Chris Powell: Bears more likely to triumph in Conn. than ‘affordable’ housing’
A Black Bear, of the species found in New England.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
With Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont's veto of the wide-ranging housing bill recently passed by the General Assembly, the state’s towns aren't likely to reach the ‘‘fair share" quotas of ‘‘affordable" housing the bill set for them. But the legislature's failure to approve other legislation may ensure that each town ends up with another quota -- a quota of bears.
Confrontations with bears in Connecticut have been increasing rapidly, and according to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, there were more than 3,000 last year. These included two attacks on people and 67 of what might be called ‘‘bearglaries," in which the hungry creatures broke into people's houses. Bear attacks on livestock are up too.
A few days ago a bear attacked a man as he walked with his dog on his property in North Canaan. He escaped with scratches.
According to the environmental department, Connecticut has far more bear confrontations than neighboring states, though neighboring states are estimated to have more bears than Connecticut's 1,200 or so. Maybe Connecticut has so many more bear confrontations because, except for Rhode Island, Connecticut's neighbors allow bear hunting while Connecticut doesn't.
The increasing conflicts with bears prompted some legislators in the recent session to propose authorizing bear hunting. But the bears have a lobby organization as influential as the government employee unions, and it also frightened the legislators out of protecting the public.
The bear lobby argues that people who put bird feeders in their yards or fail to secure their trash barrels are to blame for the increasing confrontations. Certainly bird feeders and trash barrels are attractions, but as the many “bearglaries" show, removing feeders and securing trash barrels has little deterrent value.
Providing access to bird feeders and trash barrels may actually discourage bears from breaking into houses for food.
In any case, the bears are already rampant in Connecticut and won't be going away on their own. Unmolested and having no natural predators, they will reproduce at an estimated rate of more than two cubs per year per mother. A doubling of the state's bear population every three years seems possible, with the population pushing steadily into the eastern part of the state. As long as Connecticut's feckless policy toward bears is only to shoo them into a neighbor's yard, more confrontations are inevitable, with or without bird feeders and trash cans, and within a decade every town in Connecticut could have a dozen bears as permanent residents.
Unlike housing developers, bears don't observe zoning regulations. So odds are that, if state law doesn't change, bears will be disrupting many suburbs and rural towns long before those towns get their first “affordable" housing.
It's understandable why government employees come first in Connecticut, far ahead of the public interest. They are numerous and politically organized and have their own political party, so politicians are afraid of them. But why do bears have to come second, still far ahead of the public interest?
Unlike taxpayers, bears are not an endangered species. Other states manage to stand up to them. Except for the political timidity of the state's elected officials, why should bears be any more protected in Connecticut than coyotes and poisonous snakes?
WHO NEEDS “BABY BONDS”? A month ago Hartford Mayor Arunam Arulampalam announced he had rounded up an extra $3 million in city funds and various grants for the city's ever-dysfunctional school system.
Aleysha Ortiz wants that money instead. She's the recent graduate of Hartford Public High School who is suing the city because, despite the diploma the school gave her, she was illiterate. She's suing for damages, and last month her lawyers offered to settle for ... $3 million.
If Ortiz wins she'll have invented a great racket for indifferent students and their neglectful parents. Fail to learn in school, say nothing about it publicly until social promotion graduates you, and then sue and cash in for life. By comparison the “baby bonds" about which state government is so proud will be chump change.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Illegal-immigration backers in Conn. don’t get critical questions
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Immigration-law enforcement agents must be compelled, by congressional action or court order, to identify themselves conspicuously during arrests, to display their badges, and to make prompt public reports identifying the people they have detained, why they have been detained, and where they are being held. A free country cannot allow secret arrests. The necessity of such accountability in government goes back centuries to the Magna Carta.
Democrats in Congress should press this issue instead of simply decrying all immigration-law enforcement. Most of the country will agree, and Republicans in Congress who disagree will risk being exposed as totalitarians.
Police in Connecticut already are obliged by law to follow similar procedure, though they sometimes neglect to report arrests promptly and news organizations fail to notice.
But the greater failure of Connecticut journalism lately involves its reporting of complaints against immigration law enforcement. Reporters can't be blamed when they can't reach or get responses from immigration law enforcers, but they can be blamed when they quote officials, activists, and others in the immigration controversy without posing critical questions.
The recent arrest by immigration agents of a woman as she was driving her children to school in New Haven provoked outrage. Some of it verged on hysteria, like the statement issued by Mayor Justin Elicker.
"To arrest a mother in front of her two young children while taking them to school is simply unconscionable," the mayor said.
So what is the appropriate time to arrest and detain someone with children who is suspected of being in the country illegally? Will such a suspect necessarily cooperate in scheduling her arrest and detention, or might she flee instead? Do New Haven's own police always give notice to the targets of their arrest warrants?
Mayor Elicker wasn't asked.
He continued: "We condemn this deplorable act of family separation and call upon the Trump administration to stop its inhumane approach and cruel tactics."
But don't arrests in New Haven and elsewhere routinely separate people from their children, or are children brought to jail with their parents?
The mayor wasn't asked.
"New Haven," the mayor said, "is a welcoming city for all, and our immigrant neighbors are a part of our New Haven family."
Does New Haven really welcome legal and illegal immigrants, the well-intentioned and the ill-intentioned, and the self-supporting and the dependent alike? Does New Haven distinguish among them, or is that properly the work of immigration authorities? Or should no one do that work and should the nation's borders be opened again?
Mayor Elicker concluded: "New Haven will continue to stand up for our residents and our values, and we will continue fight back with every resource available to us against the Trump administration's reckless immigration policies."
What exactly does "every resource available" mean? Even as the mayor was so upset about that immigration arrest, New Haven's school system was facing a deficit of $16.5 million and was preparing to lay off scores of employees, and the chronic absenteeism rate of its high school students stood at 50 percent.
Since New Haven can hardly take care of itself, how can it afford to be a "sanctuary city," accepting, housing, concealing, and trying to educate unlimited numbers of illegal immigrants? And since state government covers so much of New Haven's expenses, how can Connecticut afford to let the city assume unlimited liabilities like these?
Nor were compelling questions posed the other week amid outrage in Meriden about the immigration agents’ arrest and detention of a city high school student and his father a few days before the boy's graduation.
The two were reported to have been arrested at a scheduled meeting with immigration authorities, so presumably they knew there was something wrong about their presence in the country.
Protesters in Meriden chanted that they want immigration authorities to get out of Connecticut. But wouldn't that leave the borders open again? Is that what the protesters want?
Though they were surrounded by journalists, the protesters were never asked.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many year (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Look for places with good parenting
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Anyone asked to guess the 10 best public high schools in Connecticut would probably select some of those chosen by the Internet site Niche, which connects high school graduates with colleges.
Nine of the 10 high schools chosen by Niche are in Westport, New Canaan, Darien, Greenwich, Wilton, Ridgefield, Avon, Farmington, Glastonbury and Norwalk. All but Norwalk are prosperous communities that spend a lot of money on their schools and get good results. The high school in Norwalk cited by Niche is a regional school drawing especially motivated students, many from outside the city.
According to Niche, all 10 of the best public elementary schools in the state are in three of the towns with the best high schools -- Greenwich, New Canaan and Westport -- and nine of the 10 best middle schools are in the towns with the best high schools.
Of course educators will conclude from these rankings that per-pupil spending correlates with student performance -- spending up, education up. This is self-serving and wrong.
For while not everyone in the towns with the supposedly best schools is rich, most people there are at least middle class and most children there have two parents, either living with them or otherwise involved in their lives. Their parents spend time with them. Most know their letters, numbers, and colors when they first arrive in school. They know how to behave. They have some interest in learning. Their attendance is good because their parents see to it.
Most such children are easy to teach -- not because per-pupil spending is high but because per-pupil parenting is.
Of course circumstances are much different in high schools in municipalities with terrible demographics, municipalities with high poverty and low parenting. Here many children live in fatherless homes, homes with only one wage earner and a smattering of welfare benefits, homes over which a stressed, exasperated, and sometimes addicted mother presides. These children get much less attention and many are frequently absent from school.
In New Haven, the city that is always lecturing Connecticut about how to live, high schools have a chronic absenteeism rate of 50 percent, highest in the state. Good luck to teachers and administrators trying to educate children who frequently don't show up and, when they do, often disrupt classes, get into fights, or suffer mental breakdowns, but whose general discipline or expulsion is forbidden.
That's why the Niche school rankings are so misleading.
For schools and teachers play the hands they are dealt by community demographics.
Any school dealt four aces is almost certain to win regardless of its resources and the competence of its staff. Any school dealt mostly jokers will resort to clamoring at the state Capitol for more money, as if the great increase in state financial aid to schools since the Education Enhancement Act was passed in 1986 has made any difference in education results, and as if the clamor for more money isn't just an excuse for ignoring the parenting problem, which seldom can be discussed in polite political company.
Connecticut's best schools are actually the ones that get the best results from the students who are hard to teach -- the students neglected at home -- not those who are easy to teach. Nobody seems to compile such data, perhaps because it would impugn the premise of education in Connecticut -- that only spending and teacher salaries count and educational results are irrelevant.
For many years in Connecticut the only honest justification for raising teacher salaries has been to induce teachers to stick around with the demoralized, indifferent, and misbehaving kids about whom nothing can be done until government finds the courage to restore academic and behavioral standards. These days teachers are given raises mainly to secure labor peace and union support for the Democratic Party.
It's the same with police departments. Cities, where poverty is worst, struggle to keep officers not so much because suburbs often pay better but because, like city teachers, city cops increasingly want to escape the worsening social disintegration and depravity around them.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Illegal-immigration backers ignore its enormous costs
Net migration rates per 1,000 people in 2023, showing flows to more affluent nations, in blue, from poorer nations.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Last week two groups supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut Voices for Children and the Immigration Research Initiative, issued a report warning that mass deportation of the state's illegal-immigrant population -- estimated at as many as 150,000 people -- would be disastrous for the state's economy and state government. The report claimed that illegal immigrants pay more than $400 million in state taxes each year.
This was at best a dodgy estimate. Many illegal immigrants are children and are not employed. The adults among them cannot work legally and so most of their earnings cannot be tracked. While anyone who spends money in Connecticut is likely to pay sales taxes, the report acknowledges that nearly all illegal immigrants who work in Connecticut hold low-wage jobs.
So what they buy is mainly for subsistence, like food, which is exempt from sales tax.
But the bigger flaw in the report is that it omits anything about the costs of illegal immigration in Connecticut, which are huge and increasing, particularly on account of the state government medical insurance being extended to them and the education of their children, most of whom don't speak English and enter the state's schools without providing any record of their education elsewhere and so need to be laboriously evaluated for placement. These students have exploded expenses in the schools of Connecticut's “sanctuary cities," which in turn seek much more financial support from state government.
In February the Yankee Institute, drawing on estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, contended that illegal immigration costs Connecticut more than $1 billion a year.
Whatever the true cost, that it likely weighs heavily against illegal immigration became clear when Governor Lamont, a supporter of the state's “sanctuary’’ policies, disputed the Yankee Institute estimate even as he conceded to a journalist that he had no idea what illegal immigrants cost state government. The governor referred the journalist to the state budget office, which said it had no idea of the cost either and wasn't going to find out.
That is, advocates and apologists for illegal immigration in Connecticut don't want to know its costs, and, worse, don't want the public to know either.
The report from Connecticut Voices for Children and the Immigration Research Initiative is defective in other ways. It asserts that if Connecticut lacked illegal immigrants it would experience a severe shortage of workers for the low-wage jobs they hold -- especially in construction, restaurants, agriculture, janitorial work, and beauty shops.
This is the cliche that illegal immigrants do jobs citizens won't do, and it is nonsense.
Citizens will do almost any job if wages are high enough and can compete with the welfare benefits available to them. Indeed, the jobs held by illegal immigrants are so poorly paid in large part precisely because illegal immigrants are available to do them without the wage,
benefit and labor protections required for citizens. Raise agricultural salaries enough and even some teachers, charity organization workers, and journalists in Connecticut may be tempted to return to picking shade tobacco as many did as teenagers.
Connecticut is full of low-skilled citizen labor. With its social-promotion policy, public education makes sure of that.
For years the state's manufacturers have lamented that they can't find skilled workers for tens of thousands of openings. Meanwhile, middle-aged single mothers are not working at fast-food drive-through windows because they are so highly skilled. But jobs requiring lesser skills are where young people are supposed to start, not remain as adults.
So Connecticut doesn't need to import more low-skilled workers, especially since the state has failed so badly with its housing supply. The state needs to find ways of raising skills and wages and reducing the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, for its legal residents.
But the report from the apologists for illegal immigration sees the path to prosperity as a matter of legalizing all illegal immigrants, in effect reopening the borders. It didn't work the first time.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: What’s lurking Ahead for Conn.?
MANCHESTER, Conn.
In an interview the other week, Connectitcut Gov. Ned Lamont sounded unenthusiastic about seeking a third term.
He complained that legislators and municipal officials parade through his office asking for goodies at state government expense even as the Trump administration is slashing away at financial aid to Connecticut, punching big holes in state government's finances.
The aid cuts don't seem well-reasoned, or reasoned at all. They may be merely malicious. But having long been persecuted by Democrats, even as Democrats concealed and dissembled about the corruption and incompetence of their own national administration, Trump now can exact enormous revenge.
Just as Democrats long have thrived on the patronage power they invested in the presidency, losing that power is going to hurt.
A national recession and even a worldwide one may be coming, possibly triggered by Trump's leap into tariffs.
As a “sanctuary" state with several sanctimonious “sanctuary" cities, including New Haven, Connecticut may expect special hostility from the Trump administration, especially since the hostility is mutual here, as with the three Yale University professors who recently publicized their departure for Canada and attributed it to their detesting Trump. (Since Yale long has propelled Connecticut toward the looney left, these departures may be a good start.)
Lamont keeps saying he thinks that Connecticut is in good shape, but developments contradict him.
Remarking the other week on the human needs that state government addresses, the governor noted that about 40 percent of the babies born in Connecticut are born to mothers on Medicaid, which, among other groups, provides medical insurance for the indigent. But he didn't grasp the bigger significance of that data.
That is, people who can't support themselves shouldn't be having children -- or else these are people who recently have fallen out of the middle class as times get harder.
Homelessness in Connecticut is rising again along with rents and housing prices, which have been driven up by inflation and state government's failure to clear the way for less-expensive housing.
Connecticut's food pantries are experiencing much heavier demand.
Student proficiency in the state keeps declining as schools graduate illiterates and near-illiterates without prompting concern from many in authority. The failing, insolvent and poorly managed school systems in Hartford and Bridgeport are undergoing financial audits by a state education bureaucracy that seems almost as large, inscrutable, and disconnected as the failing school systems themselves. But the educational results of those school systems are not being audited.
These developments don't suggest that Connecticut is in good shape. They suggest that parts of the state are sliding deeper into poverty and ignorance.
The more that the Trump administration slashes federal financial aid to state government, the more cautious the governor properly becomes about state spending. But the legislators, municipal officials and special interests parading through his office with their hands out still can't imagine financial restraint. They think that state government has a large budget surplus and they want to spend it regardless of whether big cuts in federal aid will have to be covered. But they refuse to see that the surplus is only technical, the flip side of state government's still grossly overcommitted pension funds.
That is, the surplus is really just money borrowed from pension obligations, money that, if spent, will increase the heavy tax burden of the pension funds.
Lamont is often portrayed as a moderate Democrat. But he is moderate only insofar as he fears that overspending will produce state budget deficits and tax increases that will alienate voters. He is firmly part of his party's far left in toleration of illegal immigration, transgenderism, racial preferences and manufacturing and coddling poverty.
Other than the blindly ambitious, who would want to be governor amid what lurks ahead?
Even so, Trump's slashing of federal aid just might be the tonic that Connecticut needs to force audits of everything in state government and compel hard but necessary and ultimately beneficial choices. As long as state government remains a pension and benefit society for its employees -- the only people whom state government guarantees to take care of -- it won't even be trying to serve the public.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Political correctness flusters response to assault in school; cannibal and gambling updates
Downtown Waterbury, called “The Brass City” in its industrial heyday.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Three principles of Connecticut's political correctness have collided sensationally in Waterbury, where two middle-school students recently assaulted two other students. The victims, twin 13-year-old sisters new to the school, are of Arab descent and wore Muslim hijabs that were ripped off, so the alleged perpetrators, ages 12 and 11, are suspected of religious or ethnic prejudice. That would make the assault a “hate crime," and a political fuss is being made about it.
Children are often cruel and stupid and pick on others simply for being different. So it's just as plausible that the assault was motivated by ordinary cruelty and stupidity rather than any serious animus toward religion or ethnicity. Waterbury police are investigating and maybe they'll find out, though the public may not be told, because of those colliding principles of political correctness.
Those principles are:
1) Perpetrators of “hate crimes" should be more severely punished than perpetrators of ordinary crime because ordinary enforcement of criminal law doesn't demonstrate political correctness.
2) Short of murder, children misbehaving in school shouldn't be charged criminally or even punished at all, just referred to social workers.
3) Crime by juveniles should be handled secretly so there can never be any accountability for them or the government.
The collapse of discipline in public education argues for serious and visible punishment of students who commit assault -- something more ominous than the Waterbury middle-school principal's squishy statement about “respect, inclusivity and kindness," something requiring suspension from school and reparations to the victims.
But in the end little can be done with 11- and 12-year-olds except to watch them grow up. School authorities should be held to account but the ‘‘hate crime" crowd should can its bluster.
CANNIBAL WATCH: Questions posed by Republican state senators to the state Psychiatric Security Review Board about Tyree Smith, the murderer-cannibal whom the board recently paroled have turned out to be good ones.
In response the other week, the board's executive director, Vanessa Cardella, confirmed that despite the heavy supervision the parolee is receiving at the group home where he has been placed -- six state employees or contractors are keeping an eye on him -- he still will have plenty of time to be out and about on his own.
Cardella didn't know how much the supervisors will be paid for working on the parolee's case, but it seems likely to be many thousands of dollars a year.
Most people may not understand the necessity for the murderer-cannibal's parole and its expense. Indeed, they may be shocked and appalled. But they shouldn't blame the board, for it is only following the law, which calls for the perpetrator's release if the board thinks he'll be fine if he adheres to the conditions of his parole, which include medication.
Of course there can be no guarantee. Serious risk to the public will continue, which is why a better outcome would have been to keep the man residing in a comfortable room at the state's high-security mental hospital. This probably would be less expensive as well.
But that better outcome requires changing the law about acquittals by reason of insanity. The law simply shouldn't allow release of murderers before their old age. Republican legislators, a small minority in the General Assembly, should submit such legislation even though the Democratic majority will reject it. For at least then some Democrats may be asked to explain why people should feel good about the outcome of the murderer-cannibal's case.
THE PERFECT TAX: A recent study by the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services found that people addicted to gambling constitute less than 2 percent of Connecticut's population but produce more than half the state's sports betting revenue and a fifth of its revenue from all forms of gambling.
While the department sees this as a problem with a huge human cost, elected officials see it as a political solution -- the perfect tax. A tiny and disparaged minority finances a disproportionate share of state government and that human cost is not on state government's books.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Sanctimony city and state milk grim history for patronage
A 1743 copy of the Treaty of Hartford of 1638, which sought to eradicate the Pequot cultural identity by prohibiting the Pequots from returning to their lands, speaking their tribal language, or referring to themselves as Pequots.
The nave of Trinity Church, on the New Haven Green. The Gothic Revival building was constructed in 1814-1816.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Two more tedious but true tales from the Sanctimony City and the Sanctimony State have unfolded.
In New Haven dozens of people gathered at Trinity Church on the city's green on March 8 to mark the 200th anniversary of the last recorded sale of slaves in the city and Connecticut -- two women who were paraded to the green and purchased by an abolitionist who eventually set them free. Last week's gathering called itself a “service of lamentation and healing."
Meanwhile, at the state Capitol, a legislative committee considered a resolution to condemn the Treaty of Hartford of 1638, which marked the end of the war between the Pequot Indian tribe and its adversaries -- the English, Mohegan and Narragansett tribes. The war killed most of the Pequots and the treaty sought to nullify the few who were left, bestowing them on their adversaries as slaves and prohibiting the tribe's reconstitution.
The events implied that modern society bears some enduring guilt for the abominations of centuries past. Indeed, establishing this guilt seems to have been the political objective. This was mistaken and ironic.
Americans like to believe in their country's exceptionalism, but slavery was and remains a worldwide phenomenon going back millennia and transcending nations and races. The slaves brought to the United States and delivered to white masters had been sold first in west Africa by other Black people. To some extent slavery continues today in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
So in the larger context Connecticut's connection to slavery may be more remarkable for the efforts to overthrow it than to sustain it. In any case in no country was there a more devastating war to destroy slavery than what happened in the United States.
But even as New Haveners gathered to “lament" and “heal" from the wrongs of two centuries ago, the city remained the scene of a devastating wrong for which no sanctimonious services of lamentation and healing are ever held. That is, most of the city's children -- members of racial and ethnic minorities, far more numerous than there were ever slaves in the state -- lack parents, live in poverty, and fail in school.
New Haven's schools have the worst chronic absenteeism in the state and many of those schools are in terrible repair. Many of their students, undereducated and demoralized, graduate to a more subtle but far more prevalent form of slavery.
As for the Indian wars of almost four centuries ago, they were full of atrocities, though today it is politically correct to remember only those of the winning side.
The massacre of the Pequots in May 1637 in what is now Groton was the most horrible thing ever to happen in Connecticut. But the Pequots started the war. The tribe's very name meant “destroyers" and they already had made deadly enemies of the Mohegans and Narragansetts long before attacking the English settlement in Wethersfield in April 1637, killing nine unarmed people, including three women, kidnapping two women, and killing the settlement's cattle.
So a month later the English, Mohegans and Narragansetts united in a conclusive slaughter.
While the Treaty of Hartford fairly can be called genocidal, it was itself a response to genocide in an era when genocide was common.
No morality is taught by the sanctimony that evoked these horrors last week. Slavery has had no constituency in Connecticut since those last slaves were sold in 1825. Nor is there any constituency here for genocide, though in modern war civilians are often killed.
But there is a selfish political constituency for mobilizing the horrors of the past.
Sanctimoniously reminding people of slavery can intimidate them out of opposing the claims of racial minorities for more government patronage, though that patronage isn't righting any wrongs.
And sanctimoniously reminding people of the Treaty of Hartford may insulate the absurd patronage enshrined in state law whereby the ultra-distant descendants of the ancient Pequots, the victims of genocide, share a casino duopoly with the ultra-distant descendants of the ancient Mohegans, that genocide's co-perpetrators.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Rent control won’t Build housing; Alleging ‘Meanness’ is not an argument in School-Trans-athletes issue
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut's cost of living is high, in large part because of housing prices, and nearly everyone says the state needs much more housing, especially ‘‘affordable" housing -- most of which is rental housing. But whether everyone who says that the state needs more housing really believes it is a fair question.
That's because most of the housing legislation proposed in the General Assembly wouldn't increase the supply of housing at all. Most proposals would just scapegoat landlords, though more rental housing requires more landlords. Other proposals would just increase the dependence of renters on government.
State government action that might actually get any “affordable" housing built remains too controversial, even for many Democratic legislators who ordinarily prattle about helping the poor even as many of us argue that Democratic administrations have lately been grinding the poor down with inflation, including high electricity prices, and ineffectual schools.
For example, Democratic legislators want a big increase in state government rent subsidies to tenants, which turn housing into political patronage and take tenants hostage.
Democrats want to forbid landlords from evicting tenants at the end of their leases without ‘‘just cause." End-of-lease evictions undertaken so that landlords can raise rents would be prohibited. This would be rent control, which never got any housing built but only destroyed the private sector's incentive to build rental housing.
Democrats want to forbid landlords from charging more than a month's rent for a security deposit, as if landlords shouldn't have the right to judge how much of a deposit is necessary to protect their property against damage by tenants.
Democrats want to restrict the rent increases that can be charged upon sale of a property -- more rent control.
Democrats want to require even smaller towns to establish “fair rent commissions" -- still more rent control.
Legislation called “Towns Take the Lead" would require towns to set housing construction goals, but there would be no firm enforcement mechanism for achieving them.
Democrats want state government to increase its obstruction of federal immigration-law enforcement and provide more medical-insurance coverage to illegal immigrants, thus incentivizing more illegal immigration, even as state government has never made any provision for housing Connecticut's estimated more than 100,000 immigration-law violators.
The most helpful of the Democratic housing proposals may be the one that would formally authorize homeless people to live, eat and sleep on public land.
Connecticut has many destitute, addicted and mentally ill people, and some of them panhandle and live largely out of sight in the woods or underbrush, but so far the state lacks anything like the sidewalk tenting camps of Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. Maybe that kind of visibility for the destitute and disturbed is necessary to get Connecticut thinking seriously about its housing policy, social disintegration and declining living standards.
The only sure way to get a substantial amount of new housing in Connecticut is for state government to commission it directly and let landlords charge market-rate rents.
Connecticut's cities, with their populations impoverished by state welfare and education policies and their governments surviving mainly on state financial aid, are already wards of the state. They also have large tracts of decrepit industrial and residential property already served by water, sewer, gas and power lines and public transportation -- property that practically begs for redevelopment, especially mixed-use redevelopment, with commerce at street level and residences upstairs, redevelopment that doesn't worsen suburban sprawl.
A state redevelopment authority could be authorized to purchase or condemn such properties and provide them to developers, specifying their development format and completion schedules, while leaving rents to the market so the new properties won't become more government-engineered slums. Cities might resent their loss of control to the state redevelopment authority but then few cities are operated well enough to deserve control of state housing policy any more than suburbs deserve to control it with their exclusive zoning.
Any new middle-class housing will help bring down the cost of all housing nearby, and the cost of living generally. If Connecticut's decentralized political system can't get housing built, state government will have to do it.
‘Mean’ Is No Argument
According to the leader of the Democratic majority in the Connecticut Senate, Norwalk’s Bob Duff, Republican legislators are “mean" for proposing legislation to prevent boys from participating in girls' sports when the boys think of themselves as girls.
“Mean" is pretty tame as Democratic criticism of Republicans goes these days. At least Duff didn’t call the Republicans racist, misogynist or right-wing extremists, as is commonly done by many Democrats without prompting other Democrats to call them “mean."
These days anyone who suggests, for example, that state government shouldn’t be controlled by the government employee unions anymore is bound to be called one of those things, maybe all three. For as Lenin or some other totalitarian is supposed to have observed: If you label something well enough, no argument is needed.
Calling Republicans “mean" for wanting to keep males out of female sports is not an argument. It is a distraction, because there is no argument against keeping males out of female sports, except that doing so may hurt the feelings of the males who think of themselves as female.
But keeping those males out of female sports doesn't deny them the ability to participate in sports, as is sometimes alleged, since they remain free to participate in male sports.
If anyone really needs reminding, the premise of segregating the genders in sports is that on average males are larger, stronger and faster than females, and that only such segregation can assure equal opportunity for females, which the 1972 amendments to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were meant to achieve.
But now that the transgenderism cult has taken over some of the Democratic Party, the party implies that physical differences between the sexes have disappeared and there is no unfairness in requiring females to compete against males, even as males competing as females have famously robbed the latter of deserved victories in Connecticut and throughout the world, sometimes inflicting physical injuries on the females.
That unfairness is what is “mean," though Duff affects not to see it.
If a male can deny biology and merely think himself female and induce government to compel everyone to pretend along with him, what becomes of reality? After all, if the adage is true -- that you’re only as old as you feel -- how can adults be prevented from playing in Little League and lording it over the kids there?
Most people know that the transgenderism cult in sports is nonsense but many are reluctant to say so lest they risk having the cult’s many demagogues call them “mean" or something worse. After all, they may figure that there is only a little injustice here -- to the few females who lose to the males who purport to have transcended their gender and its physical advantages.
Even so, it’s injustice all the same, and resolving the issue in favor of justice might be easy in Connecticut if a team competing against the University of Connecticut’s beloved women’s basketball team recruited a transgender player or two who proceeded to knock the UConn women around in a blowout on television.
The resulting popular indignation might give Connecticut Democrats some political courage.
The Biden administration turned Title IX on its head, the Trump administration is striving to put it back upright, and a few Democratic leaders may be realizing that the country is not inclined to keep pretending along with them that males belong in female sports, bathrooms and prisons, nor to pretend that immigration law enforcement should stop. Indeed, only such Democratic nuttiness could have helped to bring Donald Trump back to the presidency.
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who aspires to his party’s next presidential nomination, appeared to have deduced this the other day when he told an interviewer that male participation in female sports is unfair. This was amazing, since California is where much nuttiness originates.
If Newsom can repudiate the nuttiness, could Senator Duff and other Democrats in Connecticut repudiate it someday as well? Or would that be too “mean"?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Conn. insanity Law is Crazy
Depiction of Mongol cannibalism from Matthew Paris's chronicle.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Having recently shrugged off his inability to get state government employees to return to their normal workplaces, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont may have been lucky to be traveling in India the other week when the state Psychiatric Review Board announced it had conditionally released Tyree Smith, a murderous cannibal, back into society, proclaiming him cured of his taste for human flesh.
Members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly exploded with exasperated questions.
Of course, the Democratic majority let the event pass without comment. But at least the Democrats' indifference wasn't caused by what might have been expected -- the political influence of something like the Connecticut Anthropophagist Association. Such a special interest would have to work hard to become as predatory as the primary constituencies of the Democrats, the state employee and teacher unions. No, Democratic legislators ignore everything questionable in state government when their party controls the administration, which is almost always.
The Republican questions were fair: Where is the cannibal living? Does he have roommates? If so, are they aware of his past? If he is in a group home, is the staff aware? Do his neighbors know he is nearby? Who makes sure he takes his medication? How often he is to take it? What are the supervision and mental health regimens imposed on him? What safety protocols surround him?
The Psychiatric Security Review Board's executive director, Vanessa M. Cardella, answered some of the questions. The parolee's medicine will be administered by a visiting nurse. (He or she better be tall, muscular, and heavily armed, or accompanied by several such guards.) The state probation office will supervise him. He will wear an electronic monitoring device, be tested regularly for drug and alcohol use, and keep receiving mental health treatment. If he fails to comply, the board can send him back to Whiting Forensic Institute, Connecticut's euphemistically named prison for the criminally insane.
Cardella said, ‘‘There is a 0% recidivism rate for violent crime for acquittees on conditional release status."
Yes, so far, so good -- or so it may seem. But many ordinary parolees violate their probation, not all crimes are violent, and psychiatric parolees may offend again short of violence and may already have done so.
Now who wants to volunteer to be neighbor to someone acquitted by reason of insanity for murder with a side of cannibalism?
For that matter, where do the governor and legislature find volunteers to serve on the Psychiatric Security Review Board? Those jobs may be as thankless as those of the state auditors, who at least get paid.
But there are fair questions here for legislators too.
The law distinguishes the ordinary criminal from the insane one on the presumption that the latter did not understand the wrongfulness of his actions and so shouldn't be held responsible for them -- shouldn't be punished but just confined, comfortably enough, for the safety of society -- and that he may be restored to sanity and good behavior.
While this may seem sensible and just in principle, it is not persuasive in practice when the crime is murder. For then the law's presumption carries much greater risk. The law assigns the Psychiatric Security Review Board to measure that risk and make a judgment.
That is, state law, not the board itself, already has decided that release should be available to insane murderers judged cured. The board's judgment on the cannibal may be mistaken but appears to have been conscientiously reached.
The problem is that the law itself is crazy.
The best solution here may be to forbid any release of murderers acquitted by reason of insanity, allowing release only for insane people acquitted of lesser crimes, if there are any such offenders.
The cannibal's case provides a strong financial reason for this change in policy. For enforcing all the complicated conditions imposed on his release to protect the public probably will be far more expensive and far less reliable than keeping him at Whiting and continuing to treat him there.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net),
Chris Powell: Immigration-fraud racket in Bridgeport; The sad end of Peanut and Fred
The P.T. Barnum (as in the circus) Museum in Bridgeport.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Having stuffed absentee ballot boxes for Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and the city’s Democratic machine only to be caught on surveillance video and charged criminally and belatedly fired from her patronage job as official greeter at City Hall, Wanda Geter-Pataky has found what may be a more lucrative racket.
The New Haven Independent reported this month that Geter-Pataky had become a marriage broker. She was bringing to City Hall in New Haven older foreigners, apparently legal but time-limited visitors, together with much younger U.S. citizens, getting them marriage licenses, and then, as a justice of the peace, performing marriages in the hall outside the office of Mayor Justin Elicker.
Connecticut's Hearst newspapers then reported that Geter-Pataky long had been doing similar business at City Hall in Bridgeport.
How much she has charged for these services is not known.
The couples involved have no obvious connection to their betrothed. According to The Independent, the 114 couples whose marriages Geter-Pataky facilitated in New Haven included many people from India and some from Tajikistan, Georgia, Turkey, Russia, Egypt and Jamaica.
Geter-Pataky told The Independent that the couples live in New Haven, but the newspaper found that only three included a city resident. When The Independent asked a young woman about to be married if she was being paid to do it, Geter-Pataky told her to say no.
If such a marriage is genuine, the foreigner would be entitled under federal immigration law to stay in the country. And if such a marriage is a fraud for evading immigration law, who in authority in New Haven or state government would care?
After all, New Haven is a "sanctuary city," Connecticut a "sanctuary state," and a New Haven city clerk who got suspicious about similar marriage licenses early this year and told immigration authorities was suspended for violating the city's "sanctuary" ordinance. (So much for "If you see something, say something.") The clerk retired rather than be fired.
After The Independent discovered Geter-Pataky’s racket in New Haven she moved it back to Bridgeport City Hall. Though she is awaiting trial in connection with the latter racket, she remains vice chairwoman of the city’s Democratic committee.
As The Independent was compiling its report about the racket conducted in the hall outside his office, Mayor Elicker issued a statement lamenting Donald Trump's election as president.
"Just like when Donald Trump was president before, we will once again come together as a city to stand up for what is right and just," the mayor said. "We will continue to work together to ensure New Haven is a city where all are welcome and where all can thrive."
By "all" the mayor presumably means even those who contrive and profit from fake marriages to break immigration law. How "right and just"!
Three Republican state senators reacted to the Independent’s story with alarm. (Democratic state legislators seemed to ignore the story.) The Republicans urged state Attorney General William Tong to investigate the matter. Journalists at the state Capitol should press Gov. Ned Lamont about it too.
But since, like the segregationists of old, the governor and attorney general seem happy to be nullifiers, maybe they will construe Geter-Pataky’s racket as a great new way for Connecticut to boost tourism, as with abortion.
R.I.P., PEANUT AND FRED: People not on government's payroll may say a prayer of thanks for social-media star Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon, the indoor pets of animal rescuer Mark Longo of Pine City, N.Y. As the country prepared to vote for president, Peanut and Fred were seized from Longo’s home in a five-hour raid by six agents of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, killed, and tested for rabies, which they almost surely didn’t have.
Their martyrdom has given the country what I see as a metaphor for its government -- assiduously intervening in trivia while failing catastrophically with its most important responsibilities, such as immigration and public safety.
Yet some people still wonder where all those votes for Trump came from.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net.)
Chris Powell: Connecticut’s public-pension racket
"The Worship of Mammon" (1909), by Evelyn De Morgan.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
An angry reader notes that after 24 years as a judge, the Connecticut Supreme Court’s chief justice, Richard A. Robinson, has just "retired" while joining a big national law firm, Day Pitney, which has five offices in Connecticut. "So now," the reader writes, "he will be getting a full pension from state taxpayers plus another full-time paycheck. Why should the state pay him a pension if he is still working? This is why the state is virtually bankrupt. It’s crazy. How come the press doesn’t report this part of it?"
Maybe what's left of journalism in Connecticut doesn't report the pension angle because it's an old story, not that it ever has been told very well.
Robinson's immediate predecessor as chief justice, Chase T. Rogers, retired six years ago after 20 years as a judge and then went to work at Day Pitney too. She now draws an annual state pension of more than $160,000, quite apart from her salary at the law firm. Since Robinson had four more years as a judge than Rogers, his state pension may be a bit larger. Since both retired judges are in their mid-60s, with continued good health they probably will have quite a few years earning at the law firm at least as much as their pensions.
But such opportunities are not peculiar to retired Connecticut judges. Virtually all retired state employees are eligible to do the same kind of thing -- that is, to collect an excellent retirement pension from state government even as they launch second careers.
The practice is especially popular among state troopers and municipal police officers, who typically can retire with great pensions at a young age -- in their late 40s or early 50s -- and then qualify for other good jobs to take them into their actual retirement.
Sometimes it’s a bit of a racket, as was shown in 2020 by the internationally notorious case of State Trooper Matthew Spina. The trooper was video-recorded by a motorist he stopped in New Haven and the video was posted on the Internet. It showed the trooper hysterical with rage, screaming at the motorist, ordering him out of his car and handcuffing him, bullying and threatening him, searching his backpack, and stomping on his possessions before uncuffing him and letting him go without even ticketing him, since he had done nothing wrong, or at least nothing actionable.
While inflicting this abuse Spina declared that he hated his job and the public and was eager to retire in 14 months.
Spina appeared to be middle-aged and a little journalism revealed that for five years he had been working so many extra hours that his overtime pay exceeded or nearly equaled his base annual salary of almost $100,000. That is, like many other troopers he was risking burning himself out and driving himself crazy to attain the magical threshold of the state pension system -- three extremely high-earning years from which his pension would be calculated.
State police management readily obliged his mad pursuit of a pension bonanza.
Spina indeed retired the next year and now draws an annual state pension of more than $116,000. If he has another job now, his pretend retirement may be almost as comfortable as that of the retired judges.
Of course Connecticut’s state employee pension system isn’t a racket for everyone, but it is often excessively generous. It is a fair question as to why state government should pay large pensions, or any pensions, to people earning substantial amounts in second careers.
But there is a simple explanation. It’s that Connecticut has many more politically active state and municipal government employees and retired employees than it has politically attentive and engaged citizens.
Anyone who sees extravagance here should try putting the pension question to his state legislators. Few legislators are likely to express any criticism, lest they alienate a powerful special interest. If Connecticut is ever to have a better public life, it will need a better public.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: The misnamed 'Banned Books Week'; about that bus highway
Mark Twain's famed novel has been banned in some American schools because of its racial language.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Last week was what librarians and leftists in Connecticut and throughout the country call Banned Books Week. A more accurate name for it would be Submit to Authority Week.
The week is misnamed because in the United States there are no banned books at all -- no books whose publication and possession are forbidden by government. Banned Books Week has been contrived by librarians and leftists to intimidate people out of criticizing certain books that librarians and school administrators have chosen for inclusion in school libraries, curriculums, and public libraries. The objective is to prevent libraries and schools from ever having to answer to anyone for their choices.
The selection of every book for a library or curriculum is always a matter of judgment. But the promoters of Banned Books Week would have the public believe that the choices made by librarians and school administrators are always right, and that anyone who questions these choices is a follower of Hitler or, worse, Donald Trump.
Some criticism of library and curriculum choices is nutty. Two great works of American literature that have helped to defeat racism -- Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird -- are sometimes targeted by people who can't get past the occasional racist language in them.
But these days most books whose inclusion in schools and libraries are challenged involve homosexuality and transgenderism, and these are fairly challenged at least in regard to their appropriateness for children, especially amid the mental illness that is worsening among them.
This doesn't mean that such books should be excluded automatically but that their appropriateness should be settled by thoughtful review and discussion. Calling a book's critics "book banners" and a book's advocates "groomers," as is common in these controversies, is not thoughtful.
The great irony of Banned Books Week is that as a practical matter its promoters are themselves the biggest book banners. That is, with a virtually infinite number of books in the world, librarians and school administrators reject thousands of books for every one they include.
Of course not all books can be included in any library or curriculum. Do the choices that are made give a politically balanced view of the world and academic subjects or a politically skewed and propagandist one?
If Banned Books Week succeeds, no one will ever know -- which is the idea.
Shelter along the CTfastrak route
The once-controversial bus highway between Hartford and New Britain, CTfastrak, has been operating for 10 years, and this week Connecticut's Hearst newspapers sought to determine if, after a construction cost of more than half a billion dollars, the busway can be considered a success.
CTfastrak has turned 10 and seen an increase in riders from a pandemic dip
CTfastrak has turned 10 and seen an increase in riders from a pandemic dip
CTfastrak has turned 10 and seen an increase in riders from a pandemic dip
CTfastrak has turned 10 and seen an increase in riders from a pandemic dip
The state Transportation Department says the highway had 2.8 million riders in 2016, its first full year of operation, reached a peak of 3.3 million riders in 2019, and then, amid the Covid-19 epidemic, fell to about 2 million riders in 2021 and has been slowly increasing since.
But the chief of the department's Bureau of Public Transit, Ben Limmer, was unable to provide information crucial to a judgment on the project. While it stands to reason that the bus highway has reduced automobile commuting between Hartford and New Britain, the department says it has no data on that. More concerning is that the department can't or won’t say how much each CTfastrak rider is being subsidized by state government.
"We do what we can to make sure fares are affordable," Limmer said. "I assume fares have not kept up with inflation, so we’re probably flat or slightly up on subsidies."
All modes of transportation -- sidewalks, streets and highways, trains, and airplanes -- are subsidized by government in some way. But now that the epidemic-induced trend of working from home has greatly reduced commuting, CTfastrak is even more questionable than it was when it began.
Does the Transportation Department want to know what CTfastrak’s operating costs are and how much riders are being subsidized? It doesn't seem to want the public to know.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: How many jobs were actually created by Conn. state fund? Stop companies from looting hospitals
Chimera. Apulian red-figure dish, ca. 350-340 BC
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut's state auditors are on a roll with their critical report about state government's "venture-capital firm," Connecticut Innovations, which was published the other day soon after the critical audits about expensive management failures at Central Connecticut State University, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, and the Correction Department.
The problem with Connecticut Innovations, the auditors say, is that the agency, which spends tens of millions of dollars investing in new companies in the state, can't be sure that the companies have produced all the jobs they promised to produce with state government's investment. According to the auditors, Connecticut Innovations says verifying the job numbers would require auditing the companies and the companies can't afford it. Connecticut Innovations adds that while the state Labor Department has data about employment at the companies, it's always out of date.
This explanation is weak. Surely without much cost the subsidized companies can quantify their employment at regular intervals and identify their employees by names, address, and hours worked. Connecticut Innovations then could do spot checks about the claimed employees. This wouldn't be foolproof but it would be better than simply accepting the data provided by the subsidized companies as Connecticut Innovations does now.
Connecticut Innovations says it will try to figure something out, though the issue may be forgotten unless the General Assembly presses it.
The auditors' report on Connecticut Innovations should be taken by the legislature as an invitation to reconsider the agency in its entirety. For even if the job-creation data reported to Connecticut Innovations could be verified comprehensively, it would not mean the agency's subsidies were essential.
For the world is full of banks and investment firms that finance new businesses. Who can be sure that the jobs at companies subsidized by Connecticut Innovations couldn't have been created anyway with private financing? Why does state government need to get into the venture capital business any more than it needs to get into any other business?
Of course a venture capital firm operated by state government can provide one thing more readily than a private venture-capital firm can -- political patronage for those who run the government.
In any case if Connecticut had an economic and political climate more favorable to business and wealth creation than to employment by and dependence on government, state government might not feel as compelled to play favorites and subsidize certain businesses. A better economic and political climate would be the best innovation of all.
Better late than never -- and in the middle of his campaign for re-election -- Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy has noticed the looting of Waterbury, Manchester Memorial, and Rockville General hospitals by the California-based investment company, Prospect Medical Holdings, which purchased them from their nonprofit operators in 2016 and began mortgaging their property and stripping their assets to pay big dividends to its investors.
This kind of thing has become a nationwide racket, and Murphy cited the Connecticut angle last week during a Senate hearing about the bankruptcy of Steward Health Care, a for-profit company that recently ran three hospitals in Massachusetts into bankruptcy.
Murphy asked: "How have we let American capitalism get so far off the rails, so unmoored from the common good, that anybody thinks it's OK to make a billion dollars off of degrading health care for poor people in Waterbury, Connecticut?"
The answer is simple. It is less a matter of capitalist greed than government's negligence. That is, in Connecticut and elsewhere government has allowed profit-making companies to acquire nonprofit hospitals and extract for profit the decades of public charity that built them.
Federal and state law could prohibit such transactions. So how about it, Senator, Gov. Ned Lamont, and state legislators? And Senator, how about returning the $2,500 campaign contribution you received from Prospect's political action committee in 2017, a year after it acquired the Connecticut hospitals, a contribution reported this week by political blogger Kevin Rennie?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Connecticut’s abortion barbarians
U.S. abortions by gestational age in 2016.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Now that the issue has been returned to the states and democracy, abortion extremism has revived throughout the country. In some states this extremism aims to make abortion virtually impossible, limiting it to the earliest weeks of pregnancy, sometimes before women may realize they are pregnant. But in Connecticut the extremism goes the other way.
A few days ago Connecticut abortion extremism manifested itself at the state Department of Public Health, which held a hearing on its proposal to repeal three state regulations that pose only slight impediments to abortion, regulations that did not bother advocates of "reproductive rights" back when the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade was in force. Indeed, for decades Connecticut has modeled its abortion law on the principle proclaimed by Roe -- that abortion should be an individual right prior to fetal viability but subject to state regulation after, because society has an interest in the unborn when they are able to live outside the womb.
As constitutional law Roe was questionable, as even some advocates of abortion rights acknowledged, but it amounted to a political compromise that commanded majority support nationally, though not in all states.
The Supreme Court's reversal of Roe has changed nothing in Connecticut. There is no movement here to outlaw or seriously restrict abortion, though the public probably would support legislation to require parental consent for abortions for minors, since such abortions conceal rape.
To the contrary, as shown by the health department's proposal to repeal those three regulations, the political movement about abortion in Connecticut is, in its own words, to "go beyond Roe" -- to legitimize late-term abortion, abortion of viable fetuses, in all circumstances.
The department would repeal the regulation arising from the Roe principle that authorizes abortion in the last trimester of pregnancy only to protect the mother's life or health.
This regulation is actually only the pretense of concern for unborn life, since no government authority is checking on late-term abortions and since protecting a pregnant woman's health is construed to include her mental health. In advance of childbirth it's impossible to disprove a woman's claim that delivering her child will drive her insane, absurd as such a claim may seem.
But even the regulation's pretense of concern for viable fetuses is too much for Connecticut's abortion extremists.
Another regulation proposed for repeal requires abortion providers to try to save of life of a fetus -- that is, a child -- who survives an abortion. Connecticut's abortion extremists want to erase any hint of an abortion survivor's humanity. An infant bleeding and gasping for breath is to be coldly left to die in the presence of doctors, nurses, the law, and its own mother -- barbarity.
Also proposed for repeal is the regulation that authorizes medical personnel to refuse to participate in abortions for religious reasons. As Connecticut essentially declares abortion the highest public good, all conscience is to be trampled.
The foremost advocate of repealing the regulations, state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, leader of the abortion extremists in the General Assembly -- they style themselves the Reproductive Rights Caucus -- maintains that the regulation protecting the consciences of medical personnel is unnecessary because federal law already protects them. But Gilchrest would not advocate repealing the regulation if she wasn't hoping that someday abortion extremists will gain control of the federal government, repeal the law, and let Connecticut drive anti-abortion doctors and nurses out of their profession.
Gov. Ned Lamont told the Hartford Courant he wasn't fully informed about the move to repeal the abortion regulations and would be looking into it. But he added perceptively, "I hope it's not a solution looking for a problem."
That's just what it is. For the only problem here is that some people think that while Connecticut is more liberal on abortion than all states except Vermont and Oregon, which have no gestational limits, the state still doesn't exalt abortion enough.
Does the governor agree with the barbarians? Since the health department answers to him, it will be answering for him if it decides to "go beyond Roe."
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: What do college demonstrators in Conn. and elsewhere mean by ‘Free Palestine’?
Pro-Palestinian demonstration by students near Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
College is back in session and students are returning not just to their studies but also to protests on campus about the war in Gaza. At the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Yale University in New Haven, and other institutions, students are chanting and carrying signs reading "Free Palestine!"
Journalism not being what it used to be, since literacy and civic engagement aren't either, no one seems to be asking the students exactly what they mean by "Free Palestine!" and how that objective should be achieved.
So how do the student protesters define Palestine? Do they define it as most Palestinians themselves do, as encompassing the land "from the river to the sea" -- the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean -- thus liquidating Israel, as Palestinians often have tried to do in war since the area was partitioned into Jewish and Arab sections by resolution of the United Nations in 1948, and as they are doing again now?
Do the student protesters define Palestine as something that leaves room for Israel -- a Palestine consisting of Gaza, which Israel evacuated in 2005, and the "occupied West Bank," the land between Jordan and Israel proper, most of which Israel agreed to evacuate during negotiations sponsored by President Bill Clinton in 2000?
If the student protesters define Palestine as the Clinton plan did, they might want to ask the people on whose behalf they're protesting why they can't accept such a compromise even now that the war that Gaza launched against Israel last October has brought catastrophic bloodshed and ruin to the territory. The students should explain why Palestinian irredentism is worth so much.
And what do the student protesters mean by "free"? Do they mean civil liberties -- speech, press, assembly, religion, due process of law, women's rights, and sexual orientation -- liberties enjoyed in the United States, Western Europe, and Israel, but not in Gaza and West Bank areas under Palestinian control, nor, indeed, anywhere in the Arab world? If that's what the student protesters mean, they should go to Gaza or the West Bank and try to exercise such freedoms there, after making provision for the transport home of their corpses.
Or do the student protesters understand "free Palestine" as most Palestinians appear to understand it -- a land free of Jews, a land free to attack a neighboring state and people, bombarding, murdering, raping, and kidnapping whenever the necessary strength has been regained during another "ceasefire"?
Yes, the war in Gaza is horrifying. But then wars against totalitarians seldom can be won politely. The war against the totalitarian aggressors of World War II, Germany and Japan, were won only by leveling both countries, killing millions of civilians, and then remaking the totalitarian societies through long military occupations.
If the student protesters think there is another way, they should spell it out and offer it to the warring parties. They may find, as Clinton did, that making peace requires more than pious hand-wringing on a peaceful campus far away from cutthroats whose hatred and brutality far surpass anything the students can imagine.
TREATMENT ISN'T ENOUGH: School officials and social workers report that Connecticut is facing an epidemic of mental illness among young people -- not just teens in high school but also children in elementary and middle school. There is clamor for state government to spend more for treatment and school mental-health clinics, as if that will solve the problem.
Little attention is being paid to the cause of the youth mental-illness epidemic. The recent virus epidemic and its disruption of school and home life is an easy explanation, but that epidemic is long over. Something else must be wrong. Child neglect was already bad when the virus struck. Because inflation soared during much of the time since the epidemic started, real incomes for many have fallen. That may have worsened neglect.
Treatment isn't enough. The General Assembly and Gov. Ned Lamont should strive to discern and eradicate the causes of youth mental illness.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Too much higher ed?
The precursor to the University of Connecticut in 1903.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
What a wonderfully subversive and politically incorrect idea has exploded from the committee set up by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities to study the problem of the state's estimated 119,000 "disconnected" and alienated young people.
Meeting last week at New London City Hall, the group heard a vice president of Yale New Haven Health, Paul Mounds Jr., criticize the widespread misimpression that hospitals and other medical companies hire only applicants with college degrees.
Mounds said Connecticut's hospitals have hundreds of openings for people with high school diplomas or the equivalent. He added that employers should reach out to overlooked potential workers, including former convicts. (A decent job is a strong incentive not to return to crime.)
The president of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, Chris DiPentima, elaborated. He said many of Connecticut's reported 93,000 job openings don't require college degrees and he urged employers to shift from degree-based hiring to skill-based hiring. DePentima scorned what he called efforts to "over-educate the population."
That is, Mounds and DiPentima were lamenting the cost of the credentialism that has been inflicted on society by higher educators, who profit greatly from it, and by society's own vanity. (See "Doctor" Jill Biden.) Credentialism is why millions of Americans are hobbled with billions of dollars of college-loan debt incurred in pursuit of degrees that conferred little in the way of education or job skills.
Of course, credentialism is a big business in itself, as shown by a review of salaries in higher education, especially administrator salaries. Reducing credentialism might cause a fair amount of unemployment, since much of higher education is just unnecessary overhead expense for society.
Higher education isn't useless. But outside highly technical fields, it is grossly overpriced and distracts catastrophically from the country's big education problem, lower education.
A recent survey by the Connecticut Education Association, the state's largest teacher union, illustrated a big part of the lower-education problem.
It wasn't the survey's finding that teachers in Connecticut say they are underpaid. As they are members of unions it's practically their obligation to feel underpaid, just as they felt underpaid in 1986 when the state's Education Enhancement Act became law, leading to decades of steady pay increases for teachers in the belief that student performance was mainly a function of teacher salaries. (There turned out to be no connection, and student performance has declined as teacher pay has risen.)
No, the CEA survey was valuable for showing that teachers are increasingly demoralized by student misbehavior, which is prompting teachers to leave their profession earlier than planned and making it harder for schools to hire good applicants.
This problem is worst where poverty, child neglect, and mental illness among children are worst -- cities and inner suburbs. While Hartford's school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, showed her usual enthusiasm in welcoming children back to school this week, she also acknowledged that the city's schools are still trying to fill 200 vacant positions. As the CEA survey indicated, teachers want to teach, not break up brawls or restrain children who freak out in class and don't know how to behave because they have so little parenting -- and because school administrations prohibit disciplining them.
This social disintegration is part of government's general impoverishment of society but Connecticut's political class remains oblivious to it and busies itself instead with politically correct irrelevance, as New Haven's city council did the other day even as the city's schools are just as dismal as Hartford's.
The council is promoting a resolution that would apologize for New Haven's having blocked the establishment of a college for Black people back in 1831, nearly two centuries ago.
Maybe in another two centuries New Haven will apologize for the failure of most of its schoolchildren to perform even close to grade level, for the racial achievement gap in its schools, and for the city's constant crime, most of whose victims are members of minority groups. Maybe in two centuries state government will consider apologizing too.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Stop Conn utility agency from usurping taxing power; more casinos coming?
MA NCHESTER, Conn.
Even a few members of the Connecticut General Assembly's Democratic majority recently expressed alarm at the latest arrogance at the Public Utilities Control Authority — its raising electricity rates again.
This time the increase is to repay Connecticut's two largest electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, for the millions of dollars the agency ordered them to spend reimbursing individuals and businesses for installing electric-car chargers. The program was meant to reduce climate change.
The program was silly, since even if Connecticut stopped using every kind of energy and reverted to a prehistoric way of life, it would have no bearing on climate change, nor on the introduction to the atmosphere of the "greenhouse gases" that climate hysterics believe will destroy the planet before Greta Thunberg grows up. China and the rest of the developing world will see that oil and coal remain the world's primary fuels for decades to come, until wind and solar power become much less expensive and more reliable.
Connecticut is far too small to measure in those calculations.
Stuffing the expense of somebody else's electric-car charger into ordinary electric bills, joining other expenses of government policies that have nothing to do with the generation and delivery of electricity, as Connecticut long has done, has always been beyond silly. It's offensive, because electricity, like food and medicine, is a necessity of life and commerce.
Leaders of the Republican minority in the General Assembly and even some ordinary citizens noted last week that the rate increases to pay for electric-car chargers are doubly offensive because they take more from the poor than the rich. Rate increases for electric-car chargers are essentially regressive taxes. Since electric cars are so expensive and less durable, only wealthy people can afford them. But while Democrats claim to be the party of the working class, they don't mind regressive taxes hidden in the fine print of electric bills.
But now soaring electric bills in Connecticut at last have prompted ordinary people to start questioning what have been euphemized as the "public benefits" hidden in those bills -- "benefits" such as charging people extra to make up for the people who don't pay.
Reporting on the controversy the other week, the Yankee Institute's Meghan Portfolio noted another reason why hiding EV charger costs in electric bills is offensive. That is, quite on its own three years ago the Public Utilities Control Authority required the electric companies to reimburse people and businesses for installing EV chargers and related equipment, making the costs payable to the electric companies through general rate increases.
This appropriation was made and its method of financing was levied without legislation enacted by the General Assembly and Gov. Ned Lamont. Portfolio writes: "PUCA's ability to impose sweeping mandates without legislative oversight has left ratepayers footing the bill for policies that disproportionately benefit a select few."
That is, Governor Lamont and the legislature have essentially delegated taxing power to an unelected agency. That's irresponsible and anti-democratic.
Republicans have asked the governor to call a special session of the legislature to undo some of the recent electric-rate increases. The governor says he is open to the idea -- that is, he'll call a special session if more people clamor for an end to the "public benefits" racket. People should take the hint.
MORE CASINOS COMING? Does Connecticut want more gambling casinos, and more casinos that operate from the authority of licenses awarded as ethnic privilege?
That question soon may become compelling. The other Connecticut's Hearst newspapers reported that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs may reverse its position and invite the three state-recognized tribes in the western part of the state to reapply for the federal recognition that long ago was denied to them. Such recognition almost certainly will come with the same casino privileges enjoyed by the two federally recognized tribes in the southeastern part of the state.
If that happens, it will be time for the state to democratize casino licenses and let people get into the casino business regardless of their ancestry.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Conn. isn’t prepared for greater prosperity; sneaky ‘public-benefits’ charges
Millstone Nuclear-Power Plant, in Waterford, Conn.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
When federal census data showed Connecticut's population increasing by about 57,000 in 2021 and 2022, Gov. Ned Lamont construed it as great news, evidence of the state's prosperity under his administration, a remarkable contrast with the population losses of nearby states.
But the other day the U.S. Census Bureau acknowledged that the population increase report was a mistake and that Connecticut probably experienced a population loss of 13,500 during that period.
In a way this may be construed as great too.
For the state has a severe shortage of housing, home prices and rents have been soaring, and homelessness is rising. Experts say the state needs at least 100,000 more housing units just for its current population to be able to live decently. If the state really had gained 57,000 people, it would be under much greater strain.
Connecticut isn't prepared for greater prosperity, and more strain is promised by the increased military contracting coming into the state for which thousands of new workers are needed.
Even if the national economy were entering a recession, Connecticut still would have thousands of inadequately housed people.
Equating construction of inexpensive housing with poverty because of the mess the state has made of its cities, Connecticut has been slow to recognize that its housing policy -- unfriendly if not hostile to new housing -- has been a disaster too.
But the Lamont administration has taken the hint and is proceeding with state government incentives for housing construction. Hartford and New Haven are encouraging apartments and condominiums and are showing that city living can attractive, and a few suburbs are viewing housing proposals more favorably than usual.
It's far from enough but it's a start. If housing initiatives continue for a few more years and state government discourages exclusive zoning and controls spending and taxes, maybe even accurate census data will start showing that more people want to move to Connecticut than leave it for lower-taxed states with milder winters.
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Connecticut has among the highest electric rates in the country, and the big increases imposed last month are painful reminders that the state would have to reduce rates if it would increase its prosperity and population -- or even just maintain its population.
The latest rate increases have two major causes: the decision by the governor and General Assembly to guarantee purchase of the electricity generated by the Millstone nuclear-power plant, in Waterford, as a matter of Connecticut's energy security; and second, the "public benefits" charges that long have been largely hidden in customer electric bills, essentially sales taxes to finance state government programs having little if anything to do with generation and delivery of electricity.
Among the "public benefits" charges is one by which people who pay their electric bills are required to pay as well for people who don't pay but who under state law can't be disconnected during much of the year. Since this charge is a welfare expense, it should be borne by taxpayers generally, not by electricity users particularly.
Indeed, there is no good reason to charge electricity users particularly for any of the "public benefits" hidden in their bills. Insofar as electricity is a necessity of life, taxing it is no more justified than taxing food and medicine would be.
The real justification for financing the "public benefits" from a de-facto sales tax on electricity is that state legislators and governors have liked obscuring the costs of those "benefits" and deceiving the public into thinking that the big, bad electric companies are overcharging. By some estimates 20 percent of the cost of electricity for a typical Connecticut resident results from non-electrical "public benefits" charges.
Members of the General Assembly's Republican minority have been making an issue of this and fortunately have begun pressing it harder. "Public benefits" charges on electricity bills should be eliminated, along with the "public benefits" themselves, or else their costs should be recovered through general taxation or spending cuts elsewhere.
Now who wants to specify the tax increases or spending cuts necessary to get rid of the "public benefits" charges?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years(CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: When learning is optional
Scrapped mobile phones
— Photo by MikroLogika
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Schools increasingly are prohibiting students from operating or even carrying "smart phones" -- Internet-equipped telephones -- in class. Some schools are investing in special pouches in which students must lock their phones in school, being able to unlock them only with a special device made available when they are leaving.
At $25 or so each, the pouches are a significant expense, but educators find them effective at restoring students' concentration. The pouches even induce students to start talking to each other face to face.
Gov. Ned Lamont was an early advocate of banning "smart phones" in school, and while he was unable to get the General Assembly to legislate on the point, he has asked the state Education Department to draft and recommend such a policy to school superintendents and boards. It's a good idea and most school systems probably will go along with it if pressed by the Education Department.
But there is a bigger underlying problem here that no one in authority seems inclined to address.
For if students spend too much time on their "smart phones" in school, it's because they know they can afford to miss the teaching being attempted. They know they are going to be promoted from grade to grade and even graduated from high school no matter what. Learning is completely optional.
That is, even if school policy bans "smart phones," a bigger school policy will remain: social promotion. While it would be much more expensive, repealing social promotion would do much more to restore education than locking up "smart phones."
Repealing social promotion would require teachers and school administrators to enforce academic standards not just against students but also against their neglectful parents, who outnumber responsible parents in many school districts.
Like most states, Connecticut has resorted to social promotion to boost graduation rates and thereby make education look more successful even as it is failing, with the academic proficiency of students in basic subjects continuing to decline. Schools know that when uneducated students graduate they become someone else's problem -- the problem of employers and the welfare, medical, mental health, and criminal-justice systems.
The refusal to restore standards in public education may be behind the governor's recent conversion to "diversity, equity, and inclusion," the new euphemism for "affirmative action" -- racial and ethnic preferences in hiring, college admissions, and other endeavors.
Connecticut schools long have suffered an appalling gap between the educational achievement of white students and those from racial and ethnic minorities. The gap results mainly from something over which schools have no control -- the great disparity in the parenting and wealth of the homes students come from. Students who do poorly in school almost always need more attention at home, but state government declines to examine why they don't get it. More broadly, state government declines to inquire into why poverty endures and is worsening.
The state's primary policy for improving education is just to increase the compensation of educators. This has done little for education and nothing for closing the racial achievement gap, but it has kept Connecticut's biggest and most influential special interest, the teacher unions, working for the state's majority political party.
The governor's new plan to create an Office of Equity and Inclusion to diversify state government's workforce racially and in a few lesser respects indicates state government's acceptance of the racial achievement gap.
After all, if schools eliminated the gap and most high school graduates were of largely equal education across the races and ethnic groups, state government would not have to look so hard for qualified applicants from minority groups and would not have to incorporate racial and ethnic preferences into the hiring process in pursuit of diversity. Diversity and integration would occur naturally and income inequality would fall.
But the racial and ethnic gap in education generates an impoverished underclass dependent on government for sustenance, which in turn maintains government's power, size, and expense. In that respect the many who have made comfortable careers ministering to Connecticut's worsening poverty may consider the gap a great political success.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Bears become less cute in Conn.
A black bear (the kind that live in New England)
— Photo by Diginatur ]
MANCHESTER, Conn.
As their appearances in Connecticut become more frequent and damaging, bears become less cute and amusing.
According to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, in the last two weeks:
-- A woman sitting in her back yard in Cheshire was attacked by a bear that snuck up on her from behind. She suffered two puncture wounds before managing to scare it away.
-- A man driving a small car on the Route 8 expressway in Torrington struck a bear that ran in front of him, causing the car to crash into a guard rail. The driver was uninjured but the bear was killed and turned out to weigh more than 500 pounds, almost as much as the car.
-- A bear and its cub broke into a car in Winsted, destroying the interior.
-- And residents of a home in Winchester interrupted a bear's attempt to break in.
An official of the environmental agency says Connecticut is "good habitat" for bears and "they are here to stay."
Why is that?
It's because while state law now permits killing bears in self-defense or in defense of pets, in other encounters people are just supposed to shoo bears onto a neighbor's property. Bears have no natural predator except man, and state government long has prohibited hunting them. Indeed, Connecticut is the only New England state without a bear-hunting season.
If bears really are "here to stay," they won't be stopped by securing trash cans and barbecue grills and taking down birdfeeders, as the environmental agency and bear lovers urge. There were no trash cans, barbecue grills, and birdfeeders in the forests through which the bears migrated back into Connecticut. Without predators, their population increased naturally and the northern forests couldn't support all of them.
So now bears will be reproducing in Connecticut until every town has many of them, and the more the state is "good habitat" for bears, the less it will be "good habitat" for people. Only a long hunting season will stop bears, and that won't happen until state legislators are more scared of bears and the harm they increasingly do than they are scared of the bear lovers and apologists.
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Connecticut Inside Investigator, a product of the Yankee Institute, reported the other day that state government has bigger management deficiencies than the supposed lack of diversity that has become Gov. Ned Lamont's new focus.
The news organization said Central Connecticut State University has paid nearly $763,000 to Christopher Dukes, its former director of student conduct, who, the state Supreme Court recently ruled, was wrongly fired in 2018 after police responded to a complaint that he had assaulted his wife at their home. Police arrested him there after a standoff.
The university seems to have decided that since the director of student conduct handles complaints of abuse and harassment, it wouldn't be right to have a director who was in that kind of trouble himself. But the man denied the charges, they were dropped eventually, and the incident involved conduct off the job, not on the job.
His dismissal went to arbitration, which ordered him rehired. The university appealed to Superior Court, where the arbitration award was vacated and the dismissal upheld. But then the man appealed to the state Supreme Court, which overturned the Superior Court and reinstated the arbitration award with its huge liability in back pay.
Was the university right or wrong to persist with the dismissal though its cause did not involve the employee's job performance and the criminal charges were dropped? There is an argument on both sides, but a risk to due process should have been clear to the university. It might have been better just to transfer him to a position not involving complaints of abuse and harassment.
In any case state government looks ridiculous here, and if the General Assembly ever comes to think that $763,000 is a lot of money to waste, it should investigate what happened, ascertain what legal advice the university got, and set clear policy so this kind of thing can't happen again.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).