study, the definition of fairness in taxation is highly arguable.

Lower-income people pay a higher percentage of their income in state and municipal taxes than higher-income people do. But this calculation omits federal taxes, where people with higher wages pay far higher percentages. (Investment income is something else.)

State sales and gas taxes and municipal property taxes can be construed as regressive — more burdensome for lower-income people — insofar as their rates are the same for everybody. But these taxes also can be construed as progressive, with wealthier people paying more than poorer people despite identical tax rates, since wealthier people buy more stuff, have larger homes and more expensive cars, and drive more for travel and pleasure.

Additionally, tax incidence studies don’t always take into account government benefits for lower-income people, like subsidies for medical insurance, housing, food, and child care.

Apart from percentages of income paid in taxes, in simple dollar terms higher-income people pay far more in state and local taxes than poor people do, and they use far less in government services. That’s why Connecticut’s cities are so eager to export their poor.

And while burdening the poor with taxes is easily portrayed as unfair, the less people pay in taxes and the more they receive in government services, the less they feel the burden of government and the less responsibility they take for it. No amount of waste, fraud, and ineffectiveness in government ever bothers advocates of higher taxes like Connecticut Voices for Children or the government employee unions.

Indeed, such advocates are never bothered even by the manifest failure of major government enterprises to accomplish their nominal objectives. Spending in the name of education increases as student enrollment and performance decline. Spending in the name of social welfare increases as poverty and dependence worsen. Spending in the name of rehabilitating the cities increases as living conditions there deteriorate.

So whatever fairness is, what is fair about claiming more revenue for state and municipal government when there are never audits of the performance of its most expensive undertakings, since audits would expose failure?

Yes, the federal tax code is full of provisions that diminish the progressivity of the federal income tax, especially now that the government is propping up the stock market. But ironically, liberal Democrats in Connecticut and other high-tax states want to repeal the big progressive change made to the federal tax code by the recent Republican majorities in Congress: the $10,000 cap on state and municipal tax deductions from the federal income tax.

It’s the federal tax system, not the state and municipal tax system, that needs more progressivity. With a weak economy and taxpayers leaving, Connecticut needs tax restraint, especially since “fair” in taxation here is just a euphemism for “more.”

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BRADLEY’S ‘SUBSIDY’: Last month this column asserted that Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks is “subsidized” by state government. This might have misled.

The airport is a state government operation, run by the Connecticut Airport Authority, but it does not bill state government for its costs. Rather, the authority finances Bradley’s operations from its own revenue streams, including airline landing fees, parking charges, and commercial rents. The authority’s general-aviation airports are also supported by aviation fuel taxes, which state and federal regulations require to be used for the state’s aviation system.

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