Don Pesci: Connecticut awaits a Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck, who unified the German states in the 19th Century.

The usual gubernatorial campaign in Connecticut begins with brave platitudes and ends, once office has been achieve, with whimpering platitudes.

We recall a triumphant Gov. Lowell Weicker warning during his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax in the midst of a recession would be like “pouring gas on a fire,” then, having achieved office, hiring as his Office of Policy Management Director Bill Cibes, who ran an honest but losing Democratic primary campaign by agitating for an income tax. Before you could say, “Let’s pour gas on the fire,” Connecticut had its income tax. State businesses have taken note of the ungovernable growth in spending and now have their eyes fixed on the exit signs.

Republican Gov. John Rowland was wafted into office on a pledge to repeal Weicker’s incendiary income tax; once in office, the pledge was quickly moved to Rowland’s back burner, where it expired from lack of air.

Gov. Jodi Rell, who replaced Rowland when he was sent to jail for the first time for corrupt activity, proved to be  an imperfect “firewall” preventing progressive Democrats in the General Assembly from piling up debt through reckless spending. Having declined to run for a third term, Rell passed the gubernatorial reins to then Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy and retired to Florida, far from the hurly burly of tax increases and spending binges.

Enter Governor Malloy, who imposed on Connecticut the largest and second largest tax increases in state history, having hinted in his own campaign that the weight of debt in Connecticut would be more or less evenly distributed between state employee unions and taxpayers.

One political commentator in Connecticut, weary with all the folderol, has now declared war on platitudes and artfully misleading campaigns. Other journalists committed to telling it like it is may follow suit.

“There may be many differences between Republican and Democratic candidates,” Kevin Rennie tells us. “One unhappy trait, however, unites them. They all want to be governor and no one wants to say how they would solve the state's most pressing problems. With the state facing a $5 billion budget deficit this is the ideal moment to unveil detailed, serious solutions before an engaged public. Let a thousand ideas bloom. If they possess the talent to be a successful governor, tell us what you would do right now, in a forbidding hour for Connecticut.”

Prussian and then German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck put such misgivings more succinctly:  “A statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.”

In progressive Connecticut, belief in God waxes and wanes in proportion to the trust that one places in blind fate and cowardly politicians; today, public faith in Connecticut politicians is at its lowest ebb. We pray to politicians when times are good and to God when politicians are bad, which is often. Bismarck again: “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”

And Bismarck again: “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Official denials are rarely convincing, such as: “Just as he said during the 2014 campaign ‘there is no deficit, there will be no deficit,’ the governor has no clothes,” said House Minority Leader Themis Klarides in October, 2016. The state’s present biennial deficit, as Rennie notes, is hovering around $5 billion.

The  elections in 2018 promise to be somewhat different for a series of reasons: 1)  progressivism – the notion that if government is good, bigger government is better – has been a conspicuous failure; 2) mindful of Napoleon’s advice – when your enemy is making mistakes, don’t interfere – leading Republicans in Connecticut are fully prepared to exploit in a general election the opposing party’s tactical and strategic errors on tax increases; 3) in the long run, Republicans are committed to substantial reform, including wresting political power from unions entrenched within a solicitous administrative state, while the Democratic Party has been for a half century defenders of the status quo; 4) it is true that there is no Bismarck in the Republican Party gubernatorial line-up for governor so far, but the Democratic Party's gubernatorial roster screams “more of the same,” and its program for the future promises to be chock full of Bismarckian “official denials” that many political watchers will regard as desperate, despicable and laughably untrue.  

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist whose essays often appear in New England Diary.

Chris Powell: Sharia Law not an issue in Conn., so leave Muslims alone; state helps the hoaxers

Everybody knows that Islam is having a civil war between murderous totalitarians and people who just want to live and let live. Civilization's urgent agenda must be to help the good guys. But as Connecticut saw last weekend, some people are determined to insult and intimidate the good guys by suggesting that all followers of Islam are bad, which can only discourage the good guys and strengthen the bad guys.

Last weekend's demonstration of this came in Waterbury, where a group called ACT for America held a rally, purportedly to warn about sharia law, an Islamic religious code that is contrary to democracy in many respects. Waterbury seems to have been selected because it has a large Muslim community.

But no one in Connecticut is advocating replacing civil law with Sharia Law. In Connecticut Sharia is not an issue and is no more a threat to democracy than Christian or Jewish religious law, both of which also differ substantially from civil law but are not acknowledged by ACT for America as being just as incompatible with democracy as sharia is.

Nor does ACT for America acknowledge that Christianity and (much less so) Judaism had their own civil wars that devastated Europe and the Middle East for centuries before the live-and-let-live factions triumphed. Even in Connecticut, as late as the 1950s Protestants and Catholics nearly came to blows over whether civil law should provide public school bus transportation to Catholic schools.

Being 2,000 years younger than Judaism and six centuries younger than Christianity, Islam isn't done with its civil war yet. So Islam's good guys need support, not bullying and shunning. ACT for America says it wants religious freedom for all, but the group's harping on sharia law where there is no attempt to induce government to impose it smells like bigotry and hate.

State government helps the hoaxers

Former Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly, now running a news program on NBC, is catching criticism for planning an interview with radio talk show host Alex Jones, who is renowned for asserting that the Newtown school massacre in 2012 was a hoax. Maybe Kelly's questioning will undermine Jones as a hoaxer himself, or maybe it will just glorify him among the growing segment of the population that is inclined to consider everything official to be a lie.

But if government wants to help squelch hoaxes, it should reconsider what it has done to encourage them, as the General Assembly and Gov. Dannel Malloy did in response to the Newtown school massacre. That is, at the urging of the families of the murdered, legislators and the governor hurriedly enacted an exemption to Connecticut's Freedom of Information Act to obstruct disclosure of police photographs and videos depicting victims of homicide. Such images remain essential to refuting deniers of all sorts of atrocities, from the Holocaust to the Armenian genocide to the Rape of Nanking.

If applied nationally, Connecticut's law would conceal the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as well as the photographs taken during his autopsy, even as the circumstances of the president's murder remain very much in question. After the Newtown massacre Connecticut's black and Hispanic state legislators insisted on making the photo and video exemption apply to all homicide victims rather than limit it to the Newtown case.

Now those legislators are lamenting that, because Bridgeport police are not equipped with dashboard and body cameras, there are no photos or video of the fatal shooting by officers of a 15-year-old boy a month ago. But even if there were such images, the law those legislators insisted on enacting would obstruct any release to the public.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Conn. GOP gets serious, Democrats wallow in trivia

The Connecticut Capitol, in nearly bankrupt Hartford.

While this year's regular session of the  Connecticut General Assembly has little to show for itself but more gambling -- another casino and more off-track betting -- it was positive in one respect: the recognition by Gov. Dannel Malloy and the unusually large Republican minority that structural changes in spending policies are necessary to save the Nutmeg State.

The governor has extracted substantial if inadequate concessions from the state employee unions, but he proposed to close the budget deficit by shifting to municipalities $400 million in teacher pension costs. Instead he might have proposed reducing teacher pension benefits, since those benefits, unlike state employee pension benefits, are set by state law rather than union contract. But having dozens if not hundreds of members and their dependents in every town, the teacher unions are far more influential than even the state employee unions, so no one dares to economize there.

The Republicans united behind a budget proposal that avoided tax increases by cutting more from state employee compensation. They essentially proposed to remove salaries and benefits from collective bargaining for the time being. Thus the Republicans realized at last that they gain nothing by being nice to the state employee unions. Since the Democrats are the party of those unions and retain narrow majorities in both houses of the legislature, this Republican effort to restore democratic control of public expense will have no chance of passing until Republican majorities are elected. But standing for something important may distinguish the Republicans favorably in next year's election.

The legislature failed to produce a budget for two reasons.

First, the Democrats could not hold their majority together. Most Democratic legislators are liberals and will always prefer raising taxes. But enough Democrats either agree with the governor that raising taxes now would hurt the state more than it would help or they fear for their re-election if taxes are raised again, since the public is realizing that living conditions have only worsened as taxes have been raised during the Malloy administration.

Second, the Republicans seem to have decided that any compromise with the Democrats on the budget will have to raise taxes and spending somewhat and that sharing responsibility for that isn't worthwhile politically, especially since, in the forthcoming special session of the legislature, the Democrats probably will compromise among themselves to reach such an outcome anyway. The Republicans may figure that the Democrats might as well own the whole thing and be obliged to defend it in the election next year, when the public will be looking for change.

Both parties bear responsibility for the expansion of gambling, policy that is disgraceful, contrary to Democratic pretenses of protecting the poor and opposing concentration of wealth and Republican pretenses of advocating responsible living. But at least the Republicans aren't celebrating the legislative session as the Democrats are.

Democratic state headquarters this week issued a statement lauding the legislature for banning therapy aimed at trying to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, though there was no evidence of its use in Connecticut; for increasing penalties for hate crimes, as if they were not already seriously punishable; for reducing bail for minor offenses, as if this affects many people; and for approving a state constitutional amendment for a transportation fund “lockbox,” as if money still won't be fungible and government won't always find a way to divert it.

 Failing to produce a budget, the legislative session was all trivia.

 Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
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Chris Powell: In sea of red ink, Conn. keeps sending out discretionary grants

Despite imposing during the last six years Connecticut's two largest tax increases, state government is running its third straight big annual deficit, causing Gov. Dannel Malloy last week to spend the emergency reserve and to suspend some financial aid to municipalities.

The numbers are a judgment of failure and wrongheadedness against the administration. Yet every week the press releases still fly out of the governor's office, announcing millions in discretionary grants being sent hither and yon, seeming to proclaim obliviousness. Still, the governor deserves a little sympathy, for he alone is dealing with the problem somewhat. The municipalities just whine about it, though the governor's reduction in their aid is an invitation to them to obtain concessions from their employee unions just as the governor is seeking concessions from the state employee unions.

Having left empty the fabled "suggestion box" of a few years ago that was supposed to be filled with proposals for greater efficiency in state government, state employee union leaders speak only of raising income taxes on the rich, as if tax rates should be set not by a careful calculation of fairness and effectiveness but by whatever is necessary for the unions' contentment, as if they have first claim to everyone else's income.

While he complained this week about leaks in the roof of Gampel Pavilion, University of Connecticut women's basketball coach Geno Auriemma was no help either. At a rally of real estate agents at the state Capitol, Auriemma admitted, "I don't have any answers. I'm not running for anything, nor do I want to." He, too, just wants money. Auriemma also told the agents: "I‘m in the recruiting business. You're in the recruiting business. When people have a choice, you better give them a reason to pick you."

But through its budgeting state government already engages in a lot of recruiting: for government employees, welfare recipients, and, having made itself a "sanctuary state" for illegal aliens. Meanwhile, Republican legislators just cautiously pick around the edges of the budget for small savings in the future that won't alienate anyone in the present. Asked last week why state government shouldn't reduce teacher pension benefits, since the governor is trying to push teacher pension costs onto municipalities, Senate Republican leader Len Fasano defaulted.

Instead Fasano expounded on what he called his "tenderness" for teachers, whose unions, far from being tender themselves, are actually the state's most fearsome special interest, constituting the largest politically active group in every town. With an excess of "tenderness" for the teacher unions, the Senate last week voted unanimously to repeal a law that would end social promotion in schools, a law establishing competence examinations for graduation from high school.

Trying a little "tenderness" itself last month, the State Board of Education canceled a plan to incorporate student test scores in teacher evaluations. While state Comptroller Kevin Lembo, a Democrat who recently became a candidate for governor, is supposed to be a righteous numbers guy, this week he issued a statement denouncing President Trump's removal of FBI Director James Comey. "We must speak out, we must stay engaged, we must stay active, and we must fight back," Lembo said, though Connecticut already has seven members of Congress, all Democrats, making a very good political living on Trump issues, which involve the federal government, not state government.

If Connecticut's numbers guy has any idea of what to do about the state's catastrophic budget numbers, he hasn't yet shared them, though of course he, too, well might prefer to run against Trump.

 Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Don Pesci: Weicker back with more incoherence; Hartford's dilemma and opportunity

Downtown Hartford, once famed as the "Insurance Capital of the World.''

--  Photo by Sage Ross

Former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker surfaced recently and both condemned, unwittingly, and complimented lame duck Gov. Dannel Malloy.

Every so often, Mr. Weicker, intent on working the dents out of his legacy, pokes his head above the fox hole, scans enemy territory for a friendly face, and spills some political beans. Ken Dixon of the Connecticut Post asked Mr. Weicker to comment on Mr. Malloy’s decision to pack it in, and he obliged. What Weicker said was, as usual, confusing and contradictory.

Mr. Malloy’s decision to withdraw his name for re-nomination, Mr. Weicker said, “unties Malloy’s hands.” Really? Malloy’s hands have not been tied during his entire term in office. All the heights of power in Connecticut’s government – the governor’s office, the General Assembly, the state’s constitutional offices, Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, important courts appointments made by Mr. Malloy – have been in Democrats' hands since Mr. Malloy had first been elected governor. Indeed, so untied were Mr. Malloy’s hands that he felt comfortable denying Republican leaders in the General Assembly any voice in union contract negotiations with SEBAC, the union conglomerate authorized to fashion contracts with the governor; and when budget deliberations began during Malloy’s first term and second terms, he shooed Republicans out of the negotiation room and slammed the door in their faces.

One thinks of Cromwell marching into the British Parliament and shouting, “Gentlemen, go home!” There is not a hint of “tied hands” in any of this?

Mr. Weicker then added that, were he governor, “I would to the best of my ability deny the spending spree in the legislature. We’ve got to stop spending. That’s our huge problem. Every legislator has their pet project. We’re probably in the worst financial condition of any state in the union, and we’re known for that, rather than being the wealthiest.” He rounded out his thoughts, such as they were, by commending Mr. Malloy, whose approval rating in Connecticut is among the lowest in the nation, at about 28 percent: “Dan’s had two terms, which is heavy-duty in Connecticut. I would say he still wants to leave a positive legacy. I admire the man. I like him. He’s a good governor.”

So let’s see: in 20 months, Mr. Malloy will have been in office for two terms; he is the author of both the largest and second largest tax increases in Connecticut history, outperforming even Weicker on this score; the Connecticut legislature, dominated by Democrats for a half century or more, has, even by Weicker’s reckoning, spent the state into a hole; state deficits are about what they were during Weicker’s first term in office – which, everyone will recall, necessitated the imposition of an income tax; Connecticut is “in the worst financial condition of any state in the union” Mr. Weicker pronounces, adding, implausibly, “I admire the man. I like him. He’s a good governor.” What work, if any, does the word “good” do in that sentence?

In Mr. Weicker's mind -- not that anyone need bother too much with Mr. Weicker's mind -- spending is not a function of taxation, and taxation is not a function of spending. That is why Mr. Weicker can say, both and at the same time: a) spending is a problem; if I were  governor, I would put a stop to spending, and b) Malloy, who has not done this, is, nevertheless, an admirable governor. Malloy and Weicker have increased spending because they increased taxes. These two operations being detached in Weicker's mind, Malloy is a “good governor.”

Mr. Malloy is a good governor for much the same reason Mr. Weicker was a good governor: facing deficits, both raised taxes permanently – inflicting permanent damage upon the state, while satisfying progressive legislators and unions. Mr. Weicker likes Mr. Malloy because Mr. Malloy is like Mr. Weicker.

Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin -- who, as chief counsel to Mr. Malloy, learned his politics at the feet of the master --is cut from the same progressive cloth as Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy. In fact, Connecticut’s capital city, is a microcosm of the state. Whatever is wrong in Hartford is wrong in the state; whatever is right in Hartford is right in the state.

Hartford has been a one-party town for more than 50 years. The presence of the Republican Party in the city as a political force is a whisper in the wind. Mr. Bronin replaced Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra, who, before leaving office, gifted the incoming mayor with a financial mess and a new ballpark that will be losing millions of dollars two years out from opening day. The school system in Hartford, laboring under a court order that requires schools in the city to maintain an “equitable” ratio of 25 percent whites to 75 percent minorities, is in continuing crisis.

A charter school in Hartford that provides to African-Americans and Hispanics an education that does not require remedial courses for those of its students who graduate and go to college has been forced to turn away African-American and Hispanic students because it must preserve a 25-75 percent mixture of white and non-white students that a Connecticut court whimsically considers constitutional. No one in the city even blinks at this obvious example of court-ordered educational discrimination against minority mothers who want a better education for their children.

Hartford derives its revenue from property taxes, but there is a hitch: about fifty percent of the property in Hartford cannot be taxed. When the city wades into red ink, it makes an effort – only partly and temporarily successful much of the time – to reduce costs by reducing expenditures and begging state union workers for givebacks. In both the city and the state, union givebacks have been insufficient to balance budgets without additional revenue increases. Mr. Bronin’s present budget is running a deficit in part because savings from past “givebacks” have not been given back. The budget Mr. Bronin just presented relies on a generous gift from the state’s lame-duck governor than may not materialize. Both Hartford and state budgets are “balanced” by revenue projections that may never materialize.

Here is Mr. Bronin’s dilemma in a nutshell: He cannot increase taxes without incurring business flight and a consequent diminution of revenue, and he cannot – dare not – institute permanent cuts in spending by courageously confronting powerful unions. Yet spending continues to outpace revenue collections. For this reason, both he and Malloy find themselves in the same position as Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."

Hartford has an insuperable advantage over the state. The city, as a default strategy, can and likely will declare bankruptcy, which will have the beneficial effect of forcing Mr. Bronin to do what he, Mr. Malloy and Mr. Weicker were loathed to do – cut spending by reducing contractual “fixed-cost” expenditures.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.

Chris Powell: What kind of a state would depend on money from casinos and potheads?

At the Connecticut state Capitol the issue is being framed as whether Connecticut should legalize marijuana. But that's not really the issue at all, since marijuana long has been effectively legal in the state for several reasons: because of its common use and the reluctance of courts to punish people for it; because possession of small amounts has been reduced to an infraction; because marijuana production and sales have been legalized for medical purposes; and because the federal government has stopped enforcing its own law against marijuana in those states that don't want it enforced.

The real issue is whether state government should get into the marijuana business -- licensing dealers and taxing sales in the hope of raising as much as $100 million a year to offset state government's financial collapse. Such a scheme would introduce marijuana to many more people, especially minors, who, even if the age for purchase is set at 21, will get it from their older friends, just as minors now get alcohol.

As has happened with legalization in Colorado, many more students will come to school stoned or get stoned there. Intoxicated driving will increase, even if much of the increase will result from Connecticut's refusal to prosecute first offenses. And since Connecticut's criminal sanctions against marijuana have largely disappeared already, legalization won't give the state much financial relief on the criminal-justice side of the budget.

There's another problem with licensing and taxing: It would constitute nullification of federal drug law. Nothing obliges Connecticut's criminal statutes to match the federal government's, but licensing and taxing, profiting from federal crimes, is secession -- and unless federal drug law was changed, the federal government could smash Connecticut's marijuana infrastructure at any time. In any case the half-century of President Nixon's "war on drugs" has shown that drug criminalization is futile and may have only worsened drug addiction while maiming millions of lives with prison sentences.

The drug problem needs to be medicalized, which, while increasing the availability of drugs, will also increase treatment and eliminate most crime and imprisonment expense. But the General Assembly isn't considering medicalization. Instead the legislature is giving the impression that the state's salvation lies in taxing potheads and more casino gambling. Even if that could close its budget deficit, what kind of state would this be?

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 The big argument for the Connecticut General Assembly's approval of Gov. Dannel Malloy's renomination of Justice Richard Palmer to the state Supreme Court was that judicial independence required it. This was nonsense, a rationale for accepting whatever appellate judges do to rewrite constitutions. The freedom of judges to decide particular cases within established frameworks of the law is one thing. The freedom of judges to rewrite not just the law but constitutions themselves is another, which is what Palmer did in the Supreme Court's decisions on same-sex marriage and capital punishment.

His decision invalidating capital punishment was dishonest, opportunistically misconstruing the legislature's revision of the capital punishment law, which precluded death sentences for future crimes while sustaining pending sentences. Palmer maintained that the legislation signified that the public had turned against capital punishment though the new law was written as it was precisely because the public very much wanted the pending death sentences enforced. Public officials in Connecticut have certain insulation but none is completely above deliberative democracy. Governors and judges can be impeached, legislators expelled, and judges denied reappointment. The legislators who voted against reappointing Justice Palmer had good cause consistent with good constitutional practice.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Anti-marijuana-use poster from 1935.

Chris Powell: Conn. governor wants to put heavy fees on a constitutional right

MANCHESTER, CONN.

What if a conservative Republican state tried to put a $700 tax on abortions, purportedly to defray the costs of the state's licensing of medical personnel? Of course people would scream that the state was using tax policy less to raise money than to impair a constitutional right.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, a liberal Democrat, is doing the same thing in regard to another constitutional right with his budget proposal to raise gun permit fees by more than 400 percent so that obtaining a permit might cost as much as $745. The governor's office says the increased fees are meant to offset the increased workload placed on the state police by increased demand for gun permits.

But this is as much nonsense as has been spouted lately by the governor's budget director, Ben Barnes, who insists that the governor's plan to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in state financial aid to most municipal school systems and to require municipalities to start contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to the state teacher pension fund every year won't risk property-tax increases. For the State Police already have computer access to state and national criminal records databases and can quickly determine whether a gun-permit applicant has a disqualifying record. The time and expense of reviewing these databases are minimal.

Since a constitutional right is involved, licensing fees should cover only actual costs and not be used to raise revenue. The governor is persecuting gun owners as much as President Trump is persecuting Muslims, the governor disrespecting the constitutional rights of the former, the president disrespecting the constitutional rights of the latter. While both the governor and the president have taken oaths to uphold the Constitution, they would prefer to pander to their hateful political bases.

THE MINIMUM-WAGE FALLACY: Woody Allen's best parody of political liberalism comes in one of his first movies, Bananas, in which the revolutionary leader who has just taken over a Latin American country and been driven mad by power declares that henceforth the national language will be Swedish, that underwear will be changed every hour and worn on the outside "so we can check," and that all children under 13 years old  are  13 years old.

The same delusion can be seen in the campaign in Connecticut and throughout the nation to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. For mere declarations by government that wages must be higher do not guarantee that the  value produced by labor will be higher too. Raising wages by government decree easily can raise prices, but raising the market's ability and willingness to pay higher prices is something else.

The main problem behind the campaign for $15 an hour is the large number of low-skilled adults, many of them single women with children, who in recent years have displaced the young people who traditionally dominated entry-level jobs, particularly in the fast-food industry. These adults note that they cannot support their families on their low-skill incomes, as if anyone ever could. Of course most of the kids in such jobs were and are living at home with their parents or working part-time while in college and living there.

This problem is not really one of wages for the low-skilled but rather the failure of adults to learn marketable skills, and in Connecticut it's not hard to see where that problem comes from, since the state's public education system has become mostly social promotion and as many as two-thirds of its high school graduates never master high school work.

But elected officials at both the state and municipal level lack the political courage to correct these gross deficiencies. They would prefer to blame McDonald's. Besides, since the primary consumers of fast food are the poor themselves, a higher minimum wage may not be such a gift to them if it just confronts them with higher prices.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: At least until spring, let the 'nattering nabobs' do their thing

Springtime on Connecticut's Wilbur Cross Parkway.

During the congressional election campaign in 1970, a campaign  to me almost as nasty as this year's presidential campaign, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew famouslyvderided the Nixon administration's critics in the news media.

"In the United States today," Agnew said, "we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism."  

Elected officials everywhere sometimes share that feeling, and Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy seems to be the latest one. Speaking last week to the Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Cromwell, the governor complained about the dismal view of Connecticut that is sometimes reflected by news organizations.

 "There is more good news than bad news," the governor insisted, "but we dwell on the bad news."    Having suffered a lot of bad news during his six years in the state's top office, news that included his two mammoth tax increases, the governor has developed a thicker skin, and his tone in Cromwell was more plaintive than demagogic like Agnew's.

Further, given the financial disaster bequeathed to him by his predecessors, Malloy is always deserving of some sympathy, while Agnew never was, since he was a mere political hatchet man,   and sometimes equated disagreement with disloyalty and even communism. {And he was forced by office by a corruption charge.}

But most people in Connecticut really don't need to be told that times are good or bad. While they are paying less attention to the news and more to "social media," less attention to public policy and more to cat videos and other comic relief, they still can tell if their incomes are rising and their tax burdens falling or not, just as they can tell if the people around them are happier or more harried and depressed.

Even as national surveys still rank Connecticut high for quality of life, opinion polls of state residents find most of them in a mood so sour that they claim to be inclined to leave.    That is, while living conditions here still may be better than elsewhere, people sense that conditions are getting worse.   

As the governor spoke in Cromwell, Bristol-Myers Squibb announced that it wouldclose its research and development office in Wallingford, eliminating 500 jobs or moving them out of state.   

Just after the governor spoke three men were shot, one of them being critically wounded, in separate incidents in the poverty factory known as New Haven.   

Meanwhile, police in the poverty factory known as Hartford announced that they soon will start carrying the opioid overdose-reversal drug naloxone to combat the heroin plague that has broken out of the cities and is sweeping the rest of the state, even prosperous suburbs. (People tend not to inject themselves with heroin when their lives are going well.)   

A few hours earlier Hartford's mayor had told a suburban audience that the city is insolvent and needs more of their money, but a suburban state senator replied that none would be forthcoming.   

And just after he spoke the governor himself warned that a potentially deadly cold wave was sweeping down on the state from the northwest, prompting state government to begin emergency protocols to prevent the demoralized and destitute from freezing to death.  

So even those who are not nattering nabobs of negativism might have been prompted by all this to start seeing virtue in those supposedly uneducated,  uncultured, redneck-infested, and generally benighted but at least warm Southern states such as South Carolina and Florida, especially the latter, since it has no state income tax and half its residents already seem to be exiles fromConnecticut.   

By May the young bloom of Connecticut's rolling countryside once again may make the state the most beautiful place in the world. But that's a long time to wait.  Until then, offsetting the state's many disadvantages must begin with identifying them rather than minimizing them, which in turn will require some negativism and the nattering nabobs to provide it.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester,  Conn., and an essayist on political and cultural matters. 

Chris Powell: The origins of the contempt shown by Trump voters

As many people are, Gov. Dannel Malloy is appalled by President-elect Trump's selection of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry for secretary of the U.S. Energy Department, since Perry, as a presidential candidate, pledged to abolish it -- that is, when he could remember the department at all. Perry's selection, Malloy says, is "contemptuous."

But then Trump's election itself is a gigantic gesture of contempt by many of those who voted for him.

Yes, in the popular vote for president Trump, nominally a Republican, trails Hillary Clinton, the Democrat, by around 2.8 million. But Clinton received only 48 percent of the popular vote, and a majority of the votes for minor presidential candidates, 5½ percent of the vote, probably would have gone for Trump if people had been forced to choose among the top two candidates. Clinton, President Obama's candidate, represented continuity with the Obama administration and most of those voters for minor candidates wanted change.

Since there will be more elections soon enough, those who are appalled by Trump's election and some of his Cabinet appointments might do well to try to understand the contempt he embodies.

Maybe it arises from the contemptibility of so many voters themselves, people Clinton disparaged as "deplorables" for their supposed racism and other prejudices, as well as their supposed ignorance. But many of them live in the previously Democratic states that threw the Electoral College to Trump -- Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin -- and four years ago many voted for Obama.

Or maybe the contempt felt by so many voters arises from the performance of the Obama administration. Even some leading Democrats acknowledge that living standards for the majority have been declining, and theoretically at least it is possible to resent the trend toward ever-larger, politically correct, special interest-serving, and dependence-inducing government without wishing harm to racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.

With certain nominees to head federal departments, the new president's contempt and arrogance may take him too far. Being narrowly divided between the political parties, the Senate will be in a good position to check him. If Trump's administration fails to improve conditions in the country, as the expiring administration has failed, the people themselves may check him at the next two elections.

But Trump did not spring forth out of nowhere; he did not even create himself. Rather Trump is a reaction, just as he will produce a reaction. As the liberal sloganeering goes, "This is what democracy looks like," even if this time liberals don't like it.

* * *

HIMES IS TOO LATE ON THE WARS: Fearing that President-elect Trump will strive to get the country into more wars, Connecticut U.S. Rep. Jim Himes has introduced what he calls the Reclamation of War Powers Act. It would prevent deployment of the armed forces into hostilities without a declaration of war by Congress, similar congressional authorization, or an attack on the country or other national emergency.

These days, Himes says, "we operate in state of perpetual pseudo-war where neither the executive nor Congress is ultimately responsible. That has to end."

Valid as that criticism is, it has nothing to do particularly with Trump's ascension. While he is ill-tempered and reckless, Trump didn't get the country into and sustain its stupid imperial adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Lately those adventures have been sustained by President Obama, the head of Himes's own party. So Himes's legislation should have been introduced a long time ago.

Instead the congressman is turning against the wars only when a president from the opposing party is about to become responsible for them -- just as Democratic congressmen who supported the Vietnam War while a Democrat was president turned against it only when Richard Nixon, a Republican, took office in 1969.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Don Pesci: Waiting for the burial of bankrupt Hartford

It’s more than a whisper. Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city, already is bankrupt; no one as yet has bothered to read the last rites over the corpse.

The city’s formal announcement of bankruptcy can be deduced from the math, and there is no quarreling with math, as Mr. Micawber, a character in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, well knew: “"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Misery is what happens when your expenses exceed your income. A crisis is what happens when you are unwilling to cut your expenses permanently and you have no means of increasing your income, which perfectly describes the state of Connecticut. The Democrat-dominated General Assembly, having imposed on Connecticut both the highest and the second highest tax increases in state history, Gov. Dannel Malloy has, perhaps for election purposes, forsworn future tax increases, and the state’s red ink continues to rise to knee level.

To be sure, there are reasons why state  revenue continues to plunge downward: high income salaries are diminishing; the stock market continues to under-perform, and Connecticut is more reliant than most states on taxes drawn from financial institutions; home-grown Connecticut companies either have left the state or have their eyes fixed on the exit signs; revenue from the gas tax in down because gasoline prices have been low for a long while thanks in part to fracking, and Connecticut is the only state in the union that has not yet fully recovered from a major recession that ended elsewhere more than  five years ago.

Late in August, Governor Malloy stepped before the TV cameras and declared – with as straight a face as he could summon – that his innovative crony capitalist “First Five Plus” program had been a crashing success. Outside the state’s hegemonic one-Party bubble, tittering could be heard. For the last quarter century in Connecticut, success has taken on the appearance of abject failure.

Rating the fifty states according to fiscal solvency, a June 2016 Mercatus study placed Connecticut dead last:

“Connecticut’s fiscal position is poor across all categories. With between only 0.46 and 1.19 times the cash needed to cover short-term liabilities, Connecticut’s revenues matched only 94 percent of expenses, producing a deficit of $505 per capita. The state is heavily reliant on debt to finance its spending. With a negative net asset ratio of −0.88 and liabilities exceeding assets by 34 percent, per capita debt is $9,077. Total debt is $20.88 billion. Unfunded pensions are $83.31 billion on a guaranteed-to-be-paid basis, and other post-employment benefits (OPEB) are $19.53 billion. Total liabilities are equal to 53 percent of total state personal income.”

Within the six years of the Malloy administration alone, General Electric, a fixture in the state since 1974, pulled up stakes and moved its headquarters north to Massachusetts, not south to Texas or Florida; Sikorsky, spun off from United Technologies, was purchased in July 2015 by Lockheed Martin Corp. for $9 billion in cash; Aetna Insurance, founded in Connecticut in 1853 and a beehive of employment activity in the state, appears to have its eyes on the exit signs; and – not that anyone in the Malloy administration cares all that much – gun manufacturers in a state known since the Revolutionary war as “the arsenal of the nation” are moving operations  to other move friendly states.

In 2013, Mr. Malloy gave the back of his hand to Connecticut gun manufacturers who had been begging for a place at the table before the General Assembly passed its restrictive regulations. “What this is about,” Mr. Malloy told CNN, “is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible—even if they are deranged, even if they are mentally ill, even if they have a criminal background. They don’t care. They want to sell guns.”

In the age of crony capitalism, some businesses in Connecticut – “First Five Plus” awardees selected by the Malloy administration for crony capitalist treatment – are more equal than others. When Mayor of Hartford Luke Bronin, once Mr. Malloy’s legal counsel, petitions the governor and the General Assembly for assistance prior to declaring bankruptcy, one may be certain his petition will not be so summarily dismissed.

And just for the record, it may be proper to point out here that the Malloy administration has, through the state’s Bond Commission, provided $22 million in grants and loans to the largest hedge fund in the world in order to prevent Bridgewater Associates from moving jobs elsewhere, as gun manufacturers have done, while at the same time Mr. Malloy’s “caring” government has reduced tax outlays to Connecticut’s disabled.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a writer who lives in Vernon, Conn

Don Pesci: Mother Aetna's unhappy children

VERNON, Conn.

In Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, Michael Corleone, plotting to kill a crooked cop, says to his brother Sonny, “It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business.”

Ya’ gotta do what ya’gotta do.

If Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini does move Mother Aetna’s home office from Hartford, Conn., to Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city, he can also plead it’s only business. General Electric (GE) recently announced it was moving from Fairfield, Conn., to Boston – just business, nothing personal… please try to understand.

"We've done the analysis," Mr. Bertolini said five years ago, "and, quite frankly, Connecticut falls very, very low on the list as an environment to locate employees …in large part because of the tax structure, the cost of living, which is now approaching, all in, the cost of locating an employee in New York City.”

Such “hits,” to borrow the Mafia term, are not generally shouted from the rooftops. The possibility of dramatic uprootings are conveyed by subtle body language, a frown here, a warning word there, and threats so understated it would take a raw-nerved politician weeks to decode them.

GE CEO Jeff Immelt turned all this on its head. He was shouting from the rooftops just before he shook the dust of Connecticut from his feet and headed to Massachusetts, formerly “Taxachusetts.” Mr. Immelt’s message to Gov.  Dannel Malloy and Connecticut’s Democratic-dominated General Assembly was an iron-fisted, unambiguous BANG: Get control of spending, particularly pension obligations; stop taxing the engines of prosperity; and repeal your new Unitary Tax, which will drive large multi-state businesses from Connecticut. When political decision-makers in Connecticut showed themselves hostile to such pleadings, GE decided to leave town – nothing personal.

After GE’s “hit,” Mr. Malloy sniffed, “You win some, you lose some.” Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey and President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney, having taunted Mr. Immelt as a tax-scofflaw, were not convinced the company had pulled up stakes in Connecticut for reasons given by Mr. Immelt.

It was left to Red Jahncke, president and CEO of The Townsend Group, to point out what ought to have been obvious all along: that the reasons GE decided to leave Connecticut, lucidly stated by Mr. Immelt in his many public rooftop proclamations, and the reasons that GE chose Boston  {for its strengths as a high-technology and education center} as its future nesting place were, necessarily, not the same.

How many CEOs of companies in Connecticut and elsewhere were watching Connecticut’s instructive-destructive melodrama from the wings? Was Mr. Bertolini, perhaps, among them? We are back to subtlety. Does the the Kentucky-Bertolini romance portend yet another Immelt-like rupture in Connecticut?

Maybe, thought Senate leader Len Fasano, a Republican Savonarola indelicately bringing up the matter of papal immorality: “Aetna, I believe, is under the same impression that Connecticut is not going to fix its problems. They clearly said, 'We are clearly committed to Louisville, Kentucky.' Then when politics came into play, they said, 'Well, for now, we're in Hartford.' Clearly, they're leaving the state. I would suggest they've already done some clearing out of the state already. This just speaks to a Democratic majority who wants to put blinders on, who doesn't want to see the facts because it doesn't fit their narrative, and want to continue with the status quo. We are in deep trouble in this state. ... We've gotta fix this.”

The possibility  of further business flight was dangling like a Damoclean sword over the head of Governor Malloy as he mounted the rostrum to deliver his second State of the State address before Connecticut’s General Assembly. The ladies and gents in the audience were all ears, and when Mr. Malloy proposed that the short session should be devoted strictly to budgetary matters – eschewing the pet projects that legislators often tuck into end-of-session implementer bills to enhance their re-election possibilities – he received the most raucous applause of the afternoon.

It was a fine and timely suggestion. Serious reforms that return any of the three branches of government to their pristine purposes as define in constitutions and statutes will hasten the state’s renewal and give tax-whipped Connecticut citizens fresh reason to believe that politicians generally stand for something more solid and lasting than their re-election campaigns.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.

Don Pesci: Is the Pope Catholic?

VERNON, Conn. Catholics will recognize the line– “Is The Pope Catholic?” – as a joke punchline. Some non-Catholics, and even some laypeople who self-identify as Catholics, must wonder, on reading some encyclicals with which they heartily disagree, “Should the pope be just a trifle less Catholic?”

It would suit progressives, for instance, if the pope would be so good as to repeal thousands of years of Catholic teaching on abortion. No matter the pope of the moment, this will happen only when Hell freezes over. But progressives welcome the present pope’s views on climate change and capital punishment, while on the right, such views are anathema.

Pope Francis’s antipathy toward raw capitalism cheers such as socialist Bernie Sanders, who is running for president this year, as well as President Obama, who, during welcoming ceremonies at the White House, extravagantly praised the pope on his resemblance to himself. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but, however flattering, imitation falls far short of self-praise, which is always intensely sincere.

A master at co-opting moments, Mr. Obama gave it his best shot. As a community organizer in Chicago early in his political career, Mr. Obama told the 11,000 guests gathered on his lawn to hear the pope, he had worked with the Catholic Church to bring hope and change to the poor.

“Here in the United States, we cherish our religious liberty,” Mr. Obama said, but around the world, at this very moment, children of God, including Christians, are targeted and even killed because of their faith.”

Perhaps from a sense of delicacy, Mr. Obama did not identify the chief persecutors of Christians in the world. ISIS, a confederation of Islamic terrorists, has been particularly oppressive. The beheading of Christians, the burning of Christian churches, the rape and enslavement of Christian women never occurred in Chicago when Mr. Obama was evangelizing on its mean streets.

The pope acknowledged that “American Catholics are committed to building a society which is truly tolerant and inclusive, to safeguarding the rights of individuals and communities, and to rejecting every form of unjust discrimination. With countless other people of good will, they are likewise concerned that efforts to build a just and wisely ordered society respect their deepest concerns and the right to religious liberty. That freedom remains one of America’s most precious possessions.”

As if to underscore his remarks concerning religious liberty, the pope on Wednesday made what is being called “an unscheduled stop” to a convent of nuns, The Little Sisters of the Poor, “to show his support for their lawsuit against U.S. President Barack Obama’s healthcare law.” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi characterized the unscheduled stop as a “brief but symbolic visit.”

Congress doubtless was pleased to host the pope and listen to his message, but the Holy Father did not dine with Congressional leaders after the presentation, because the keeper of the pope’s schedule already had booked him for lunch with the poor in Washington D.C.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, who describes himself as “a non-practicing Catholic,” was stirred by certain portions of the pope’s remarks. We should not let Mr. Malloy’s self-characterization pass without noting that since Catholicism is largely a praxis, there is little difference between “a non-practicing Catholic” and a non-Catholic. Receiving the Pope with 11,000 others on the south lawn of the White House, Mr. Malloy said, was an “amazing” and “moving” experience for him.

According to one paper, Mr. Malloy had “embraced the progressive movement within the Catholic church known as liberation theology. Believers of the movement felt it wasn’t enough to simply care for the poor, but felt it was necessary to pursue political changes to eradicate poverty.”

The pope, Mr. Malloy told the paper, “seems to be inviting that back.” Not true. This pope and others – most dramatically, Pope John Paul II, who was canonized in 2014 – sternly rejected liberation theology, a theological-political movement in the Latin American of the 1970’s that attempted to combine Catholicism with revolutionary socialism, but then one cannot expect part-time Catholics to be current with the theological niceties of their church.

The pope is much more interested in liberty than in liberation theology. He holds, along with Catholics throughout the ages, that true freedom is attained through a love of the good and beautiful, whose exemplar is the Christ of Holy Scripture. All of us will do well to remember that popes are not presidents or congressmen or governor, for which we should all drop to our knees and thank God. The pope’s kingdom, like that of the Christ he serves, is in some sense not of this world.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a  political writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.

Making a 'Blue Plan' for Long Island Sound

Via ecoRI News Connecticut has caught up with its neighbors in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and recently enacted a program of marine spatial planning for Long Island Sound.

After years of background work by a coalition of environmental groups, academics and Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) staff, “An Act Concerning a Long Island Sound Blue Plan and Resource and Use Inventory” (HB 6839) was signed by Gov. Dannel Malloy June 19 and went into effect July 1.

This “Blue Plan” establishes a process by which Connecticut will develop an inventory of Long Island Sound’s natural resources and uses and, ultimately, a spatial plan to guide future use of its waters and submerged lands. Currently, Connecticut’s Coastal Management Program (CMP) protects coastal resources and guides shoreline development. The development of a Blue Plan for Long Island Sound will supplement the CMP’s existing authority in the deeper offshore reaches of the sound.

The Blue Plan is intended to prioritize the protection of natural resources and uses, such as fishing, aquaculture and navigation, from future conflicting or incompatible activities and it won't create new regulatory restrictions for them.

Under the plan, an inventory of Long Island Sound’s natural resources and uses must be completed by a Long Island Sound Inventory and Science subcommittee that will be convened by the University of Connecticut.

The inventory will be based on the best available information and data on the sound’s plants, animals, habitats and ecologically significant areas in nearshore and offshore waters and their substrates — surfaces where marine organisms grow. This inventory must also include the human uses of the sound’s waters and substrates, such as boating and fishing, waterfowl hunting, shellfishing, aquaculture, shipping corridors, and energy facilities and interests including electric power lines, natural-gas pipelines and telecommunication crossings.

Once the resource and use inventory is complete, that information will be used to develop the Blue Plan, a spatial plan that will help avoid user conflicts by identifying and protecting special, sensitive and unique estuarine and marine life and habitats. The plan will foster sustainable uses of Long Island Sound that will make the most of economic opportunity without significantly harming the sound’s ecology or natural beauty, according to the DEEP.

The Blue Plan will also remain “fluid,” adapting as necessary to ever-evolving knowledge and understanding of the marine environment, recognizing current issues such as climate-change impacts and sea level-rise adaptation while anticipating and addressing future issues.

Another significant benefit of the Blue Plan, according to state officials, will be the identification of appropriate locations and performance standards for activities, uses and facilities that are regulated by permit programs, developing measures that will guide the siting of those uses in ways that are consistent.

Development and implementation of the Blue Plan must also be coordinated with the state of New York, and with local, regional and federal planning entities and agencies including the Connecticut-New York Bi-State Marine Spatial Planning Working Group, the Long Island Sound Study and the National Ocean Policy’s Northeast Regional Planning Body.

The plan will not “zone” Long Island Sound. There is no need to specify uses or “use zones” over every part of the water surface, according to state officials. However, the plan could establish priority use areas such as utility corridors or shellfish beds. The plan could also identify critical areas that may need greater protection and management of uses.

A version of this story originally ran in the July 2015 edition Sound Outlook, the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection’s e-newsletter.

Don Pesci: The Democrats' star slavers dinner

In case anyone has not noticed, we are in the midst of a Nietzschean transvaluation of all values epoch.  Last week, the U.S.  Supreme Court raised the roof on marriage to accommodate gays, striking down with one bold stroke state laws governing marriage that the justices and the editorial board of the New York Times thought primitive and unnecessary.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, WFSB reported, “called the decision historic and had a LGBT pride flag flying at the Governor's Residence in Hartford on Friday. ‘This is a historic moment, and we should recognize and celebrate its significance. Equality, freedom, justice and liberty – all recognized by the Supreme Court in this ruling that moves our nation forward,’ Mr. Malloy said.” His administration, Mr. Malloy has said previously, is the gayest in state history and has been full of historic moments.

“Well, Scott Walker, if you believe the next president’s job is to encourage bigotry and to treat some families better than others, then I believe it’s our job to make sure you aren’t president. That’s just a taste of the ugly picture of Republican leadership,” said progressive flamethrower U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, during the Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey dinner at the Connecticut Convention Center.

Ms. Warren disappointed progressives when she refused to enter the primaries as an alternative candidate to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Some progressives, Connecticut’s own Bill Curry among them, think that Mrs. Clinton is a middle-of-the-road Democrat of no strong principles who, once in office, will surrender to the blandishments of non-progressive Democrats.

In addition, she seems pox-marked with various scandals she may not be able to overcome. The loss of the bully pulpit after eight years of autocratic rule by progressive President  Obama would amount to a revision of values that would put a serious dent in the good humor of progressives as displayed by Ms. Warren in what might have been a thumping presidential stump speech. Scott Walker, she says twice elected governor of Wisconsin, is a bigot; Jeb Bush wants to privatize Social Security; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wants to repeal Obamacare and provide tax breaks for Big Business; and former President  Reagan’s trickle-down economics was “nothing more than political cover for helping the rich and helping the rich become more powerful.”

That sort of bumper-sticker thought went smoothly down the throats of the 1,300 Democrats in attendance who purchased tickets beginning at the non-proletarian price of $185 to hear Ms. Warren spank the behinds of Republican presidential candidates. Not a serious candidate for president herself, Ms. Warren is under no compunction to lay out a domestic and foreign policy program that might garner a sufficient number of votes to propel her into the White House; this is the unhappy lot of Mrs. Clinton, whose candidacy Mrs. Warren has not yet fulsomely endorsed. However, progressive Friends Of Warren (FOWs) here in Connecticut, among them uber-progressive Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, have thrown in their lot with Mrs. Clinton and her scallywag but loveable husband.

Ms. Warren’s appearance at Connecticut’s Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey fundraising dinner was rich in irony. The event itself is named after two slavers and an Indian killer; Andrew Jackson, the founder of the modern Democratic Party, was both a slaver and an Indian killer. John Bailey, the last Democratic Party boss in Connecticut, was innocent of these crimes against humanity, and he was an upstanding Democrat too, though politically he was not as ferocious a progressive as Ms. Warren.

On  slavery, Jefferson was somewhat torn. Unlike George Washington, he did not liberate his slaves in his will; he thought blacks were primitive and therefore unworthy of full manumission. Both Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Jackson breeded slaves for private gain. Of the two, Mr. Jackson was less conscience-stricken by what the founders called our “peculiar institution.”

Not only did Mr. Jackson own hundreds of slaves, he vigorously prohibited abolitionists from distributing tracts condemning slavery, tabled abolitionist activity in Congress and was himself a slave trader, according to a piece in Salon.

But it was as an Indian killer That Mr. Jackson excelled. T.D. Allman argues in “Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State” that brutality was a habit of mind for Mr. Jackson long before he prepared the ground as President for the Trail of Tears, the forced death march that killed 4,000 Cherokees in 1838-39.

Slaving and Indian resettlement were not unrelated in that brutal mind. As early as 1816, then-U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson displaced Spanish-speaking black and Choctaw Indian in Florida because he feared that a free black community nearby might serve as a magnet for runaway slaves. Mr. Jackson convinced his subordinates that the blacks and Indians, free under Spanish rule, were bent on “rapine and plunder,” when in fact they were small farmers raising crops.

The news that there is a move underfoot across the nation to re-title all Jefferson Jackson dinners trickled down late to Connecticut. Blue Virginia may already have gone Jacksonless by the time this column appears in print. As a progressive, Ms. Warren’s conscience is exquisitely tender, which is why she called the inoffensive Mr. Walker a bigot. How a woman of such refined feelings could bring herself to participate in a function that honors both herself and Mr. Jackson, a slaver and Indian killer, is a deep puzzlement. Following Ms. Warren’s appearance, The Democratic Party in Connecticut belatedly scrubbed the names of both Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Jackson from their annual fund appeal dinner.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.

Don Pesci: Reconsidering the death penalty

VERNON, Conn.

Norm Pattis, a well-known Connecticut criminal  lawyer, is reconsidering capital punishment, the death penalty abolished by the General Assembly in 2012.

The death penalty was “broken” said the abolitionists, by which they meant it could not be executed. As a practical matter, they were right.

Capital punishment was so hedged about with seemingly endless processes that it took the state of Connecticut nearly 20 years to put to death mass murderer Michael Ross, who had raped and strangled most of his eight victims, the last two 14-year-old girls. Had not Mr. Ross pulled the plug on his own appeals process, he might still be with us.

Connecticut’s capital punishment law was “broken” because the sometimes pointless navigation through all the legal breakwaters made the execution of the sentence nearly impossible. But instead of mending it – retaining the punishment for multiple murder crimes or the murder of public-safety officers for example -- the General Assembly ended it.

Mike Lawlor, later appointed by Dannel Malloy as the governor’s undersecretary for criminal-justice policy and planning and for many years the co-chairman of the state’s Judiciary Committee, was an early proponent of abolition. The General Assembly abolished capital punishment prospectively – which means that the 11 death row inmates still awaiting punishment will be executed, after their appeals processes run out, in the absence of a law prescribing the death penalty for the crimes they had committed.

Asked on WNPR’s program, Where We Live, whether he thought  that prospective repeal was advisable, Mr. Lawlor, artfully dodging the bullet, said that Connecticut was not alone in repealing the death penalty prospectively: “Of the six states that have repealed the death penalty in the last few years, all of them did it prospectively. There's nothing unique to Connecticut."

 

It is hardly reassuring to note that six states other than Connecticut had violated a rule of law that undergirds every law ever written. Nulla poena sine lege – “Where there is no law, there is no transgression” – is a part of the Natural Law that informs all laws, including all statutory and constitutional law.

When Samuel Johnson was reporting on debates in the House of Commons, he offered this gloss on the doctrine: “That where there is no law there is no transgression, is a maxim not only established by universal consent, but in itself evident and undeniable; and it is, Sir, surely no less certain that where there is no transgression, there can be no punishment.”

Punishments meted out in the absence of laws prescribing such punishments is the hallmark of tyrants who wink at injustice, including King John of  England, who was forced to sign the Magna Carta by the victims of his lawless rule. The six states that abolished capital punishment prospectively are hardly templates of proper justice.

It was not a regard for justice but rather legislative cowardice that persuaded members of Connecticut’s General Assembly to retain a punishment abhorrent to them for current murders on death row after they had abolished the law prescribing capital punishment for future murderers. Connecticut’s cowardly legislators knew they could not abolish capital punishment for Steve Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky – two paroled prisoners with long rap sheets convicted by juries of their peers of having cruelly murdered three women in Cheshire, a mother and her two young daughters – without stirring up a hornet’s nest of opposition.

And so, by abolishing the law prospectively, anti-death penalty legislators violated every argument they put forward as justifying the abolition of the death penalty. And they also violated a cardinal rule of justice – no, the cardinal rule of justice: To administer a punishment in the absence of a law warranting the punishment is the very essence of lawless tyranny.

Death-penalty opponents in 2012 asserted that the death penalty should be abolished because it was “cruel and unusual punishment” and a form of “judicial murder.” And so they abolished the law but retained the punishment in the case of the eleven men awaiting their cruel and unusual punishment on death row. But to punish a man with death in the absence of a law prescribing such punishment is quite literally – judicial murder. And, please notice, the punishment is irrevocable, precisely the argument used by death-penalty abolitionists to abolish the law.

The fatality of capital punishment – jury determinations may be wrong – still provides Mr. Pattis with reason enough to oppose the practice – but…

“But—and the fact that the word 'but' appears at all in this context surprises—I'm hard-pressed to agonize over the destruction of those who seek to destroy me and what I value. A world of perpetual love and peace is a theologian's dream, not mine. Am I condoning tinkering with the machinery of death? Not at all. I'm merely recognizing that we've always done so, and probably always will. The marvel is that we paralyze ourselves in agonizing over it.”

Don Pesci is a political columnist who lives in Vernon and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.

Chris Powell: Sex slavery, Democrats, government as a business

"La Grande Odalisque''  (1814) by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Sensing a winning issue, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy used his last debate with his Republican rival Tom Foley to lecture Foley about the name of his yacht, Odalisque, a name derived from the Turkish word for concubine, though it has evolved to include portraiture of the naked female form.

"You have a daughter," Malloy harrumphed at Foley. "Do you really think it's appropriate to have a boat named after a sex slave?"

Foley, a very rich businessman, insisted that his aim in naming the yacht had been to evoke art, not lust, and he cited the works of the French painters Matisse and Ingres. At last the campaign had come upon a subject about which Foley knew something -- just not one involving public policy or likely to make him seem like a man of the people.

But if Foley had known less about art and more about Connecticut he might have turned the tables on the governor, whom of course, won the election. For in one respect sex slavery is actually state government policy, fervently supported by the Democratic Party's most fearsome ideologues.

It happens when abortions result from the sex slavery of minors.

This rationalization of sex slavery was first noticed in 2007 when a West Hartford man was charged with harboring and using as a sex slave a 15-year-old girl who had run away from her home in Bloomfield. Having impregnated the girl, the man sent her to an abortion clinic, where the pregnancy was terminated with no serious questions about the girl's circumstances or about her parents or guardian, with the girl returning to her sex slavemaster. Those who remarked that the case argued for legislation to require parental notification for abortions on minors were denounced as Neanderthals.

A similar case became public in Coventry, Conn., last year with the arrest of the fire chief, who was having frequent sex with a cadet member of the department when she was 15 and impregnated her when she was 16. As a matter of law it was all rape, even at 16, since the girl, as a cadet, was under the chief's authority. The chief also arranged for the girl's abortion without anyone being the wiser. In this case Connecticut's lack of a parental -notification law concealed not only the sustained sexual exploitation of a minor but also an abuse of official power that itself had been specifically criminalized. But this time the horrible circumstances were taken for granted.

For in Connecticut a boat that might have been named after a sex slave is purported to be a political scandal, an affront to the dignity of women generally and children particularly, but sex slavery for children is considered preferable to requiring an inquiry into the rape of minors when abortions are to be performed on them.

* * *

The rhetoric of the recent election campaign in Connecticut was full of the cliche that government should be run more like a business. But that's exactly the problem -- that government in Connecticut already operates like a business, primarily to make money for itself in a monopoly environment rather than to uphold a social obligation and perform a public service.

Student test scores and the explosion in the need for remedial courses show that education has been declining even as its cost is always rising.

A half-century of poverty policy hasn't elevated the poor to self-sufficiency but instead has created and sustained a vicious cycle of dependence and degradation in which nearly half the state's children now grow up without fathers.

Criminal-justice policy serves mainly to give a third of the state's young black and Hispanic men criminal records that leave them unskilled and largely unemployable for most of their lives.

But education, poverty, and criminal justice are the major employment agencies of government, providing livelihoods with great salaries, benefits and pensions to tens of thousands of people regardless of the results of their businesses, results that are never audited but are infinitely more damaging than anything from which the infamous Koch Brothers make their money.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, based in Manchester, Conn.

Don Pesci: Conn. GOP losses will lead to more corruption

You don’t have to love me. I’m a porcupine

--Conn. Gov.  Dannel Malloy

VERNON, Conn.

There are two ways to lose an argument: by not saying enough or by saying too much. Likewise, there are two ways to lose an election. The Republican nominee for Connecticut governor, Tom Foley, cannot be accused of having said too much in his attempt to wrest the gubernatorial office from Democratic Governor Malloy. Mr. Malloy, on the other hand, has never in his long political career said too little.

Mr. Malloy’s second gubernatorial campaign and President Obama’s second presidential campaign were remarkably similar. Of the two, fortune -- as well as lots of money, a great  ground game, sharper demagoguery, a media used to genuflecting before incumbents and a progressive ideology that has not yet wearied the general public in Connecticut – smiled broadly on Mr. Malloy, while baring its teeth towards Mr. Obama. National progressives lost the Senate and sent Joni Ernst to the chamber where she will no doubt “make the pigs squeal.”

The headline on the Drudge Report early the morning after was celebratory: “REPUBLICANS TAKE CONGRESS +7 +8? +9? SENATE, THE DEM DISASTER.”

In South Carolina, Tim Scott was appointed by Governor Nikki Haley to the U.S. Senate after Republican Jim DeMint resigned to join the Heritage Foundation. Now returned to the Senate, Mr. Scott is the first black candidate to win a race in South Carolina since just after the Civil War and the first African-American senator from the South since Reconstruction.

Governor Haley more than a year ago warmly embraced PTR, formerly a Bristol, Conn.-based semi-automatic weapons manufacturer fleeing Mr. Malloy’s thrown quills. Malloy said, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass murder that gun manufacturers want “to sell as many guns to as many people as possible—even if they are deranged, even if they are mentally ill, even if they have a criminal background. They don’t care. They want to sell guns.” Sturm Ruger, of Southport Conn.,  had at the same time begun t expanding its business in Mayodan, bringing 500 new jobs to North Carolina over the next five years.

 

Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Malloy are progressive politicians, which is to say both tend to yield to autocratic leftist impulses. To put it another way, progressives, as a rule, do not fancy trickle-up democracy. In Mr. Obama’s case, the chief executive, faced with a legislature one house of which was dominated by the opposition party, simply misused the constitutional prerogatives of his office to redraft legislation by choosing which portions of bills passed into law he would or would not execute.

Mr. Malloy does not have this problem, both houses of Connecticut’s General Assembly having been dominated for decades by members of his own party. Under the Malloy administration, Connecticut has what might be termed unitary party problems.

In a governing system in which power is shared between the two major parties, political corruption is more easily rooted out. In a tripartite system in which the balance of power is evenly distributed between the three departments of government – the executive, the legislative and the judiciary – corruption is more visible because there are more competitive eyes on the ground to report such indelicate corrupt activities that political flesh is heir to.

A legislative branch in which both parties share power is more keenly aware of corruption and more ethically ordered. Disclosure is the most formidable enemy of corruption, and disclosure is more likely in a legislature in which power and authority is shared between the parties. In a political system in which the legislative and executive power is vested in a single party, corruption – politically defined as non-democratic, authoritarian governance – tends to become the well hidden rule rather than the exception.

In Connecticut, where Democrats once again have swept the boards, back room deals, questionable elections, opacity in government and the arrogance of unchecked power – Mr. Malloy is expert in throwing his quills at those who presume to question him – will be the rule for the next few years. Connecticut’s  congressional Delegation, all Democrats, will be returning to a Congress masterfully captured by Republicans. The raucous voices of Connecticut’s two U.S. senators and their influence over congressional events will be muted for the last two years of Mr. Obama’s lame-duck presidency; the media influence on the Malloy administration will be similarly ineffectual. The few contrarians in the state’s largely pro-status quo Media conglomerate -- those few, that brave band of brothers – had better be on the lookout for the sharp quills.

Don Pesci  (donpesci@att.net) is a  political writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.

Don Pesci: Do political endorsements matter?

VERNON, Conn.

First Lady Michelle Obama has endorsed Democrat Dannel Malloy for re-election as Connecticut's governor. In a picture worth a thousand words, Mrs. Obama was shown on “Capitol Report” being bussed robustly by U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, who no doubt would endorse Mr. Malloy were Mr. Blumenthal a newspaper; some would argue that Mr. Blumenthal  is a newspaper. The winner of the Malloy contest with Republican Tom Foley will become governor of a state first in the nation in progressive governance and crony capitalism and last in almost every other important measurement of prosperity.

Will the first lady's endorsement matter to anyone but hardened Democrats, or to voting age high-schoolers who prefer healthy and pallid lunches to pizza and brownies? Probably not. For politicians, endorsements are little more than shows of party solidarity, and there are few political marriages in the nation more solid than that between Mr. Malloy and President Obama. Indeed, newspaper editorial endorsements in Connecticut’s left-of-center news media also have become highly predictable displays of ideological solidarity.

The lame-duck  president has had some difficulty getting himself invited to campaign soirees elsewhere in the Disunited States. Democrats vying for office in Red States  have tended to shun the president, if only to avoid the falling timbers of Mr. Obama’s foreign and domestic policies. Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is recklessly absurd because all foreign policy but his is constructed around a realpolitik understanding of friends and enemies. Mr. Obama is the first U.S. president who seems incapable of distinguishing between the two. In domestic policy, Mr. Obama should have devoted his energies during his first term to settling market uncertainties occasioned by a ruptured housing mortgage bubble partly caused by Beltway favoritism and the dismantling of the Glass Steagall Act, a Franklin Roosevelt measure that that prevented investment banks  from meddling in commercial- banking activities. Instead of attending to the crisis at hand, Mr. Obama created a crisis of his own making by instituting Obamacare, a progressive baby step on the way to universal health care.

Mr. Obama will be appearing in Bridgeport – if, indeed he does make an appearance, a previous campaign appearance on behalf of Mr. Malloy having been called off because of the Ebola crisis – only a few days after Anne Melissa Dowling, Connecticut’s deputy commissioner of the Department of Insurance, announced that  of course she was concerned about insurance-policy cancellations in Connecticut.

“Dowling, NBCConnecticut reported, “says some 55,000 people across the state will have their policies canceled either because it no longer meets the requirements of the Affordable Care Act or because grandfathered policies that didn’t need to meet requirements have simply been canceled by the insurer.”

Even here in true blue Connecticut, some members of the state’s all Democratic congressional delegation have proven resistant to Mr. Obama’s charming attempt to make the world over according to his eccentric predilections.  Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty, for instance, has announced she will not attend Mr. Obama’s prospective campaign appearance of behalf of Mr. Malloy unless the president somehow manages to cross her path in her own district. The lady is very busy attending to her re-election – partly by composing and endorsing killer ads against her opponent, Republican Mark Greenberg, that even The Hartford Courant considered “creatively misleading” and (gasp!) “false.” Mrs. Esty has announced she would not be calling on the president when he appears in Bridgeport, only a hop, skip and a jump from Mrs. Esty's 5^th District.  Connecticut is such a small state that anywhere in the state is but a hop, skip and a jump from anywhere else.

The Courant, the state’s largest  newspaper, endorsed Mrs. Esty, the second time it had done so. One of the indispensable determinants that garner Courant endorsements is experience in office, a requirement the paper waived during its first endorsement of Mrs. Esty, who at the time was running against a far more experienced candidate, Republican nominee for the U.S. House in the 5^th District Andrew Roraback. The notion that the more experienced candidate for a particular office ought to receive the approbation of voters is, in fact, an argument for the perpetual election of incumbents, except on those rare occasions when the retirement of an incumbent leaves an office vacant. It is a policy, highly suspect in a constitutional republic, that would have stopped the American Revolution in its tracts: King George III, who inherited the British throne at the age of  12, had a much longer and deeper experience running the American colonies than did any of the founding fathers of the country. Most Americans are uncomfortable with perpetual monarchies or unchanging legislatures.

But not The  Courant. The paper’s current endorsement of Governor Malloy is riddled with enough qualifiers to sink a battleship, and this year, as usual, Democrats in Connecticut’s congressional delegation have garnered the paper’s affections; this at a time when Republicans are expected to retain control of the House. Some bean counters expect Republicans to capture the Senate as well. As the whole of New England moves further left, the usual endorsements will increasingly be taken with a ton of salt by voters less progressive than the usual progressive representatives.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net)  is a Connecticut political writer.

Don Pesci: In Conn., the fine art of insincerity

VERNON, Conn

Most commentators in Connecticut seem to trust the Quinnipiac Poll. The latest Q poll shows Republican gubernatorial challenger Tom Foley leading Gov. Dannel Malloy by about six percentage points. The same poll shows Independent gubernatorial challenger Joe Visconti capturing about 7 percent of the vote, and that 7 percent represents the ants in the pants of Foley supporters who point out that, during the last gubernatorial go-around, Mr. Foley lost to Mr. Malloy by a very thin margin. The Q poll also points out that Mr. Visconti appears to be drawing equally from Republicans and Democrats, so that his effect on the general election would appear to be a wash.

Still, Republicans are nervous, and Democrats are pleased that Mr. Visconti – unlike Jon Pelto, a Democratic Independent who earlier withdrew from the gubernatorial race – is still stubbornly plugging along. Mr. Visconti’s position on taxes and education is indistinguishable from that of Mr. Pelto, whose position on taxes is indistinguishable from that of Leon Trotsky. Both Mr. Pelto and Mr. Visconti see an increase in taxes as inevitable. Mr. Pelto would hammer the rich in Connecticut by making the state income tax more progressive. There are a number of resurgent Republican conservatives in Connecticut who believe that Mr. Pelto is exactly what the doctor ordered for Connecticut’s billionaires, many of whom continue to toss campaign contributions in the direction of progressives determined to use the contributions to purchase the rope with which they will hang the dupable contributors.

Mr. Pelto and conservative Republicans in Connecticut both oppose Common Core for different reasons. Conservatives dislike Common Core – or, as some of them call it, Common Gore – because it is a federally imposed standard that violates the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that educational decisions should be made by the smallest political unit affected by political decisions: Towns, rather than state and federal governments, should decide how best to shape public and private schools. Mr. Pelto dislikes Common Core because he perceives enforced national standards as a threat to hegemonic teacher unions. Mr. Pelto’s venom tap was turned on by Mr. Malloy, who sneered that, because of tenure, teachers only had to “show up on the job” to continue to miseducate urban school children. Mr. Malloy and other Common Core adepts would change all that once national standards had been put in place. Mr. Malloy since has had second thoughts.

The correlation of political forces in Connecticut, little understood by Connecticut’s media, has not changed since 1991 when former maverick Gov.  Lowell Weicker festooned the state with an income tax. It was the fashion in Connecticut before and after the age of Weicker to insist that Connecticut, a small but rich state, had no spending problem; rather, Connecticut had a revenue problem that became apparent whenever red ink appeared in its budgets. Any deficit could be discharged by a sufficient increase in revenues. Mr. Pelto clings to the same notion today. So do other progressives -- including Mr. Malloy, however much he insists that he has no plans to increase taxes -- so do most political writers in the state.

Since 1991, Connecticut’s forward progress has been thwarted by progressives who now man all the political high ground in the state. Progressives run the governor’s office, all the Constitutional offices in Connecticut, the entire U.S. Congressional Delegation, both Houses of Connecticut’s General Assembly, and they have captured all these office from moderate Republicans who had never effectively challenged Democrats on social issues. Democratic moderates also have disappeared. For this reason, any effective challenge to Democratic political hegemony in Connecticut must come from right of center Republicans who in the past have been quietly strangled in their cribs by left of center forces.

There is an additional problem.  In the absence of strong state political parties, which have been weakened for many years by campaign finance reform, state political campaigns have been “other directed” by professional armies of political architects that provide strategy and laundered money to candidates.  In the new political dispensation, every candidate is his own political party, multiple dog tails wagging the Democratic or Republican Party apparatus. In such circumstances, political campaigns become detached from political practices, and a measure of deceit is accepted that not so long ago would have sunk duplicitous campaigns.

Given the level of duplicity in political campaigns, saying what you mean and then doing what you say itself becomes a revolutionary act that cannot be tolerated by incumbents who have become practiced in the fine art of insincerity. This crooked politicking alone accounts for the inattention of voters who hunger for authenticity; they are unwilling to sanction with their votes the obvious duplicity of shamelessly duplicitous politicians.

 

Don Pesci  (donpesci@att.com) is a  political writer who lives in Vernon.

Carolyn Morwick: In Conn., 'Step Up', passing/repealing Keno

  This is one of a series on this year's New England legislative sessions as prepared by Carolyn Morwick for the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org).

In the second session of the biennium, Connecticut legislators approved a $19 billion budget for  fiscal 2015 that increases spending by 2.5%.

Toward the end of the session, revised revenue forecasts forced lawmakers to scale back in a number of areas. Gov. Dannel Malloy’s promise to provide Connecticut taxpayers with a $55 rebate was put on hold as projections for declining revenues came into focus. Also, plans were put off for a year to give retired teachers an income-tax break as were cuts to the sales tax on clothing and nonprescription medications.

After passing Keno in the previous session,  members of the General Assembly repealed it in the second session. Nonpartisan fiscal analysts forecast a shortfall of $1.4 billion for  fiscal 2015. Questions remain about how to address a looming budget shortfall without increasing taxes. Administration officials maintain that outstanding tax receipts will materialize to reduce the shortfall, while Republican lawmakers question the wisdom of relying on those who have yet to pay their taxes

The budget includes:

$70 million in grants to Connecticut municipalities. $50 million in additional funding for Educational Cost Sharing. $21 million for PILOT (payments in lieu of taxes) to cities, towns with private colleges, hospitals and state-owned land. $42 million in operational funding for Connecticut State Universities and Colleges. $10 million to improve remedial education. $83.5 million in bond funding as part of the Transform CSCU initiative. $9.4 million to enroll 3– and 4-year olds of low-income families in preschool. $13.5 million increase in funding for magnet schools. $12 million for past-due state and real estate conveyance tax revenues to cities and towns. $10 million in additional funding for certain outpatient mental-health services. $3 million to $4 million for mental-health services to children and adults on Medicaid. Session Highlights

Lawmakers raised the minimum wage: rising from $8.70 per hour to $9.15 in January 2015, then up $9.60 in 2016 and to $10.10 in 2017. Three other New England states have taken similar action. Massachusetts will raise the minimum wage to $11 by Jan. 1, 2017, the highest in the nation. Rhode Island increased the minimum wage to $9 beginning in January 2015. Over the next four years, the minimum wage in Vermont will increase to $10.50 in January 2018.

Building on the success of the Subsidized Training and Employment Program ('Step Up''), Connecticut lawmakers provided an additional $10 million to help small businesses hire more employees.

Lawmakers also created a “new apprentice” grant program under Step Up, which provides grants to small businesses and manufacturers to hire high school and college students.

In exchange for $400 million in tax relief, United Technologies Corp. (UTC) will invest $500 million at several of its locations, including: a new world headquarters and engineering facility in East Hartford; renovated, refurbished lab and office space in UTC’s Research Center in East Hartford; a new customer training center and engineering lab at the UTC Aerospace Systems facility in Windsor Locks; and upgrades to the engineering lab and other facilities at Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford. Malloy suggested  that the deal will preserve an engineering knowledge base essential not only to UTC, but also to thousands of small subcontractors and suppliers.

Lawmakers enacted new consumer-protection initiatives that will make electric rates, customer accounts and billing more transparent. Suppliers will be prohibited from raising rates for the first three billing cycles of new supplier contracts entered into on or after July 1, 2014. The law requires electric suppliers to notify residential customers in advance of certain rate changes and prohibits them from charging early termination fees to residents who move within the state and do not change suppliers or residents who lack a contract with a supplier and receive month-to-month variable rates.

The legislature also prohibited hydraulic fracturing waste in Connecticut until the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection adopts regulations to control it as a hazardous waste and imposes certain licensing and disclosure requirements.

Legislators restored the Earned Income Tax Credit to 27.5% for 2015, up from the 25% it had been lowered to in the 2013 session.

Higher Ed Legislation Enacted

An Act Making Adjustments to State Expenditures and Revenues for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 2015, (Sections 50-57)

In 2011, when Malloy and state legislators were confronted with an unprecedented deficit, funding for the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities was cut by 15%.

In  fiscal 2015, as part of Malloy’s Transform CSCU initiative, state lawmakers approved $42 million in new funding in the state budget, including: $24 million in new operating funds and tuition support; $1 million for Early College Program; $10.8 million for developmental education; and $6 million for Malloy's ''Go Back to Get Ahead,''  intended to encourage individuals who dropped out of a higher-education degree program to return and earn a degree. Eligible participants may receive up to three free three-credit courses required to complete an associate or bachelor’s degree program. To be eligible, the student must be a Connecticut resident, previously enrolled in an associate or bachelor’s degree program at any public or private college or university, left before completing the degree program, not attended any college or university for at least 18 months as a June 30, 2014, and enrolled in an associate or bachelor’s degree program by Sept. 30, 2016 at a Connecticut State University, Connecticut Community College or Charter Oak State College.

An Act Implementing Provisions of the State Budget for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 2015, (Section 68)

Requires the Connecticut Board of Regents (BoR) to report to the General Assembly and submit monthly reports on developmental education, Go Back to Get Ahead, early college/dual enrollment programs and Transform CSCU 2020. Allows the Department of Education, BOR and UConn to consult with the Connecticut Department of Banking to institute a program of financial literacy for students in high school and higher education institutions.

An Act Authorizing and Adjusting Bonds of the State for Capital Improvements, Transportation and Other Purposes, and Concerning Miscellaneous Programs, including the Smart Start Program, the Water Improvement System Program, School Security Grants, the Regenerative Medicine Research Fund, the Connecticut Manufacturing Innovation Fund and the BOR for Higher Education Infrastructure Act.

Changes the name of the Connecticut State University System (CSUS) 2020 program to the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) 2020 program to include Connecticut Community Colleges and Charter Oak State College. Adds $83.5 million in new funding and $20 million in reauthorization of community college bonds for the system. Requires the BOR to report to the General Assembly’s Finance and Higher Education Committees the details of allocating the funds in a timely fashion.

An Act Concerning the English Language Learner Educator Incentive Program

Redesigns a loan-reimbursement program for teachers that is administered by the Office of Higher Education (OHE) as an incentive grant and loan program for college and university students studying to be teachers of English language learners.

An Act Establishing Uniform State Academic Degree Standards

Requires the University of Connecticut Board of Trustees to follow certain statutory requirements concerning standards set by the OHE when approving academic programs. Also eliminates the BOR authority to impose penalties on public institutions for violating program approval and licensure and accreditation requirements.

An Act Implementing the Recommendations of the Legislative Program Review and Investigations Committee on the Reemployment of Older Workers as They Relate to the Labor Department.

Requires the BOR to explore expansion of the advanced manufacturing center model to create centers of excellence in other career areas. Requires institutions to implement the Plus 50 initiative (based on national American Association of Community Colleges project to assess innovative college programs that engage workers ages 50 or older). By Jan. 1, 2015, the BOR must establish consistent parameters for noncredit vocational courses and programs recognized by each institution. Makes information available about financial aid.

An Act Concerning Sexual Assault, Stalking and Intimate Partner Violence on Campus, as amended by Sec. 163 of HB 5597 PA 14-217)

Expands the scope of the law requiring public and independent higher education institutions to adopt and disclose one or more policies on sexual assault and intimate partner violence and offer sexual assault and intimate partner violence primary prevention and awareness programming and campaigns. Specifically, the act applies to stalking and all institutions' employees and requires for-profit institutions licensed to operate in Connecticut to comply with these requirements. It also requires all public, independent, and for-profit institutions to immediately provide concise written notification to each victim regarding his or her rights and options under the institution's policies after a reported incident, and allows all institutions to permit anonymous reporting.

Requires all higher-education institutions to report annually to the Higher Education Committee concerning their policies, prevention and awareness programming and campaigns, and the number of incidents and disciplinary cases involving sexual assault, stalking and intimate partner violence. It also requires institutions to include information about stalking and family violence in their annual uniform campus crime reports.

All higher-education institutions must establish a campus resource team to review their policies and recommend protocols for providing support and services to students and employees who report being victims. The act establishes: 1) membership and education requirements for the team; 2) education requirements for the institution's Title IX coordinator and special police force, campus police force or campus safety personnel; and 3) training requirements for members of the state or local police who respond to campus incidents.

Requires all higher-education institutions to enter into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with at least one community-based sexual assault crisis service center and one community-based domestic violence agency. The MOU must establish a partnership with the service center and agency and ensure that victims can access free and confidential counseling and advocacy services, either on or off campus.

Exempts Charter Oak State College from several of this act's requirements.

An Act Conforming Higher-Education Purchasing Statutes with Department of Administrative Services Purchasing Statutes and Practice.

Allows the president of an institution to join with federal agencies, other states, Connecticut political subdivisions or private or nonprofit organizations in cooperative purchasing plans when it is in the state’s best interests to do so.

An Act Concerning Revisions to the Higher-Education Statutes and Military Occupational Licensing Data.

Amends a law requiring various governmental licensing authorities to certify, waive, grant or award licenses, registrations, examinations, training or credit to veterans or armed forces or National Guard members with military experience or qualifications similar to those otherwise required. It limits the circumstances under which licensing authorities must inquire about applicants' service member status and information authorities must annually report to the Department of Labor (DOL) and the Veterans' Affairs Committee.

Requires the BOR and the UConn Board of Trustees to submit separate reports containing information that differs from the other licensing authorities' and extends their first annual reporting deadline.

Changes reporting requirements for the Planning Commission for Higher Education, which by law must develop and ensure implementation of a strategic master plan for higher education in the state.

An Act Concerning the Findings of the Military Occupational Specialty Task Force as mended by House Bill 5028—An Act Concerning Revisions to the Higher Education Statutes and Military Occupational Licensing Data.

Section 11 requires higher education institutions to award college credit for military occupational specialty training to service members enrolled at the institution. The applicant must have experience in a military occupation recognized as substituting or meeting requirements of a course of study.

By July 1, 2016, the BOR must develop and adopt guidelines for awarding college credit for a student’s military training, coursework and education which must include course-equivalency recommendations adopted by the American Council on Education and other institutions deemed reputable by the BOR and the University of Connecticut Board.

An Act Concerning a Plan for Participation in a State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement Regarding Distance Learning Programs

Requires OHE to report to the Higher Education and Cultural Affairs Committee in January 2015 with a plan to enter into a multistate or regional reciprocity agreement that will allow for participation by the state and Connecticut institutions of higher education in a nationwide state authorization reciprocity agreement establishing uniform standards for distance-learning programs across states and eliminating the need for a participating state to assess the quality of a distance-learning program offered by an out-of-state institution of higher education through such the participating state’s traditional authorization licensing and accreditation process.

K-12 Legislation Enacted

An Act Establishing the Office of Early Childhood, Expanding Opportunities for Early Childhood Education and Concerning Dyslexia and Special Education

Creates the Office of Early Childhood (OEC) as the lead agency for the early care and education of young children. OEC will be responsible for administering early childhood programs previously administered by departments of Education, Social Services and Public Health. Also requires that all teacher-preparation programs that lead to teacher certification include instruction on detection and recognition of and evidence-based interventions for students with dyslexia.

An Act Establishing the Connecticut Smart Start Program

Creates the Connecticut Smart Start competitive grant program to be administered by the OEC with assistance from the Department of Education to reimburse boards of education with capital and operating grants to establish or expand a preschool program.

An Act Concerning a Plan for Career Readiness and Manufacturing Apprenticeship Preparation Programs at the Technical High Schools.

Requires the technical high school system to collaborate with the departments of Labor and Education and the BOR to develop a plan that would use technical high school manufacturing centers during off-hours for career readiness programs and DOL-approved apprenticeship training.

An Act Concerning the Recommendations of the Uniform Regional School Calendar Task Force, Licensure Exemptions for Certain After-School Programs and Expanding Opportunities Under the Subsidized Training and Employment Program.

Creates “new apprentice” grant program under the Step Up to provide grants for small businesses and manufacturers to hire high school and college students. A “new apprentice” is defined as a student in a public or private high school, preparatory school or higher education institution.

Click here for public higher education summary of the 2014 Connecticut Legislative Session and here for a private higher education summary of the session.

Carolyn Morwick handles government and community relations at the New England Board of Higher Education and is former director of the Caucus of New England State Legislatures.