Chris Powell: Union secrecy; neither banned nor read; U.S. should pay its own way

“The Secret,’’ by Moritz Stifter (1857-1905), German and Austrian painter

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Congratulations to Connecticut state Rep. Holly Cheeseman for exploding a spectacular hypocrisy of state government arising from its long subservience to the government employee unions.

Last week the state House of Representatives was debating legislation that would conceal from the public the home addresses of nearly every state and municipal government employee. This would have impaired accountability in government, but then that was the point. Cheeseman, a Republican from East Lyme, noted that two years ago the General Assembly and Gov. Ned Lamont enacted legislation to allow unions to obtain the same information in pursuit of enrolling and mobilizing government employees against the public interest.

Another Republican state representative, Craig Fishbein, of Wallingford, noted that the address-concealing bill as it was introduced originally would have concealed addresses for employees in only two state agencies, the state attorney general's office and the Department of Aging and Disability Services.

Other legislators complained that the expansion of the bill had never gotten a public hearing, though of course any such hearing would have been dominated by the unions. As they were about to be given another inch, the unions strove to grab another mile with the help of their tools in the legislature.

With debate making the legislation seem less sensible and starting to consume too much time in the General Assembly's always frantic hours just prior to mandatory adjournment, the House Democratic majority leader, Jason Rojas of East Hartford, took the bill off the agenda. But it will return sooner or later, maybe with a provision to make it illegal to know anything unflattering about a government employee.

xxx

Now that Newtown's Board of Education has decided against removing from the local high school library two books that some townspeople considered too sexually explicit, people are celebrating the defeat of what news organizations like to call book banning.

But the placement of books in a public school library is always fairly a matter of judgment about age-appropriateness, just as the placement of any  book in a public library is always a matter of judgment on several levels. Anyone has a right to challenge these judgments, and democratic government is entitled to make them. There is no book banning here. The challenged books remain available outside the libraries to anyone who wants them. Indeed, challenges to books may increase their readership.

But that does not seem to have been the case with the two sexually explicit books at Newtown High School. As the school board voted to leave them in the library, the superintendent said one of the books had been checked out only once and the other not at all. The books may not exactly be great literature, and their sexual explicitness may not compare to the pornography to which high school students easily can gain access on the internet.

The lack of student interest in the challenged books invites another challenge to school officials. If there is so little interest in the books, why do they remain in the library? After all, every book that is stocked crowds out a book that isn't stocked. What isn't that considered book banning too?

xxx

While three of Connecticut's five U.S. representatives -- John Larson, Rosa DeLauro, and Jahana Hayes, all Democrats -- voted against the deal by President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to raise the federal debt ceiling, they almost certainly did so by arrangement with the Democratic House leadership and the White House.

That is, the legislation had enough votes so that the three from Connecticut could be spared, allowing the three House members to strike the usual poses in favor of the needy, whose assistance might be slightly reduced by the legislation.

A compelling question remains unanswered. If this assistance is so crucial, why is essentially infinite debt needed to finance it, transferring the cost to future taxpayers and countries that foolishly buy U.S. government bonds?

Why can't the United States pay its own way in the present and the usual way -- with taxes and economizing elsewhere in the government budget?

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

Chris Powell: Remediate Conn.’s present before repudiating its past

At the Salem Witch trials

Connecticut inventor Eli Whitney's (1765-1825) original cotton gin patent, dated March 14, 1794. The invention lead to a huge expansion of slavery and thus to the Civil War.

MANCHESTER

While the new state budget wasn't yet complete, with several big issues waiting to be settled, the other day the state House of Representatives found time to pass a resolution that more or less repudiated and apologized for the conviction and execution of people alleged to have been witches in the Connecticut colony 400 years ago.

Advocates of the resolution said it was needed to assuage the feelings of the distant descendants of the wrongly prosecuted, though if there really are any people with feelings so tender, they need a legislative resolution less than round-the-clock sedation.

For does anyone in Connecticut consider witchcraft convictions from centuries ago to be a mark of shame against anyone alive today?

While the witchcraft resolution was being considered, Connecticut's news was full of reports about matters whose shame is contemporaneous -- like the miserable educational performance of children from racial minorities, the growing violence in the cities, the mental illness and drug addiction of most of the offenders being released from prison, the rise in poverty and homelessness, and worsening social disintegration that suggests the state has become the set of a zombie movie.

The General Assembly has yet to repudiate or apologize for any of those things. For doing something about them would require profound changes in government policy and probably substantial appropriations, even as posturing self-righteously with a resolution of no practical help to anyone is free.

But more discouraging than the legislature's propensity for stupid posturingis the growing presumption that inspired and advanced the witchcraft resolution and inspires other claims for apologies or reparations -- the presumption that the past is so bad that it should shame everyone in the present.

Of course, some shameful things from long ago have present consequences that may be remediable. The disproportionate failure of students from minority groups may be considered the consequence of slavery, though slavery ended 160 years ago. It may be considered the consequence of prejudicial policies that ended 50 years ago, though far more recent policies may be at fault, policies no one in authority cares to question.

In any case the natural order has been for mankind to advance over long periods -- to gain knowledge, wisdom, and decency so that, for example, prosecutions for "familiarity with the Devil" are understood as unjust and based on the superstition and irrational fear inherent in ignorance.

That society improves gradually used to be understood as what was called the ascent of man. Painful as that ascent sometimes has been, ascent it was, and no shame attaches to those who did not participate in old injustices, a point that the opponents of the House resolution on witchcraft tried to make.

Besides, once society begins apologizing for the mistakes of the distant past, there may be no end to it even as its only practical effect will be to provide distraction from the mistakes of the present, just as the witchcraft resolution has done.

xxx

In a desperate attempt to regain ratings a few weeks ago, CNN partnered with former President Donald Trump in televising a public forum in New Hampshire that was packed with Trump supporters while hostile questions were posed to Trump by reporter Kaitlan Collins.

Running for president for a third time, Trump got exactly what he wanted -- another chance to behave outlandishly, call names, and demonstrate the demeanor that has troubled even people who favored some of his administration's policies.

The audience in New Hampshire loved it, providing more evidence that nothing disgraceful, from mere lies to graft to sexual assault, can hurt Trump with his base. As he discovered with happy surprise when he began his first campaign for president in 2016, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters."

Trump is the embodiment of the contempt our government increasingly deserves.

Responding to the CNN broadcast, President Biden asked the country: "Do you want four more years of that?" But seeking re-election, the doddering and gaffe-producing Biden, a tool of wokeism, is himself why many people might choose four more years of Trump.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

Chris Powell: How about basic literacy?

In a high school in the ‘50’s, when literacy was higher.

The Brick School House in Coventry, Conn., was built in 1825 and closed in 1953. It is now a local museum and the only one-room school open to the public in Connecticut

— Photo by Topshelver

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut state legislators are never more oblivious than when they propose requirements for schools to teach certain subjects. A few months ago the subject to be required was the history of the Indian tribes that inhabited the state centuries ago. Now the subject to be required is "financial literacy."

The Indian history requirement was stupid pandering to the owners of Connecticut's two casinos. For as the latest report from the National Assessment of Education Progress showed, knowledge of U.S. history among the country's eighth-graders has sunk to the lowest point since NAEP tests began, in 1994. The history of the country's Indian tribes is a mere subset of U.S. history generally, worth knowing only when the basics are mastered.

The Indian history requirement was also stupid pandering for the reason that the financial literacy requirement is simply stupid: Most students in Connecticut are hardly literate at all, never mastering basic English and math. Two weeks ago it was reported that only about a third of Bridgeport's students perform at grade level in English and only about a fifth in math. Proficiency is better in more prosperous areas but still mediocre on the whole for the state.

So why should schools pretend to teach advanced subjects when they fail with the basics?

It's because legislators and governors long have wanted to distract from the catastrophe of public education, for which they are responsible, as with state government's policy of social promotion. Legislators and governors have acted as if noisily expanding school curriculums automatically conveys learning when it conveys nothing but publicity for politicians.

Students and parents increasingly recognize the fraud, as signified by the high rates of chronic student absenteeism in schools, not just in poor cities but lately in middle-class suburbs as well. Attending school hardly seems necessary when everyone knows that, far from being penalized for not showing up, students will be promoted from grade to grade and given high-school diplomas without regard to learning.

One state legislator, Sen. Douglas McCrory, D.-Hartford, began to pick up on this issue last month at a meeting of the legislature's Education Committee. In debate on a budget amendment that would have authorized a charter school in Danbury, McCrory said the much-anticipated growth of the workforce at submarine builder Electric Boat in Groton will mean nothing to the children who are being graduated ignorant of basic skills. They won't qualify for serious jobs.

The failure with so many students in Connecticut schools is an old scandal. In his decision in the last of the futile school-financing lawsuits seven years ago, Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher detailed the horrifying gaps in student proficiency across the state, especially in the cities, citing the graduation of the functionally illiterate.

The judge added that Connecticut's teacher-evaluation system is practically useless. He could have noted that it is useless in part because, unlike the evaluation system for other government employees in the state, the teacher-evaluation system is, at the insistence of teacher unions, entirely secret.

But the remedy Senator McCrory supported in debate on the state budget -- more charter schools -- is not so promising. For while charter schools let better-motivated students escape “failing” schools, schools fail mainly because the parents of their students do, and by removing better students, charter schools make neighborhood schools worse, depriving them of their good examples.

Judge Moukawsher's remedy in the school-financing case -- the old one of spending more on "failing" schools -- similarly fails, since Connecticut has been spending steadily more in the name of education for 45 years without improving student performance, just school-employee compensation.

That is, public education in Connecticut is collapsing not because of a lack of financing but because of a lack of parenting. Indeed, the more that Connecticut has spent in the name of education, the worse education results have been. More has been spent only to gain political results, and elected officials remain OK with that.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

Don Pesci: Conn.’s neo-progressives move to take down fiscal guard rails

VERNON, Conn.

A Hearst editorial has been answered by Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont.

“The Hearst Connecticut editorial, ‘Caution on the budget can go too far,” the governor wrote, “suggests that our balanced budgets and budget surpluses are shortchanging spending on important needs. Respectfully, I disagree.

“On the contrary, the fiscal guard rails established by the legislature in 2017, and recently reconfirmed on a bipartisan basis for another five to 10 years, have served as the foundation for our state’s fiscal turnaround, stability and economic growth. Higher growth is more than GDP — it means more families moving into the state, more new businesses, more job opportunities and more tax revenue (not more taxes, but more taxpayers). All of which have allowed us to increase investments in core services while proposing the biggest middle-class tax cut in our history.”

Neo-progressives in the General Assembly appear to be moving towards dismantling by degrees the spending guard rails supported by Lamont and a majority of Republicans in the General Assembly, now that Democrats have achieved a near veto-proof majority in the state legislature. Connecticut’s taxpayers and reporters may recall that the guard rails – essentially limits on spending – were installed after Republicans had achieved numerical parity in the state House. That parity, and with it an opportunity to press responsible budgetary restraints on profligate spenders, has long since gone by the wayside. The neo-progressive mutineers who invariably favor unlimited spending are now in charge of the General Assembly.

Why don’t we just spend the state’s mouthwatering surplus on necessary expenditures, the Hearst editorial asks?

“The surplus,” Lamont answers, “is invaluable in a state with some of the biggest debt per capita in the country, with the costs of carrying that debt eating into the resources we need to maintain and expand key services. But what the editorial fails to articulate is the volatility associated with the surplus. What is ‘here today’ can just as easily be ‘gone tomorrow,’ as they say.”

The governor is a bit too polite to put the matter more boldly. In fact, surpluses have in the past disappeared in the blink of an eye because they have been used by vote thirsty Democrats in the General Assembly to permanently increase long term spending. That is to say: Past surpluses have been folded into future increases in spending in budgets affirmed by neo-progressive Democrats who believe that if spending is a good thing, more spending is always better. It is this ruinous idea that has swollen all past budgets. The last annual pre-Lowell Weicker income tax budget was $8.5 billion. The current biannual budget is $51 billion, a more than fourfold increase in spending.

“The problem with socialism” – i.e., unrestrained, autocratic spending – Margaret Thatcher reminded us, “is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.” There are some indications that voters in Connecticut are running out of patience with heedless neo-progressive legislators who cavalierly run out of other people’s money.

The single line in Lamont’s challenging answer to the initial Hearst editorial that drives neo-progressives batty is this one: ‘Funding future programs via a current surplus is irresponsible” and, Lamont might have added, costly in the long run to a state that hopes to liquidate part of its gargantuan debt of some $68 billion by poaching businesses from more predatory Eastern Seaboard states and increasing business productivity in Connecticut.

By trimming Lamont’s tax cuts and agitating for increases in spending, neo-progressives in the General Assembly are sending a message to the governor that the dominant left in the state has no intention of seriously cutting net-spending. The easiest way to corner a vote in Connecticut is to use surplus money to buy votes, and the purchasing of votes cannot be done in the absence of budget surpluses, either real or imaginary.

“Getting and spending, we know, are conjoined twins. Years after [former Governor Lowell] Weicker had left politics,” this writer noted four years ago, “he appeared with a panel of businessmen at the Hartford Club. Asked to reflect on Connecticut’s then burgeoning debt, Weicker groaned, “Where did it all go?” But he knew where it went. Politicians spent it and, by raising taxes, relieved themselves of cutting governmental costs, always a painful ordeal for those who have pledged their political troth to state employee unions, Connecticut’s fourth branch of government.”

The neo-progressive wing of Connecticut’s Democrat Party simply waited Weicker out. It is infinitely patient.

Don Pesci is Vernon-based columnist.

The Tower on Fox Hill, in Vernon

Chris Powell: Someone is always above the law; UConn rioters

MANCHESTER, Conn.

While former President Donald Trump has long been mainly a grifter, his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury is not justified by the cant coming from Democrats in Connecticut and around the country: the cant that “no one is above the law.”

To the contrary, criminal prosecution is almost always largely a matter of prosecutorial discretion.

Alvin Bragg, the current Manhattan district attorney, ran for office implying that his office would prosecute Trump for something. And now Bragg has persuaded a grand jury to indict the former president for 34 alleged felonies. But Bragg has been routinely reducing felony charges to misdemeanors for offenders who are not named Trump.

Federal and other state prosecutors have so far declined to press against Trump charges like those now being pressed in Manhattan because those other prosecutors considered the evidence too weak.

Bill Clinton broke criminal law while in office but received prosecutorial discretion, being considered above the law.

Connecticut is full of prosecutorial discretion. The state long has put illegal immigrants above the law, facilitating their breaking of federal immigration law and obstructing its enforcement by federal agents. Lately Connecticut also has been putting marijuana users and sellers above the law, pretending that federal drug law -- which, rightly or wrongly, continues to criminalize the drug -- is nullified by the state law that actually has put state government itself into the marijuana retail licensing business.

Indeed, U.S. Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland has formally stated that President Biden’s Justice Department has decided that enforcing federal marijuana law in states that don’t want it enforced would not be a good use of the department’s resources -- still more prosecutorial discretion that puts people above the law. So much for the U.S. Constitution’s command that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Connecticut’s law against murder does not seem to be enforced in New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford as well as it is in Woodbridge, Easton and Avon. About 80 percent of the murders in the last several years in New Haven remain unsolved. There is plenty of discretion as to where the state allocates its police resources.

Sometimes prosecutorial discretion may serve a more cosmic form of justice. Sometimes prosecutorial discretion is political opportunism. But someone everywhere is always above the law.

xxx

Just as its men’s basketball team was winning the national college championship and putting the University of Connecticut in the spotlight across the country, dozens of students rioted on the campus at Storrs, pulling down lampposts, breaking windows and starting fires, discrediting the university at what should have been its most glorious moment in years. Fourteen people, most of them students, were arrested, and 16 others were injured badly enough by the mayhem to be hospitalized.

The university’s admissions department has a lot to answer for. How do such thugs get into something that calls itself higher education?

Of course, the thugs have even more to answer for than the admissions department does. Having been arrested, some may actually be prosecuted, though most criminal charges in Connecticut these days are so heavily discounted in court that the law has lost deterrence. Most of the young rioters probably will be penalized in court with nothing more than probation.

The university promises its own vigorous internal discipline of the rioters, including possible expulsion. UConn should regularly update the public about that process -- to reassure the public and deter any other thugs on campus. The basketball team, its coaching staff, its fans, and everyone else in Connecticut deserved far better, and the state needs to be shown that, at least at UConn, nobody is above the law.

xxx

A reader offers what might strike most people as a good idea: that each criminal court in the state should issue a weekly report of cases concluded and their outcomes, and that newspapers should publish the reports. But it won’t happen because the General Assembly, with a far-left political majority obliged by Gov. Ned Lamont, lately has been ordering the erasure of criminal records.

Most legislators and the governor think the public knows too much about criminal justice.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com).

Chris Powell: Legislator’s drinking problem isn’t the biggest scandal; sneaky fuel tax; a No Labels presidential candidate?

1994 federal government poster

MANCHESTER, Conn.

By now nearly everyone who pays attention to Connecticut news knows of the state legislator who last year stood up to speak at the Capitol when she was drunk and lapsed into incoherence and who, a few weeks ago, was driving drunk when she crashed her car nearby.

The legislator has become so well known in large part because television stations have delighted in broadcasting video of her failing a sobriety test and getting arrested. There was nothing remarkable about the video. It was just like all failed sobriety-test videos except for the office of the person being arrested. She was hardly known statewide before her public intoxication; she was what in Parliament would be called a back-bencher. But now she is famous for being humiliated, and her legislative committee assignments are suspended.

Of course, she should have gotten treatment for her drinking problem before crashing her car and putting others at risk. But after the crash she quickly apologized publicly and began treatment. Beating an addiction is not easy; all may hope that she succeeds.

But the repeated broadcast of her arrest was only prurient and may not make it easier for her. It was as if the TV stations thought that she was Donald Trump.

Yes, after a long career as a grifter and four years of unprecedentedly disgraceful conduct in the nation's highest office, Trump may be irremediable. But the state legislator is just an ordinary person without bad intent who has a character weakness shared by many others, including others in elected office. There are many other things that Connecticut should be more ashamed of, but viewers of the state's TV news probably don't know.

xxx

HIDDEN TAXES AGAIN: Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and Democrats in the General Assembly are trying again to raise fuel taxes surreptitiously.

They are pushing legislation to authorize the commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to commit the state to interstate agreements requiring fuel businesses to buy and compete for a limited number of "carbon credits."

The cost to the businesses would be passed along in higher prices to retail fuel customers, who would blame energy producers and distributors, not the real culprit, state government.

The "carbon credits" scheme might be less objectionable if the legislature had to vote on such interstate compacts directly as ordinary legislation, if the governor had to sign it before it took effect, and if in doing so they were candid with the public about the inevitable result and explained why higher fuel costs were worth the supposed progress against "climate change."

But no. The Democrats want to pander to the climate extremists in their party without taking responsibility with everyone else.

If the governor and legislators want to raise fuel prices, they don't need any interstate compact. They can just raise fuel taxes in the open, as they have done before, though such taxes in Connecticut are already high.

xxx

FIND AN ALTERNATIVE: According to The Washington Post, the No Labels political organization, which includes former Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, aims to try to put its own candidate for president on the ballot in all 50 states in 2024.

No such candidate has been designated but the idea is to draw the likely major-party candidates in 2024 -- President Biden for the Democrats and former President Trump for the Republicans -- back toward the political center and away from their pandering to the left and right. Such movement might cause No Labels to endorse one or the other, refraining from offering its own candidate.

Biden supporters are said to be most afraid of the No Labels plan. One says: "The only way you can justify this is if you believe it doesn't really matter if it is Joe Biden or Donald Trump."

No, there is plenty of other justification. A third-party candidate can be justified if people believe, as many well may, that Biden and Trump are equally catastrophic, if in different ways.

To ensure its victory in 2024 one of the two major parties needs only to nominate a presidential candidate who is competent, moderate, relatively honest, sane and sentient.

But the parties don't yet seem to have noticed that Biden and Trump aren't.

Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: If sex changes become routine, America will get even crazier

MANCHESTER, Conn.

According to an assistant secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, Rachel Levine, who spoke the other day at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center, in Hartford, "gender-affirming care" -- the euphemism for sex-change therapy -- will be common and considered normal before too long.

Levine may be right but no one should hope so.

For it would signify profound national unhappiness if many people were so uncomfortable in their own skin that they would want to undergo physique-altering drug treatments and even mutilation. The law should prohibit this kind of thing for minors, for the same reason that it prohibits minors from making contracts and should prohibit minors from marrying, as is increasingly being urged. Minors aren't prepared to make such decisions.

Children may grow out of gender dysphoria, as they grow out of many other things, and evidence that sex-change therapy increases the long-term happiness of those who undertake it is lacking, even as the therapy may have irreversible effects.

While it does not seem to have been noted, the rise in gender dysphoria among children corresponds with the explosion of mental illness generally among the young. This may not be a coincidence.

After all, about a third of children in the United States live in a home without two parents and thus with less parenting and support than most children used to get. Many of those children are living in poverty. In cities the percentage of children living in poverty without fathers approaches 90 percent.

Meanwhile, school performance is crashing throughout the country.

The explosion in youthful mental illness (and mental illness in the adult population as well) would seem to invite government to inquire urgently into its cause.

Indeed, the mental illness epidemic may be more damaging than the recent virus epidemic was. But no.

Instead Assistant Secretary Levine remarked in Hartford that sex-change therapy for minors has the "highest support" of the Biden administration.

If such an administration remains in power, the assistant secretary's prophecy that sex-change therapy for children will become normal could be self-fulfilling, whether such therapy is really needed or not and though the country won't be any saner for it.

xxx

MORE URGENT THAN BONUSES: While state government has begun paying $45 million in bonuses to 36,000 of its "essential" employees, a couple of sad news reports related to government finance were largely overlooked.

The housing authority in Bridgeport is evicting about a fifth of its households, 502 of 2,500, because they haven't been paying rent and are already about $1.5 million in arrears. In New Haven a longstanding camp of homeless people in a city park, considered a sanitation and fire hazard, was dismantled and bulldozed by city employees.

The city governments didn't mean to be cruel. They are striving to find other accommodations for the people being displaced, some of whom of course have drug and other mental problems. Even so, people living in a homeless camp are probably not in a condition to support themselves, just as people who can't cover the rent in government housing for the poor probably aren't either.

That doesn't mean that with some temporary support, rehabilitation, and training these people couldn't support themselves eventually, but their present is desperate. They need shelter immediately, and in Connecticut shelter is scarcer and more expensive than ever.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont is not indifferent to the problem. His administration has just given $2.45 million to Pacific House, a social-service organization that operates emergency shelters, to build 39 inexpensive apartments to become "supportive housing" in Stamford. But as the evictions in Bridgeport and New Haven show, that housing will not be nearly enough for immediate needs.

So Connecticut should consider opening a few emergency shelters such as the field hospitals the National Guard set up quickly during the COVID pandemic. Much vacant retail, school and church property might be adapted for this purpose. Of course, supervisory staff would have to be hired, and rules devised and enforced to keep the facilities clean and orderly, but such a project would not be complicated, except maybe for assuaging the neighbors.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)\

Chris Powell: Teacher raises always fail to reduce poverty in Connecticut

The Truant's Log,” by Ralph Hedley (1899)

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Hardly a week passes without revealing more evidence that poverty is worsening in Connecticut.

As an emergency measure, all public school students in Connecticut are now eligible for free or discounted school lunches for the current school year. But this month it was reported that the number of students who would qualify under the old rules increased by 4% in the year ending last October. The number of students not able to speak English increased by 10%. These data points are the key measures of poverty used by state government for allocating state money to school systems.

Predictably enough, most of both increases involved children in Connecticut's ever-struggling cities.

While the number of state students qualifying for free school lunches had fallen in the prior two years, this seems to have been only because of the federal government's temporary tax credit for people with children. It's not that students suddenly were able to pay for their own lunches but that government was paying for them in a different way. The self-sufficiency of poor families did not increase.

People who consider themselves advocates for children assert that the new data calls for state government to "invest" another $300 million in education in the cities. Actually the new data suggest that state government's long practice of "investing" more in urban education has failed to achieve any substantial increase in learning or any substantial reduction in poverty.

But failure in education and poverty policy long has been the rationale for doing still more of what has failed.

All the extra money "invested" in urban education probably has failed because it has been spent mainly on increasing the compensation of teachers and administrators. The extra money has not made disadvantaged children any more prepared to learn when they get to school, nor has it made their households much less poor and their upbringings much better.

Indeed, though the virus epidemic is long over, chronic absenteeism in Connecticut's schools has risen to an average of 25% and is closer to 50% in the cities. Standardized test results show that student proficiency in Connecticut has been collapsing for more than 10 years. The education and poverty problems have endured no matter how much money has been thrown at them.

But for political reasons this failure of policy has never been audited.

This doesn't mean that teachers are to blame. They play the hand they are dealt -- indifferent, unparented and sometimes incorrigible students. School administrators who stick to such pernicious policies as social promotion and the suspension of discipline are partly to blame. But the problem is still bigger than that -- social disintegration and proletarianization, which begin long before children get to school, and quite without government's objection.

The legislation proposed by a few far-left Democrats in the General Assembly to require people to vote seems to presume this proletarianization -- to presume that the many people who don't vote and the many who don't even register to vote would vote Democratic if they were required to vote, since the Democrats are the party of enlarging government to dispense ever more free stuff and patronage and to increase dependence on government.

The mandatory-voting legislation raises questions that its advocates have yet to answer.

Could the mandatory voting requirement be met by filing a form affirming that a person is aware of an election but doesn't want to vote for anyone?

What would be the penalty for refusing to vote or to file the opt-out form?

Would mandatory voting apply to everyone or only to those people registered to vote?

Would a mandatory voting requirement discourage people from registering to vote in the first place?

Perhaps most important, why would requiring everyone to vote necessarily improve politics, government, and public life?

After all, for years now, half of Connecticut's high school graduates have failed to master high school math and English, most have lacked a basic knowledge of civics, and many carry this ignorance through life. They are being prepared mainly to become lifelong dependents of government.

Of course even the ignorant and uninformed have the right to vote. But why push it so hard?

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

Chris Powell: Leftist fascism at colleges; apologizing for witchcraft convictions

In New Britain: View over campus of Central Connecticut State University.

— Photo by Artsistra

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Before voting on the huge increase in appropriations being sought by the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, state legislators should watch the video taken of the dozens of students and their friends who on March 2 invaded the Student Center at Central Connecticut State University, in New Britain, to prevent the showing of a film most probably had not seen.

The film, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of Black Lives Matter, was to be shown by the Central chapter of Turning Point USA, a conservative group. But the protesters commandeered the stage and chanted slogans, took seats and shouted interruptions, and even after being persuaded to leave by a university official, made so much noise outside the hall that the film had to be canceled.

The protesters called Turning Point USA a hate group even as their own misconduct dripped with hate for freedom of expression. They chanted "This is what democracy looks like" as they committed fascism.

A protesting student interviewed by The Hartford Courant called the film "triggering," yet, by attending the event, she had  sought  to be "triggered." Indeed, the protesters outnumbered the people who came to see the film, and the protest brought far more attention to the film than the event's organizers achieved by themselves.

This fascism from the political left is now typical of higher education throughout the country and it increasingly infects public higher education in Connecticut. It suggests that higher education is more interested in political indoctrination than scholarship -- indoctrination financed with tax money.

A university committed to freedom of expression and academic freedom would punish the students who prevented the showing of the film. If this is "what democracy looks like" at Central, legislators should stop sending public money there.

* * *

SLEAZE IS LIBERATED: Political blogger and newspaper columnist Kevin Rennie, a former Republican state legislator from South Windsor, Conn., revealed the other day that Democratic state senators are soliciting lobbyists at the state Capitol for thousand-dollar donations to the Hartford mayoral campaign of state Sen. John Fonfara. While state law long has forbidden legislators from seeking contributions from lobbyists for legislative campaigns while the General Assembly is in session, the ban doesn't apply to municipal campaigns like Fonfara's. Still, the solicitations stink of extortion, the more so because Fonfara is Senate chairman of the legislature's powerful finance committee. Many lobbyists need his favor.

Gross as this is, it may be more notable for showing just how politically uncompetitive Connecticut has been made by the Republican Party's infatuation with Donald Trump. Connecticut Democrats seem to believe that as long as Trump is the face of the opposition, they can get away with anything.

Will Republican legislators make an issue of the sleaze of their Democratic colleagues, as by proposing to extend the lobbyist-solicitation ban to cover municipal campaigns? Will Connecticut Republicans see that their association with Trump facilitates everything wrong that Connecticut Democrats do, and thus the state's decline as well?

SUPERSTITION EVOLVES: A resolution to apologize for the witchcraft convictions and executions that occurred in Connecticut nearly 400 years ago is advancing in the General Assembly and getting much publicity though it is only pious posturing, as if anyone today needs to be told that witchcraft really isn't so powerful and that innocent people were hanged.

Meanwhile the state should be much more concerned about recent  wrongful convictions, some based on false confessions sweated out of young people. Recent wrongful convictions and imprisonments are estimated to have cost the state about $48 million. So legislation has been proposed to prohibit police from misleading, intimidating, or coercing criminal suspects.

What constitutes misleading, intimidating, and coercing may be difficult to define, so the legislation probably will lead to much litigation. But this issue is far more compelling than an official admission that Connecticut's superstitions have evolved over the centuries. While state government no longer believes that witches can do much harm, it now believes that, if the right political spells are cast, men can become women and women become men just by thinking it so.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

Chris Powell: Why would anyone want to build inexpensive rental housing?

A 1945 comic explaining World War-era rent control under the U.S. Office of Price Administration.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Exclusive zoning may not be the only reason that little inexpensive rental housing is being built or renovated in Connecticut. Anyone interested in the housing issue would do well to read the fascinating report about a day in housing court published March 5 in The Day of New London. It was written by journalism students from the University of Connecticut.

The court was full of people whose landlords were trying to evict them for chronic failure to pay rent. Some of the delinquent tenants were hard-luck cases. Others were victims of their own irresponsibility in life. An indulgent judge, court mediators and lawyers provided to the tenants by state government tried to arrange payment solutions and forestall evictions.

But most of these efforts were probably impractical from the start. In the end even patient and understanding landlords ended up seriously cheated. Evictions were dragged out for months but not prevented since the tenants simply couldn't or wouldn't pay.

“If you need something," one landlord said, "you can't just take it, like a coat if you're cold. Yet if you take my product -- time, space -- and don't pay, it's not illegal. ... If someone steals from you, you can be made whole. But my product is gone, used, consumed.”

The Day's report indicated just how mistaken the clamor at the state Capitol for rent control is, for the troubled people in housing court often can't pay any rent. They hold on by using the court to expropriate their landlord, sometimes for most of a year.

Rent control would be expropriation. But in housing court expropriation is already policy.

With rent control possibly coming on top of the expropriation any delinquent tenant can arrange in housing court, why should anyone want to get into the less-expensive rental business in Connecticut, even if exclusive zoning is overthrown as it should be?

And yet the only solution to the housing problem is to increase supply.

Submarine maker Electric Boat, in Groton, just across the river from New London, plans to hire thousands more workers over the next few years. But no one has announced plans to build thousands of housing units for the new workers to occupy nearby. EB's growth will push housing costs way up.

The problem bigger than the housing shortage is Connecticut's growing population of people not equipped to support themselves and their families -- people who are uneducated, unskilled, and often demoralized. Meanwhile industry in the state is unable to find qualified applicants for tens of thousands of jobs with good salaries and benefits. (Contrary to the premise of public education in Connecticut, giving high school diplomas to people who never mastered their schoolwork doesn't make them educated.)

Many people whose evictions are prolonged in housing court are in effect long-term welfare cases. To reduce evictions during the virus epidemic, state government has reimbursed landlords for some unpaid rents. The program continues but many tenants have exhausted the benefit. Maybe it should be enlarged to become like the Section 8 housing voucher program.

But housing the incapable is government's responsibility, not the responsibility of any landlord. That's why delinquent tenants aren't really the ones expropriating the people who provide rental housing. The expropriating is being done by government.

Is Accountability Illegal?

The dumbest non-sequitur of government in Connecticut is thriving at the top of the state's system of what styles itself higher education.

The Board of Regents for the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, which runs the community colleges, still refuses to explain what happened with the firing and reinstatement of Manchester Community College CEO Nicole Esposito two years ago. Esposito sued, charging sex discrimination and retaliation for her questioning financial improprieties, and quickly got her job back and $775,000 in damages.

A spokesman for the board says that it won't comment on personnel matters that have been resolved or allegations that have been withdrawn.

But why not? Is accountability illegal in Connecticut now?

No, the law doesn't forbid explaining when so much money has been squandered. Governor Lamont and state legislators should press the point.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com).

Chris Powell: Rent-control bill a fraud; college-job racket; nimbys vs. Bridgeport

In a studio apartment.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Nearly everyone agrees that Connecticut badly needs more inexpensive apartments. Many basic two-bedroom units in the state carry monthly rents that are as high as a home mortgage payment, and rents are still rising. As was demonstrated the other day at a state legislative committee hearing, many renters are desperate, especially with unprecedented electricity price increases coming on top of rent increases.

But no one has explained how a law restricting rents -- government price control that would be exclusive to housing even as the prices of all other necessities are rising sharply as well -- is going to encourage construction and renovation of rental housing. Indeed, with a rent-control law Connecticut may send a powerful signal to rental-housing developers to avoid the state and a powerful signal to landlords to convert their apartments to condominiums and sell them.

Rent control may help people who already have apartments but it won't increase supply or slake demand.

Fortunately the major rent-control legislation under consideration in the General Assembly is a fraud. It would restrict annual rent increases to 4 percent plus inflation. With the latest official U.S. inflation rate at 6.4 percent, the legislation would hardly cap rents at all. Its main value to its advocates may be to establish the principle of expropriating property without fair compensation.

Then, after a few years, other legislation might cap rent increases at 4 percent without an inflation adjustment, and then freeze rents entirely. After all, many advocates of rent control think that everything necessary should be free. Of course nothing is really free, and decisions about who should pay can be messy, since cost-shifting is such a big objective of government.

Many people oppressed by their rents aren't familiar with economics and how the real world works. But many advocates of rent control are, and they know exactly what they are doing and what they are not doing.

They are not encouraging the crowd to understand inflation and where it comes from -- government itself. They are not encouraging the crowd to notice that since most important prices have risen sharply, landlords aren't to blame.

Nor are the rent-control advocates concentrating on the only solution to rising rents: increasing housing supply. No, expropriating is their objective.

There are solutions to supply, but they aren't quick and easy.

Liberalizing municipal zoning is the one most discussed. But any zoning solution will be slow and disjointed.

State government could build housing directly, exempting itself from municipal zoning, using eminent domain to obtain land, hiring contractors, and assigning construction plans, but that would risk much corruption.

Or maybe state government could exempt itself from local zoning, use eminent domain to obtain property near water and sewer lines and transit infrastructure, put the properties out to bid to apartment developers, and then exempt them from taxes as long as the properties were well maintained.

Such a policy would be sounder environmentally and possibly less controversial than putting apartments in rural towns that lack infrastructure.

But there can be no substantial construction of housing anywhere without controversy. In the end the issue is a choice between the haves and have-nots. Government may try to mollify the have-nots with free bus rides, diapers, and contraceptives, but what they need most is less expensive housing.

* * *

In the meantime state government will continue to take care of itself better than anything else.

Central Connecticut State University, in New Britain, has just announced its hiring of former Hartford Democratic state Rep. Edwin Vargas as the new occupant of the Gov. William A. O'Neill Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Practical Politics. The job pays $69,000, pretty sweet for someone who is 74 with pension income. That’s "practical politics" for you.

Vargas won re-election last year but, betraying his constituents, declined to take office in January so he could accept the university job. His predecessor was another state legislator, former state Sen. Donald J. DeFronzo, a Democrat from New Britain.

If Republicans ever want to occupy an endowed chair in public higher education in Connecticut, they'll have to start winning a lot more elections.

View of Sikorsky Memorial Airport (left), the Housatonic River and Stratford. The airport is named for aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky (1889-1972).

No place in Connecticut has as much untapped potential as its largest and most impoverished city, Bridgeport -- on Long Island Sound with a great harbor, superhighways leading to the east, west and north, a major stop on the Northeast Corridor railroad line, and a city-owned airport just over the municipal line in Stratford.

But state government long has overlooked Bridgeport's potential because no one in authority has dared to deal with the poverty of the city's residents.

Refurbishing the airport and restoring scheduled commercial flights there could contribute greatly to Bridgeport's revival and economic development. But predictably enough Stratford doesn't want to cooperate. Two of its state legislators, Republican Sen. Kevin Kelly and Democratic Rep. Joe Gresko, have introduced legislation to thwart Bridgeport's sale of Sikorsky to the Connecticut Airport Authority, essentially giving Stratford control of the airport, which would mean no improvement.

Bridgeport is too poor and ill-managed to restore Sikorsky itself. But it could be done by the airport authority, which has greatly improved Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks. If Bridgeport is ever to be improved in any respect, state government will have to do it. Let it start with Sikorsky.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com).

From slush to lush (in two months)

On Feb. 28, gradations of gray along a western Long Island Sound estuary in Connecticut. But March 1 marks the start of meteorological spring.

— Photo by Hilary Cosell

Chris Powell: Time for ranked-choice voting; the bear facts

Typical counting process of a single seat ranked choice voting election. RCV/IRV = ranked-choice voting / instant run-off voting are synonymous.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

While it's good that Donald Trump now has some official competition for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 -- former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was Trump's ambassador to the United Nations -- the problem is likely to be that Trump will have too much competition for the nomination, as he did when he first ran in 2016.

Back then 16 candidates of some standing ran against Trump for the Republican nomination, and they split the anti-Trump vote in the party so badly that he had a surprisingly easy path through the primaries to the Republican National Convention.

Trump retains much support among Republicans, though he is probably the weakest candidate they could choose to challenge President Biden or any other Democrat. Recent polls have suggested that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is acting like a potential presidential candidate, might defeat Trump in one-on-one Republican primaries but that Trump would win if he faced more than one challenger.

Despite the incompetence of the Biden administration, there is little chance that Trump could ever carry Connecticut. Maybe no Republican candidate for president could. But surely there are potential Republican candidates for president who might do better in Connecticut than Trump and thus harm other Republican candidates here less and help restore political competition to the state.

The prospect of Trump's renomination is an urgent reason for Connecticut to adopt ranked-choice voting, which encourages candidates to try to win by becoming more acceptable to majorities instead of by carving out the biggest and most extreme minority.

xxx

MUST MISTAKES BE FOREVER?: In a newspaper letter the other day defending the monopoly enjoyed by Connecticut's liquor stores on sale of wine, former Enfield state Rep. William Kiner inadvertently showed not only what is wrong with the state's liquor law but also what long has been wrong with state politics generally.

Liquor-store operators, Kiner wrote, "purchased their stores with the knowledge that they alone could sell wine." So, he continued, for state government to let supermarkets sell wine would be "changing the rules in the middle of the game when people's livelihoods are at stake."

That is, mistakes in policy must be preserved forever, no matter how unfair and contrary to the public interest -- especially if an influential special interest draws its livelihood from the mistake. Even the basic rules of a market economy, like free competition, must be suspended if they threaten someone's profitability -- the public interest be damned. That's the Kiner Rule.

But preventing supermarkets from selling wine isn't the only anti-competitive aspect of Connecticut law on alcoholic beverages. State law also establishes a system of minimum pricing for those beverages, a system that inflates prices, ensuring the profitability of beverage distributors and retailers.

If policy is to make alcohol expensive for health reasons, state government should receive the extra revenue as a tax. Instead in Connecticut the extra revenue from the law inflating prices goes to the distributors and retailers themselves. It's a racket that, according to Kiner, must never end.

Of course state law does not guarantee such privileges for any other business. All other businesses in Connecticut are always subject to changes in state law that may and often do diminish their profitability.

If, as many liquor store operators now admit, they can't compete in a free market with lower prices, they should leave the business to people who can.

xxx

ONLY HUNTING MIGHT WORK: Another lobby at the state Capitol, the bear lobby, argues that Connecticut should continue to prohibit hunting of the animals because their infiltration of the state is caused by people failing to secure food and garbage outside.

But if bear food was really so plentiful outside, bears would not increasingly be breaking into Connecticut homes in search of something to eat. No, the bear population has been increasing in the state mainly because hunting them was outlawed long ago.

Yes, getting people to secure their garbage might sometimes induce bears to move along faster. But the state will never eliminate people's negligence, and the bears are already here and causing more trouble. They won't be leaving voluntarily.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

Chris Powell: School violence starts at home

Candles outside of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla., after Nikolas Cruz shot to death 17 students there on Feb. 14, 2018.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Legislation has been proposed in the General Assembly to diminish the use of police in Connecticut's schools, and some of its supporters suggested the other day at the state Capitol that the presence of police in schools actually causes crime -- that if the police weren't there, students wouldn't be arrested. Of course that's not quite to say that bad stuff wouldn't happen anyway.

"The story is simple," said Robert Goodrich, executive director of Waterbury-based Radical Advocates for Cross-Cultural Education. "The moment police started being implemented in our schools, arrests rose dramatically, and they continue to rise. The more police we have in schools, the more likely it is that any student is going to be arrested," especially Black and Hispanic students.

The far-left child-welfare organization Connecticut Voices for Children made a similar claim a year ago.

So did boards of education request the permanent stationing of "school resource officers" to get more minority kids in trouble with the law?

Or were police requested -- especially for schools in impoverished and crime-ridden cities -- because schools increasingly were having trouble maintaining order with teachers and administrators alone?

Of course, it was the latter. Indeed, in the days just preceding the recent clamor at the Connecticut Capitol for expelling cops from schools, students were arrested for bringing guns or knives to school or brawling at school in Waterbury, Hamden, Meriden and Manchester.

The racial disproportions in arrests in school are no more remarkable than the racial disproportions in crime and arrests everywhere, nor more remarkable than the racial disproportions in poverty, child neglect and mental illness, which all correlate with crime.

The people complaining about police in schools don't seem to have noticed the long rise in misbehavior by students, nor the special schools that have been established in recent years to try to educate the kids who can't behave, nor the recent calls to put mental-health clinics in schools because so many more students these days are disturbed.

The kids aren't disturbed because of "school resource officers." No, they come to school disturbed -- that is, when they come to school at all, the chronic absenteeism rate in Connecticut's schools now being up to 25 percent. Most of these kids get little parenting and especially little from fathers.

Nor is it remarkable that students who behave, and their parents, favor having police in schools for protection against the kids who don't behave.

Connecticut and the country are awash in social disintegration -- from the schools to the streets and highways, where reckless driving now abounds; to crude behavior in markets and at public meetings; to shootings, including shootings at schools. Government claims misleadingly that crime is declining even as murders and shootings increase and much of the worst crime involves repeat offenders who should have been jailed for life a dozen convictions ago.

The people who blame this disintegration on cops in schools think that social workers and therapists can handle it. But it already is straining the capacity of the police, as indicated by the high unsolved murder rates in the cities.

The people who blame cops in school scorn what they call the "school-to-prison pipeline." But that pipeline is a lot longer than they acknowledge. Crucially, it starts at home.

xxx

PRETEND PROTECTION: Another of Connecticut's "protective orders" proved its worthlessness Jan. 31 as Traci-Marie Jones was shot to death at home in Bethel by her estranged husband, Lester Jones, who then killed himself. Traci-Marie had gotten the order from a court a week earlier.

It prohibited her killer from any contact with her and required him to stay at least 100 yards away and to give up any guns and ammunition. He didn't, and of course nothing was done to enforce the order. Nothing is ever done to enforce such orders.

The only solutions in such circumstances are to provide the endangered person with round-the-clock police protection, move her permanently to a secret location, or arm her.

Every time a woman with a protective order is murdered, state legislators say they'll do something about the problem. But they will do nothing. For two of the solutions are expensive and the third is too politically incorrect.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. =(CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

Can’t run the Nutmeg state at the same time

The governor’s mansion in Hartford.

“I’m having trouble managing the mansion {official governor’s residence in Hartford}. What I need is a wife.’’

—Ella T. Grasso (1919-1981), a moderate Democrat who was Connecticut’s governor from 1975 to 1980, when she resigned because of illness.

Chris Powell: Conn. politicians strike hypocritical poses about distant police outrages; Afghans blew their chance to defeat Islamo-Fascism

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut’s population is barely growing (only 0.1 percent in 2022) and its economy growing very slowly, but its elected officials are as busy as ever deploring the awful things happening elsewhere in the country, and they may be thankful for the distraction. In recent days mass shootings in California and murderous misconduct by police in Tennessee have prompted Connecticut's leaders to issue proclamation after proclamation deploring the incidents, as if their constituents had any doubt about their feelings, or thought that those feelings might make any difference.

Connecticut's leaders seemed to feel the need to strike a pose -- to gain publicity for their self-righteousness.

The people who do the hiring for the Memphis Police Department may have a lot to answer for, but then Connecticut has enough of its own police misconduct to answer for, misconduct captured on body-camera video just as it was captured the other day in Memphis.

A Connecticut state trooper is facing a charge of manslaughter for repeatedly shooting a young man, Mubarek Soulemane, three years ago as he sat quietly in a car that had been stopped on a highway in West Haven after a wild chase.

Five New Haven officers are facing charges of reckless endangerment and cruelty for dragging and dumping Randy Cox, whose neck had been broken during an abrupt stop in a police van last June.

The execution in West Haven and the rough treatment of the man in police custody in New Haven evoked from Connecticut's leaders only a fraction of the indignation they have mustered for the police misconduct a thousand miles away in Tennessee.

And while elected officials should avoid prejudicing proceedings in criminal justice, Connecticut's elected officials might do well to show more awareness of the social disintegration that police officers confront every day -- social disintegration that has made recruiting officers critically difficult, especially in the cities, which have the worst crime.

As Connecticut's elected officials were fulminating about the mass shootings in California and the police riot in Memphis, two 16-year-olds were shot on the streets of Hartford. The incident passed without official comment and nearly without any notice at all by news organizations, this kind of thing long having become typical of Connecticut's cities, too common to deplore. Besides, any elected official who deplored what has become so common might be obliged to fix responsibility for it, a search that would lead him to some of his own constituents.

Better to deplore California and Tennessee, since nobody there votes here.

xxx

Afghanistan and especially its women are getting sympathy around the world as the theocratic fascists again ruling the benighted place, the Taliban, are banning women from education and service with the international charitable organizations that are trying to prevent starvation and disease in the country.

But disgraceful as the Taliban regime is, sympathy for the Afghans is misplaced. For Afghanistan's men and women alike had their chance during the Western world's 20-year attempt at nation building there.

While some Afghans showed courage in pursuit of a more democratic society, most Afghans, including most Afghan women, were indifferent. Many Afghan women now realize that they won't have much of a future without education, but they can do nothing about it -- unless, of course, they want to pick up a gun, learn how to use it, and fight a revolution.

Few want to do that. Instead many will try to leave the country. Some will head for the United States, and a few may deserve consideration.

But most Afghans now deserve to live under the oppression they refused to fight, and the United States should not make that oppression any easier for the oppressors with financial or material assistance of any kind. Neither should the United States intervene to help overthrow the Taliban. No, Afghanistan should be left in peace to evolve gradually in its misery.

If Afghan women want a better life, they will have to contend for it themselves over the long term, just as women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other women-oppressing theocracies will have to.

No one will be liberating them but themselves.

Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Rent control worsens housing shortage; teacher union greed

A price ceiling will create a shortage in between Qs and Qd.

— Photo by Karinnna13

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut may have had its "All power to the Soviets!" moment the other day as more than 200 people summoned by the Democratic Socialists of America gathered on the Internet to call for a law to limit residential rent increases to 2½ percent annually. Five Democratic state legislators have co-sponsored the legislation and thus have tainted themselves with its demagogic scapegoating, its accusation that landlords are uniquely responsible for inflation.

"Our rent increases every year and our incomes do not," a tenants union activist said -- an excellent point immediately discredited by the failure to acknowledge the wider world.

That is, real wages throughout the country long have been falling behind inflation in all important respects -- not just the cost of housing but also food, electricity, gasoline, medicine, education and other essentials.

So where is the legislation to limit those  costs?

Such legislation can't be introduced without exposing the scapegoating being done to the landlords, nor without revealing that a substantial percentage of inflation is caused by government itself as its creation of money far outstrips the production of  goods and services.

While Connecticut has a severe shortage of inexpensive rental housing, the rent-control legislation has just struck a powerful blow against efforts to get more such housing built or renovated.

For what housing developer or landlord will want to risk his money building or renovating apartments when state government may prohibit him alone from fully protecting himself against inflation?

Under the rent-control legislation, everyone else in commerce will remain free to raise prices by any amount to cover himself against inflation, and apartment tenants will be free to demand higher wages in any amount. But the rental-housing business will be strictly limited to price increases far below the inflation rate.

The result of this will be still more scarcity inflating housing prices. Under rent control housing providers will be effectively expropriated by inflation.

That's "democratic socialism" for you -- diverting the blame from government without ever solving the problem government itself caused. Whom will the "democratic socialists" scapegoat next?

xxx

 Guess how Connecticut's teacher unions want the state budget surplus distributed.

It's not to do anything compelling. No, the teacher unions want to use the surplus to increase their members' pay, which is already nearly the highest in the country.

Connecticut does have a problem with teachers, as it does with police officers. As social disintegration worsens, especially in the cities, fewer people want to teach where as many as half the students are chronically absent and many misbehave, and fewer people want to work in law enforcement where respect for law has collapsed.

As a result many teachers and police officers in the cities have been leaving for jobs in the suburbs, where social disintegration isn't as bad and they are paid more for easier work.

But that is no reason to increase compensation for teachers  generally. It is a reason to increase salaries for teachers where more teachers are most needed  particularly  -- and not just in the cities but in particular subjects.

Typically, teacher union contracts won't allow that. So any new state money addressing the teacher shortage should be exempt from union contract restrictions.

Any new money also should come with audit requirements to determine if the money improves student performance, which is so bad in the cities that no additional spending is likely to accomplish anything unless it hires parents for the kids.

xxx

The Board of Education in Bridgeport, whose schools long have been in turmoil and whose students perform terribly, wants to hire a public-relations company. According to the Connecticut Post, the company would "manage the district's reputation, provide risk mitigation and consultation services, develop a crisis response plan, and train administrators in crisis communications."

It's as if the board has never heard that to change the image, it's necessary to change the reality. But then all Connecticut seems to have given up on changing the cruel reality of its cities.

Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Don Pesci: Of manners, moral duties and the death penalty in Conn.

Execution room, Connecticut State Prison, Wethersfield

– Connecticut Historical Society and Connecticut History Online

VERNON, Conn.

“The problem with bad manners,” the late conservative Republican writer (and Connecticut resident) William F. Buckley Jr. told us “is that they sometimes lead to murder.”

No scholar in Connecticut has yet produced a study showing a correlation between bad manners and murderers once on Connecticut’s death row, abolished several years back by a well-mannered state Supreme Court. Scholars and prison records and even the personal testaments of prisoners have led us to believe that prisons, as a general rule, are schools of bad behavior.

One of the prisoners set free from death row by Connecticut’s overly compassionate state Supreme Court in 2015 was Frankie “The Razor” Resto, a candidate for a death penalty and an ill-mannered character.

The abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut was a three-step process. In 2012, Connecticut’s House of Representatives voted to repeal capital punishment for future cases, choosing to leave past death sentences in place. The Connecticut Senate had already voted for the bill, later found unconstitutional by the same state Supreme Court that had found the death penalty unconstitutional, and on April 25 it was signed into law by then Gov. Dannel Malloy. In the same year, the state Supreme Court, unsurprisingly, ruled that applying the death penalty only for past cases was unconstitutional, and capital punishment in Connecticut was promptly shown the door.

Resto, who burned his mattress while in prison and dealt in drugs, was called “The Razor” because he was known for shaking down drug dealers on the street with a straight edge razor. He was paroled early owing to a newly created program, separate from the usual parole process, devised by a former co-chair of the state House Judiciary Committee, Mike Lawlor, then a prison czar appointed to the newly created position by former Gov. Dannel Malloy, that awarded “get out of prison early credits” to deserving prisoners.

Immediately following his early release from prison, Resto easily acquired a gun, despite Connecticut’s stringent gun laws, and held up an Easymart store in Meriden, Conn.

When the co-owner of the store handed over the cash, Resto shot and killed him, without so much as a “thank you very much.” This is not the kind of well-mannered behavior one expects of Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood.

When I attended high school way back in the early ‘60’s, honorifics were very much in vogue. We addressed teachers as Mr., Mrs. and Miss. The fear that, caught out in some deplorable indiscretion, intelligence might be shared with our parents made us toe a straight line, at least in school. In the close-knit world of the neighborhood, eyes were everywhere and police far less necessary than they are in this post-modern period. Boys loved, respected and feared their fathers.

When my father asked me at the supper table, “How did your day go?” he knew beforehand exactly how my day had gone, particularly if it was spotted with delinquencies I had overlooked. No one in the family ever thought of lying to him, whether the lies were black or white lies.

“You know,” he told me once – and only once – “if you lie, your word will never be trustworthy.”

All manners are related to moral obligations, and all moral obligations, Immanuel Kant tells us, are related to duties – not convenient private moral codes. This whole system of Kantian morality – enforced by fathers and mothers in intact family structures and aunts and uncles and sometimes nosey and mischievous neighbors -- has collapsed in the post-modern period. Morality is now related to power and force.

My wife, Andrée, legally blind since birth, was among the first visually impaired persons to teach in public schools in Connecticut. Getting there was a fierce battle. Today, more than four decades after she had left teaching, she still receives notes  from some of her grateful students, all bearing the same moral stamp – “You were the toughest teacher I ever had, but thanks to you...” and here followed a series of personal accomplishments.

Andrée’s most memorable teacher was an accomplished Jesuit priest who taught a course in aesthetics at Fairfield University, where she had gone to acquire her master’s degree in American Studies, in order to convince then Gov. John Dempsey that, having graduated at the top of her college class, and having taught with distinction for three years in two separate Catholic schools, and having appeared with special notice in Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities, and having now acquired her master’s, with honors, in a new discipline, she was perfectly capable of teaching sighted students in public schools. Letters had gone back and forth for about two years, the governor claiming he could not overrule college administrators. But finally after much clarifying correspondence a letter appeared from Dempsey that said, “OK, Andrée, you win,” and she was certified to teach in public schools.

The priest was big man in a flowing robe, in appearance somewhat like the British writer G.K. Chesterton. We became friendly and one evening over our meager supper he said that Socrates was a moral man.

“How do you know?” I asked him.

“Socrates’s last word, after he drank the hemlock,” the priest explained, “was an instruction to one of his disciples to pay for a rooster he wished to sacrifice to Asklepios. Socrates’s last words to Crito were, “Don’t forget to sacrifice a rooster to Asklepios,” whose father was the god Apollo. Asklepios had special powers of healing; indeed, he had the power to bring the dead back to life.

The instruction, credible scholars believe, was a code to his followers. One scholar commented on “what Socrates means as he speaks his last words. When the sun goes down and you check in for sacred incubation at the precinct of Asklepios, you sacrifice a rooster to this hero who, even in death, has the power to bring you back to life. As you drift off to sleep at the place of incubation, the voice of that rooster is no longer heard. He is dead, and you are asleep. But then, as the sun comes up, you wake up to the voice of a new rooster signaling that morning is here, and this voice will be for you a sign that says: The word that died has come back to life again. Asklepios has once again shown his sacred power. The word is resurrected.”

The conversation – the splendid dialogue -- may now continue. New roosters crow eternal truths from the housetops. Though the messenger of truth had died, the truth and the means of conveying the messages were, for all practical purposes, eternal.

The post-modern world has left very little of all this intact. Manners are bad and getting worse. Courts rule, in many cases, in favor of social anarchy. Fathers, especially in major cities in Connecticut, have fled their familial obligations. Honorifics have become as numerous as they are meaningless. Teaching, once considered a calling – like the priesthood – has become a grinding chore. And college graduates, armed with degrees in Yeti Hunting or Tree Climbing or Lady Gaga or Zeitgeist Science, almost certainly do not know who Asklepios or Socrates was.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Chris Powell: What housing emergency?

In Danbury: Clockwise from top left: Main Street Historic District, The Summit at Danbury, Tarrywile Mansion, Praxair Headquarters, Danbury Municipal Airport, Danbury Fair Mall, David Wooster Monument, Western Connecticut State University, and the Danbury Railway Museum

— Wikipedia

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Maybe the recession that has begun will loosen up Connecticut's housing market, but it will take a while even as the poor get poorer. The housing shortage is already making life desperate for many of the poor. But state government doesn't yet consider it an emergency, not even in the face of what seems about to happen in Danbury.

For the two years of the virus epidemic a former hotel building in Danbury has been operated as a shelter for the homeless by a social-service organization based in Stamford, Pacific House. The organization got state financing to purchase the building for use as a shelter but Danbury's zoning board has refused to approve it. The shelter has stayed in operation only because of one of Gov. Ned Lamont's emergency orders arising from the epidemic, but those orders expire Dec. 28.

The former hotel is adjacent to Interstate 84 and few residences are nearby, so the shelter is no more of a nuisance than the hotel was. While it is far from medical and commercial facilities and thus not the most convenient location for the homeless, Pacific House can bring services to them or help them get where they need to go as they work to gain self-sufficiency.

If state government really cared about the poor and troubled, it would pass a law exempting shelters from zoning regulations just as it has exempted group homes for the mentally handicapped.

Danbury lacks any facility that can accommodate all the people now being housed at the former hotel. Most may be out on the street at the end of the month just as the dead of winter sets in. Surely state government can put aside less essential matters until it solves the emergency housing problem.

Crooked guards

Connecticut's Correction Department lately worsened the state's housing problem. It was inadvertent but predictable.

Since prison guards work in tightly confined spaces and were at more risk of contracting COVID 19, the department used federal epidemic emergency money to let them rent hotel rooms so they might avoid infecting their families.

But, the Connecticut Mirror reports, state auditors found that the program was badly abused. Correction Department employees, the Mirror says, "used the program to book hotel rooms during a wedding, to celebrate New Year's Eve, and to live full-time in the hotels with their families. ... Others booked rooms in multiple hotels on the same days, and at least one correction officer used the program while he was on military leave." Some employees used the program to live in hotels for five months or more.

There were rules again this kind of thing but since this was an emergency, no one was hired to enforce them. Some employees who abused the program suffered short suspensions but it seems that no one was fired or prosecuted.

Of course, much federal emergency money has been defrauded throughout the country, just as it was defrauded by the corrupt city government in West Haven, where more than a million dollars was stolen or misdirected by a City Council aide who was also a state representative.

The lesson seems to be that any emergency's first order of business should be to hire extra auditors.

Another murder despite protective order

Another Connecticut woman who had a protective order was murdered the other week, apparently by the former boyfriend she got the order against. Julie Minogue of Milford was battered to death with an ax after her ex had harassed her with hundreds of text messages. An arrest warrant application for the harasser had been pending, left incomplete, for weeks.

The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence says there have been 12 intimate partner murders in the state so far this year.

The only way to stop them is to require police, prosecutors, and courts to give priority to domestic threats and violence and to impose heavy penalties upon conviction, even for first offenses. Here too state government is always doing many less important things.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

And Hell that way

Lake Waramaug, in Litchfield, Conn., with Mt. Bushnell across the water.Z

“This was a little valley all to myself
In Connecticut’s northern hills: Cornwall was there;
Warren to westward: Waramaug Lake to the south;
And the great Gehenna {hell} sufficient six-score leagues—’’

“From “Death at The Purple Rim,’’ by Hyam Plutzik (1911-1962), a poet who grew up in Connecticut.