Don’t turn state pension money into a political slush fund

By CHRIS POWELL

Despite some recent improvement, Connecticut’s state employee and teacher pension accounts are still underfunded by billions of dollars. Yet Governor Lamont wants to start using them as political slush funds.

Connecticut Democrats divert more public money to patronage

Yale has become too big for its property tax break

Awful Trump is right on crime but Connecticut is indifferent

The governor’s idea is to have the pension funds buy a stake in the Mohegan tribe’s Connecticut Sun women’s basketball team in the Women’s National Basketball Association as a means of gaining leverage to keep the team in Connecticut, and then moving the team from the Mohegan reservation in Montville to Hartford. The tribe is deep in debt and wants to sell the team to an investor group that would move it to Boston, giving the tribe a capital gain of more than $300 million. But the league apparently disapproves and wants to move the team to Houston instead.

Thanks to decades of heroic work at the University of Connecticut, women’s basketball is extremely popular in Connecticut. The Sun has a strong fan base in the eastern part of the state but nothing like the UConn team’s fan base throughout the whole state. Putting the Sun in Hartford and having it play at the People’s Bank Arena — where the UConn women play more games than they play at Gampel Pavilion on campus, since the Hartford arena has 60% more seats — would pose financial risks to both teams, making them direct competitors. 

The Sun’s value in a sale probably would diminish substantially if the team was headed for a small market like Hartford. Besides, the Mohegan tribe wouldn’t be offering the team for sale if its financial prospects would be greater in Hartford, since the tribe could afford to move the team to Hartford itself.

Investment involves risk, but the risk in state government’s investing in a WNBA team to facilitate its move to Hartford is far greater than the risk of many investments, and state government’s pension funds are in huge deficit relative to their obligations. Until the funds are in comfortable surplus, they should be investing only for investment profitability and security, not the politics of pleasing certain sports fans.

If it wants to buy a stake in the Sun, state government should do it with regular money, like the wonderful “budget surplus” state government pretends to have, though the surplus is really just money that has been produced only by the decades-long cheating on the pension funds. 

If they decide to buy a stake in a basketball team when Connecticut already has two state-owned basketball teams with national standing, the governor and state legislators should take clear responsibility, explaining why the state needs part ownership of a third team more than it needs, for example, better medical care for the poor, adequate “special education” for troubled children, and more housing.

Whether they make it explicit or not, the governor and legislators will also be proclaiming a terrible precedent — that the pension funds are now political slush funds.

INSURRECTIONIST DEMOCRATS: The people who keep claiming that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state” and is not obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law now want to block federal immigration agents from making arrests in state courthouses.

The request was directed last week to state Chief Justice Raheem Mullins by state Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, and 19 other Democratic senators.

How exactly would the chief justice block the federal agents? Would he instruct judicial marshals to tackle them at the metal detectors and shoot them if they get through? Would he try to get a federal court order to exclude the agents? 

It’s not clear. The Democratic senators just want him to do something — something the senators themselves have failed to do: enact legislation barring federal agents from state courthouses.

Since federal law is superior to state law, a state law blocking federal agents from state courthouses would be brazenly unconstitutional nullification. Essentially the Democratic senators have told the chief justice: “Let’s you and them fight.” But at least the senators now have come into the open as insurrectionists.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

By raising minimum wage, Connecticut admits failure

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo last week announced gleefully that Connecticut’s minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 by 3.6%, from $16.35 to $16.94 per hour, being tied by state law to the federal employment cost index. The justifications they offered were not persuasive. Indeed, they were based on false premises.

Connecticut Democrats divert more public money to patronage

Yale has become too big for its property tax break

Awful Trump is right on crime but Connecticut is indifferent

“Nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty,” the governor said, as if working full-time necessarily has some connection to the monetary value of the work. All honest work may be honorable, but menial work — work that can be done by anyone — is not worth $16.94 per hour if someone can be found to do it for less. The minimum wage is government’s idea of what menial work should be worth in an ideal world, an aspiration — well-meaning in some cases, perhaps, but mostly just government’s striking a pose about its own goodness.

The governor’s statement about not living in poverty is just liberal blather, especially in Connecticut, as the governor should know well. That $16.94 per hour is $654 per week, even as social-work and economic research groups long have calculated that to live decently in Connecticut a single person needs an income of at least three times as much. 

The governor’s economic principle about the minimum wage is no more meaningful than everyone else’s principle that it shouldn’t rain on weekends.

Despite the minimum wage increase, tens of thousands of people in Connecticut will keep working for pay well above minimum wage while still living in or on the edge of poverty. Part of it will be their own fault, their living beyond their means, and part of it the government’s. 

Lt. Gov. Bysiewicz did no better. “The minimum wage,” she said, “was established to provide a fair, livable baseline of income for those who work.” The lieutenant governor’s pay, about $190,000 a year, is 5½ times more than Connecticut’s new full-time minimum wage salary, $34,000. If she ever did the numbers seriously, how fair and livable would minimum wage sound to her?

Bysiewicz added, “This is a fair, gradual increase for workers that ensures that as the economy grows, our minimum wage grows with it — and that’s good for everyone.”

Except that the economy really isn’t growing much at all. What’s growing is mainly inflation, the devaluation of the money workers earn.

At least Commissioner Bartolomeo approached this point. Raising the minimum wage, she said, “helps protect the most vulnerable earners from inflation and cost increases, and helps keep wage gaps from widening.”

Hardly. Inflation long has been underreported by the federal government, with price criteria frequently revised in the hope that people wouldn’t believe the evidence of their own lives, the decline in their standard of living. Most of those voting in the last election seem to have stopped believing official inflation data. And even liberals in Connecticut acknowledge that the wage gap keeps widening.

The minimum wage was never meant to be fully supportive for a single person. It functioned as a standard of entry-level pay for the unskilled, especially teenagers, so people wouldn’t be too demoralized by their first jobs and would strive to gain skills and advance. 

Today in Connecticut the need for a minimum wage increase is mainly political — to camouflage the declining skill level of much of the workforce, the fatherless urban underclass — the increasing numbers of young people who attend schools without standards and graduate uneducated but who, it is hoped, remain full of self-esteem.

Connecticut has tens of thousands of job openings — for skilled workers — in manufacturing, nursing, teaching, and other fields, jobs that pay far above minimum wage, for which enough qualified applicants can’t be found.

Raising the minimum wage is actually a proclamation that Connecticut has given up on a skilled workforce, a proclamation that the jobs of the state’s future will be at the fast-food window — until the robots take over.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Connecticut Democrats divert more public money to patronage

By CHRIS POWELL

Before complaining that state government doesn’t spend enough money on basics like medical care, education, transportation, environmental protection, and such, people should take note of recent reports from the Connecticut Mirror and the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator. 

Yale has become too big for its property tax break

Awful Trump is right on crime but Connecticut is indifferent

Newington raid shows Democrats want no immigration enforcement

The reports found that state government is spending ever-increasing amounts of money on what is just political patronage — appropriations made not for any broad policy purposes but for helping the most influential state legislators of the majority party, the Democrats, to pose as heroes to constituents.

The Mirror report blames the trend on the federal government’s American Rescue Plan Act, which flooded states and municipalities with billions of dollars, nominally to offset the economic and tax revenue losses of the virus epidemic of 2020-23. But the act allowed states and municipalities great discretion in spending the money, and so the money did much more than offset specific losses. For the most part it became free money from Washington for whatever states and municipalities wanted to do with it.

Connecticut state legislators loved it, and the state budget they adopted in 2023 authorized the state Economic and Community Development Department to do something similar: to award almost $18 million in unspecified grants — still more seemingly free money. The most recent state budget appropriated raised the amount to almost $39 million.

Democratic legislators worked with the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont, also a Democrat, to assign the money to their pet causes, outside the normal appropriations process. Now suspicion surrounds the grossly disproportionate amounts that have been directed to nominally nonprofit enterprises controlled by a close friend of state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Bloomfield. A federal grand jury is investigating.    

The Mirror reports that the economic and community development grants are now going to more than 120 organizations, none of which had to submit applications. “The only requirement,” the Mirror says, “is to know a lawmaker on good terms with the House and Senate Democratic leaders or their top aides.”

Meanwhile Connecticut Inside Investigator reports that the nominally nonprofit Hartford Economic Development Corp. has made millions of dollars in loans backed by state government to small businesses that have failed to repay, including second loans to businesses that were in default on their first. Some of the money ended up with enterprises operated by Senator McCrory’s friend.

Has any of this patronage money made a substantial difference in the health and prosperity of the communities where it was spent, or has it benefited mainly the people receiving the money and the legislators who arranged the grants and got political gratitude for them?

There is little if any auditing of what taxpayers get for these grants, and since no official applications have been required for many of them — since it has been enough that individual legislators advocate them — they can be assumed to be political payoffs if not corrupt. 

Really, why should state government finance a legislator’s connection with influential constituents rather than provide adequate funding in basic policy — funding for, say, Medicaid insurance for the poor or “special education” for the many neglected and disadvantaged children of Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport who are failing in school?

Political liberals in Connecticut might ask questions like that if their liberalism isn’t just a pious pose. 

NOT ENOUGH POLICING: Governor Lamont and other Connecticut Democrats are criticizing President Trump for wanting to send the National Guard to police Chicago and Baltimore as he now has guardsmen policing Washington. While Trump, as usual, is trying to stretch his authority and strike his own pose, Chicago and Baltimore indeed are the hell holes he calls them, overwhelmed by crime and depravity.

Last weekend there were dozens of shootings in Chicago, with eight people killed and 50 wounded. 

Who will deny that with their own daily violence and depravity, Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport could benefit from a lot more policing? New Haven just had five murders in two weeks. Criticizing Trump’s overreach with crime doesn’t excuse Connecticut’s indifferent underreach. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Yale has become too big for its property tax break

By CHRIS POWELL

If any news report in Connecticut this year should prompt an urgent response from state government, it’s the one published last week by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers about the burden of Yale University’s property tax exemption in New Haven.

Awful Trump is right on crime but Connecticut is indifferent

Newington raid shows Democrats want no immigration enforcement

Democrats keep pretending they aren’t obstructing ICE

It’s actually an old story but one that has never gotten proper attention from Connecticut governors and state legislators.

The essence of it is that most real estate in New Haven, being owned by nominally nonprofit entities, is exempt from municipal property taxes; that most of this exempt property is owned by Yale; and that the university, while being New Haven’s largest employer and the city’s main reason for being, is less of a boon than generally thought.

According to the Hearst report, the university’s taxable property in New Haven, property used mainly for commercial purposes, has total value of $173 million while its tax-exempt property, used mainly for educational purposes, is valued at around $4.4 billion.

Yale pays the city $5 million annually in taxes on its taxable properties and another $22 million or so in voluntary payments for its exempt properties, or about $27 million. But without its property tax exemption Yale would owe New Haven as much as $146 million more than the university pays now.

Of course there’s no denying Yale’s enormous economic contribution to New Haven and its suburbs. Without Yale, New Haven would be Bridgeport, whose reason for being, as long assumed by state government, is mainly to confine Fairfield County’s poverty. 

But Yale’s relationship with New Haven has gotten far beyond disproportionate. As a political force the university is bigger than the city and, it seems, since state government has not acted against that disproportion, bigger than the whole state.

It’s not that Yale can’t afford to pay more; it has an endowment of around $40 billion that even President Trump and the Republican majority in Congress have found the courage to begin taxing. 

Nine years ago the General Assembly considered legislation to limit the university’s tax exemption but did not act.

Yale has claimed that the charter it received from Connecticut’s colonial legislature in the 1700s gives the university permanent exemption from property taxes. But the charter and its revisions under state law during the next two centuries put limits on Yale’s tax exemption, the first limit being a mere 500 pounds sterling. The tax exemption was thought justified in large part because, in its early years, Yale was heavily subsidized by cash from state government and was a de-facto government institution. A remnant of this connection to state government is the continuing “ex-officio” membership of Connecticut’s governor and lieutenant governor on the university’s Board of Trustees.

Yale no longer gets a direct annual cash stipend from state government but its $146 million tax break is worth a lot more. That money is paid not just by New Haven’s residents through their property taxes and rents but by all state taxpayers as well, since New Haven city government is so heavily subsidized by state government. 

Even if the courts concluded that the university’s charter, as amended over the years, puts it beyond all property taxes on educational buildings, state government could coerce Yale by restricting the acreage it owns in the city, thereby forcing it to sell property and rent it back.

Would Yale leave Connecticut if, as was proposed nine years ago, state law limited university property tax exemptions to $2 billion per year, thereby raising Yale’s annual tax bill by $70 million or so? Yale’s huge endowment implies otherwise.

At least the new federal tax on large university endowments has not prompted the richest schools to start planning to leave the country. 

The additional property tax revenue paid by Yale could be divided equally between New Haven and state government, state government recovering its share by reducing its financial aid to the city. 

Of course those governments probably wouldn’t spend the windfall very well, but it’s the principle of the thing.      

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Awful Trump is right on crime but Connecticut is indifferent

By CHRIS POWELL

For the sake of argument, stipulate that President Trump, a Republican, never has good intentions, only demagogic ones, and has a political interest in exaggerating the problem of crime in the cities, most of which long have been mismanaged by Democrats.

Newington raid shows Democrats want no immigration enforcement

Democrats keep pretending they aren’t obstructing ICE

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But that political interest is no stronger than that of the Democrats in falsely minimizing urban crime. Indeed, crime data is almost as manipulated as economic data is by whoever is in power. The question now is whether the urban crime problem is bad enough to deserve the attention Trump has called to it by taking control of the District of Columbia police and deploying the National Guard to patrol the district.

In any case, crime in D.C. seems to be down sharply now that there are soldiers all over the place. Though the president may not have authority to put soldiers in other cities, many of them, like Chicago and Baltimore, could use similar treatment or else thousands more police officers on their streets and aggressive prosecution of the lesser crimes like shoplifting that are now condoned.

State government in Connecticut could hardly care less about crime. As long as the worst of it — the shootings, stabbings, and murders — is confined to the state’s cities, particularly Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, the poverty factories — it’s all considered normal and largely avoidable by the middle and upper classes, who can stick to the suburbs.

Presiding over a poverty factory, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker has an especially difficult job, since he feels obliged to express sympathy for victims and perpetrators alike while trying to persuade suburbanites that his city is still safe for them despite incidents like the two fatal shootings that occurred Aug. 25 next to the Yale University campus. Those murders unnerved students as the new college year began, reminding them that New Haven consists of two parallel and very different universes.

Responding to the murders, Mayor Elicker noted again that most criminal violence in New Haven involves people who know each other. That is, you’re perfectly safe in New Haven as long as you don’t know anyone there, or at least no one outside the Yale cocoon.

If you’re born into the underclass, born into a fatherless household, as so many children in the poverty factories are, state government would have you put your faith in ever more anti-poverty programs — free or heavily subsidized stuff, and in social promotion in school, during which you may feel better about yourself until you graduate from high school and find yourself qualified only for menial work or the dangerous trade in illegal drugs. (Connecticut’s purported legalization of marijuana has not eliminated that trade as was hoped.)

Of course that’s if you ever get to school and graduate in the first place. Chronic absenteeism is high in the poverty factories and was probably about to get higher in Bridgeport when the school board decided in April to save $4.6 million by eliminating bus service for 2,400 students, increasing by a half mile the distance students are obliged to walk to school.

The state Education Department, which has put Bridgeport schools under extra scrutiny because of their grotesque failure, intervened, locating extra money and apparently negotiating a better deal with the bus contractor than the school board made, allowing bus service to remain as it had been. But that won’t diminish chronic absenteeism. 

That problem, like most of the problems of the underclass in Connecticut, is mainly a matter of child neglect, a lack of parenting in households that can’t afford to take good care of their children or don’t try to. The less parenting, education, and job skills in society, the more policing will be needed. 

So awful as Trump may be, he is emphatically right about the cities, even if he doesn’t fully understand or care about why they got so bad, and his Democratic adversaries are not only wrong about the cities but the main perpetrators of their frightening decline.

——

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Newington raid shows Democrats want no immigration enforcement

By CHRIS POWELL

Nothing seems to upset Democrats in Connecticut more than arrests for illegal immigration. 

For years the Democrats were indifferent to millions of illegal entries into the country, figuring that while illegal immigrants might drive down wages for the less skilled and drive up the costs of housing, social services, and schools, at least illegal immigrants would concentrate in Democratic-leaning congressional districts, cause creation of more Democratic districts, and make the U.S. House of Representatives politically uncompetitive forever without the need for gerrymandering. 

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Immigration law enforcement policy under the last Democratic national administration was to overlook the gate crashers and merely to issue immigration court summonses to those caught entering the country illegally or claiming asylum, and then chuckle when the illegal entrants and asylum claimants just disappeared into the country and never showed up for their hearings.

The people whose party broke the immigration system now complain that it’s broken and that the exquisite due process of law they’d like to see with enforcement, full of distractions and appeals, is impossible if enforcement is to be even partially effective with 14 million people illegally residing in the country.

There are valid concerns about due process in many deportations. But Democrats in Connecticut aren’t really worried about due process. They would be opposed to deportations even with exquisite due process.

They made this plain with their screeching last weekend about the arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of seven employees at a car wash in Newington. 

A statement issued by Newington Mayor Jon Trister, state Sen. Matthew Lesser, state Rep. Gary Turco, and other Democratic officials said: “The recent actions of ICE are designed to intimidate and terrorize immigrants and their families, and we will not stand idly by. As community leaders, we stand united with Newington’s immigrant communities. Our town has been and will remain a place where families are welcome and where neighbors look out for one another.”

The mayor and others complained that ICE did not notify the town’s police department in advance of the raid at the car wash.

But if the arrests in Newington were “designed to intimidate and terrorize immigrants,” exactly how were they any different from most other immigration arrests and from many ordinary arrests by police in Connecticut and elsewhere — and how could they have been any different?

To avoid scaring illegal immigrants, should ICE have telephoned or mailed summonses to the car wash to direct the employees in question to visit an ICE office for a hearing to adjudicate their status? Of course those of the car wash employees whose presence in the country is illegal would have scattered immediately. 

That would have been more Democratic pretense of enforcement policy.

ICE probably knows better than to give notice of its raids to police departments in a “sanctuary state” like Connecticut, which gives special driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and whose “Trust Act” forbids police from cooperating with immigration authorities in most instances. Indeed, ICE fairly could have presumed that Newington’s police chief would alert Mayor Trister and the mayor would tip off the car wash to thwart the raid, just as state Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, tried to thwart immigration enforcement in his district a few days earlier. 

After all, the statement Mayor Trister issued with the other local Democrats refused to make any distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. The statement indicated that all immigrants are welcome in Newington, legal and illegal alike — no distinctions.

That is, the Democratic position is that there should be no immigration law enforcement in Connecticut — that anyone who enters the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut generally and Newington particularly should be exempt from immigration law enforcement until he’s caught committing a serious crime. Driver’s licenses, New Haven resident identification cards, welfare and other social services, and pious protection against immigration law enforcement await anyone who breaks in. 

Connecticut seems unable to bolster its population by increasing the state’s prosperity but illegal immigration could do it. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Democrats keep pretending that they aren’t obstructing ICE

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut Democrats keep doubling down in support of illegal immigration and obstruction of immigration law enforcement even as they keep pretending they’re not doing so.

Last week at the Legislative Office Building about 25 Democratic elected officials held a news conference that made a spectacle of their contradictions.

Governor should make prisons account for deaths of inmates

Medicaid fraud, cuffed kids, and arrests in courthouses

New Haven understands ‘sanctuary’ while Tong and Lamont pretend not to

A week earlier state Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, had issued a warning on social media that federal immigration agents were active in his district. He urged people to “remain vigilant, stay aware of our surroundings, and, above all, prioritize your safety,” as well as to bring immigration enforcement actions to the attention of groups that assist illegal immigrants.

Responding on social media, a conservative organization accused Paris of publicizing the “live location” of immigration agents and urged the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to “charge him.” 

ICE reposted the accusation, prompting, according to Paris, lots of anonymous threats against him. He denied disclosing the “live location” of immigration agents and putting any agents at risk.

Indeed, Paris had not posted that agents were, for example, working around the Stamford train station or a particular supermarket. But his district is a small place with defined borders, and citing it conveyed information useful to people seeking to remain in the country illegally, so Paris’ intention was clear: to obstruct enforcement of immigration law.

At their news conference, Democratic elected officials, including Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, minimized that aspect of the controversy. They concentrated on the threats Paris received, as if there is substantial political disagreement in Connecticut about the impropriety of such threats. (Even Republican state legislators felt obliged to deplore the threats against Paris while failing to deplore what he did.) 

No, the substantial political disagreement is about illegal immigration.

“Corey did nothing wrong,” Blumenthal insisted, and his colleagues at the news conference repeated this assertion. 

All this came just days after Governor Lamont and state Attorney General William Tong had proclaimed again that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state” and does not interfere with immigration law enforcement.

No one in journalism called the governor and the attorney general to ask why, if Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state,” a state legislator had just acted as if it is one and if they approved of what he did. 

Indeed, in calling their news conference the Democratic elected officials must have been confident that no one in the Capitol press corps would ever question them critically about illegal immigration.

No one asked the Democrats if, by saying Paris did “nothing wrong,” they meant that trying to sabotage immigration law enforcement is OK.  

No one asked if they would feel justified in doing what Paris did if they knew that immigration agents were working in a particular area. 

No one asked how the explosion in the country’s illegal immigrant population in recent years is likely to effect congressional redistricting and which political party will benefit most from it.

No one asked if immigration law violators who have not been accused or convicted of other offenses should be exempt from enforcement — that is, if there should be another immigration amnesty.

No one asked if, for the country’s protection, every foreigner should get ordinary vetting before being admitted.

And no one asked if, before publicizing immigration enforcement in his district, Paris should have determined whether the agents were going after criminals or just ordinary immigration law violators.

But almost simultaneously with the Democratic news conference ICE announced that in a recent four-day operation in Connecticut it had arrested 65 people, 29 of whom “had been convicted or charged in the United States with serious crimes, including kidnapping, assault, drug offenses, weapons violations, and sex crimes.” Others, ICE said, had criminal records in their native countries.

“Connecticut is a sanctuary no more,” ICE said, implying that there would be more enforcement in the state. 

How much more enforcement will be required in Connecticut before critical questions are put to public officials who deplore it?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Governor should make prisons account for deaths of inmates

By CHRIS POWELL

Criminally convicted people are generally not very healthy. Many have smoked, abused drugs and alcohol, and become mentally ill or close to it. So it’s to be expected that some will die in prison. But since prisons are government institutions largely concealed from the public, government should account fully for every death in prison.

Medicaid fraud, cuffed kids, and arrests in courthouses

New Haven understands ‘sanctuary’ while Tong and Lamont pretend not to

Will Governor Lamont allow escape from unpublic education?

Connecticut is doing miserably in this regard. 

Katherine Revello of Connecticut Inside Investigator, an undertaking of the Yankee Institute, last week recounted her great difficulty extracting information from the Correction Department and state police about the deaths of three inmates at the prison in Newtown in July last year.

One inmate hanged himself. It took the department three months to answer Revello about the cause of the other two deaths: drug overdoses. Only this month did the state police provide documents Revello sought about the investigation of those deaths, and most pages of the reports were entirely redacted.

Revello writes that the state police attributed their redactions to four exemptions in the state’s freedom-of-information law: “investigatory techniques not known to the public, personnel or medical files that would invade personal privacy if released, logs that contain information on the movement of inmates and staff in prisons, and an exemption that prevents the disclosure of images of deceased victims.”

This is ridiculous. What techniques of investigating deaths in prison are so sensitive that the public must be kept ignorant of them? 

As for invasion of privacy, people in prison have little privacy and the dead have none at all. 

What is so sensitive about the movement of prison employees and prisoners? Of course they don’t stand still. 

As for images of the deceased, there may not always be a need for their release but there sure would be public interest in releasing them if death was attributed to a drug overdose when photos of the victim show a knife in his back.

And where did the drugs found in the bodies of the two overdose victims come from? The drugs seem to have been pharmacological drugs that are prescribed, not cocaine or heroin. So did the inmates get them properly from prison medical staff, or improperly from prison staff, other prisoners, or visitors?

These are fair questions about prison management, and if investigation can’t find answers, someone in authority should have said so by now.

Meanwhile Connecticut’s new prison ombudsman, an advocate for prisoners, DeVaughn Ward, has been trying to gain the release of Correction Department video showing the fatal subduing of a mentally ill prisoner by prison staff seven years ago — also at the prison in Newtown.

In a recent newspaper essay, Ward wrote of the prisoner: 

“As he awaited placement in round-the-clock observation, officers escorted him for a strip search, forcing him to bend over while naked on a cell bed, per Correction Department policy. Almost immediately a struggle erupted. 

“Officers pulled a spit mask over his face, struck him repeatedly, and sprayed him with chemical agents while the mask remained on. Pinned, he was injected with a combination of medications. When officers later tried to move him, he couldn’t walk. He was wheeled to another cell. By the time medical staff checked him, he was unresponsive.  

“Connecticut’s chief medical examiner ruled Jones’ death a homicide: ‘sudden death during struggle and restraint with chest compression.’ The autopsy documented a liver contusion; contusions and abrasions to the head, torso, and extremities; and internal bleeding along the back, sides, and shoulders caused by chest compression. Yet no one was charged with a crime, and some of the officers remain on the state’s payroll.”

The ombudsman blames state Attorney General William Tong for the withholding of the video. But Tong is just representing his client, the Correction Department, which doesn’t want the public to see what’s going on.

The ombudsman’s complaint should be directed to Governor Lamont, who appoints the correction and state police commissioners. The governor needs to understand that there is a chronic problem here and that he should do something about it. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Medicaid fraud, cuffed kids, and arrests in courthouses

By CHRIS POWELL

When the Republican national budget and tax legislation was enacted in July, Democratic officials in Connecticut screamed that it would destroy Medicare and Medicaid, that Republican claims of waste and fraud in those programs were exaggerated, and that there is too little waste and fraud in those programs to worry about.

New Haven understands ‘sanctuary’ while Tong and Lamont pretend not to

Will Governor Lamont allow escape from unpublic education?

Poverty racket and kickbacks disgrace state government

But a few months earlier Governor Lamont’s public health and social services commissioner retired after it was disclosed that she had countenanced the termination of an audit of Medicaid fraud in a case in which the governor’s former deputy budget director and a former Democratic state representative have been indicted and a Bristol doctor has pleaded guilty.

Just hours before the budget and tax legislation was enacted, state prosecutors charged an acupuncturist from Milford with defrauding Medicaid of $123,000.

And a few days ago the owners of a medical laboratory in Branford who were being federally prosecuted agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle Medicaid and Medicare fraud charges.

Necessary as Medicare and Medicaid are, as third-party payment systems they are structured to relieve beneficiaries of any incentive to check the charges incurred on their behalf. Such systems invite fraud and always can use more auditing, especially since the federal government’s deficit is out of control and is severely eroding the value of the dollar and thereby reducing the country’s living standards.

Elected officials who care about people who need government’s help should be clamoring for more serious auditing of all expensive government programs to ensure that the money is well spent. The Democrats’ reflexive defense of the status quo of spending actually hurts the poor.

HANDCUFFS AREN’T THE PROBLEM: Last month elected officials and representatives of the social-services industry joined Governor Lamont at the headquarters of a youth services organization in Norwalk to celebrate his signing of a law restricting the use of handcuffs by police on children under 14.

The law doesn’t entirely forbid handcuffing children; they can still be handcuffed if they are violent or threatening violence or being conveyed to or from confinement. 

Just how violent or disorderly do children have to be before police can properly handcuff them? Good luck to police officers in making this judgment and avoiding lawsuits.

Of course police officers are sometimes overbearing even as they are far more sinned against than sinning. The body cameras they increasingly wear and the dashboard cameras that are increasingly placed in their cruisers will help restrain them.

But the problem signified by the new law is not a problem of police misconduct, and the new law against handcuffing children is nothing to celebrate.

The problem is the worsening of juvenile misconduct and the growing number of children who don’t know how to behave, one of the many problems that correlate with inadequate parenting. With the handcuffing law state government has decided, in essential Connecticut style, to try to address the symptom of a problem in the hope that no one will note that state government doesn’t dare to investigate the problem’s causes.

LAW APPLIES IN COURTHOUSES TOO: Federal immigration agents caused a shocking scene the other day as they raided the state courthouse in Stamford and arrested two men who briefly barricaded themselves in a bathroom. The arrests appalled people who don’t believe that immigration law should be enforced, especially not in a courthouse, though people are routinely detained in courthouses on other charges.

The incident was also shocking to some because federal policy used to avoid arrests in courthouses, but the Trump administration has changed it, realizing that the law applies in courthouses too and that courthouses are good places for apprehending immigration law violators. 

Former state Rep. David Michel, D-Stamford, who documents immigration arrests, lamented, “It feels like we’re in a state of lawlessness. When I document this, I feel like I’m in another country.”

But the lawlessness is the illegal immigration, not arrests for it, and if immigration law is not enforced and all immigrants are not vetted normally, the United States soon may become another country. 

——

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

New Haven understands ‘sanctuary’ while Tong and Lamont pretend not to

By CHRIS POWELL

What are “sanctuary states” and “sanctuary cities”? 

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and Governor Lamont last week claimed not to know and to have no idea why the Trump administration has labeled Connecticut a “sanctuary state.”

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Why can’t journalism pose key immigration questions?

“There is nothing in our laws or statutes that says Connecticut is a ‘sanctuary’ state,” Tong says. “We are not.”

The governor says: “I am focused on making sure people feel safe in our schools, churches, and elsewhere. Nothing about this makes Connecticut a ‘sanctuary’ in any legal or practical sense.”

But the U.S. Homeland Security Department provides a clear definition: “Sanctuary” jurisdictions have “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” 

That’s Connecticut. 

The state’s “Trust Act” explicitly forbids police agencies from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in most circumstances. It doesn’t matter that the “Trust Act” doesn’t use the term “sanctuary.” “Sanctuary” means “a place of refuge or protection,” which is what the “Trust Act” makes Connecticut for illegal immigrants.

The attorney general and the governor play their word game in the hope of not provoking the Trump administration, which, unlike its predecessor, is enforcing immigration law. But the game not only fails to avoid provocation; it also falsely suggests that the attorney general and the governor don’t know they are attempting nullification of federal law just as the segregationist states of the last century tried to do.

New Haven city government is just as nullificationist but it wasn’t playing the word game last week. An announcement from Mayor Justin Elicker was headlined: “Mayor Elicker applauds growing nationwide coalition of local governments challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to defund welcoming and sanctuary jurisdictions. …”

The announcement added: “Sanctuary policies make us all safer and ensure communities are welcoming places for everyone.” That is, “welcoming” even for people in the country illegally and even for people of bad intent. 

The attorney general and the governor note that no federal law requires police in Connecticut to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. But this refusal to cooperate very much impedes immigration law enforcement — the point of the “Trust Act.” 

State government and New Haven city government impede immigration law enforcement far more directly by issuing identification documents to illegal immigrants precisely to facilitate their violation of immigration law — state government by issuing special driver’s licenses to them, New Haven by giving them city identification cards. These identification documents make the state and the city direct and knowing accomplices in illegal immigration.

Pretending that the state is not providing “sanctuary” when it obviously is doing just that, the governor and attorney general take their constituents for fools. New Haven’s policy is the same and just as bad as the state’s but, unlike the attorney general and the governor, at least Mayor Elicker is honest about it.

FORBID ANONYMOUS LAWSUITS: In recent years Connecticut’s Judicial Department has transformed from the least transparent to the most transparent of the state’s three branches of government. But a civil lawsuit from Kent could push the department back to the old ways.

Former students and employees of the Kent School are suing the school in Superior Court for damages arising from what is said to have been a former school employee’s copying intimate photographs and other information about them from the school’s computer system. Three plaintiffs have asked the court to let them sue anonymously, using pseudonyms, to avoid embarrassment.

Judge Daniel Klau has denied the request, holding that the public interest in open courts outweighs the privacy interests of the plaintiffs, but the pseudonym issue has been taken to the Appellate Court.

Merely identifying the plaintiffs as is ordinarily done in lawsuits won’t make any intimate photos public, but concealing their identities will set an awful precedent. After all, many plaintiffs might prefer to sue anonymously. In effect that would close the courts to the public, since anonymity precludes accountability. 

Connecticut’s Constitution commands, “All courts shall be open.” If it has forgotten, the Appellate Court should look it up.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)