Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Congratulations to Eversource Energy for scaring the daylights out of Connecticut residents upon the approach of Tropical Storm Henri, warning that two-thirds of them might lose electricity for as long as three weeks. The company was preparing people to be glad if they just escaped with their lives and never got electricity again.

Of course the storm weakened and changed course enough to spare Connecticut the severe damage that Eversource terrified people about. Only a few percent of the company’s customers lost power and most got it back in a day.

Along with its hysterical warning, Eversource said it had recruited more supplemental repair crews from out of state than ever so the company might be more prepared than ever. As it turned out, many of the crews were diverted to Rhode Island, where damage was worse.

But Eversource may be somewhat forgiven for its hysteria, since it was a response to state government’s own hysteria last August following Tropical Storm Isaias, whose winds were underestimated by forecasters and did more damage to Connecticut than any storm in many years. As a result repairs to the electric grid last August were painfully slow and Eversource and United Illuminating were faulted for poor coordination with municipal officials.

After last August’s storm government officials couldn’t just blame the trouble on the difficulty of predicting the weather. For the great virtue of life in Connecticut is convenience, and the power outages last August caused almost unprecedented inconvenience. People were angry, and blaming the weather satisfied no one. So government officials blamed the utilities and eventually even fined them for their supposed lack of preparation.

This time the weather’s changeability worked in Connecticut’s favor and the electric companies were overprepared. As Governor Lamont said, overprepared beats underprepared, and most people were relieved.

But an electric utility’s preparation for a storm will always be a judgment call, susceptible to mockery by nature, and overpreparation, however satisfying at first, will have its own costs. Eventually many of those extra out-of-state crews will show up in Connecticut’s electric bills.

Electric companies are convenient scapegoats in politics, which is why few elected officials who complain about them ever propose that government take over the electricity business directly, eliminating the buffer of a regulatory agency.

State government admits that it isn’t properly maintaining its transportation system. Despite ever-increasing appropriations, Connecticut’s schools have been declining as well. The electrical system is more complicated technically than those two others. So people who can’t manage the transportation and school systems well may be doubly glad they don’t have to manage electricity too.

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In his great speech in 1944 Judge Learned Hand declared that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right.” But according to a poll reported last week by the Pew Research Center, nearly half the country — 48% — wants the government to start censoring “false” information.

The poll found 65% of Democrats favor censorship while only 28% of Republicans do. Democrats used to be the party of free speech and Republicans the party of repression. But now Democrats hold the presidency and Congress, politics is more bitter than ever, and power still corrupts, even faster these days.

So who is to decide what is false? That will be decided by the people in power — people with names like Johnson, Nixon, Bush, Trump, and, yes, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Putin, Xi, Kim, and Khameini, for censorship is the essence of totalitarianism.

Of course imposing censorship in the United States would require subverting the First Amendment. But this has already started under President Biden.

Constitutions, laws, and courts aren’t enough to preserve liberty, Hand warned. “Liberty,” the judge said, “lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

If the Pew poll is right, almost half the country has lost the spirit of liberty. Can the other half save it?

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s Republicans have been down so long that they’re entitled to construe almost anything as up. But they’re making too much of Ryan Fazio’s victory in last week’s special election in the 36th Senate District, which includes Greenwich and parts of Stamford and New Canaan.

The district ordinarily leans strongly Republican and until 2018 had not elected a Democratic state senator in 88 years, but Fazio defeated the Democratic nominee, Alexis Gevanter, by only 2½%. In its previous two elections the district had chosen a Democrat, Alexandra Kasser, because she spent a fortune on her campaigns and because of the district’s disdain for President Donald Trump. Kasser resigned this year amid an ugly divorce.

Republican State Chairman Ben Proto claimed that Fazio’s victory was remarkable because President Biden, a Democrat, carried the 36th last year by 25%. But Proto’s cheerleading mainly emphasized how vulnerable Fazio may be in seeking re-election in 2022 if Trump remains national leader of the Republicans. Governor Lamont, a Democrat who presumably will lead his party’s ticket again next year, is inoffensive and a Greenwich resident himself, and the Democrats are sure to try to tie Fazio to Trump.

With the Democrats holding the governor’s office and big majorities in the General Assembly, one-party rule of state government is increasingly worrisome for its lack of oversight. In Washington, Biden seems unable to maintain coherence for more than a half hour a day, and the incompetence of his administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has greatly reduced his approval rate. But to re-elect Fazio, increase their ranks in the legislature, and unseat Lamont, Connecticut’s Republicans will need to develop issues that make people forget Trump.

There are many such issues, like the enduring weakness of Connecticut’s economy, state government’s subservience to government employee unions, and the failure of education, welfare, and urban policy. But, like most Democratic candidates, most Republican candidates in Connecticut strive to avoid the compelling issues, afraid to alienate the special interests to which the Democrats pander even though those interests will never support Republicans anyway.

That is, despite Fazio’s victory, the Republicans seem content to be Connecticut’s minority party.

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Nearly everyone may want to forget the war in Afghanistan. But the lives and treasure lost cry out for accountability.

With the consent of Congress, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to invade Afghanistan in 2001 in pursuit of 9/11 terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, who had been sheltered by Afghanistan’s Taliban government. But it took 10 years to find bin Laden and by then he was in Pakistan. In the meantime the invasion turned to “nation building,” though Afghanistan was not a nation at all but a bunch of primitive tribes.

Presidents Obama and Trump continued the Afghanistan project, repeatedly lying that progress was being made. Trump groused about “forever wars” and “—-hole” countries but never got the United States out. President Biden botched the withdrawal, humiliating the country, but at least he is getting the country out — and despite its vastly superior numbers and equipment, the army of our puppet regime dissolved overnight.

Congress, including Connecticut’s delegation, always approved Afghan war appropriations. A few members struck poses against the war but fewer tried ending it by cutting off appropriations, as that might have cut off their states’ military procurement contracts.

And Americans tolerated “forever war,” war never fought to be won, war without a military draft and war taxes.

Now we are calling our former puppet regime corrupt. But where did it get the money and materiel to be corrupt with? And who overlooked that corruption all this time?

Families who lost loved ones in Afghanistan are now doubly crushed, lamenting that their sacrifices were in vain. But this is mistaken.

All who served in the Armed Forces during the Afghanistan misadventure, as during the Vietnam misadventure, were defending the United States. If only the country had appreciated their service enough to prevent it from being squandered.

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

But where was she as that environment seethed with abuse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly how were his cases handled, and by whom?

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

Who will investigate the case?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Powell

Accountability and integrity are slipping badly with the Connecticut state police.

The agency has failed to complete an investigation of trooper misconduct arising from a retirement party at a brewery in Oxford 22 months ago.

Security video reported last week by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers shows that state police Sgt. John McDonald drank heavily for five hours at the party. Leaving in a state police car, McDonald drove about three-quarters a mile before smashing into a car carrying a woman and her daughter, pushing them off the road and seriously injuring them.

McDonald was charged with driving while intoxicated, reckless driving, and assault with a motor vehicle, but he achieved a sweet plea bargain in court, where he pleaded guilty to two counts of reckless endangerment and was sentenced to a suspended six-month prison term and two years of probation.

While his police powers were suspended after the crash, McDonald has remained on the state police payroll doing administrative work, and the Hearst papers say that while serving his suspended prison term and probation he has been paid tens of thousands of dollars in overtime.

Paying overtime to a police officer while he serves a suspended criminal sentence and probation may be a first in Connecticut’s annals of government corruption.

Will McDonald’s misconduct cause him to be disciplined in regard to his job? That hasn’t been determined yet. A state police regulation prohibits officers from driving after drinking, but the plea bargain’s removal of the drunken-driving charge against McDonald may have been arranged precisely to prevent him from being disciplined in regard to his job.

Of course the bar video still establishes his violation — if state police executives can’t find another loophole so they can overlook the video.

That regulation also would apply to the other troopers drinking at the party if they departed in police vehicles, and supposedly the entire circumstances of the party remain under investigation.

Neither Governor Lamont nor any other state elected official has expressed concern about this case. Odds are that it won’t be resolved until McDonald has been able to pad his pension with still more overtime from administrative work and retires at something like $150,000 a year.

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Connecticut’s secretary of the state, Denise Merrill, long has maintained that there is no election fraud in Connecticut. But the opportunity is vast.

Last year when the secretary’s office mailed absentee ballot applications to the 1.2 million voters eligible to vote in the August primaries, 8% were returned as undeliverable, signifying that many municipal voter lists are much out of date. Merrill said this was lower than the national average for undeliverable absentee ballot mail, as if that was much consolation.

A state administration that wasn’t so smug might have called hearings on the problem and proposed requiring annual audits of each town’s voter list. But Connecticut is an overwhelmingly Democratic state and such audits might only diminish the Democratic vote.

Now there’s another voter fraud case in Bridgeport, where a federal grand jury last week indicted a Democratic member of the City Council, Michael DeFilippo, on charges involving fraudulent absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots in city elections.

The secretary’s office has offered no comment about the indictment, and since Bridgeport is renowned for political corruption as well as for producing fantastic pluralities for Democratic candidates for state office, the state administration in which Merrill is a key player won’t look too closely at the city.

But those who don’t profit from the Bridgeport pluralities might fairly ask why the U.S. attorney is prosecuting the absentee ballot fraud and not the secretary of the state and a state’s attorney. Are those offices incapable of investigation? If witnesses were uncooperative, could not the secretary and the chief state’s attorney apply to the Superior Court to impanel a grand jury with subpoena power?

Merrill long has sought to impose secrecy on Connecticut’s voter lists. But unless voter lists are fully public, voter fraud will be nearly impossible for the public to detect.

Fortunately the secretary is not seeking reelection, so maybe her successor will be more favorably inclined toward election integrity.

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