Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

In his farewell address 60 years ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against what he called “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Since he was a military hero, perhaps only Eisenhower could give such a warning during the Cold War without risking denunciation as a communist.

But Eisenhower’s warning has never been heeded, and President Biden, with his nominee for defense secretary, is essentially proclaiming the victory of the military-industrial complex. The new president’s nominee is retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who upon leaving the Army a few years ago joined the Board of Directors of military contractor Raytheon Technologies Corp., which recently acquired Connecticut-based United Technologies Corp. If confirmed by the Senate, Austin will have to sell Raytheon stock he received for serving on the board. It may net him as much as $1.7 million.

Acknowledging what will be his continuing potential for conflict of interest, Austin pledges to avoid decisions involving Raytheon for a year. But this can’t worry Raytheon much about its investment in the general, since the corporation plans to be doing government business a lot longer than that.

With Austin at Defense and former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen becoming Treasury secretary after receiving at least $7 million in speaking fees from big banks and investment houses in the last three years, the federal government’s two most lucrative agencies will have been securely captured by their primary beneficiaries.

With the exception of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation — all supposed liberals — are fine with this exploitation. After all, the state is full of investment bankers and military contractors and what’s good for them may be considered good for the state. As for the country, that’s something else.

Even Blumenthal’s concern about Austin probably will become a mere quibble. Federal law prohibits military officers from becoming defense secretary until they have been out of uniform for seven years, so Austin will need a waiver from Congress. Such waivers have been granted twice before. Blumenthal says that to uphold the principle of civilian control of the military, he opposes another waiver. But few other members of Congress are objecting to it, and Blumenthal and those others still could have it both ways, voting against the waiver and then voting to appoint Austin once the waiver is granted.

Besides, with the Democrats in full control of the federal government, conflicts of interest and civilian control will barely register against the party’s new highest objective in Cabinet appointments — racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. Austin is Black and so meets the decisive qualification.

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PAY AS YOU THROW?: The Lamont administration seems to have determined that state government no longer can make any money by burning trash to generate electricity at the state Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority’s facility in the South Meadows section of Hartford. Such generation apparently is now much more expensive than electricity generated from natural gas, and the facility’s equipment already needs renovation estimated to cost more than $300 million.

So the authority plans to close the facility by July 2022, turning it into a trash transfer depot and shipping to out-of-state dumps the trash now being burned. This is not only retrograde environmental policy; it likely will raise costs for the authority’s 70 client towns. As a result the authority and the towns are discussing how to reduce their “waste streams” — possibly by charging residents a fee for every bag of trash collected, a system called “pay as you throw.”

There would be some sense to this, since it would cause people to take more responsibility for their trash, the packaging of what they buy, and recycling. But this also would increase the risk of illegal dumping, even as Connecticut’s roadsides and city streets are already strewn with trash.

It might be best for state or federal sales taxes or fees to recover in advance the disposal costs of everything sure to wear out, as the state already does with beverage containers and mattresses and used to do with tires.

Government needs to teach people more about the trash issue. But all that roadside litter suggests that many people are unteachable slobs.

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

By Chris Powell

As he skips the inauguration of his successor and shuffles off to his resort in Florida, has Donald Trump destroyed the Republican Party? Some political observers think so and of course Democrats hope so.

Trump’s petulant and even seditious exit from office did him no credit. But then he did not do so badly in the popular vote and the Electoral College, and even landslide defeats in presidential elections seldom knock a major party down for long.

Herbert Hoover led the Republicans to a landslide victory in 1928 over Democrat Al Smith but himself was ousted in a landslide by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1932.

Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, was derided as too conservative and was clobbered by Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democrats in 1964, but the Republicans still won the next presidential election with Richard Nixon.

George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, was derided as too liberal and lost big to Nixon and the Republicans in 1972, but the Democrats still won four years later with Jimmy Carter.

The reversal of party fortunes in these cases was largely a matter of self-destruction. Hoover turned a stock market crash into the Great Depression. Johnson escalated and failed to win a stupid imperial war. Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, got caught in criminality. (Even so, Nixon’s appointed vice president, Gerald Ford, nearly won the 1976 presidential election for the Republicans anyway.)

Both major parties have influential elements that many voters find objectionable if not repulsive and yet gain big roles when their party is in power. So it is not hard to imagine such elements bringing trouble to Joe Biden’s new Democratic national administration even as the Republicans at last may be relieved of the daily embarrassments of Trump’s demeanor, especially since, out of office, much civil and even criminal litigation may keep him busy. Additionally, Republicans in Washington may rediscover that being in the minority makes taking potshots easy, far easier than governing.

Will the Biden administration self-destruct with corruption, incompetence, failure, or politically correct nonsense? Maybe not, but with the Democratic margins in Congress being so thin, the new administration may have to be unusually successful to avoid losing control of both houses in the elections two years hence, since mid-term elections usually go against the president’s party.

In any case, while good government is good politics, good government seldom lasts long, so defeated parties tend to revive faster than expected.

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REVOLVING DOOR SPINS: Having just left the speakership of Connecticut’s House of Representatives, former state Rep. Joe Aresimowicz, D-Berlin, has quickly moved into a position with Gaffney Bennett and Associates, which calls itself Connecticut’s leading government relations firm. Connecticut’s “revolving door” law prohibits Aresimowicz from lobbying legislators and government agencies for a year, but obviously the firm believes he can bring in a lot of good business anyway.

Aresimowicz’s transformation may dishearten advocates of the public interest but it’s not unusual. The Connecticut Mirror notes that three former House speakers are already lobbying or working for firms that do government relations. The Mirror might have added that a former state Senate leader heads Connecticut’s biggest teacher union.

As a legislator Aresimowicz himself was employed by a government employee union. While this presented more than the typical potential conflict of interest most legislators face, it was perfectly legal, since the legislature is nominally part-time work, most legislators must hold other jobs, and Aresimowicz’s constituents knew who he was when they elected him.

Former state legislators aren’t the only ones drawn to government employment in Connecticut. Many journalists have left news organizations for public relations positions with government agencies or businesses. Indeed, there now may be more former journalists in government P.R. in Connecticut than there are news reporters.

Government is just where the money is these days. Former legislative leaders don’t go to work for the Red Cross, Salvation Army, or Audubon Society, nor do former journalists. There always has been and always will be more money in subverting or deflecting the public interest than in pursuing it.

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

By Chris Powell

Last week this column examined the government pension racket in Connecticut through the example of the “retirement” of New Haven Police Chief Tony Reyes, who is only 49 and is giving up his city salary of $170,000 to become police chief at Quinnipiac University in adjacent Hamden. Since New Haven City Hall needed a week before it could provide an estimate of the annual pension Reyes immediately will begin receiving, last week’s column surmised it might amount to $80,000.

That was low. The city’s budget office now estimates Reyes’ annual pension at $117,000.

While Quinnipiac is a nonprofit institution exempt from federal, state, and municipal taxes and thereby is subsidized by all levels of government, the university won’t disclose what it will pay Reyes. But his salary there likely will equal or exceed his salary with the city. That would mean annual income for him of at least $287,000 for his remaining 15 or so years of a typical working life. That’s getting close to the $319,000 salary now being paid by the University of Connecticut to its former president, Susan Herbst, who is now teaching just one or two political science courses at UConn’s Stamford branch — essentially another premature pension — after enjoying a year of paid vacation costing UConn $711,000.

Social Security, the pension system covering most people who do not work for the government, penalizes those who begin claiming benefits prior to the standard retirement age but continue to work for wages. The benefits of such people are reduced. But Connecticut’s government pension system rewards people for working for wages while also collecting benefits, thereby signifying that government employees are better and more deserving than the people who pay for them.

This practice is somehow called public service, and while it is all taxpayer money, it draws no objection from the governor, state legislators, and mayors like New Haven’s Justin Elicker, who are always pleading poverty.

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ANOTHER HIDDEN TAX: Now Democratic state legislators are planning to impose another hidden tax like the “gross receipts tax” levied on wholesale gasoline prices, which drivers pay without seeing it posted at the gas pump or anywhere else.

The Democrats’ new idea is to tax medical insurance companies as the federal government did until recently in the name of raising money for insurance for the poor. This tax would drive up insurance costs for everybody while giving the false impression that the big, bad insurance companies had raised prices again. The Democrats’ idea presumes that medical insurance is not already expensive enough for nearly everyone.

Government already imposes hidden taxes on medical insurance by requiring policies to provide discretionary coverage many people don’t want.

While government should facilitate decent medical insurance for all, people always should be given a clear view of government’s cost. Other than deceiving voters, there is no justification for hiding the cost of insurance for the poor in the insurance bills of others.

The additional tax burden would be clearer if the revenue was drawn from general state taxes, like the income and sales taxes. Then insurance for the poor would compete in the open with all other demands on government.

Until people can see clearly how they are taxed, they are not likely to insist on efficiency and better priorities in government, like ending the pension racket.

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MURPHY LOOKS AWAY: Last week Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy deplored the decline of press freedom in Ethiopia. Meanwhile the giant social media companies in the United States began censoring President Trump, former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, and others because of their political views.

That did not bother the senator.

Additionally, in recent years one national media company has acquired half the daily and weekly newspapers in Connecticut and another three companies have acquired most major radio and television stations in both the state and the country — again without objection from the senator.

Is the senator unaware of the worsening concentration of media ownership at home and the resulting reduction of voices? Or does he realize that while nothing about Ethiopia can ever hurt him, challenging the concentration of media ownership here might?

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

By Chris Powell

Maybe President Trump’s greatest talent has been to bring out the worst in nearly everyone — not just his supporters, some of whom ransacked the Capitol the other day to stop Congress from formalizing the result of the presidential election, but also his opponents, whose own betrayal of decency has provided many excuses for Trump’s.

Amid the president’s contempt, sneering, mockery, cruelty, hatefulness, megalomania, narcissism, distortions, self-contradiction, ignorance, mental instability, and unfitness to hold authority over others, the country has become Weimar America, with proto-Nazis and Communists brawling in the street, even at the Capitol.

Trump’s contempt is what has resonated most with people. As government is more corrupt than ever and drained of meaning by posturing politicians, people are especially vulnerable to nihilism. Trump didn’t cause this but he has exploited it dangerously.

While the last-minute effort to impeach the president a second time won’t drive him from office and isn’t likely to disqualify him from another presidential candidacy, it at least may restrain him from more recklessness and subversion in the days left before the next president is inaugurated.

Even many Republicans in Congress must be sick of Trump’s demeanor, which has discredited the good things done during his administration as well as the opposition party the country and Connecticut will continue to need.

But as was indicated this week by a phenomenon at law schools around the country, the Trump years have done vast damage to politics and public life, prompting both left and right and large elements of journalism to abandon fairness and due process of law. Instead of trying to calm the hysteria, the president has stoked and reveled in it.

Thousands of law students and professors have just signed a petition originated at Yale University in New Haven calling for Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, both lawyers and Republicans, to be disbarred for challenging the count of the presidential electoral vote in Congress.

The senators had every right to do this, a right guaranteed in two places in the Constitution, and Democratic senators had done the same after recent elections without being denounced.

The law school petition charges falsely that the challenges by Hawley and Cruz incited the riot at the Capitol, though it was the president who called his supporters to Washington and told them to “fight” before ushering them along to try to intimidate and disrupt the electoral vote count.

But these days it is not enough to defeat one’s adversaries politically. No, political disagreement is now considered cause to strip away their very livelihoods, and this hateful belief infests not just the country’s brawl-ridden streets but also its law schools.

The law students and their professors seem to have missed the warning from playwright Robert Bolt’s resurrection of the great medieval English lawyer, judge, churchman, and martyr Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons.” Bolt’s More says:

“And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.“

For someday the Devil’s side may be in power and eager to abuse it.

The law students and their professors also seem to have missed the similar warning from the great American judge Learned Hand.

In the middle of World War II Hand reflected on the spirit of liberty. The judge said it “is not the ruthless, the unbridled will. It is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few, as we have learned to our sorrow. … The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right.“

That is, it is a spirit that will not deny the liberty of others no matter how profound the political disagreement. This spirit will remain in danger even as the Trump years come to an end.

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

By Chris Powell

Everyone agrees that Tony Reyes has been a great police chief in New Haven, having been appointed in March 2019 after nearly two decades of rising through the ranks of the police department. But the city will lose him in a few weeks as he becomes police chief at Quinnipiac University next door in Hamden. This is being called a retirement, but it is that only technically. In fact it is part of an old racket in Connecticut’s government employee pension system, an abuse of taxpayers.

Typically police personnel qualify to collect full state government and municipal pensions after 20 years, no matter their age. Reyes is only 49, so he easily has another 15 years of working life ahead of him even as he collects a hefty pension from New Haven.

The chief’s salary is $170,000 so his city pension well may be half of that each year. After a week of requests City Hall was unable to provide an estimate of the pension, but then maybe city officials were too busy helping their Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force figure out how to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In the meantime maybe the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can handle New Haven’s pensions.

Nor would Quinnipiac disclose what it will pay Reyes, though the university is a nonprofit institution of higher education whose tax exemption comes at the expense of federal, state, and Hamden property taxpayers. But since a Quinnipiac vice president is paid nearly $600,000 a year, Reyes probably won’t starve there.

In the absence of accountability from city government or the university, here’s a guess: Reyes will draw an annual pension from New Haven of $80,000 per year while Quinnipiac pays him $150,000 a year. After 15 years at Quinnipiac, Reyes may get another annual pension of $80,000, plus $30,000 a year in ordinary Social Security, for total retirement income at age 65 of close to $200,000 annually — as if half that wouldn’t be lovely.

Pensions are ordinarily understood to be to support people whose working capacity is ended or substantially diminished. But pensions in state and municipal government in Connecticut often provide luxury lifestyles during second careers and after. Meanwhile mere private-sector workers are lucky to conclude their careers with enough Social Security and savings to scrape by on their way to the hereafter.

This scandal could be remedied easily, with enormous savings and greater retention of the best personnel. State and municipal legislation and contracts could restrict government pension eligibility to the customary retirement age of 65 or to the onset of disability before that. But that would require elected officials who had the wit to alert the public to how it is being exploited and the courage to stand up to the government employee unions.

It also would require news organizations to report the scandal in the first place. But it seems that not even New Haven’s own news organizations have inquired about the police chief’s pension bonanza.

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WEED VS. VAPING: The new session of the General Assembly will be intriguing for many reasons, maybe most of all for plans to legalize and tax marijuana while outlawing flavored “vaping” products and prohibiting the sale of tobacco products in stores within 5 miles of schools, which might limit tobacco sales to kiosks in the middle of a few state forests.

Both campaigns seem to be originating with liberal Democratic legislators. The House chairman of the Public Health Committee, Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, an advocate of outlawing flavored vaping products, says, “There’s plenty of documentation about how exposure to addictive products at a young age makes it hard for people to extricate themselves.”

Of course marijuana also can lead to addiction to other drugs. Some people deal with and outgrow dope smoking, but some don’t.

Drug criminalization long has failed and probably has done more damage than illegal drugs themselves. But it is silly to pretend that outlawing “vaping” products will protect kids any more than outlawing marijuana has done.

Contraband laws just create black markets that make the law futile. If Connecticut opts for legal marijuana while prohibiting “vaping” products, it will be only because legislators believe there’s much more tax revenue in the former than the latter.

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

By Chris Powell

Does any state do more posturing against racism than Connecticut does only to get such meager results?

A week ago West Haven’s City Council joined the 19 other municipalities in the state that have declared racism a public health emergency. Tolland’s Town Council is being asked to do the same.

But who exactly are the racists? None are ever identified.

And what exactly are the racist public health policies? Seldom are any identified, and the policies cited in West Haven’s resolution aren’t health policies are all, nor are they particularly racial — educational disparities and exposure to environmental hazards. Rather these problems are the consequences of poverty.

Of course poverty and educational disparities are disproportionately racial, and poverty and educational policies fail to elevate many poor people to self-sufficiency. But there is no clamor to examine this failure, perhaps because the perpetuators of poverty and educational policies are in government office and bestow much patronage.

Yes, many Connecticut towns obstruct construction of inexpensive housing through exclusive zoning. To facilitate economic and racial integration, state law should end this. But the motive for the obstruction is perfectly reasonable: Impoverished households impose great public expense, especially because of their child neglect and abuse. They raise school costs, reduce performance, and increase crime.

As long as state policy is merely to spread poverty around rather than to eliminate it, most people won’t want it nearby, and complaints of racism will be misleading and ignored.

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Much poverty results from federal government policy, like the failure to enforce antitrust law against the reduction of competition in major sectors of the economy. This failure reduces demand for labor and wages. Meanwhile the deregulation of investment banking has taken huge amounts of money out of the productive economy.

Much poverty also is a matter of the perverse incentives created by education policy, like social promotion, which rewards failure, and by welfare policy, which subsidizes childbearing outside marriage, destroying the family.

Getting at these causes will require returning to basics — like restoring the Glass-Steagall Act to get banks under control and stopping their high-frequency trading and market rigging, as well as holding parents accountable for their child neglect and abuse.

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Last week the Connecticut Mirror inadvertently hinted about how elementary some remedies should be. The Mirror reported about a single woman in Bridgeport with two children. Her son had become an early reader and she was warned by his teacher that if she didn’t get him out of his neighborhood school he would quickly fall behind like his disadvantaged classmates.

The woman said she couldn’t afford to move out of Bridgeport and indeed could barely afford an apartment there. “Rents are a lot of money, especially for single parents,” she said. “I don’t know how people do it.”

Just as banks apparently don’t know they shouldn’t rig markets, the Bridgeport woman apparently didn’t know that having children outside marriage is expensive and reduces one’s housing options. Or maybe the banks and the Bridgeport woman do know they shouldn’t do what they did but figure they can get away with it. After all, when government subsidizes institutions and individuals no matter what they do, why not behave badly?

Fortunately the woman’s son won admission to a school in Westport, but his former classmates are still stuck.

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For that matter, why shouldn’t state government employees behave badly? There is seldom any serious penalty.

A Judicial Department marshal, Edward Finlayson, was fired in December 2019 for two incidents of misconduct. First he thwarted the arrest of an immigration lawbreaker by federal agents at the courthouse in Derby. Then he obstructed Shelton police in their attempt to arrest two other people there.

But Finlayson appealed and his firing was reduced to a 45-day suspension. He appealed again and the suspension was reduced to 10 days. Despite his subversion of law enforcement he was back on the job within weeks.

News organizations reported his dismissal but not his quick reinstatement, which became public only a few days ago when a curious citizen asked that it be looked into.

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

By Chris Powell

Few may begrudge Governor Lamont the cheerfulness of his “state of the state” address upon the opening of the General Assembly this week. As he noted, since last March Connecticut has produced much heroism in confronting the virus epidemic. That heroism includes the governor’s own.

For nobody runs for governor to preside over the destruction of the state’s economy amid mass sickness and death. The epidemic has been overwhelming, and even Lincoln acknowledged being overwhelmed in office. “I claim not to have controlled events,” the president wrote, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” They have controlled the governor too.

But the governor’s pep talk conflicted a bit too much with reality. He boasted that the attractiveness of Connecticut is so great that many people have been moving here in recent months. Of course some people have relocated here from New York City and thereabouts, but just days before the governor spoke, the Census Bureau and a moving company reported a net exodus from Connecticut for the year just ended. For many years the state has been losing population relative to the rest of the country.

Responding to the governor’s address, Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, and the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Bob Duff of Norwalk, avoided cheerleading. The epidemic, the senators said in a joint statement, “has impacted everyone in our state, caused untold loss, and fundamentally changed daily life. The 2021 legislative session will be like no other and our focus will be to protect the public’s health and help people recover economically, physically, and mentally.”

The agenda of the legislature’s Democratic majorities, enlarged by the November election, likely will include raising taxes. This week government employee unions rallied at the state Capitol in support of taxing the rich more to reduce pressure to economize with government employees.

The governor’s address said nothing about raising taxes and he lately has opposed raising taxes except when they can be hidden in wholesale gasoline prices. But the governor spoke favorably about legalizing marijuana and sports and internet gambling, which would be heavily taxed. Legal marijuana and more gambling, the governor noted in justification, are happening throughout the country. But these things are less signs of human progress than of the financial desperation of state government as it lacks the courage necessary to control costs.

Amid his cheerleading the governor could manage only a single reference to the thousands of state residents who for months have been lining up for free food. Meanwhile business closings and bankruptcies have been increasing.

Maybe the new national administration will send the states trillions more dollars in remediation, but there are serious risks in that, since the dollar’s international value is already falling sharply and some experts are musing about hyperinflation, which will harm the working class most even as property owners profit from it. Restoring the economy is likely to take a long time.

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THE NEW OLD BOSS: Anyone hoping for a big change in the federal government’s economic and market regulation policies should take a close look at President-elect Biden’s nomination of former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen for U.S. Treasury secretary.

The nomination has raised concerns because it seems like a merger between the Treasury Department and the central bank, whose independence of the frankly political side of the government long has been touted as a principle of central banking.

But it turns out that in the three years since Yellen resigned from the Fed she has been paid at least $7 million in speaking fees by the big banks and investment houses that the Fed and Treasury regulate and occasionally rescue financially. Yellen probably received more than $7 million, since it appears that she has not yet fully reported her income from banking and investment interests.

Rejoicing in what seems to be their party’s capture of a narrow majority in the U.S. Senate, some Democratic congressmen are promising to enact another cash bonus to every citizen of as much as $2,000. But with Yellen at Treasury, will the big banks and investment houses already have assured themselves of far more than that?

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

By Chris Powell

When Bob Stefanowski was the Republican nominee for governor two years ago, he was mocked by Democrats for being light on the issues — for advocating repeal of the state income tax without specifying how to reduce government spending. Even so Stefanowski came within 40,000 votes of winning the election — a matter of failing to change only 20,000 minds — and he seems inclined to run again.

With an essay in The Wall Street Journal last week, “What Isn’t the Matter with Hartford?,” Stefanowski wrote about what’s wrong in the capital city’s government and state government generally, and he specified some policy alternatives. Whereupon Democrats around the state went apoplectic, denouncing Stefanowski personally but never confronting the issues he raised.

Two years ago the Democrats wanted specifics from Stefanowski. The ones he gave them last weekend seemed to wound them deeply. Stefanowski cited Hartford’s long decline — in population, business, education, crime, personal income, health, capitulation to municipal employee unions, unfunded pensions, and high property taxes. It was a diagnosis few would argue with, not just in regard to Hartford but to all Connecticut’s cities. Indeed, Democrats themselves often cite most elements of Stefanowski’s diagnosis when they seek more money for cities.

Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin didn’t argue with Stefanowski’s diagnosis. The mayor simply dismissed it. Stefanowski, Bronin sneered, has “zero understanding of the city.” But Stefanowski understood Hartford well enough to recall that a few months ago the mayor pandered to demands to “defund the police,” reducing the city police budget by a million dollars, only to face rising violence and have to ask Governor Lamont to send state troopers to the city.

The alternative policies Stefanowski’s essay supported — more school choice, charter schools, linking school funding to student choice, resistance to government employee unions, curtailing government pensions — are of course arguable and don’t fully address the urban problem. But they acknowledge the failure of Connecticut’s urban policies, as state Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, with remarkable fairness, himself implicitly did in his response to Stefanowski. Winfield asked: “Can someone tell me what my party has as an urban agenda?”

Winfield’s question is answered easily enough. The Democratic agenda for the cities remains social disintegration, welfare policy that destroys the family, social promotion that destroys education, subservience to the government employee unions that destroys public finance — and a refusal to audit anything no matter how long it fails to achieve its nominal objectives. That is, perpetuating poverty and dependence.

Connecticut could have used this debate in the gubernatorial campaign two years ago — or 30 years ago, before the state income tax was enacted and locked failing policies into place. Better late than never, but policy failure in Connecticut is now so profitable for so many that any candidate who dares to question it with specifics must prepare for the nastiest personal abuse.

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LEONE’S BIG PAYDAY: More Democratic exploitation at the state Capitol escaped much notice last week.

Having just won re-election, state Sen. Carlo Leone, D-Stamford, accepted Governor Lamont’s offer of a job as an adviser to the transportation commissioner and isn’t taking the legislative oath this week. Leone has served in the General Assembly for 15 years at the low legislative salary, but his salary probably will be more than doubled at the Transportation Department.

Since state government pensions are calculated from an employee’s highest-earning years, Leone has secured a big payday even while deceiving his constituents and imposing on Stamford the cost of a special election.

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TAXED FOR NOTHING: Maybe the half-percent increase in the state income tax that took effect this week will prompt a few people to ponder these policy failures. The tax increase is to fund a program of paid family and medical leave. But since the program will give people only a chance to get their own money back, it provides nothing they couldn’t have accomplished for themselves with an ordinary savings account at a bank.

A savings account would be far superior, since it could be tapped for any emergency. Since the program is so restricted, many will never qualify for it. For them it’s just another tax increase.

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

By Chris Powell

After a cowardly absence of nine months, the General Assembly reconvenes this week. Though legislators may not recognize it, the first question facing them is whether their new session is to be one of substance or merely a formality.

For Governor Lamont has been ruling by emergency decree since the virus epidemic began in March, and with the approval of legislative leaders he has extended that power until Feb. 9. If the emergency is allowed to end then, what is essentially monarchy will end too, democratic government will resume, political responsibility will be widely shared, and legislators will have to earn their salaries again — not that they are paid so much but most have kept money they didn’t really earn.

Supermarket clerks and cashiers, mail carriers, medical personnel, police officers and firefighters, food processors, delivery people, and others have had the courage to continue dealing with the public in their jobs, but not Connecticut’s legislators. They have let the governor handle nearly everything. He has done well in unprecedented circumstances but rule by decree is not democracy. Any legislator who still doesn’t want to do his part in democracy should resign and prompt a special election to locate someone who does.

Even so, it’s easy to see why legislators might want to keep defaulting. Their new session could be the most challenging ever, what with a huge state budget deficit being projected and uncertainty about how much financial assistance from the federal government will be forthcoming. Just trying to make things add up within a billion dollars one way or the other may crowd out all the state’s profound but unaddressed issues.

A longstanding issue is being pressed again by liberals. They want the state to raise taxes on the rich so that everything in state and municipal government can continue without the slightest review of its effectiveness. While he is a liberal Democrat, the governor has opposed raising taxes on the rich, fearing that some will move to states with lower taxes.

This fear is a bit speculative and advocates of taxing the rich more dismiss it, but there is something to it, for Connecticut has been losing population relative to the rest of the country for many years and last week the Census Bureau included Connecticut among 15 states estimated to have lost population in 2020, down about 10,000 people. The wealth of those who moved out is not quantified, but in light of Connecticut’s already high taxes and generous welfare benefits, those who left probably paid more taxes than they consumed in government services and had some financial incentive to leave.

Even some liberals might admit that high taxes don’t attract new self-sufficient residents.

The rich already pay most of Connecticut’s taxes, but even if raising taxes on them would not be the end of the world, why do it without first making some effort to economize in government? Why let it remain essentially illegal to economize?

Transportation writer Jim Cameron recently raised a huge financial issue that isn’t being discussed. Because of the epidemic, Cameron noted, Connecticut’s commuter trains are operating nearly empty, and as businesses have discovered that they can operate well and less expensively with many employees working from home, most commuters probably won’t be coming back — even as state government still in investing heavily in railroads and “transit-oriented development.”

So can state government still justify its big subsidy to the Metro-North Commuter Railroad and the deficit being incurred by state government’s new rail service from Springfield to New Haven?

In any case the legislature’s first order of business should be simply to get down to business — to resolve to end the governor’s emergency powers, to extend as ordinary legislation or to cancel the orders he already has issued, and to remain in session as long as necessary to address additional changes in law or policy that the epidemic may require.

This would not disparage or diminish the governor’s management of the epidemic but require the legislature to decide on anything he proposed to do that was not already within his ordinary authority. This also would bring the public back into government, and not a moment too soon, before the habit of democracy is lost.

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

By Chris Powell

Employees of Connecticut’s largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant, cleaned out their desks the other day as the newspaper left the building at 285 Broad St. where it had operated for 70 years. It was well reported that the newspaper will continue publishing as its employees work from home, as they have done since March; that the Springfield Republican will do the printing; and that the Courant doesn’t know if it will have an office again.

But why the newspaper gave up its offices has not been well reported, and it is not just because of the virus epidemic. It’s also because of internal sabotage that carries a warning about ownership of news organizations generally.

From its founding in 1764 and for more than two centuries afterward, the Courant had local ownership. But in 1979 the stockholders sold the paper to the Times Mirror chain, which had arisen from the Los Angeles Times. In 2000 the Tribune chain, which had arisen from the Chicago Tribune, acquired Times Mirror with a plan to merge its papers with Tribune television stations in markets where they overlapped, including Hartford.

Such combinations are anti-competitive and contrary to Federal Communications Commission rules, but Tribune figured that it could get the rules repealed. So began a legal struggle that remains unresolved after 20 years.

But by 2014 it was clear that combining TV stations and newspapers in the same markets was not going to be as profitable as expected, since the internet was draining advertising, especially from the papers. So Tribune split itself into separately owned and operated broadcast and newspaper companies, with the split heavily favoring the broadcast side.

Tribune already had moved its Hartford TV stations, WTIC-TV61 and WCCT-TV33, from a downtown office tower into the Courant’s building, and when the broadcast and newspaper properties were separated, the building was given to the broadcast company. Suddenly the Courant was an interloper in its own house and had to pay rent.

Of course this was a humiliation to the newspaper and an insult to Connecticut as well, since the newspaper’s long public service in journalism was infinitely greater than that of the TV stations that inherited the Courant’s building. Those stations already have been resold to another chain, Tegna, as the expanding chains constantly juggle properties to stay within the FCC’s weak geographic limits on ownership.

Now the building is owned by Alden Global Capital, which owns 32% of Tribune Publishing as well as many other newspapers from which it has been systematically stripping their real-estate assets and redeveloping them.

The country prattles about “diversity” but when it comes to broadcast media ownership, this is a joke. Federal broadcast licenses can be awarded in only two ways — to diversify or concentrate control of the airwaves. There is little public interest in allowing anyone to hold more than one or two licenses. Yet Tribune’s TV company owned 42 stations before it was sold last year to Nexstar, which now has 197 stations.

A recent boast by Nexstar CEO Perry Sook about his company’s acquisitions and growing reach inadvertently conveyed the worsening concentration of ownership. “It took us 15 years to get to 9% of the U.S. homes,” Sook said, “and then, in the last eight years, we went from 9% to 18% to 39%, and now to roughly 63% of the country.”

Tegna, the new owner of Tribune’s Hartford stations, has 60 others.

As the looting of the Courant suggests, few of these behemoths care much about the communities they purport to serve. They are just accumulations of capital that government allows to run wild without enforcement of antitrust law, proving the observation of the philosopher William James: “The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed.”

Presumably the Courant, like many newspapers a shadow of its old self, will be sold soon, with or without the other Tribune papers, if the whole newspaper industry doesn’t collapse first along with the economy, literacy, and civic engagement. But if a new owner for the Courant pursues an office for the paper, maybe Alden at least will donate the big Hartford Courant lettering that remains on the front wall of the old building. After all, it’s of no use to anyone else.

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